How I lost my mind and bought an old half-restored nineteenth-century Thuringian villa

The Palais in the Grand Garden in Dresden. Not my villa.

So, as many of you know, I did a crazy thing two years ago.

I put my house in upper Bavaria on the market and bought an old Gründerzeit villa in the Thuringian Vogtland. Some readers (and also some family members) have asked why in the hell I did this and what I was thinking. Others have wondered how this eccentric project is going; they’ve wanted to know if I’m happy with all the complications and expenses I’ve welcomed into my life, how it is to live in a minimally modernised historically protected manse built to flatter the tastes of industrialists from 150 years ago, and other similar things.

I promised a report last year, but I put it off, mainly because I doubted very many readers would find an account of my adventures in obsolete German housing all that interesting. This was a mistake, and I am going to rectify it now. I desperately need to get out of the rut of German politics, I need to write more, and that is only going to happen if I diversify topics and dedicate New Posts to New Things.

From here on out, I’ll aim to write on some totally different topic every Tuesday. I’ll bring up crazy interests of mine, like famous German true crime cases that have always fascinated me; I’ll address various historical topics, from early modern witch trials to the Second World War; I’ll review strange books; I’ll throw caution to the wind and perhaps even experiment with new media, like audio. If you have specific topics or ideas you’d like to see, let me know in comments. All of this is going to be in addition to, and not in substitution of, the standard fare I’ve been churning out for years now. As I said, I need to write more, and that can only happen if I start to write about more things.

For now – and for this inaugural totally different Tuesdays post – I’m going to fill you in on my crazy villa idea. This will be the first of the New Things, and it must be paywalled, because I don’t want to put photos of my house all over the open internet.