Sherlock Holmes Night: Long Night Of Sciences
By Maria Fleischhack, Baker Street Babes
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| Baker Street Babe Maria |
On June 29, the Leipzig ‘Long Night of Sciences’ offered a glimpse
behind the scenes to everyone who was interested. Watching chemical
reactions, or being introduced to the field of forensic biology,
visitors of the Long Night were able to get a picture of what scientific
research looks like in Leipzig. But not only the natural sciences were
of interest; the humanities make up a large part of Leipzig’s scientific
tradition and several institutes decided to participate, including the
British Studies institute. I had wanted to do a little Sherlock Holmes
related event with my colleagues in order to celebrate the 125th
anniversary of the publication of the first Sherlock Holmes story, but
things turned out to be much bigger than initially planned. A bookshop
close to campus offered to host the event; the perfect location to talk
about Sherlock Holmes. Our ‘Sherlock Holmes Night’ was also advertised
in the local newspaper and even though we knew that quite the crowd
could be expected, we did not anticipate more than 250 people – mostly
students – to show up; too many to sit on the 100 chairs the room held,
and too many even to stand. A few visitors sadly were turned away at the
doors to the bookshop, simply because there was no more room for them
to fit in.
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| Professor Elmar Schnekel |
The programme consisted of four presentations by British
Studies lecturers; starting off with a short introduction of Arthur
Conan Doyle and his work by Prof. Elmar Schenkel. It is always fantastic
to hear about the many interests Doyle had, and how many different
projects he worked on. One might think that he achieved in one lifetime
what others would have needed at least three lifetimes for.
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| Professor Sabine Fiedler |
The second
talk, given by linguistics Professor Sabine Fiedler, was concerned with
the phraseology of the Holmes stories and the challenges of translating
phrases such as “Elementary, my dear Watson”; including, of course, the
discussion of false quotes which are attributed to the original stories,
but which only appeared in adaptations and later rewritings of the
text.
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| Dr. Jürgen Ronthaler |
Dr. Jürgen Ronthaler then spoke of numerous adaptations of The
Hound of the Baskervilles, concentrating on the traditional look and
almost symbolic markers of the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr.
Watson throughout the history of the Hound adaptations.
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| Maria being introduced. |
My talk, the
last of the evening, was concerned with Sherlock BBC. I compared the
series with the original stories, showing similarities and differences,
and how – despite updating Sherlock Holmes to the 21st century – the
series is still incredibly true not only to the stories themselves, but
also to the tradition of detective fiction and Arthur Conan Doyle’s
style. The little “Undershaw” insider in Hounds of Baskerville also gave
me the opportunity to briefly talk about Undershaw and the UTP.
The evening ended with a screening of the 2002 adaptation of
The Hound of the Baskervilles with Richard Roxburgh and Ian Hart.
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| This was only HALF the crowd there. |
It was fantastic how many people showed up to listen to the talks and
the atmosphere was amazing, despite a failing air-condition and not
nearly enough chairs. It’s brilliant to see how interesting Sherlock
Holmes is for a younger generation and I do hope that our little
Sherlock Holmes night sparked the interest in some of them to go back to
the original stories, and find out how it all started. It was a fun
night, and I am so glad that we had the opportunity to talk about
Sherlock Holmes, who we all love; and to show that Sherlock Holmes is
‘not just popular literature’, but a proper academic subject which can
be approached from numerous angles and which is relevant, not only for
the study of literature, but also for cultural studies and linguistics.
