No, I’m not talking about reenacting a German civil war (not sure what that would be – the Thirty Years War maybe?) but about Germans reenacting the American Civil War. Via Coates and Appelbaum, it’s apparently a thing. Now, in the American context, I’m always a bit ambivalent about Civil War reenacting. I have no problem with the practice per se. You get Revolutionary War reenactors in Massachusetts from time to time, and it seems to be a relatively harmless and fun way of engaging with history. That said, in the context of the Civil War, reenacting is hard to separate from Confederate nostalgia, Lost Cause ideological posturing, and a cultural geist with which I’m… uncomfortable to say the least.
The PRI article reports/speculates that reenacting has an appeal in Germany because of the post-WWII discomfort with other types of war fantasy. Again, that’s fine as far as it goes. But if war fantasy is culturally verboten because of Germany’s legacy of fighting destructive wars in the name of morally outrageous, racist ideologies, it’s a bit unsettling that they seem to mostly want to play the Confederates. Just sayin’.
June 3, 2011 at 7:15 pm
The strange ways of the internetz, but let me assure you that civil war reenactment is not really mainstream over here in Germany. (In fact this is the first time that I have heard about such a thing.) So I would rather assume that the relevance of this is, that American media is reporting about something which hat some appeal at home. Even if they have to take this completely out of proportion.
But it is a temptation to speculate about the cultural appeal of the US civil war in Germany, especially since German perception of the American 19th century is usually only based on Karl May (German writer who did write about noble Indians and evil cowboys). I can only imagine two possibilities, "Gone with the Wind" rather than civil war reenactment. Or it seems that the structure of the German far right would be quite well reflected by the American civil war. In this case it would be a pro US (Wilders type) 'new right' against the classic racist nazis on the confederated side. (However these two groups usually don't play together).