Germany Lives The American Civil War

Filed in Culture & Art, Events

There’s a good number of you Germanophiles (is that even the right word?) that love all things German, I’m sure. And I’m pretty sure there are a good number of you out there that can’t speak German.

Good thing Germany’s news understand this, so over at the TheLocal.de you’ll get plenty of local Deutschland news in English.

Believe it or not, one recent article is all about the US of A. Kind of makes no sense since I just said that it’s all about Germany, huh?

But, hear me out. Did you know that almost a quarter of million soldiers in this “War of Northern Aggression” (that’s what the South called it) were German?

And you don’t have to go all the way to Virginia, Pennsylvania, or some other United State to see a Civil War reenactment. Nope, you can do it within an hour north of Berlin at the El Dorado theme park in Templin.

How cool is that?

Who can resist a whole interactive theater-type extravaganza with hundreds of folks all dolled up in period garb? All right, some of the uniforms might look a little out of place considering you’ll even find some soldiers dating to the American Revolution.

How fitting to bring this up now, since July 4th is the day America celebrates its war for independence, and it was 150 years ago this year that the American Civil War erupted at Fort Sumter.

Sure, some have said (and I quote) “in Germany, its taboo to glorify anything military-related since World War II,” but I say why not? Civil War reenactments have been going on for years in the American South who were for secession and pro-slavery.

Now don’t give me any flack for saying it like that, but this is very much a part of German history as it is an American one. Remember the number of soldiers who fought were German?

Whether you know how or it turns out or not, I just wouldn’t expect TheLocal.de to report the outcome of a different winner.

—Marcus

This entry was posted on Monday, July 18th, 2011 at 1:00 am. You can follow the responses to this post through the RSS Feed. If you link to this post from your Web site and would like to send me a ping, here is the Trackback link.

One Response to “Germany Lives The American Civil War”

Ann says:
August 24, 2011 at 1:22 am
i had no idea! how interesting! as an American, its always a bit funny to me that ‘the south’ is so excited to reinact a ‘war’ (really more a battle of secession) that they lost. i’m not from the south but my husband and all his family are and when i ask them about this odd phenomenon they are all rather proud about it, it seems so strange to me.
on the other hand, july 4th is our independence from the UK and is a federal holiday that we all (as a Union) celebrate. it’s really more commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, which symbolized our independence from the UK, and the approval of the document happened on July 4, 1776.
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