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6 Myths About the Confederacy, Debunked

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Kragar6/26/2015 3:37:05 pm PDT

Something I came across while researching this:

Confederates on the Rhine

“On a warm spring morning about 50 miles north of Berlin, Union troops and their Confederate rivals prepare for battle.” That’s the attention-grabbing lede of a PRI story on the bizarre phenomenon of Germans reenacting the American Civil War. The reporter explains that many participants feel “a personal connection to the war,” and that everyone with whom she spoke took care to note that 200,000 Germans had taken part in the fight:

After World War II, any talk of military glory became socially taboo here…So for those at the reenactment, it is appealing that the U.S. Civil War took place in another country, in another time. It is safer, even romantic.

But the two parties to the fraternal conflict exert unequal appeal. When Germans gather at the reenactments, “more people want to be on the Confederate side.” That produces a surreal spectacle. Germans marching about in butternut and gray, pretending to dwell in Dixie. With Teutonic precision, they have replicated every detail, down to the brass buttons and the brightly colored piping on their trousers.

Among military reenactors, the chance to fight on the losing side or to struggle against overwhelming odds exercises a particularly powerful appeal. That, after all, is an essential component of the romance of Gone with the Wind; after exalting it, the Nazis found themselves forced to ban it in the nations they occupied, where audiences cast themselves - and not the Germans - in the role of the wronged. If even the Resistance in Europe was inspired to identify with the South, why read anything sinister into the existence of German Confederates?

Wolfgang Hochbruck, a Professor of American Studies at the University of Freiburg and a Union reenactor, is less charitable. “I think some of the Confederate reenactors in Germany are acting out Nazi fantasies of racial superiority,” he told author Tony Horwitz. “They are obsessed with your war because they cannot celebrate their own vanquished racists.” It’s an unsettling thought.