{"id":1233,"date":"2009-10-22T18:08:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-22T18:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1233"},"modified":"2009-10-22T18:08:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-22T18:08:00","slug":"after-2000-years-hermann-is-followed-by-ghosts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1233","title":{"rendered":"After 2,000 Years, Hermann is Followed by Ghosts"},"content":{"rendered":"

This autumn is the 2,000th anniversary of the battle when German tribes decisively defeated 20,000 Roman soldiers in the Teutoburg Forest<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But the anniversary–particularly the memory of the leader of the German commander, Hermann (Arminius)–is a complicated thing in Germany.<\/a> <\/p>\n

The events surrounding Hermann, though, are a weird mix of the two, presenting a revised, sanitised, consumer-friendly warrior, a national hero recast as neither \u201cnational\u201d nor a hero. \u201cTo me, he is just a garden gnome,\u201d Schafmeister said during an interview in his office, his desk piled with Hermann chocolate bars and other paraphernalia. The exhibits and plays organised for the anniversary no longer depict Hermann as the founding father of the German peoples: instead he appears as a minor warlord who got lucky, an interesting figure with no relevance to the present. <\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cHe is really history,\u201d says Herfried M\u00fcnkler, a historian at Berlin\u2019s Humboldt University and the author of <\/i>The Germans and their Myths. \u201cHe is no longer relevant to the question of German identity.\u201d <\/i><\/p>\n

“It\u2019s a thin line to walk \u2013 a year of festivities for a man no one thinks is worth celebrating. \u201cWe don\u2019t even call it an anniversary, because that implies a celebration,\u201d said Schafmeister. \u201cIt is just a recognition of something that happened from 2,000 years ago.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

The religion journalists at Get Religion<\/a> often talk about “ghosts” in news stories–a religious element or motivation that the journalist fails to see or explain. (The news media, in other words, do not “get” religion.)<\/p>\n

Do you see a religion ghost or two here also?<\/p>\n

A few years ago, I was talking with a German student of mine at the university and her boyfriend. The boyfriend had wanted to read a diary kept by some of my own German ancestors about their immigration from Lower Saxony to Missouri in 1843.<\/p>\n

I mentioned how Germans who came to Missouri had established vineyards, and how a center of wine-making was the town of Hermann.<\/a><\/p>\n

“Hermann, of course!” said my student, rolling her eyes.<\/p>\n

Had she been one of the schoolchildren who “learnt what a shame it was that the erstwhile hero had prevented Latin culture from reaching northern Germany”?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This autumn is the 2,000th anniversary of the battle when German tribes decisively defeated 20,000 Roman soldiers in the Teutoburg Forest. But the anniversary–particularly the memory of the leader of the German commander, Hermann (Arminius)–is a complicated thing in Germany. The events surrounding Hermann, though, are a weird mix of the two, presenting a revised, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[93,56],"class_list":["post-1233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-germany","tag-rome"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-jT","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5386,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5386","url_meta":{"origin":1233,"position":0},"title":"When Hitler Spoke Latvian","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 27, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"A BBC piece examines EVP \u2014\u00a0 Electronic Voice Projection \u2014 or the alleged recording of spirit voices on tape or digital recorders. The simplest explanation is that EVP voices are just stray radio transmissions. Usually they are so faint and masked by static interference that it's hard to make out\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"ghosts\"","block_context":{"text":"ghosts","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=ghosts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8664,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8664","url_meta":{"origin":1233,"position":1},"title":"An Amber Alert from 1284 CE","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 21, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Amber alert\" defined for readers outside the USA. In five days it will be the 733rd anniversary of the most famous missing children case in Western Europe. What happened to the children of Hamelin, a town (current population about 57,000) in what is today the German state of Lower Saxony\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"childhood\"","block_context":{"text":"childhood","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=childhood"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/ham_play.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":12750,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12750","url_meta":{"origin":1233,"position":2},"title":"The Making of an Ethnobotanist in a 1960s University Scene","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 23, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the books on my ethnobotany shelves is Witchcraft Medicine:Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants, a colloboration between Wolf Dieter Storl, Claudia M\u00fcller-Ebeling, and Christian R\u00e4tsch, all three anthropologists and ethnobotanists. M\u00fcller-Ebeling and R\u00e4tsch are married and live in Hamburg, but Storl was born in Germany in 1942\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/storl.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3298,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3298","url_meta":{"origin":1233,"position":3},"title":"Academic Work on Paganism in Germany","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 14, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Ren\u00e9 Gr\u00fcnder shared a link to a monograph series that includes work on contemporary Paganism and shamanism. Information in English, but the books themselves are available only in German. His web page also contains links to some articles in English.","rel":"","context":"In \"Asatru\"","block_context":{"text":"Asatru","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=asatru"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10740,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10740","url_meta":{"origin":1233,"position":4},"title":"Talking to the God of Tanks","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 1, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Recently I started a post label called \"Pagan-ish.\" Now maybe I should make one called \"animist-ish,\" having watched the 2012 Russian movie White Tiger. That is Tiger as in Tiger tank, not the big cat. This is a World War II movie. If you don't like war movies, stop. If\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Germany\"","block_context":{"text":"Germany","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=germany"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/white-tiger-photo.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/white-tiger-photo.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/white-tiger-photo.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/white-tiger-photo.jpg?resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/white-tiger-photo.jpg?resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1187,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1187","url_meta":{"origin":1233,"position":5},"title":"All Great Men Were … Rosicrucians?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 8, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"It's the 100th anniversary of modern Rosicrucianism.For all their concern about tracing lineage, however, it is possible to find beneath the umbrella of modern Rosicrucianism just about any belief, philosophy or superstition you might care to name \u2013 pantheism, reincarnation, alchemy, psychic power, astral out-of-body travel, telepathy. There are Cosmic\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}