Confederates on the Rhine
By
Why are so many Germans participating in Civil War reenactments - and
siding with the South?
"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.
They have missed only one thing. In their search for an anodyne conflict,
lacking the baggage of their historical wars of mastery, these Germans have
taken a wrong turn. The units they prefer to recreate fought to preserve an
abhorrent system that kept more than three million men, women, and children in
bondage while denying their very humanity. Confederate Vice President Alexander
Stephens famously explained the essential principle of his new nation:
There is
no escape from this uncomfortable truth. And unlike their American
counterparts, most Confederate reenactors in Germany cannot claim to be
honoring their ancestors or their heritage. There were, in fact, some 200,000
Germans who fought in the war. But by donning Confederate gray, they are
betraying their legacy, not preserving it.
"Take the [Germans] out of the Union Army and we could whip the Yankees
easily," Robert E. Lee allegedly remarked. The quote, likely apocryphal,
captures an important fact. Immigrants born in Germanic lands were enormously
overrepresented in the Union Army. By one estimate, 176,817 donned the army
blue, half again as many as their share of the overall population would have
predicted. Other reliable estimates range as high as 216,000. And adding in the
descendants of earlier generations of German immigrants would more than triple
that total. The Germans, one contemporary judged, understood
"from the beginning, the aim and the end of the civil war, [and] they have
embraced the cause of the Union and emancipation with an ardor and a
passion."
If the German reenactors actually "model their characters in the
reenactments after...German immigrant soldiers," as they explained to the
reporter that they do, then those who wear gray have their work cut out for
them. Less than 10 percent of the Germans immigrants in the United States,
scarcely 70,000, dwelt in the entire territory controlled by the Confederacy at
the outbreak of the war. Many fled north, with perhaps 2,000 joining the Union
Army. Hundreds of those who remained petitioned the consuls of German states
for protection from the draft. There were certainly some ardent secessionists,
and even a few slaveholders, and between 3,500 and 7,000 Germans may have
served in the Confederate Army. But of that number, many were conscripted, a
large number deserted, and some mutinied. "The German minority of the
South," one scholar concluded, "was all but insignificant
politically, economically, and militarily during the American Civil War."
So why are Germans dressing in Confederate Gray?
The PRI story explains that "A lot of fantasies have built up around the
Confederacy; thanks to the movie Gone with the Wind, it is a staple of
German popular culture." Margaret Mitchell's novel was published in
Germany in 1937; over the next four years it sold 276,900 copies there,
becoming the most popular American product of the era. Reviewers hoped it would
salvage the reputation of the institution of slavery, redeeming it from the
calumnies of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and praised its portrayal of a
"wonderful, strictly regulated life," with "patriarchal,
well-defined relations between black and white."
The film reached Nazi Germany in 1940. "A great American
achievement," Goebbels raved, "One must see it more than once."
It was reportedly one of Hitler's two favorite films. A home video shows him teasing
a supporter, "I know you would rather be watching Gone with the Wind."
In itself, this reveals rather less than it may seem: Gone with the Wind
may have "glamorized the Old South and romanticized the Confederacy,"
as historian James McPherson contends, but it is also among the most popular
novels and films ever released. If German reenactors ground their affection in
that imagined past, they are hardly alone.
No, the problem is that in Nazi Germany, the glamor
extended beyond the magnolias and the melodrama. Hermann Rauschnning,
in his memoir, alleged that Hitler regretted the outcome of the Civil War. A
literal master-race, holding those it deemed inferior in hereditary bondage:
this was the Confederate vision as the Nazis approvingly understood it. It was
what they saw when they watched Gone with the Wind.
It is easy to take all of this entirely too seriously. Reenacting offers
participants an array of attractions, including camaraderie, respect, and the
chance to step into entirely new roles. Simply put, it's
fun. And it can bring a transgressive thrill. Every
April, the red-coated 1st Foot Guards march on Lexington Green to disperse the
rebels, but their patriotism is not in question. The Star Wars-inspired 501st
Legion counts more than 5,000 active Stormtroopers,
who don the armor of the original Evil Empire without stirring suspicions that
they are really motivated by their seething hatred of Jawas.
Some push, or step beyond, the bounds of taste. Last year, Rich Iott saw his campaign for Congress disintegrate after The
Atlantic's Joshua Green reported on his weekends as a Waffen-SS
reenactor, a hobby that would have seen him arrested in Germany.
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.
