HEY GAL posted:

Wallenstein's tomb is here. The current plaque thing was put on in 1934 and it is super tacky.
http://www.oberlausitz.com/ferien/kulturell/via-sacra/de/kapelle-hl._anna_mnichovo-muenchengraetz.aspx

HEY GAL posted:

Wallenstein's tomb is here. The current plaque thing was put on in 1934 and it is super tacky.
http://www.oberlausitz.com/ferien/kulturell/via-sacra/de/kapelle-hl._anna_mnichovo-muenchengraetz.aspx

feedmegin posted:

Interesting timing; I wonder if the local Nazis held him up as some great exemplar of <insert Nazi virtue here>...

Trin Tragula posted:

100 Years Ago

Kitchen sinks are in short supply on the Isonzo front, having now been thrown in far too many times. The retreat from Ctesiphon is underway in earnest, the ships lurching desperately from sandbank to sandbank. Flora Sandes loses her friend, and someone tries to stitch Louis Barthas up after the recent incident at the listening post. He also has a cautionary tale about the accuracy, or otherwise, of official war diaries.

HEY GAL posted:

as one former bohemian corporal to another, I

quote:

If the rain comes they run and hide their heads
They might as well be dead
If the rain comes, if the rain comes

HEY GAL posted:

there are a shitton of scottish and irish on both sides of that war, and i think that's where all those german/austrian/bohemian/french nobles with Anglo names came from

edit: on a more humble level, every now and then i find a scot or two in a muster roll, or some english, but no irish. no idea why, it may just be random chance, or maybe they didn't want to be employed by Lutherans and i'd find a lot more in the imperial army

they know that pants are a thing, but they're not quite sure how to get there from where they are

Xerxes17 posted:

Rabhadh posted:

Most of the Irish guys tend to get recruited into existing Spanish or French regiments rather than float around as individuals. The great thing about Irish soldiers is you can pay them 12 times less than the French and they'll eat grass if they have to.

Monocled Falcon posted:

Okay, so this may well be the stupidest question I have ever asked, but what's the green overcoat/cloak of these guys are wearing?



It looks really cool in a sort of batman in the red army way.

Hogge Wild posted:

Like almost all self-made claims in WWII, his too are wildly inflated. There were 7800 troops on the German side on Omaha Beach and the American casualtied were 3000. He definitely didn't cause 2000 of them.

SeanBeansShako posted:

I'm pretty sure that is a camoflage smock part of a whole Red Army recon suit deal. Is this Company Of Heroes 2? It might not be 100% accurate.

gently caress that campaign.

SeanBeansShako posted:

I'm pretty sure that is a camoflage smock part of a whole Red Army recon suit deal.

quote:

Yes we know, it'll make you look like a hobbit bound for Mordor...

Trin Tragula posted:

They're taking the hobbits to Stalingrad!

SeanBeansShako posted:

We joke but there is some guy pushing for WW2 soldiers somehow falling into a tradtional fantasy universe and loving poo poo up.

I'd watch it. Especially if a tank was involved.

Agean90 posted:

If mordor got the Dresden treatment from the US, would anyone be able to tell the difference afterwards?

Splode posted:

maybe it already did

Gandalf was actually the Strategic Bomber Commander all along.

FAUXTON posted:

It's pretty crazy to read broad-stroke stuff about the 1848 revolutions because it's always about how poor people got hosed by the powerful when nature dealt a poo poo hand, but instead of sitting in church and praying for the strength to put up with it they came up with the idea of shooting the bastards who were charging an arm and a leg for a loaf of bread. Why? Was there some critical tipping point where literacy allowed revolutionary ideas to spread like wildfire? Was mass illiteracy even a thing in the mid-19th century anymore?

Splode posted:

maybe it already did

Gandalf was actually the Strategic Bomber Commander all along.

Saint Celestine posted:

Mordor IS within easy atomic cannon range of Minas Tirith....

EvanSchenck posted:

It happens that I wrote my undergrad thesis about the German Revolutions of 1848 (near eight years gone, I feel very old). The event as a whole is a huge confusing mess, as you might expect from a whole continent boiling over with discontent, but I'll try to give a "quick" summary. Quick note, I mostly know about Central Europe. The word Vormärz is the term usually used for the period between the Congress of Vienna and the outbreak of the revolutions in March 1848.

Rising literacy and refinement of vernacular literature did indeed play a huge role. By '48 literacy was over 80% in the western parts of Germany, though lower the further east you went, and there was a ton of newspaper and book publishing going on. Vernacular printed German that was reasonably intelligible to any German-speaker was not actually all that old--the Brothers Grimm were working on their studies of German linguistics and folklore throughout the Vormärz period and they were smack in the middle of putting together the first usable, definitive German dictionary. There had already been some use of common German vernacular, in particular the Luther Bible, but the Vormärz is really the period when reading takes off for real in Central Europe. Newspapers especially.

During the same period you also see the revival of Central European languages like Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, etc. Previously these languages had been largely superseded by German in print and even to some extent everyday usage by anybody of means and education. Rising nationalist feeling and increasing interest in vernacular language, partly stimulated by the kind of work that guys like the Grimms were doing, led to the purposeful renewal of these languages as vehicles for political speech, literature, poetry, and everyday communication. i.e. you start getting Hungarian noblemen who think the Diet should be conducted in Hungarian instead of Latin, you get professor types in Prague writing letters to each other in Czech instead of German, etc.

And yes, this is also the time that European people at large are discovering nationalism. This is sometimes difficult for people to grasp from the modern perspective, but until round about the French Revolution and a little while afterwards, people didn't necessarily believe they belonged to any shared community that encompassed everybody who spoke a reasonably similar language. I don't want to spend a lot of time on this, so if you haven't read Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities go ahead and read it. People are now thinking of themselves as French, German, Czech, Italian, etc. in a way that they hadn't before. This goes primarily for literate, middle-class people. In many cases, and especially in Central Europe, this puts them squarely at odds with the powers that be. There's a whole bunch of German princes who will be out of a job if their principalities stop being a thing, and the Habsburgs aren't keen on the idea that the Austrian Empire should go all to bits.

It also happens that nationalism usually shows up as part of a package of ideas that we term liberalism. The same guys who spend a lot of time thinking about one big country for all the Germans also, for the most part, think that country should have universal or nearly universal male suffrage, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of trade, no fixed prices, no government-granted monopolies, low tariffs, no more guild privileges on entry into trades, no more common lands, no more aristocratic privileges, etc. etc. This also puts them at odds with the ruling class, because it all sounds so very revolutionary. In addition, an interesting thing happens: it turns out that ordinary common people readily buy into nationalism, but they have some grave doubts about the rest of the liberal program. This, in fact, happened during the French Revolution--the Paris mob was down with the Republic, but then when they got hungry they made all sorts of very illiberal demands, e.g. price fixing. Something similar happens in '48.

So at this point we've established that there's a growing tension and gulf between the ruling class and the middle class, which is now really starting to be a thing. But not all that much of a thing--most people are still ordinary farmers and workers. What's going on with them? They're in a lot of loving trouble is what. After 1815 Central and Western Europe see a population explosion. Between '15 and '48 the population of the German states jumps by maybe 50%. It's happening in France, Italy, and elsewhere as well, and it's especially pronounced in rural areas. This is a major problem, because there's a finite amount of farmland available. Farmers who have too many sons have to split their holdings, and during the Vormärz period it's getting ridiculous--kids are winding up with so little land that they can't even realistically pursue agriculture. They have to sell out (tough to do in a currency-poor occupation like farming) and move to the cities where things are... actually not that much better.

In Central Europe entry into trades is still controlled by the old medieval guilds. You have to apprentice with a master, complete your wanderjahre (basically walk around Germany for a few years learning from various masters), find a permanent placement, and God willing, eventually get guild approval to start your own shop somewhere. Maybe then you can actually get married! Only now they have the same problem as the farmers: too many sons. There are way, way more apprentices and journeymen than there will ever be opportunities to rise to master craftsman. That means that you spent your life learning a trade for the opportunity of one day becoming a boss, but now get to live out your days as a bachelor and some rear end in a top hat's employee. Bullshit. This is also a time when we start to see stories about surplus journeymen who wind up getting their wanderjahre "extended" for lack of any shop where they can be placed permanently, who get to stroll from place to place praying for a job with a minimal income and on the edge of starvation. I think I read about some guys who basically were kept on the move so long with no paying employment that their shoes and clothing pretty much disintegrated, but that might have been an exaggeration.

Not that things are going all that well for the master craftsmen. It's a buyer's market for skilled labor, but check the year: 1848. What's going on in England, right now? The First Industrial Revolution is putting an absolute beating on manufacturing all over the continent. The markets for textiles, furniture, tools, and anything else that people can make and use are being flooded by cheap British manufactures. There's a famous incident in Silesia in 1844. Competition from Britain was already a huge problem for the local weavers who worked mostly in cottage-based putting-out industry, and it got worse when Russia responded to the threat of cheap British goods by banning all textile imports. They were literally starving to death, and inevitably they flipped out in a militant uprising. The land shortage I mentioned above is also a problem: the established urban working class is suddenly being underbid by desperate refugees from the rural districts, who will work for relative peanuts. The whole social order of working-class life is being overturned.

On top of all of this, the ruling class has no loving idea what to do. None at all. They have one strategy: ignore problems, censor the papers, make arrests, send in the troops if you must, but change nothing.

Fun side note. The Emperor of Austria, Ferdinand I, was probably not literally mentally disabled as he was sometimes depicted but he definitely did suffer about two dozen epileptic seizures per day. He was unable to consummate his marriage because on the one occasion he tried to have sex, he had a series of severe seizures and almost died. He is only known to have ever issued one command in his capacity as emperor... famously, he wanted to have apricot dumplings even though apricots were out of season (i.e. there are no apricots in Europe right now, you dumbshit): Ich bin der Kaiser und ich will Knödel!

Meanwhile... every educated person who doesn't have a noble title hates the government, the common people in both town and country are in severe distress. From 1845 Europe sees the potato blight. The suffering is worst in Ireland, basically because of the appalling racism and incompetence of the British government, but all of Northern Europe is affected and food supplies are groaning under the strain. Prices are spiraling upward while taxes remain very high. Farmers are forced off the land and workers are laid off. No system exists to help them meet their basic needs. The guilds are in crisis. In many countries much of the population believes that the present national boundaries are an affront to destiny. Hungary, Bohemia, Slovakia, Poland, Italy, etc. are looking for the exit. Europe is a powderkeg. Riots in Silesia, in Krakow, in Sicily, in Paris, in Vienna... the system can't cope.

The saving grace for the ruling class is that the causes and the factions in play are so various and so diffuse that when the explosion actually happens, there is no center. Everything flies apart in different directions, and in the end, the forces of conservatism hunker down and survive long enough to win out.

EvanSchenck posted:

Agean90 posted:

Any books you would recommend on the subject? Its fascinating

EvanSchenck posted:

It happens that I wrote my undergrad thesis about the German Revolutions of 1848

EvanSchenck posted:

1848

Chamale posted:

Brilliant post, thank you. What events caused the revolutions to begin in that particular year?