Enter the Hessians
Jan. 10th, 2014 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakMy Sleepy Hollow marathoning has arrived at episode 4, wherein the operetta Germans zahrawithaz warned me about show up, and they are indeed hysterical. Oh, and Ichabod getting congratulated for his German is on a level with Duncan MacLeod getting congratulated for his German in the Highlander episode Valkyrie, meaning neither actor knows how to pronounce a single word. Otoh, the actors who play the Germans in this episode don't, either (in the opening scene, the only reason why I knew it was supposed to be German that the guy in red talked was because Zahra had warned me), so it's understandable their characters think Ichabod is fluent. (Clearly, they themselves are zombies hypnotized into believing they're Hessians by watching too many Hollywood movies.)
No offense to the good citizens of Hesse, but the funniest thing is the repeated declarations that Hessians have a reputation for ruthlessness, because err, well, um, not so much. (They have a reputation for having the easiest-going school system in the German states, though.) At least not in the martial toughness/brutishness sense the term is used in the episode; otoh Hesse produced the most famous German poet of all time, who also spent a lot of years in politics (not in Hesse, though; in Thuringia) and was the first German writer to establish a copyright (thank you, Goethe), and he could certainly be ruthless in another sense. Also from Hesse: one of our former secretaries of state, Joschka Fischer, with a curriculum vitae from taxi driver and radical violent protester against the state to second most powerful politician of the country, so there's that. But the Hessian accent can't help sounding soft to this Franconian's ear, and I hear it at least once a year when I go to Frankfurt for the book fair.
As for the Hessian soldiers in the American War of Independence: I have no idea how ruthless, or not they were then, but the one contemporary thing that immediately comes to my mind when thinking about German soldiers in the revolutionary wars is a scene from Schiller's drama Kabale und Liebe, in which he attacked a practice that was all too common then among the princes of the dozens of German principalities. All of whom wanted to have their mini Versailles which was costly, and several sold regiments to the British. Not regiments of volunteers, mind. Regiments of gangpressed farmer's boys. The scene in question, which is one of Schiller's most famous, has the mistress of the duke receiving new jewelry from him. Which she's fairly indifferent towards, since both she and the Duke at this point are over each other, eying greener pastures. She does, however, notice that the man delivering the necklace seems to be upset over something, barely holding it together, is curious, pushes him a bit and then it bursts out of him that his sons are among the pressed-in-to-service-and-sold-to-the-American-wars which are paying for her finery and goodbye jewels. 7000, the old valet says, and describes how anyone who protested or questioned was clubbed down or shot: Wir hörten die Büchsen knallen, sahen ihr Gehirn auf das Pflaster spritzen, und die ganze Armee schrie: Juchhe! nach Amerika! -
("We heard the guns shoot, saw their brains on the cobblestone, and then the whole army cried: 'Hooray! To America!' -")
So I'm sitting over here, imagining the scared out of their wits gang pressed sons of the valet in Kabale und Liebe....ending up in a weird place where everyone makes a fuss about tea taxes as unbearable tyranny.
zahrawithaz warned me about show up, and they are indeed hysterical. Oh, and Ichabod getting congratulated for his German is on a level with Duncan MacLeod getting congratulated for his German in the Highlander episode Valkyrie, meaning neither actor knows how to pronounce a single word. Otoh, the actors who play the Germans in this episode don't, either (in the opening scene, the only reason why I knew it was supposed to be German that the guy in red talked was because Zahra had warned me), so it's understandable their characters think Ichabod is fluent. (Clearly, they themselves are zombies hypnotized into believing they're Hessians by watching too many Hollywood movies.) No offense to the good citizens of Hesse, but the funniest thing is the repeated declarations that Hessians have a reputation for ruthlessness, because err, well, um, not so much. (They have a reputation for having the easiest-going school system in the German states, though.) At least not in the martial toughness/brutishness sense the term is used in the episode; otoh Hesse produced the most famous German poet of all time, who also spent a lot of years in politics (not in Hesse, though; in Thuringia) and was the first German writer to establish a copyright (thank you, Goethe), and he could certainly be ruthless in another sense. Also from Hesse: one of our former secretaries of state, Joschka Fischer, with a curriculum vitae from taxi driver and radical violent protester against the state to second most powerful politician of the country, so there's that. But the Hessian accent can't help sounding soft to this Franconian's ear, and I hear it at least once a year when I go to Frankfurt for the book fair.
As for the Hessian soldiers in the American War of Independence: I have no idea how ruthless, or not they were then, but the one contemporary thing that immediately comes to my mind when thinking about German soldiers in the revolutionary wars is a scene from Schiller's drama Kabale und Liebe, in which he attacked a practice that was all too common then among the princes of the dozens of German principalities. All of whom wanted to have their mini Versailles which was costly, and several sold regiments to the British. Not regiments of volunteers, mind. Regiments of gangpressed farmer's boys. The scene in question, which is one of Schiller's most famous, has the mistress of the duke receiving new jewelry from him. Which she's fairly indifferent towards, since both she and the Duke at this point are over each other, eying greener pastures. She does, however, notice that the man delivering the necklace seems to be upset over something, barely holding it together, is curious, pushes him a bit and then it bursts out of him that his sons are among the pressed-in-to-service-and-sold-to-the-American-wars which are paying for her finery and goodbye jewels. 7000, the old valet says, and describes how anyone who protested or questioned was clubbed down or shot: Wir hörten die Büchsen knallen, sahen ihr Gehirn auf das Pflaster spritzen, und die ganze Armee schrie: Juchhe! nach Amerika! -
("We heard the guns shoot, saw their brains on the cobblestone, and then the whole army cried: 'Hooray! To America!' -")
So I'm sitting over here, imagining the scared out of their wits gang pressed sons of the valet in Kabale und Liebe....ending up in a weird place where everyone makes a fuss about tea taxes as unbearable tyranny.
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Date: 2014-01-10 08:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-10 08:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-10 08:30 pm (UTC)(Yeah, I got nothin', but Lafayette was a pretty cool guy?)
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Date: 2014-01-10 11:09 pm (UTC)(Back when Himself was still in the Navy and stationed down in Panamá, there was a painting on the wall of US Naval Headquarters Southern Command of the French fleet under the Comte de Grasse breaking the English line at the Battle of the Virginia Capes. There was a little sign posted underneath the painting that said: "French Intervention in the Colonial Affairs of Great Britain.")
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Date: 2014-01-10 11:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-10 10:57 pm (UTC)