Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 39

[cahn]

Last post, along with the usual 18th-century suspects, included the Ottonians; changing ideas of conception and women's sexual pleasure; Isabella of Parma (the one who fell in love, and vice versa, with her husband's sister); Henry IV and Bertha (and Henry's second wife divorcing him for "unspeakable sexual acts"). (Okay, Isabella of Parma was 18th century.)

Comments

Re: What the term Holy Roman Empire actually meant

[selenak]

Ha, let me see, the first world event I not at the time but in retrospect noticed was the global oil crisis in the early 1970s. The reason why I noticed is that I remember my Dad not allowed to drive at the weekends and being grumpy about it. (I didn't connect the dots until much later). Otherwise, my 1970s childhood memories do include politics, but not on a global level - i.e. I remember all the "Wanted" posters for the members of the Rote Armee Fraktion (Baader Meinhof Gang in English, as English speakers don't want to use the shorthand RAF for obvious reasons, while German speakers generally call them that) being everywhere, and in the early 1980s, I remember Schmidt's government falling and Kohl becoming Chancellor. One of the essay topics we had to write about during election season was "Does TV distort political reality? Discuss!" And lots and lots of nuclear power, yes/no debates being everywhere. I think that's one of the big differences between Germany and the US, and it struck me for the first time when I watched Dark, the first season of which was released shortly after Stranger Things had become a hit with its 1980s nostalgia. If you were a German teenager in the 1980s, you remember Atomkraft? Nein Danke! demos, whether you were pro or against. Whereas something like, say, the whole Satanic scare just wasn't a thing. And I really got a culture shock when visiting the US for the first time at age 14 smack in the middle of Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign, with flags everywhere (in itself bizarre and triggery if you grew up in Germany at that time, because national flags everywhere were strictly coded as tied to the Third Reich) and Reagan so incredibly popular (when the impression teenage me had of Reagan before that was that he was kind of ridiculous, because former actor, and that the British tv show "Spitting Image" made fun of him and Margaret Thatcher).

...and then came AIDS. Yes, I think that was the first global thing I very consciously noticed in the 1980s when it was happening. In terms of politics. In the later 1980s of course Gorbachev, Glasnost and Perestroika. I was one year out of school when the Berlin Wall fell, but I'd started to pay attention to what was going on in the Soviet Union while still at school. Most of us did. It's not a little heartbreaking to think about now how much hope there was, as we could see Gorbachev actually following through with this.

Re: What the term Holy Roman Empire actually meant

[mildred_of_midgard]

The first paragraph was very educational, as I learned *none* of the German parts of that

1980s elections: I do actually vaguely remember the 1988 election, in that that was where I, freshly turned 5 years old, learned what an election was and what political parties wrere, and that my parents and grandparents belonged to different parties, and I remember the name Dukakis, but I sort of wasn't counting that as my first, as what I got out of it was less a current event for me and more a political science lesson.

It's not a little heartbreaking to think about now how much hope there was, as we could see Gorbachev actually following through with this.

Oof, I can imagine. By the time I started paying attention, it was already not looking good.

Re: What the term Holy Roman Empire actually meant

[selenak]

Having read the relevant book now: Mikhail Gorbachev, the Lafayette of the Soviet Union?

Not really, I know, the analogy doesn't work for Lafayette's entire life - just for the French Revolution vis a vis Gorbachev & the Soviet Union, especially from a German perspective. He was and still is seen re: German reunification as Lafayette is seen from the US (you could tell in all the German obituaries this year, no matter whether in left, moderate or right papers), while Russia has the later-French-Revolution/Bourbon pov on him.

Once-current events that are now history

[cahn]

Like Mildred, I found the first paragraph very educational!

In the 80's: I remember acid rain being a big thing! I remember even writing a horror story about it in... probably third or fourth grade, haha. Nuclear power was never a big thing in the US, but the threat of nuclear annihiliation was. (Reading Watchmen, years and years later, took me back... I felt like it got that feel right, that there was always this undercurrent of "so we don't really think the world is going to end tomorrow... but it might!") I think I must have been too young to get much of the Satanic scare stuff, and I think my parents were much too pragmatic for it to really bother them in any case, though I do remember it being a cultural thing, very vaguely. By the time I was in late high school I played D&D a couple of times and it was fine, although I'm not sure my parents knew about it.

Oh, right, yes, I do remember being conscious of AIDS. Probably not in the early 80's, but certainly by the mid-to-late 80's I knew quite well it was a big thing. And Gorbachev, glasnost, and perestroika, yes, I remember those too; like German reunification, I wasn't old enough to get into it in great detail, but I certainly knew it was a Really Big Deal. And I remember how hopeful everything was.

Re: Once-current events that are now history

[mildred_of_midgard]

Acid rain, 90s: check!

Nuclear annihilation: I missed out on this entirely! I remember reading Madeleine L'Engle in middle school and being *so* confused by what the characters were talking about. She clearly expected you to be able to fill in the blanks, and in hindsight I understand why, but it was a long time before my "history" knowledge was good enough to supply the context.

Satanic scare: That one made it onto my radar, as did Waco (omg Waco). As in, "Don't do things that might make people erroneously think you are a Satanist or cultist!"

AIDS, 90s: check.

Gorbachev, glasnost, and perestroika: Nope. This one I learned as history.