From Teamchef Arminius to Hermann Junior: glocalised discourse about a national foundation myth

If for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the ‘Battle of the Teutoburg Forest’, fought in 9 CE between Roman armies and Germanic tribes, was predominantly a reference point for nationalist and chauvinist discourses in Germany, the first decade of the twenty-first century has seen attempts to link public remembrance with local/regional identities on the one hand and international/intercultural contact on the other. In the run up to and during the ‘anniversary year’ of 2009, German media, sports institutions and various other official institutions articulating tourist, economic and political interests attempted to create a new ‘glocalised’ version of the public memory of the Teutoburg battle. Combining methods of Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, the paper analyses the narrative and argumentative topoi employed in this re-orientation of public memory, with a special emphasis on hybrid, post-national identity-construction. Das zweitausendjährige Gedenkjahr der „Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald“ im Jahr 2009 bot eine günstige Gelegenheit, die bis in die zweite Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts dominante Tradition nationalistisch–chauvinistischer Deutungen des Sieges von germanischen Stämmen über drei römische Legionen zu korrigieren und zu überwinden. Der Aufsatz analysiert mit Hilfe diskurslinguistischer Methoden die Anstrengungen regionaler Institutionen und Medien, die nationale Vereinnahmung des historischen Gedenkens kritisch zu thematisieren sowie neue, zum eine lokal situierte, zum andern international orientierte Identifikationsangebote anzubieten. Die Analyse zeigt, dass solche „de-nationalisierten“ Identifikationsangebote zwar teilweise auch früher verwendet wurden, aber heutzutage rekontextualisiert und auf innovative Weise in den Vordergrund gestellt werden

Replication data for: Projekt Römerschiff: Nachbau und Erprobung für die Ausstellung ’2000 Jahre Varusschlacht’

How fast to roman warships sail and how useful is the sail if the wind comes at an angle? In order to test the sailing and rowing characteristics of Roman warships, a series of experiments was conducted. The bases for this is a roman riverboat of the type "Oberstimm" that was reconstructed in Regensburg in full scale. This boat was equipped with a Silva Marine NX2 system to record boat speed, wind speed and direction, boat position and speed over ground and other parameters not a vital for this study. In addition the number of oar strokes per minute was recorded by hand. In this study, we release the digital files written by the NX2 system and the digitized noted. From this data we calibrated the log response and calculated a polar diagram, which shows how fast the boat can go for each wind speed and wind direction