everythingsbetterwithbisexuals:
Minnesota restaurant hosts Nazi-themed dinner.
Dressed in SS uniforms and surrounded by Nazi flags, members of a World War II reenactment group attended a Third Reich-themed Christmas dinner last December at a Minneapolis restaurant, City Pages reported..
The organization has held the event for 16 years running, the last six of which were at the Gasthof Zur Gemutlichkeit restaurant, a participant at the event said.
“All of the German [reenactment] groups in Minnesota have a Christmas party because we don’t typically have events going on in the winter,” Jon Boorom, a member of the WWII Historical Re-enactment Society Inc said.“It’s just like any club that has a party. Because they dress up like Germans from World War II, it’s cool to go to a German restaurant, eat German food, and drink German beer.”
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members of a World War II reenactment group
Add that to the list of things I didn’t know exist, but really fucking shouldn’t.
IDK, you guys, I appreciate cosplay as much as anybody, but there’s something deeply creepy about war reenactors. Like, if you want to pretend to be Sith lords or elves or something, okay, but I don’t really think that systematic genocide and the suffering and death of tens of millions of actual real people all over the world ought to be appropriated for games of dress-up and make-believe.
WOW. Yeah, I’m just…not really understanding the Nazi thing because that smacks of some underlying issues, there, but the concept of war cosplay is pretty well established. I mean, the movies Gettysburg, North and South, and Glory (IIRC) used actual Civil War cosplayers as extras as they were already in authentic historic dress and wanted to do it basically for free, anyway. It’s been around for a long time.
I come from a pretty long stint in museum-based first person historic interpretation, and the main purpose of historic cosplay is an emphasis on education and authenticity. For example, I’m still part of a historic baseball team that, frankly, gets walloped almost every game because the players on our team aren’t athletes, they’re teachers and profs and gardeners and what have you, all brought together for love of the subject. The Civil War reenactors, as I know them, are generally there for the same reasons: to educate, both themselves and those who come to watch. The fact that they enjoy doing it doesn’t detract from that aspect, IMO. They don’t glorify the worst parts and they don’t gloss over the ugly parts, if they can manage it. The point is to make people understand it a bit better.
I can see, though, how difficult it would be for those actually cosplaying a war where some of the fighters are still alive. My brother is a veteran of the First Gulf War, and cosplaying soldier from a war he experienced I think would be a grave affront to him. So I think the difference here is time and distance, and the American Civil War, say, is far enough away from us there’s value in it, whereas WWII is still close enough I sat with my 95yo grandma last weekend and talked about her experience during that war, when my grandpa was an essential worker in an airplane transmission factory. In other words, we don’t need reenactment – we still have the actual people to talk to.
NOW FOR NAZIS: Nope. Just nope. We’ve got education enough, thanks.
Four words for these fuckers: Auschwitz cosplay party crashers.
Now, if at the end they gathered up all the money and donated it to a Jewish charity and then laughed their asses off because fucking Nazis…
Otherwise it’s kind of a creep show.