Am I (not) a reenactor?

For reasons, this will be the first article that will also appear separately in English here on the blog! Maybe I am doing other ones in eglish too, if I think they could be usefull!

Some time ago I had an email exchange in which I was addressed as a reenactor and at a certain point I objected because I don’t see myself as such. In addition, further discussions arose around the topic and at some point a statement emerged that I would be one of the best reenactors in Germany for the Carolingian period (I don´t even own a tent!). There are also upcoming a few other situations in which I “won’t” do reenactment… Or in short: From my point of view, I’m not a reenactor!

And in fact, I’ve never really done any real reenactment.
Well, not quite. In 10 years I have only performed the “explanatory bear (some kind of german saying) in Carolingian clothing” three times in public. Once for Terraplana in 2012 as part of the “Der Kreis rollt” event, a second time in 2016 at the Museumsuferfest in Frankfurt for the Archaeological Museum Frankfurt and this year in Tübingen with Hiwisca for the MUT. I’m not counting the Trebur tours in clothes. That was just ambience for the visitors.

But I have almost everything at home for reenactment. And that for a period from Carolingian to Salian! Also armor parts and weapons. So it’s not like I can’t hit someone hard at an event. It’s just that I never felt the need to do it or had enough time for it. In addition, I never bought the things explicitly for a reenactment.

But first a quick look into the past. My interest in history was sparked by my father, who visited all the Rhine castles with us on excursions. The moment came when I was about three or four and we were chugging past Trebur in the old VW Beetle and he told me that there used to be something like a castle there. I think he also tried to explain the term Pfalz to me.
Equipped with this basis, I always tried to find out something about the Pfalz Tribur, but found nothing or not much.

When I was at school, I think I had just read Lord of the Rings, I heard about LARP for the first time. But in the early 90s, without a driver’s license and without money and, above all, without the Internet, it was impossible for me to find something like that. Especially since back then it was more like this: the wizard and the paladin met each other, took out the character sheet and started rolling the dice, then came the cotton ball phase… (Wizards throwing cotton balls as spells…)

I then started something with cotton renaissance fair style clothing.
Around 2005 I learned about a huge group of “crazy men” who went by the name Franco Flemish Contingent. What a crazy idea, I thought. With a squad like that to Hastings, that would be it.
I was a silent reader in the forum, as well as at Tempus Vivit. I made a simple outfit (hand-sewn), had it approved by Jörg Fraske in Freienfels, got a bow and… …in the end I didn’t have any money, didn’t pursue it any further and stayed at home. So the chance for reenactment was missed.
I then made up for the visits to Normandy and Hastings privately while on vacation

But why do I have this stuff, why do I build a shield, have parts made for a carolingian baldric and constantly sew stuff?

My primary goal is to first arouse interest in the Pfalz Tribur and to provide information about it, in the hope that something like excavations will happen at some point.

I had the advantage of receiving crash courses from historians and art historians, sometimes even in archiving techniques. Of course, that inevitably led me to dealing with archival materials.

I research and plow through history for information. A lot of things are extremely dry if you’re not interested in the details. (I still find it exciting) In principle you could say that I am interested in the entire life in and around a Pfalz or royal court. The stupid thing is that this includes the entire aspect of life, from unfree, semi-free, free to (high) nobility, from simple to stately architecture, from agriculture and fishing to the military. Of course, one interests me more than the other.

I am a very visual and tactile person. I imagine that I can understand or understand things better if I can only “grasp” them. Now I can put on an Oculus and look at my 3D models, which gives me a good feel for the architecture and sizes.
It’s comparable to when I sew a tunic, try out how I could have made a shield and use it or something similar.
They say clothes make people, I actually move and behave differently when I wear a suit. The same goes for different tunics and coats. So I do this to get a feel for something. To be honest, the fact that I sew everything by hand is due to the problem that I am at loggerheads with sewing machines. Then just do it by hand.
So I sewed myself a Klappenrockt with a long-pile wool lining (aka Flokati) and decided to go to the Vogelsberg Mountains when it snows and trudge through the snow on the top of Hoherodskopf to get a feel for the clothes, temperature, etc .

Since I always have to keep in mind when it comes to something like this, why someone could have trudged through the Vogelsberg snow in the year 825, it occurred to me that someone could have made a Christmas pilgrimage to Fulda. This in turn gave rise to the question of what someone is carrying around with them and why they are traveling on foot. On foot = repentance and Advent is a time of repentance. Very little luggage. A few blankets for emergencies, an ax for wood in an emergency and a bit of food and whatever else you have with you to make a fire, knives and things like that. Not much. And sleeping freely would only be an emergency, because the servitium, the duty of hospitality for the king, also applies to pilgrims and anyway hospitality had a different meaning at the same time, I also understand why you shouldn’t necessarily stay with the charcoal burner or the lonely forest miller. They can make you disappear relatively unnoticed. In the next village things are different. If in doubt, join a familia, a community of convenience as a travel group.
So the clothes are a means to an end for me to think about.

There is also one more thing. Simply cramming theory can be good, but it doesn’t have to be. I am reminded of Wilfried Menghin, who died in 2013, and who in “Das Schwert im frühen Mittelalter” provided a suggestion for the baldric of the Merovingian period. The whole thing was based on logical considerations, but it only worked to a limited extent. It pinches here and slips there. Menghin had never put it into practice or tested it. But it would be wrong to blame Menghin for this. He came from a time when archeology and history often sat in their elitist ivory towers. So there is no comparison to people like Zbigniew Robak, for example, who puts his theories about a possible sword belt into practice.

But if what I’m doing isn’t a reenactment, then what is? Is this experimental archaeology? In parts of the definition, yes. But I wouldn’t see it that pretentious. It basically just helps me get a feel for a period. I also see myself under pressure to act. I cannot, like Menghin, put forward a theory and then rely on my reputation that I don´t have. I have to deliver or support the whole thing with a model or a replica. In this way, a lot of stuff accumulates that gives the impression of a reenactment.

But that’s not even a bad thing. In the spring I was invited to the March Field of the former Franco Flemish Contingent and appeared there in, admittedly, a little early clothing. (Well, strange situation. First you wanted to join in, it didn’t work out, and then you’re invited there…) There, for example, I was able to understand for the first time something that I knew from text sources.

Notker the Stammerer reports on Charlemagne’s army, all dressed in metal and flashing in the sun. When I showed up at Funkenburg it was around 10 a.m. It was fantastic weather, I had the sun behind me and the fully equipped squad was in front of me for training. Although the chain mail was partly burnished and had rust in places, they sparkled, glittered and sparkled in the sun, not to mention the helmets. I had already imagined such a scenario in my mind, but I never saw it. You don’t need plate armor or scale armor to create this look. This was an insight I could only gained through reenactment.

Actually, I act more like a historian with far too broad areas.
I just have a little problem with the term historian. Although it is not a protected job title in Germany, I personally think it is unfair to put myself on the same level as people who, for example, have studied medieval studies.
Then there’s the matter of imposter syndrome – self-doubt about your own abilities.
I’m sitting in my booth, writing something and thinking that no one will read it. Then you go somewhere and discover things that you yourself have postulated at some point and then find out from the conversation that you used the blog here and afterwards I think that maybe I wrote shit or could have gone deeper into the matter and have doubts about what I’m doing.

But I’m probably a reenactor somehow and don’t want to admit it. Probably because I always thought and still think I can’t reach the level of those people from 2006.
I see one reason for this being the availability of items in general. When I first started looking at silk decorations on tunics, you couldn’t buy silk replicas yet. At that time I had the idea of ordering similar textiles from a London or Athens shop for Christian Orthodox sacral textiles. That would have amounted to a small fortune. Twenty years ago the world looked completely different in this aspect.
And when I see my stuff, I always think, that’s crap, you could have done it differently here and better there. And then the invitations come from all aound and you don´t anderstand why..
Therefore, I am not a reenactor, but someone who uses reenactment as a means to an end, a freeloader, so to speak…