Kriegsreisen.de
Kriegsreisen.de is an e-magazine that deals with the social history of mercenaries from a historical perspective.
description
The online platform is operated by the historian and author Frank Westenfelder. It is considered the most comprehensive German-language source of information on the subject of mercenaries and describes the history of mercenaries from antiquity to the present day, which is shaped by private security companies such as Blackwater . Self-definition: "War travelers deals with mercenaries, soldiers of fortune and adventurers - the men from everywhere and nowhere."
history
The portal was founded in 2002. The trigger, in addition to a journalistic assignment from the magazine Damals, was the realization that apart from lurid books, mostly on mercenaries and the French Foreign Legion and some exotic specialist articles, there was very little material on the subject of mercenaries.
Westenfelder, who works for the magazine Damals , was commissioned by the editors to write an article about pirates (published in 1997 under Pirate War in the Mediterranean ) and, while researching archives, came to the conclusion that most of the travelogues had been written by mercenaries. “Since I've always had a preference for strange, lost characters ignored by great historiography,” he later told reporter Dominik Irtenkauf, “I decided to write the missing book myself.” The internet was already good at that time developed, and so the research results flowed in the form of a growing magazine Kriegsreisen.de.
criticism
According to the historian Mathias Wörsching, the texts are "fresh and entertaining, are always critical and averse to any mystification or heroization."
Publications (selection)
- Mercenaries in Mali. The flow of money that wars and warriors are paid for; Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 4, 2013
- How Western Money and African Blood Come Together - The African Union Mission in Somalia; Deutschlandfunk, February 19, 2013
- The UN rental regiments - on the privatization of peace: the rich countries pay, the poor provide the soldiers
literature
- Frank Westenfelder: A little history of the mercenaries - historical figures on the way to the modern age ; Adatia-Verlag Sankt Augustin, 2011, ISBN 9783940461124
- Marco Seliger: Portrait of a Mercenary: The War Traveler , FAZ from April 30, 2013