Soldateska
The term Soldateska comes from the Italian ( soldatesca ) and means "rampant soldiers" or "raw war people".
Although it was known and used since the Middle Ages , the word only became a negative catchphrase through the descriptions by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen and the description of the Thirty Years War by Friedrich Schiller and others. The mercenary armies then did not have the discipline known - or at least required - from armies today . Above all, the lack of supplies for the troops often led to looting and commission demands on cities. Torture, such as the use of the Swedish drink , was also used, for example to get the farmers' hidden supplies. Marauders , who were mostly unable to fight due to injury or illness, often found their only livelihood in looting. They are a by-product of the Soldateska. Such properties and phenomena were and are also to be found in later centuries. The term was mainly coined to differentiate the younger military armies from the mercenary armies.
Soldateska is still used in modern times for undisciplined military units that are engaged in warfare .
Kurt Tucholsky, for example, in his review of Julius Gumbel's book "Zwei Jahre Mord" (from 1918 to 1920) uses the term Soldateska to refer to the arbitrary acts of the Freikorps after the First World War and the Black Reichswehr ("A small army of unsatisfied, angry, declassed and humanly degraded men had returned home and did not know what to start ")
In contrast to the actions of the Soldateska of earlier centuries, in addition to martial law, international law also applies.
literature
- Bernhard Kroener: Soldier or Soldateska? Programmatic outline of a social history of the military lower classes in the first half of the 17th century . In: Military History Research Office : Military History. Problems - Theses - Ways , Stuttgart 1982, pp. 100–123.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Kurt Tucholsky. Review of Julius Gumbel's book "Zwei Jahre Mord" (first edition of "Vier Jahre Politischer Mord"), in: Die Weltbühne , September 8, 1921, No. 36, pp. 237–242. Facsimile at archive.org
