Word: germanism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...peculiar language of the document was easily skirted by the Germans, who used poison gas to devastating effect in World War I. In April 1915, German soldiers surreptitiously installed 5,730 cylinders of liquid chlorine in the trenches along a four-mile section of no-man's-land near the Belgian town of Ypres. Using a heavy artillery barrage, the Germans were able to shatter the cylinders and release the lethal gas. In a single afternoon, 5,000 French troops were killed and an additional 10,000 were injured. The carnage in Flanders was commemorated in a poem by Wilfred...
...German chemists subsequently introduced the far deadlier mustard gas to the battlefield. By the end of the war, both sides had fired about 124,000 tons of chemicals, killing 91,000 soldiers and wounding 1.2 million more. But strategists were still divided about the effectiveness of gas. Advocates of chemical warfare produced statistics showing that gas caused far more casualties per round than explosives; opponents produced conflicting evidence that it took a higher tonnage of chemicals to control a given area. Some claimed that gas was a "humane weapon" because the incidence of fatal casualties was only...
...least one young German corporal who was temporarily blinded by a retaliatory blast of British mustard gas never forgot the experience. "My eyes," wrote Adolf Hitler, "had turned into glowing coals; it had grown dark around me." Hitler's memory, coupled with larger fears of retaliation, may help explain why the Nazis never unleashed their newly developed nerve gases on the battlefield in World War II, though they were applied in the gas chambers of the concentration camps...
Protestant scholars in Germany took the lead in the early 19th century, similarly sifting the New Testament for evidence of the flesh-and-blood Nazarene beneath the "myths." Often their Jesus turned out to be an inspirational preacher who bore a suspicious resemblance to a 19th century German. But by the 20th century, the great Protestant critic Rudolf Bultmann of Marburg University had concluded that such quests were fruitless. The Bible is so much an article of faith, so laden with unprovable events and legends, he contended in 1926, that "we can now know almost nothing concerning the life...
...acceptance of much of what the New Testament postulates about Jesus and his teaching. The impetus comes in part from new evidence. As a matter of principle, Bultmann never visited the sites in the Holy Land and totally neglected the influence of Jewish culture on Jesus -- "a bad old German tradition with dangerous results," according to Martin Hengel of the University of Tubingen in West Germany. Hengel and his colleagues, and scholars elsewhere, are now reversing that anti-Semitic tradition, discovering that studies of Jewish culture in 1st century Palestine shed fresh light on the historical Jesus...