A year ago this week a detachment from the German armed forces lined up in front of the Reichstag building to honour their 160,000 comrades who had served in Afghanistan, including 59 who lost their lives.
The sight of rifle-toting formations stomping up and down in front of the parliament with blazing torches and eagle banners reminded some of Twitter’s more sensitive souls of an altogether darker period of German history. “All that’s left is for Leni Riefenstahl to make a film,” as one prominent Palestinian journalist put it.
But the Grosser Zapfenstreich (Grand Tattoo) goes back considerably further than the Nazis. The term, which means something like the “striking of the spigots”, comes from a 16th-century ritual where plastered German Landsknecht troops were rounded
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