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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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I mean im not sure LARP is always a problem. If a worthy tradition was lost due to force — for example, a culture was forced to give up its language after a conquest, it’s somewhat a LARP to go back to that. It’s also in many cases a worthy effort to do that even if at first it is a LARP. The revival of Hebrew was a LARP at tge time. Now it’s the native language of Israel, and there’s a living culture that grew up alongside it. Irish is taught in schools in Ireland, it is sort of a LARP even now, but it’s an attempt at reviving a piece of that culture.

As usual, it depends on your goals and the details of what is done. In our region, my parents' generation got the local language & culture beaten out of them by the greater german system, which resulted in me and my generation not being able to speak it (despite my parents still talking it among each other; I can understand it, though) and internalizing a more general "cosmopolitan" german culture instead, even if it still has some local flavors to it.

Now some of my old classmates are reviving the old language through "traditional theater" and similar events, but as far as I can see, they don't reject their actual internalized culture at all. I can't help but view it as pointless LARPing, even if they clearly are mostly sincere about wanting to reconnect with their heritage. Then again, I'm not really a traditionalist myself, so you could call my criticism dishonest itself.

I'm holding onto my dialect for dear life. It's a core element of my experience of "home". Somehow I internatlized early on that it was in fact the others, the dialect-rejectors, the ostentatiously high-german who were LARPing, who pretended not to understand and speak the actual natural language of this place and time. And I had the goood fortune to be among others who practiced their dialect shamelessly and naturallly.

But that was long ago.

It's obvious that young people are socialized not primarily with others from the same place, but above all else with rootless cosmopolitans and their media. The number of those who naturally speak the local dialect are dropping precipitously and, outside of a few isolated villages, are already unsustainably low. Maybe a comprehensive, widespread and sustained LARP might save it, but not nearly enough people have the desire, nevermind the ability, to do it. Things are looking dire.