KrautBlog

Occasional musings, Geistesblitze, photos, drawings etc. by a "resident alien", who has landed on American soil from a far-away planet called "Germany".

Friday, February 6, 2009

Kesselschlacht (word of the week)

This could have been a word of the month, but since a reader has brought it up, let's look at it now.
Posted by Ulrich at 4:31 PM · ·
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10 comments:

ArtLvr said...

Hi Ulrich -- I thought you'd get a kick out of Jim Cramer's comment on his Mad Money TV show on CNBC tonight, re Bush administration's disastrous removal of the "uptick" rule which then allowed unfettered bear attacks on the stock market... He said the Germans have a word for it: kesselschlacht -- meaning total annihilation. I think he was saying something about surrounding a castle and throwing everything at it, but if "kessel" is a kettle, it sounds more like slamming boiling water (or oil) all over somebody... good old medieval technique, anyway?

February 10, 2009 at 6:35 PM
Ulrich said...

@artlvr: A Kesselschlacht (lit. "kettle battle") is a battle in which one side is surrounded and attacked on all sides by the enemy--they are "in the kettle". It ususally ends, as you suggest, in a total rout. Stalingrad was the mother of all Kesselschlachten (that's the plural) in WWII. A famous example from history is Thermopylae, where the Spartans under Leonidas found themselves attacked from the front and rear in a narrow passage between steep cliffs--that was the "kettle" they were in. We are told that the Persians were shown a secret path to the rear by a Greek traitor.

BTW The German Schlacht (battle) derives from the verb schlachten--to slaughter. Again, the German do not mince words when it comes to naming things.

February 11, 2009 at 8:56 AM
ArtLvr said...

Many thanks for explaining, Ulrich! Very grim... Do rewrite or omit my lead-in, and have a Word of the Week!

February 11, 2009 at 10:09 AM
Ulrich said...

Further research reveals that Thermopylae wasn't really a Kesselschlacht--the Spartans were not encircled by the Persians on all sides (it was a complete rout, though). A typical Kesselschlacht takes place on an open plain that makes a quick encirclement possible. The classical Kesselschlacht from antiquity is Cannae, where the Carthaginians under Hannibal annihilated the Romans under Terentius Varoo in 216 bc. Hannibals's cavalry did the encirclement then. In WWII, this role was usually played by tanks.

February 11, 2009 at 1:48 PM
Ulrich said...

oops--the Roman commander was Terentius Varro.

February 11, 2009 at 7:22 PM
Anonymous said...

It's now a memorable word!!! Many thanks... Was Hannibal's cavalry mounted on horses at that point or on elephants? Whichever, let's hope that the unprincpled Bushite elite has not succeeded in virtual ruin of the world's less empowered masses!

February 12, 2009 at 8:22 PM
Ulrich said...

I have never seen elephants mentioned in connection with Cannae. My guess it that by that time, the elephants that had made it over over the Alps (and had played a part in Hannibal's first victory 2 years earlier) were no longer alive.

February 13, 2009 at 11:47 AM
Anonymous said...

Cramer also uses this word in this weekend's New Yorker magazine in reference to his appearance on Jon Stewart's show (it's misspelled in the magazine); I think Cramer doesn't understand its meaning exactly however.

It does refer to a battle of encirclement, but does not necessarily end in total annihilation for the trapped forces (indeed at Demyansk, Cherkassy, and Falaise the majority of German soldiers escaped or survived, although generally without their equipment). It's more about being cut-off and attacked from all sides, however, this is not literally a battle of "annihilation", the term for that would be something like Vernichtungsschlacht. (It also predates World War Two, so is not necessarily a "Nazi" term.)

May 17, 2011 at 7:56 AM
Ari said...

You're probably amazed someone is commenting after all this time but I thought a good example of a Kesselschlacht would be Julius Caesar's final battle against Vercingetorix. Not only did Caesar's legions encircle Vercingetorix's forces, but they built a wall around him. Then Vercingetorix's reinforcements encircled Caesar, who built a second wall behind him so he could both siege the forces in the middle while defending against the forces on the outside!

In a sense it was a double Kesselschlacht! With both the gaulic and roman forces encircling each other in a rare case!

May 8, 2017 at 11:57 AM
Ulrich said...

@Ari: I'm more delighted than amazed by your comment after all this time. I always consider my posts alive, no longer how old they are--that's one of the reasons why I cling to my blog, as opposed to switching to FB or Twitter--It seems blogs have a longer shelf life when it comes to search engines.

We did read Caesar's own account of the battle of Alesia in the original in my high school way back in Cologne, but I do not remember much, except that Caesar at some point, when the Roman were close to defeat, jumped into the fray himself (if memory serves me right). So, thanks for the refresher!

May 8, 2017 at 12:42 PM

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