287 - Richard Rohlin - Universal History: The Symbolism Of Nationalism
The Symbolic World
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The Search for the National Epic
In 18th and 19th century Europe, you have the emerging of what's sometimes called the search for the national epic. Yacob Grimm is a philologist, he's interested in really old words. And so his two great works that he composed were the largest and most comprehensive dictionary of the German language which has ever been created. His Teutonic mythology is, let's say having a lot of problems from the perspective of modern scholarship. He was trying to package all these stories by collecting them and arranging them into one identity. An identity that's based in this based in the language that you speak or who your ancestors were.
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