Kriegsspiel
Returns to the Museum By Ana Edwards Photos by John Dixon
On a Friday afternoon last April,
Oslo, Norway
fourteen students from the Deutsch-Norwegischen Schule (German-Norwegian School) in Oslo, Norway, completed a morning’s worth of programs at our Tredegar campus. They had a semester-long survey of US history from settlement to Reconstruction and in English class had studied the African American experience. Their trip to the US included visits to Jamestown, Williamsburg, and The American Civil War Museum, followed by Monticello, Montpelier, and Gettysburg, where they did a project on Civil War memory and monuments.
Katharina Schlichtherle, an English and History teacher at DeutschNorwegischen Schule, brought her first students to visit ACWM in 2018 for an immersion in Civil War history. She was so pleased that in this post-pandemic visit, Schlichtherle requested as close to the same itinerary as possible. This group spent the morning on a Brown’s Island tour followed by self-guided explorations of A People’s Contest, Greenback America, and Southern Ambitions. After lunch they were treated to one of our youth groups’ favorite programs, Medical Practices of the Civil War.
Kelly Hancock entertains questions from the students on 19th century disease and medicine.
The culminating experience was the utterly hands-on, all-in activity called Kriegsspiel, the German word for “wargame.” This game was designed as a training tool for young officers in early 19 th century Germany and eventually continued on the next page
T H E A M ER I C A N CI V I L WA R M US EU M
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