User:Obenritter

About me
American citizen from central Illinois, heritage speaker of German. Work for gov, teach college history

Areas of historical expertise:
 * 1) Ancient Germanic Peoples and the Late Roman Empire                                                                                             Zeke.jpg
 * 2) Modern Germany
 * 3) Modern Europe
 * 4) The Third Reich
 * 5) WW1 and WW2
 * 6) Warfare

Favorite Writers: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hermann Hesse, Merleau Ponty, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Anna Akhmatova

Favorite Historians: Thomas Burns, Arnulf Krause, Peter Heather, Walter Goffart, Guy Halsall, Patrick Geary, Adrian Goldsworthy, Erik Jensen, J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, Edward James, Richard Bessel, Peter Fritzsche, Klaus Fischer, Malcolm Todd, Jonathan Riley-Smith, Niall Ferguson, Roger Collins, Sir Hew Strachan, Sir Ian Kershaw, Volker Berghahn, Sir Richard J. Evans, Gerhard Weinberg, A.J.P. Taylor,  Bernard Lewis, Norman Davies, Geoffrey Hosking, Gary W. Gallagher, Wolfram Wette, Claudia Koonz, Stephen Sears, Michael Bess, Sir Christopher Clark, Mark Mazower, Lawrence James, Shelley Baranowski, Andrew Wheatcroft, Thomas S. Burns, George C. Herring, Wolfgang Mommsen, Jane Caplan, Gordon A. Craig, Sir Alistair Horne, James M. McPherson, William Hitchcock, Donald Kagan, Giles MacDonogh, Michael Burleigh, Fred Anderson, Peter H. Wilson, Christopher Tyerman, Sir Raymond Carr, Derek Wilson, Rosamond McKitterick, Steve Pincus, John Lewis Gaddis, Bruce Catton, Joachim Fest, Richard Marius, Hagen Schulze, Mary Fulbrook, Steven Ozment, Robin Winks, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Martin Kitchen, Michael Geyer, Bruce Cumings, T.C.W. Blanning, Holger Herwig, Williamson Murray, John K. Fairbank, Allan R. Millett, Randall Bytwerk, Sir John Keegan, William Doyle, J.M. Roberts, Tony Judt, Mike Rapport, Orlando Figes, Antony Beevor, Richard Overy, Jonathan Spence, Robert Service, Piers Brendon, Robert Citino, Sir Michael Howard, William Manchester, Michael Palmer, Arno Mayer, Shelby Foote, Herwig Wolfram, and Roger Price

Favorite Movies: Sneakers, The Right Stuff, Amadeus, Glory, The Empire Strikes Back, A Beautiful Mind, Da Vinci Code, The Imitation Game, Angels and Demons, Das Leben der Anderen, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Favorite Musicians / Composers: J.S. Bach, Mozart, Olafur Arnalds, Pink Floyd, Beirut, The Cure, Coldplay, Supertramp, Beethoven, Johann Johannson, Rush, The Police, Sigur Ros, Hammock, Dustin O'Halloran, Max Richter, This Will Destroy You, Trentemoller, The Last Days, Yann Tiersen, Ab Ovo, Brian Crain, Hans Zimmer, James Horner

Books which impacted me most: Undaunted Courage, The Brothers Karamazov, Germans into Nazis, Kalte Heimat, Narcissus and Goldmund, On the Origins of War, Choices under Fire, Phenomenology of Perception, Tale of the Heike, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Either/Or, The Will to Power, The Tao Te Ching, Why Did the Heavens not Darken, The Pity of War, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Chronicles of Tao, Faust, Doctor Zhivago, Master and Margarita

Favorite Quote: Man kann in Gesellschaft unterrichtet werden, aber man wird nur in Einsamkeit inspiriert. (One can be instructed in the company of others, but one is inspired only in solitude.) Goethe

More insight about Me
For anyone interested: my mission is to try and contribute a small measure of sanity and intellectual substance to an otherwise mad and intellectually depraved world. With earnest, I attempt to add academic substantiation (citations) to pages that strike my fancy—no matter how unusual they are. As a historian, the general trend is towards themes related to my subject matter expertise but my contributions are by no means thereby constrained.

Realistically, I do not consider myself the foremost authority on anything as very few truly are (despite their mature education and credentials) - that does not mean however, we should refrain from contributing valuable academic content when and where we can. My Ph.D. work is in European history and strategic studies with a particular focus on Roman and Germanic peoples of Late Antiquity. My secondary specialization is modern Germany. My graduate degree is in European history as is my undergraduate degree. My eclectic nature shows in that I also have minors in math and chemistry. Despite the fact that many are put off by intellectuals, I cherish them. They make this world interesting and shape both their environment and mold our history. People who use wonderful expressions in multiple languages, worship J.S. Bach as a veritable god (or one at least sent by the gods), engage in heavy philosophy (no matter the genre), enjoy dabbling in abstract mathematical discourse, or those who try to decipher and interpret historical trends, are of my ilk. Two things that most amaze me in life: (1) the Mandelbrot set, (2) the seeming transcendence of Tibetan monks / Two things I most abhor: (1) the intransigent moral absolutism of bigots, (2) ratiocinative oversimplification/reductionism

My hobbies (past and present): Tai Chi Chuan, chess, long-range target shooting, and motorcycles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Template_index/User_talk_namespace < USEFUL

Advice: Observations on Wikipedia behavior, from the mind of.