Interesting fact. Shortly after returning to Germany from Kazakhstan, where he was a prisoner of war, Reinhard Koselleck attended a re-education programme at Göhrde castle in Lower Saxony. He sketched one of the officers charged with teaching him, the young Eric Hobsbawn.
He was using an eccentric - who was well recorded *because* he was eccentric - because by refraction it gave insight into the unremarkable and largely unrecorded normal.
Ginzburg ascribed Menocchio's (mis)interpretation of the texts to the prism through which he read them: the peasant culture of sixteenth north-east Italy. Ginzburg was not looking for atypical eccentricity, but the peasant quotidian.
@HeerJeet Reminded me that the FDP was the primary critic of broad denazification and consequently became the political home of a fair number of former Nazi Party members after their reintegration
@lionel_trolling EP Thompson’s brother, who he always maintained the smartest and most impressive of his parents’ children, was a sort of commando in Bulgaria aiding the partisans there when he was killed