Russia’s Farcical Mutiny Is Deadly Serious for China and Iran
Today’s geopolitics and economics have more in common with the 17th century than the 20th. Is that a greater threat to the democracies or the autocracies?
The embattled tsar.
Photographer: Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images
In Friedrich Schiller’s The Death of Wallenstein, the downfall of a mercenary has a dark, tragic majesty. It was the first play I ever saw in a German theater, in Hamburg in the late 1980s, and I still remember the way Schiller’s verse thundered through the auditorium, the quintessence of Sturm und Drang.
Albrecht von Wallenstein was one of the towering figures of the Thirty Years’ War. Born into a poor Bohemian Protestant family, he converted to Roman Catholicism and acquired wealth, power and ducal status in the service of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II. In a singularly bloody career, he fought the Turks, the Venetians, the Danes, the Swedes and even his own countrymen — in short, he fought whomever the emperor paid him to fight.