The unexpected consequences of Tacitus's little treatise about some troublesome northern tribes.
It is a dark and thrilling thought that a little book can change history. The first edition of the "Communist Manifesto" was only 23 pages long, and look what trouble it caused. It is an even more unnerving thought that a little book can change history without its author meaning to. The "Germania," by the great Latin historian Tacitus, is only 40 pages long in my old Penguin Classics edition. There is no evidence that the author intended much more than to offer the Roman public a short guide to those quarrelsome Northern tribes with whom Rome always seemed to be at war. Yet the most learned of modern historians, Arnaldo Momigliano, called it "one of the hundred most dangerous books ever written."
In his fascinating new study, Christopher Krebs sets out to explain why. Tacitus was not the first ancient historian to offer an account of a foreign people, or even of the Germans. Julius Caesar, Livy and the geographer Strabo all had a go before Tacitus published his monograph in 98 A.D. But it was his account of these pure-bred, frighteningly tall, dazzlingly blond warriors with their piercing blue eyes, their chastity and their courage, that stuck in the German mind and, nearly two millennia later, bolstered the Nazis' fantasies that they were destined to be the Master Race. Other writers had said some of the same things, and said them about other races too, but Tacitus's account is the only complete treatise on the subject that has come down to us from the ancient world.
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A Nazi rally on the Nuremberg Zeppelin Field during the 10th Party Congress in September 1938.
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It very nearly did not come down at all. The book was much copied in classical times, and a later Roman emperor called Tacitus (no relation, though he claimed he was) ordered mass production of Tacitus's works, for fear that they "might perish from readers' negligence." But most of these copies, like so much else, were lost in the Dark Ages. By the early Renaissance, besotted classicists were desperately hunting what appeared to be the last copy, which turned out to be tucked away in an obscure monastery in central Germany. From there, after much murky monkish haggling, it reached Rome and became famous. When the text was first printed (as distinct from circulating in manuscript), at Bologna in 1472, it was proudly subtitled "libellus aureus"—the "golden book."
A hand-copied 15th-century version—the oldest extant manuscript—turned up at the beginning of the 20th century in the Villa Baldeschi-Balleani on Italy's Adriatic coast and immediately became an object of desire for German nationalists. Hitler tried, in vain, to get Mussolini to procure it for him. During the German retreat up the Italian peninsula in 1943, Himmler sent an SS detachment to the villa to grab this precious memorial of the Germans' glorious past and blueprint for their rapidly disappearing glorious future. They failed too, and the codex disappeared once more until it literally floated to the surface in 1966 when the River Arno flooded the Banco di Sicilia in Florence, where Count Baldeschi-Balleani had left it for safekeeping. It is an extraordinary tale, and Mr. Krebs, a Harvard professor of classics, tells it with great verve and charm.
Yet how odd it is that the Germans should have beatified the "Germania." For as one of its first Renaissance readers, the humanist scholar Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, pointed out, the book depicts the ancient Germans as a horde of illiterate, barbaric brutes, living in squalid huts, too idle and drunk to practice farming, let alone the arts. Piccolomini also noted that earlier classical writers had painted much the same picture, which is not surprising, since Tacitus himself had never been north of the Alps and must have based much of his text on the testimony of others.
In the 19th century, German nationalists silently acknowledged this by rewriting the "Germania" to prove that their ancestors were in fact brilliant farmers, drank sparingly, were by no means illiterate, lived in nice houses and certainly did not practice human sacrifice as Tacitus had claimed. Gustaf Kossinna, a professor of archaeology in Berlin, argued that "a people of sots cannot persist as a people of heroes, and there was no question that the Germans were heroes"—so Tacitus must have been wrong.
The Nazis preferred to criticize any accurate accounts of the book as "too historical." Hitler himself in "Mein Kampf" belittled careful scholars who "rave about old Germanic heroism, about dim prehistory." At party rallies he would bellow out that "the Germans had experienced a period of high culture one thousand years before Rome was even founded." Yet over dinner, he would concede that, "at a time when our forefathers were producing stone troughs and clay pitchers, the Greeks were building the Acropolis." One must never underestimate the bottomless cynicism and mendacity of the Nazi leaders. Tacitus was simply one more source to pillage, distort and misquote.
Tacitus's remarks about the Germans not having intermarried with other tribes (largely because of being cut off in their dark forests) certainly gave credence to the Nazi claim that German blood was uniquely pure. Yet it is hard to see why he was any more dangerous than Charles Darwin, whose theory, when distorted and vulgarized as the survival of the fittest, provided scientific support for Himmler's program to breed flaxen-haired demigods—so unlike the physique of the dear Führer and his closest associates.
Other countries in Europe—notably France, Italy and Ireland—boasted about the unique beauty of their native tongue and founded language societies and literary clubs to promote a national culture. Everywhere in the 19th century students of folklore (itself a newly invented word) plumped up their local legends, sagas and fairy tales just as much as Jacob Grimm and Richard Wagner did in Germany.
Mr. Krebs tells us how Friedrich Jahn, in his book "The German Essence" (1810), urged gymnastics as the way to reinvigorate the German nation after the defeat by Napoleon, a message eagerly taken up by the Nazis in the next century. But again the Germans were not alone in resorting to physical jerks. After Britain's travails in the Crimean War, Charles Kingsley extolled "muscular Christianity" to put steel back into an unhealthy nation. And after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, Pierre de Coubertin devised the revival of the Olympic Games for much the same reason.
By concentrating on the "Germania" and the Germans, Mr. Krebs ignores the waves of nationalism that recurrently swept the European continent and that often took remarkably similar forms in different countries. As a matter of fact, we British could have made something out of Tacitus's account of us, in his companion book, "Agricola," where he shows our forefathers as cheerful, brave and devoted to their families—a rather more sympathetic picture than his portrayal of the Germans.
The question remains: Why exactly did nationalism take a uniquely vicious form in Germany? There are several possible answers, none of them entirely satisfactory—recent achievement of nationhood, inferiority complex, unstable frontiers—but I don't think that poor Tacitus deserves much of the blame.
It is politically incorrect these days to claim that there is any such thing as an enduring national character or, even if there were, that Tacitus's tribes bear any relation to modern Germans. Heinrich Böll, the Nobel Prize-winning German novelist, is reproved by Mr. Krebs for being naïve in finding Tacitus's book "surprisingly up to date" and the description of German songs "rather familiar" when he re-read the book in the 1970s. Yet I must confess that when I read the "Germania" quite soon after having lived in Germany for some months, I had the same sense of familiarity that I have experienced when reading Tocqueville on the Americans or Giraldus Cambrensis on the medieval Welsh. When we have this sense, perhaps we are just reading back into the text something that isn't really there.
Right at the end of his entrancing book, Mr. Krebs himself concedes that "Tacitus did not write a most dangerous book; his readers made it so." Earlier he quotes the old Roman grammarian's saying "books have their own destiny." But he misses, as we all tend to do, the little qualifying phrase that comes first, "according to the capacities of the reader."
—Mr. Mount, a former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, is the author of "Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us."
