Krebs, however, is more interested in tracing almost five centuries of German nationalist interpretation through which German historians, theologians, philosophers, poets, dramatists and politicians have seen in this innocuous and uninformed text the true story of the origins and customs of their ancestors. Since the historian had never visited Germany and constructed his image of the land and its peoples from other writers, what then was the aim of his rather idealised picture of the simple life, marital chastity, tribal loyalty and manly courage of the ancient Germans? Most scholars now believe that Tacitus' chief purpose was to critique by contrast - as the "noble savage" has often been used - the corruption and self-indulgence of his Roman contemporaries. The Harvard classical scholar Christopher Krebs has taken Momigliano's judgement as the starting point of this engaging book, which begins and ends in 20th-century Germany when the Nazis invested the Germania with their nationalist and racist ideology. But he would never have imagined that his Germania would have much impact, least of all on the barbarous, illiterate Germans themselves. Since he had experienced the brutal tyranny of the emperor Domitian (AD81-96), Tacitus had surely hoped that his narrative histories ( Histories and Annals) would be a lasting deterrent to tyrants and an encouragement to lovers of liberty. Although few in that Copenhagen audience could have been very surprised, Tacitus would have been deeply shocked. Krebs, a professor of classics at Harvard University, traces the wide-ranging influence of the Germania over a 500-year span, showing us how an ancient text rose to take its place among the most dangerous books in the world.In 1954, less than a decade after the fall of the Third Reich, the great Italian-Jewish historian Arnaldo Momigliano told an important international classical congress that Cornelius Tacitus' brief ethnographical pamphlet on the ancient Germans was among "the one hundred most dangerous books ever written". In this elegant and captivating history, Christopher B.
But the Germania inspired - and polarized - people long before the rise of the Third Reich. When Tacitus wrote a not-very-flattering little book about the ancient Germans in 98 CE, at the height of the Roman Empire, he could not have foreseen that the Nazis would extol it as "a bible", nor that Heinrich Himmler, the engineer of the Holocaust, would vow to resurrect Germany on its grounds.
The pope wanted it, Montesquieu used it, and the Nazis pilfered an Italian noble's villa to get it: the Germania, by the Roman historian Tacitus, took on a life of its own as both an object and an ideology. The riveting story of the Germania and its incarnations and exploitations through the ages.
Winner of the 2012 Christian Gauss Book Award
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