A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus' 'Germania' from the Roman Empire
to the Third Reich
Christopher B. Krebs,
New York: W.W. Norton, 2011
303pp, black and white illustrations
Hardback, $25.95, £18.95
The reconstruction of the archaeological and historical pasts of ancient European societies has often been tainted by modern nationalistic conceits. Christopher Krebs, has undertaken a correction. The appropriation of Tacitus' Germania as an adjunct to the construction of a German national identity was not merely the work of a handful of National Socialists in the 1920s and 1930s but a long running process that began with the rediscovery of the minor works of Tacitus in the first half of the 15th century and continued through the Renaissance and into the modern era. Krebs explains how the ancient Roman work, which, with its list of tribes appended to a description of geography, customs and mores and reads like an intelligence briefing prepared for the Flavian bureaucracy, was twisted by its future readers into something more sinister.
The author has, in fact, written three works, any one of which is deserving of fuller exposition. He first explains what is known about Cornelius Tacitus and his literary career. This is the shortest part of the work. Krebs then takes up in exquisite detail the re-emergence of Tacitus' minor works, including the Germania during the Renaissance. Though an account of researches by Italian humanist manuscript collectors in old monastic libraries may not seem a promising subject, the characters involved are sufficiently colorful and dubious to make the tale seem like a hard-boiled detective story.
Krebs thus opens his narrative with a scene that could come straight from any Indiana Jones movie. Towards the end of World War II, SS agents raid and ransack the villa of an Italian count in a desperate bid to seize the 15th-century Codex Aesinas, containing the surviving manuscript of Tacitus' work on the Germanic tribes outside the Empire. In a similar vein, Krebs examines in depth the rediscovery of Tacitus in the light of the larger efforts of the Italian humanists of the 15th century.
Far from being ivory tower academics, one gets the sense that the manuscript hunters of that era, men like Petrarch, Poggio Braccolini and Niccolo Niccolini were not so much cloistered academics, but rather men of action, quite willing to resort to dubious methods in their frantic pillaging of European monastic libraries for manuscript copies of Classical works.
The bulk of Krebs' work, however, consists of German efforts to appropriate Tacitus in the service of creating a national identity. While Krebs' interest is primarily literary, and the history of ideas, these chapters could benefit from an expansion to consider both some of the other academic endeavours being carried on at the same time in archaeology, for example, and from comparison to some of the other national identity rationalisations going on elsewhere in Europe.
Krebs thus carefully traces the use of the Germania, first as a means by which Italian Renaissance thinkers, like Piccolomini, conflated the existing population of the northern part of the Holy Roman Empire with the population that existed in classical times in the same region. Whatever might actually have occurred during the migrations, for the humanist thinkers of the era, it was highly convenient to see this group as a unified, monolithic population with a continual line of descent. This was an effort to try to rouse the Holy Roman Empire to a reaction against the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. Subsequent events would take a radically different turn.
German scholars, beginning in the 1500s and working forward into the 1700s took the idea planted by Piccolomini, of a Germanic identity, very much to heart in an era which found the Germanic ethnic group fractured into many states. From this political situation, which was viewed as a decadent decline from a glorious Classical past an ideological concept of the German nation arose. On the whole, A Most Dangerous Book is both a most informative book and a most entertaining one. It ought quickly to find a place in both the fields of classical literary studies, and scholarship of 19th and 20th century nationalism.
Joseph Isenberg
