The Uses and Abuses of History: Tacitus’ Germania

Interesting history and impact of the work of the Roman Tacitus on Germans:

Tacitus wasn’t a satirist himself, but in the Germania he was working one of Western moralism’s most enduring tropes: contrasting the noble savage beyond the border with the decadent civilized man within. The Germans, he wrote, were all of a phenotype, red-haired, blue-eyed and huge in stature; they were warlike, but honourable and loyal to death, fighting only for truth, justice and the German way. Overall, their moral standards put Romans to shame: “nobody laughs off vice, and to corrupt and to be corrupted is not called ‘modern times.’ ” As that line reveals, Tacitus meant his work as a call to Roman renewal, not a paean to the barbarians, whose faults as he saw them—in culture, manners and personal hygiene—drew sneers to match his praise for their virtues.

But the sneers were easily ignored in the first stirrings of the German nationalism that would prove so potent during the Reformation, especially among intellectuals envious of the French and English nation-states. One of the few to play both themes was an Italian papal envoy sent north to rally support for a crusade against the expanding Ottoman Empire. In public he stressed German warrior prowess as set out by his illustrious Roman predecessor; in private the envoy sent whining letters home, begging his friends to pull enough strings to get him out of a frozen hell hole of inedible food and “dead men who are still farting.”

German thinkers simply embraced the positive aspects. By the 19th century, racial theorists were taking Tacitus’s judgment that the ancient Germans preserved their virtues through their refusal to intermarry with other peoples as Gospel—and as proof that Jews were poisoning the very blood of the volk. By the time the Third Reich arose, Nazi theorists considered the Germania “a bible that every thinking German should possess,” in the words of one, and its author supremely trustworthy because he was both ancient and an admiring enemy of the Germans. Nazi gatherings had “Tacitus rooms” with particularly choice quotations about blood purity and the supreme virtue of manly loyalty unto death written on the walls for the contemplation of young. Adolf Hitler aimed to call the new capital he aimed to build Germania.

For true believers like Heinrich Himmler—who sent an SS team to steal a manuscript copy of the Germania from an Italian villa even as the Allies were advancing up the peninsula—Tacitus was a racial genius on a par with the Fuhrer himself, and his work one of the foundations of Nazism. Some of the old monks of Corvey, those who agreed with the long-running medieval argument that no good could come from preserving the works of pagan authors, would have said “told you so.”

The uses and abuses of history