A Most Dangerous Book

A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich by Christopher B. Krebs


There is an interesting book to be written about the rediscovery of Tacitus's Germania, but this is not that book.

I have a high tolerance for technical detail and minutia, but “A Most Dangerous Book” by Christopher Krebs went well past my limits. I think the problem was that I kept waiting for the “most dangerous book” part, which, of course, does not happen until late in the narrative when the Germania becomes a primary source for the Nazis. When that happened, I was not surprised although I was exhausted by Krebs' efforts to inflate the significance of the Germania.

This book is mostly about the reception of the Germania. It reminds me of Stephen Greenblatt's “The Swerve,” which was about the discovery and reception of the poem “On the Nature of Things” (De Rerum Natura) by Lucretius. Greenblatt's book promised to describe how De Rerum Natura changed the course of European history, but never came close to making that showing. Instead, Greenblatt's book, like this book, bogged down into a collection of references to the subject book over the centuries, most of which show that the book was taken out of context or largely ignored. It seems to be a mark of this genre for the author to oversell the importance of the book, probably in an effort to attract readers to what is a book of limited interest for those with an “inside the game” love of books.

A problem with both Greenblatt's book and this book is that we never get an introduction to the text. We are told about what people say about the text. We are told about people's reaction to the text. There is, however, never anything more than a broad gesture at the major themes of the work. Certainly, the reader can go and read the text for themselves. Readers should do that. However, it seems like a wasted opportunity to bait the hook with a survey of the work in question.

What also unites Greenblatt's book and this book is that both works were the chance discovery of long-forgotten, last remaining texts by Poggio Bracciolini. Krebs writes:
SILENCE IS almost all we hear of Tacitus for much of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Then, toward the end of 1425, a year otherwise conspicuous for its lack of conspicuousness, Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) in Rome sat down to compose with “a hasty hand” one of his many letters to his lifelong friend Niccolò Niccoli in Florence. Secretary by profession, humanist by passion, Poggio reeled off letters that detail his life in general and his hunts for manuscripts in particular. This time he had grand news. As a skilled writer, he knew to withhold this tidbit for last for his correspondent, another bibliomaniac:

Krebs, Christopher B.. A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (p. 56). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

It stirs the romantic cockles of my heart to think about someone marching into a monastic library and pulling out a lost manuscript. I could die satisfied if I pulled off that trick.

The problem is that the next move in disseminating this book is that it wasn't disseminated. Poggio lent it to another scholar who forgot to return it for decades. The text mysteriously moved from site to site until it resurfaced decades later. If the rescue of Tacitus's The Germania from a monastic library was miraculous, grace preserved the text from being lost during this decades-long interregnum.

Thereafter, the reception of the Germania depended on the prejudices or agenda of the recipient. Italians used it to show that Germans were barbaric. Germans used it to show that their ancestors were noble and that there was something like a unified German culture. A fair bit of editing occurred to remove some of the less attractive descriptions of German ritual sacrifices by some of the German commentators.

Krebs walks us through a lot of German history in the guise of talking about the Germania. In a lot of this history, the Germania does not seem to play a significant role. References to the Germania are few and far between.

This changed in the Nineteenth Century with the humiliation of the French victory over the many Germanic states. In the later Nineteenth Century, the Volkisch movement started, and interest in the Germania waxed. After the (second) French victory over the German Reich in World War I, revanchist Germans look to the Germania for inspiration. Even during the Nazi period, interest in the Germania is hit or miss. Himmler loves the Germania, particularly with its putative connection of German virtues with the farming class. Other leaders, including Hitler and Goebbels, were less interested in the antiquity that the Germania represented.

There was a definite “crank” strand in the Nazi movement who turned to the Germania for inspiration. Krebs argues that Nazi anti-miscegenation laws were putatively rooted in the inspiration of Germania:

Though it waned as years went by, Günther's impact on National Socialist ideology was profound. His doctrine was outlined in handbooks like The ABC of National Socialism and summarily found its way into school curricula. It figured centrally and prominently in doctrinaire booklets authorized by Heinrich Himmler, and it left traces in the second part of Mein Kampf (Hitler's library contained many of Günther's writings).60 Rosenberg, who may have initiated the conferral of the NSDAP prize, also noted in his Nuremberg speech the race expert's legal impact. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor was passed “out of the deep conviction that the purity of German blood is the prerequisite of the survival of the German people.” On the strength of this creed, then, the Reichstag “unanimously decreed the following law . . . : Marriages between Jews and citizens of German or related blood are forbidden.” Just as the Germanen, in Günther's interpretation, had discouraged mixed marriages in an effort to retain racial purity, National Socialist legislation prohibited mixed marriages between Jews and Germans. It was hardly the only National Socialist law based on an alleged Germanic practice. Shortly after coming into power the Nazis dissolved unions and passed the Law for the Organization of National Labor, which framed the relationship between manager and employees as one of “leader” and “followers,” the former answerable for the common good, the latter obliged to be loyal—just like Tacitus's Germanen in chapters 14 and 15.61 Similarly, what the Nuremberg race laws chiseled into stone was ultimately an adaptation of the erratic ethnographical stereotype that the Roman historian had taken from Greek sources and applied to the Germanen in chapter 4. As a result ideologically aligned readers of the Germania considered the laws concerning the “Jewish question” as the “most recent effort” to restore the racial purity Tacitus mentioned.62 But there had never been any such thing.

Krebs, Christopher B.. A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (pp. 229-230). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

On the other hand, there are books that argue that the Nuremberg laws were based on American precedents, and those precedents were certainly not based on Tacitus. So, as with most of the book, the actual impact of the Germania on history is nebulous.

Krebs's book also contains a surprising passage about the Catholic bishop of Munich, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber's, attack on the crypto-paganism that the Nazis seemed to be projecting in 1933. Krebs writes:

A FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT noted the “breathless silence in the mighty room.”1 When the cardinal-archbishop of Munich and Freising, Michael von Faulhaber, ascended the pulpit of Saint Michael's Church in Munich to deliver his New Year's address, he held the heightened attention not just of his audience, with its numerous journalists from around the world: The newly installed National Socialist regime also listened uneasily. It was December 31, 1933. The Weimar Republic was dead but its gravediggers not yet certain of their power, and the cardinal made them nervous. Saint Michael's, the largest Renaissance church north of the Alps, on the preceding Sundays of Advent had proved too small to host all who wanted to attend, so Faulhaber's sermons were transmitted by loudspeaker to two other churches, both filled to the last seat. With forthright eloquence “welded in the fiery forge of the . . . prophets of the Old Testament,” Faulhaber had addressed inopportune issues.2 While the National Socialist program contained an article (number 24) that decried the Old Testament as an offense against the “moral sense and the sense of decency of the Germanic race,” he had spoken about its value. And although he was careful to qualify his statements, he “should” have foreseen, in the words of the Security Service (SD), that in praising the people of Israel for having “exhibited the noblest religious values,” he would outrage some and comfort many others.3 Julius Schulhoff, a German Jew, thanked the cardinal in a letter, expressing his hope that God would strengthen his “wonderful courage.”4 Michael von Faulhaber showed courage again in his fifth sermon that New Year's Eve; he would need more for many weeks after.
The telling topic on the last day of the year was “Christianity and Germanicness” (Christentum und Germanentum).* The archbishop worried that there was “a movement afoot to establish a Nordic or Germanic religion.”5 The merits of Christianity were being cast into doubt. But who could possibly take a look at the Germanic existence before Christianization and doubt them? To explain his surprise the cardinal proceeded to rouse a drowsy specter of the Germanic barbarian from 450 years of sleep: Wittingly or not, the picture he sketched was almost an exact replica of the barbaric Germane that Enea Silvio Piccolomini had brought to the fore in his influential treatise in the fifteenth century. Like his predecessor Faulhaber used “a small but valuable historical source,” and with it painted for his congregation an abhorrent picture of polytheism, human sacrifices, and “savage superstition.” He disapproved of the pre-Christians' warrior existence with its primitive “obligation of the vendetta” and denounced their “proverbial indolence, mania for drinking,” carousals, and “passion for dice playing.” The list of shortcomings was long, and all were substantiated using Tacitus's text.

Krebs, Christopher B.. A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (pp. 214-215). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

And:

A secret SD memo reported that all five speeches met with an “enormous resonance,” but none more than the New Year's address.6 The national and international press—including the Bayerische Staatszeitung, the New York Times, Le Temps (Paris), and Il Lavoro (Geneva)—all covered it. National Socialists of all ages and ranks refuted, scorned, and attacked the address in journals like Germanien, People and Race, and the Vanguard. It was “a political crime,” they said, and its speaker, “a categorical and determined enemy of the National Socialist state.”7 Alfred Rosenberg, the regime's chief ideologue, charged the cardinal with “severely disgracing the process of self-reflection which [was] under way in the Third Reich.”8 But the German people would not, he added threateningly, “quietly accept such utterances.” Far from acquiescing, Nazi opposition took violent form during the night of January 27, when two shots were fired into the living room of the cardinal's home. No one was hurt. The book containing the sermons came under fire as well. Members of the Hitler Youth, “with the warrior passion of the ancient Germanen,” tried to disrupt its distribution.9 Just as in May 1933, when the Bebelplatz in Berlin had crackled, ablaze with a bonfire of books, they burned it in the course of a demonstration (to no avail: It sold at least 150,000 copies and was translated into eleven languages). A caricature ominously suggested that a similar fate might be in store for its author. Even though some critics occasionally ventured into the territory of rational argument, all in all the reactions “cast the contemporary cultural sophistication in a less than flattering light,” as the archbishop wryly wrote.10 When he uncovered the barbarian past, barbarity reared up in the present.

Krebs, Christopher B.. A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (pp. 216-217). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Along with Jewish businesses and synagogues, Faulhaber's residence would be attacked on Kristallnacht. Opposing revanchist antiquarianism can be a dangerous occupation.
In sum, like a lot of books of this type, there is a flood of information. Whether that information is interesting or material to the reader depends on what the reader hopes to find. I appreciated the passage about Faulhaber. Was that germane to the topic of the Germania being “a most dangerous book”? Probably not. I'm not sure Faulhaber mentioned the Germania; it seems that he was responding to volkisch romantic stereotypes that were in the air at the time.

So, whether the reader will find this book worth the investment depends on what the reader hopes to find. As Krebs concludes:

“In the end the Roman historian Tacitus did not write a most dangerous book; his readers made it so.”

But isn't that true of all books?