A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich

by Christopher B. Krebs

The  New York Times Book Review  Editor's Choice . 
Times Literary Supplement  Book of the Year . 
Choice  Outstanding title. 
Winner of Phi Beta Kappa's 2012  Christian Gauss Book Award.
    
"A model of popular intellectual history . . . . In every way,  
A Most Dangerous Book is a most brilliant achievement."--Washington Post   

The riveting story of the Germania and its incarnations and exploitations through the ages.
The pope wanted it, Montesquieu used it, and the Nazis pilfered an Italian noble's villa to get the Germania, by the Roman historian Tacitus, took on a life of its own as both an object and an ideology. 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. But the Germania inspired--and polarized--readers long before the rise of the Third Reich. In this elegant and captivating history, Christopher B. Krebs, a professor of classics at Harvard University, traces the wide-ranging influence of the Germania over a five-hundred-year span, showing us how an ancient text rose to take its place among the most dangerous books in the world. 14 black-and-white illustrations

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Germany, Books About Books, Ancient History, Philosophy, European History

303 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2011

About the author

Christopher B. Krebs is a classics professor at Harvard University whose academic publications include extensive work on the ancient historians and a recent contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Tacitus. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Mark Porton · Rating 4 out of 5]

For my own part, I agree with those who think the tribes of Germania are free from all taint of inter-marriages with foreign nations, and that they appear as a distinct, unmixed ethnicity, like none but themselves

This is an excerpt from Germania written by one of Rome’s greatest historians, Publius Cornelius Tacitus (56 CE – 120 CE). Tacitus wrote Germania in 98 CE, to describe the Germanic Tribes. The Germane were a group the Romans always had great difficulty conquering. This review’s opening quotation from Germania is a typical excerpt that appealed to the likes of the German National Socialists such as Heinrich Himmler when trying to develop a narrative regarding what it meant to be “German”.

BUT……. this isn’t a review of Germania. I did download it as well, to see what all the fuss was about. This review is about A Most Dangerous Book by Christopher Krebs.

Krebs takes the reader on a journey from the creation of the ‘lost’ manuscript to the discovery of the which contains portions of the original manuscript and can be found in a Rome Museum – I must see it when I return. Some of Himmler’s goons were sent to Italy, to look for the Codex Aesinas just as the Allies were overrunning the Axis troops towards the end of WWII. They didn’t find it. In some ways this piece of work was very much a Holy Grail for the Nazis.

From my understanding, the Germanic people, were never just one people. They were numerous tribes, loosely associated with the region of modern-day Germany (and beyond). In fact, the different tribes were often fighting with one another. However, there were times they were sufficiently organised to defeat the Romans in battle – such as when led by the famous Arminius, who banded together disparate tribes to clobber the Roman’s in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE. But even during this time they weren’t totally unified.

In fact, Tacitus did say the Germanic people were far from a single entity. But it seems the one-eyed Himmler’s of this word only seemed to see what they wanted. Perhaps we can draw analogies today regarding our polarised populous who seems to derive totally different conclusions from the same political events or reporting. We only see what we want to see.

It’s worth mentioning, the work of Germania was largely ignored during the Middle Ages and only came to prominence during the period of the German Renaissance – they came to the party a bit late compared to the Italians. German ‘Humanists’ were perhaps the first to try and form a collective from this heterogenous group of tribes. Krebs spent much of this book discussing the period of the Humanists from the late 1400s. I did find this part a bit dense, it was interesting, but there was a lot of it. To be honest, I really wanted to learn more about the impact of Tacitus’ work on Nazism.

So back to the Nazis. Parts of Tacitus’ text fuelled overt racism such as this. He referred to the ‘purity’ of the Germanic people. This is cheap fodder for the Hitler Youth.

The purity of German blood is the perquisite for the survival of the German people

This is a Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour (1935).

I did laugh when reading a quote attributed to a brunette wife of a high-ranking member of the SS who was reported as saying “the current leadership of Hitler, Himmler, her Husband and Dr Goebbels would need to forfeit their positions…..if the ideal German was to be blond, willowy and blue-eyed. In fact, (my words) you could throw Hermann Goering, Rudolph Hess and any number of the bloated Nazi leadership into the bucket of non-Aryan looking Aryans. Bit of a joke really.

Krebs says Hitler didn’t share the same enthusiasm as some of his acolytes regarding this Germanic myth. In fact, during a dinner party Hitler was reported to say “…….at the time when our forefathers were producing stone troughs and clay pitchers…...the Greeks were building the Acropolis. Well, I reckon that’s one of the few quotable quotes I’ve seen from him.

The author makes the point the Nazis were trying to create a ‘National and Popular Book…...just like the Bible, to raise the National Spirit’. I’d like to make the point we should think about this in today’s context. With the increase in populism and the consequent move towards Isolationist thinking and even Nationalism, this could be a not so small step towards this pernicious, malignant way of thinking of the 1930s in Pre-war Germany. Humans have an ability to make the same mistakes, we don’t seem to learn from history.

Even though the German Humanists may have had different views on Tacitus’ Germania and how it applied to the German people, I will leave this passage from one German Educator at the time:

Friedrich Kohlrausch as recent as 1816 stated:

The Romans justly considered the German people as an ancient, pure and unmixed original people. It resembled only itself; and like identical field plants that spring from a pure seed……so not differ one from another through degeneration, so also, amongst the thousands stemming from the simple German race, there was but one firm and identical form of body.

Dangerous stuff indeed.

It’s worth noting, Tacitus never travelled to the region inhabited by the Germanic Tribes. He may have just been warning the Roman people of some of the qualities of these formidable foes who lived East of the River Rhine. Who knows?

A fascinating book. Really a 5-star effort, but I wanted a bit more regarding the impact of Tacitus’ Germania on the Nazis and their doctrine; rather than the German Humanist period from around 1480 to modernity – as that large chunk of this book lost me a bit.

4 Stars

Oh, one last thing. This book also provided me with reason to think a great deal about what it means to be Indigenous and how we decide if a group of people are, in fact – Indigenous.

I do love this quote from 1501 by the German Humanist Conrad Celtis, he said:

They are indigenous: They do not draw their beginnings from another people but were issued under their sky.

Momentous words indeed.

[David Bird · Rating 5 out of 5]

Those who have offered lower ratings should, I think, address their complaints to the marketing department at Norton, rather than to Prof. Krebs. If you are expecting Dan Brown, you will be disappointed. If you expect a learned exploration, with thorough command of primary sources in multiple languages across many periods, you will be quite gratified.

The dangerous books of the world are not those hidden away in some archive, guarded by monks or obscurity; they are the texts that are most widely read, misread, mis-appropriated, and used to justtify horrors. Krebs demonstrates that beginning shortly after the rediscovery of this work of Tacitus, it was used to answer the awkward question, Who are the Germans? As different answers became desirable, the text was adjusted to meet the needs of the new agenda.

Non-classicists should realize that classical texts, because they come from manuscript traditions, can only ever be approximations of what the original author wrote. Every scholarly edition of such a text includes a listing of alternate and disputed readings, whether from different manuscripts, or based on the informed guess of an editor. Some changes made by an editor are clearly responsible and smooth out errors introduced in the manuscript tradition. But others can push an agenda, maybe innocently, maybe not. Tacitus suggests that the tribes he describes practiced human sacrifice. The few words with which this idea was raised were quietly dropped by editors who sought to ennoble their supposed ancestors.

Similarly, names in the text could be altered to suggest greater antiquity and purity for the German race and language, in an era where hierarchic rankings of races were unblushingly used to justify all sorts of foul activity.

Other reviewers have also castigated Krebs's style. This is unwarranted. A sample passage describing the work practice of the loathesome Houston Stewart Chamberlain shows that Krebs has spent profitably his time with magister Tacitus:

He worked on what would become The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century from February 1896 to the fall of 1898, with a frenzy befitting the work's scope, for eight hours a day. After an appeal for God's guidance in the morning, some time was spent leafing through volumes of his well-stocked library in search of suitable quotations (with little regard for their contexts), which he then arranged in sweeping arguments abounding in inconsistencies aided by inaccuracies. Throughout he displayed the kind of logic he used in a letter to his aunt, in which he suggested that having lost a fortune speculating, he now enjoyed other investors' heightened confidence.

This work offers, I think, a fine model for making classical scholarship relevant to a broader audience.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

It shouldn't be a surprise that a book entirely focused on the history of a particular written document (and in particular, one written by one of Rome's most eloquent historians) would be as well-written and as grounded as this book is, but as the author himself points out, the book's history, for all its popularity (particularly in the century and a half preceding the Nazi regime), has been primarily one of gross mistranslation and pseudo-scholarly interpolation. I picked up this book because the topics were interesting to me (Tacitus, Nazism and historiography), but I was pleasantly surprised by what a treat it turned out to be to read.

[Olethros · Rating 3 out of 5]

Del libro pero también, e incluso más, de sus interpretadores y de sus intenciones.-

Género. Ensayo.

Lo que nos cuenta. Monografía sobre la “Germania” de Tácito, su texto, el contenido y las diferentes interpretaciones (que van de lo correcto a lo literal, pasando por lo imaginativo, lo falso y hasta por lo torticero) que de la obra se han hecho a lo largo del tiempo por parte de ciertos individuos y grupos, con un vistazo a las consecuencias de las mismas hasta incluso más de 1.800 años después de su escritura.

¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://www.librosdeolethros.blogspot....

[Nooilforpacifists · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book details the "Chinese whispers" of Tacitus's Germania. Although Tacitus wrote from Rome -- never having crossed the Danube -- for years, his short book was considered the authoritative ethnography of the German-speaking tribes. It was intended as scorn. But, beginning in the Renaissance and Reformation, it was invoked increasingly as the source-book for warrior qualities built into the German genetic code. And, soon it was employed to weed out those German-speakers not having such qualities.

As I say: Chinese whispers, and well beyond (if not the opposite of) Tacitus's intent. But the book misses a basic point. Yes, there was -- still is -- an arc of ascension in consciousness of the German peoples; yes German Unification shifted the global balance of power (1871, 1914, 1939) or prompted questions about the connection to globe (1990). But Krebs struggles to cram Tacitus's Germania into the each event. Some work better than others. Some don't work at all.

In the end, Krebs simply fails to prove the syllogism in his title: a 69 page book in Latin, written in 98 AD, didn't cause Prussian militarism, much less the Third Reich.

[Biblio Curious]

This book traces this history of Tacitus' Germania from the ancient roots straight through to this darkest chapter in it's life. Pretty decent history of this Ancient Roman book, how it was taken out of context to eventually fit an agenda.

I'm coming away from this book with the impression that Germany has a long history of being excluded from Europe in some ways. I'm certainly curious to learn more about Germany's early history. There seems to have been some tensions with Ancient Rome?

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Per one other reviewer, I don't know if many 1- and 2-star reviewers were expecting Dan Brown, or if they're just neo-Nazis or fellow travelers, or what, but they're wrong.

First, Krebs explains to the general history reader what classical historians have long known. Tacitus wrote Germania as intra-imperial propaganda, to shame allegedly unvirtuous slacker Romans, as his primary purpose.

Second, "Germania" refers to a region as much as anything. Not all peoples Tacitus references by name, let alone all in the area, were Germanic/Gothic speakers. There were still a fair chunk of Celts east of the Rhine. And Slavs and Balts within lands "controlled" by Germanic tribal groupings, who of course were not nation-states.

Third, even with those caveats, while Tacitus was a decent ethnographic historian *for his time,* he was no more than that.

But, that's just to background these issues, because modern Deutschentum saluters would prefer to ignore them. And Krebs focuses his book's latter part on how Nazis used Tacitus as part of their reines blut myth.

[Peter Bradley · Rating 3 out of 5]

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?

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gets *really* into the weeds of the correspondence of Renaissance antiquarians and speculating about what caused them to write coyly the things they wrote to one another, leaving me wondering who this is even for. It is just not a fascinating detective story!

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 4 out of 5]

If there was ever a better lesson in misappropriation of original material, it is this story of Tactius' "Germania" transforming from an interesting chauvinistic-Roman opinion piece into a supposed biblical ur-text for the German people...culminating in the obsessions of the Third Reich. A fascinating and mind-boggling read that would be worth laughing about if it hadn't lead to so much death and destruction.

[Arthur Sperry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really excellent book that I enjoyed as a person who teaches Latin for a living. The Germania has always been fascinating, and the anecdotes in this work show how many have tried to "spin" its messages in various ways.

[Alex Cotterill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read the chapter “Bible to National Socialism” (think it’s called that) as it was recommend by Classics lecturer after we studied Tacitus’ Germania.

Basically it’s how the NSDAP studied Tacitus’ work and used it as a propaganda tool as a method of creating the new Germany both int he public and political spheres but also through education - an aspect of „Gleichschaltung“.

[Ashwin Srinivasan · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It is the greatest honor, the greatest power to be at all times surrounded by a huge band of chosen young men.”


slay

[Nick Sorrentino · Rating 4 out of 5]

While there are hearty portions of the books that may seem to be very detailed and drowned in semantics, the message remains very clear. Poor and shotty readings of history, especially under the guise of nation building, is dangerous.

In fewer than 30 pages Tacitus, someone who most likely never went north of the Alps, describes German people using (simplified if not false) terms that are still commonly used by politicians and regular people to this day.

[Phillip Ramm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book about the Roman historian Tacitus's Germania, in which he describes the
'unmixed" people of the area North of the Danube and East of the Rhine. The discovery in the 15th century of an old manuscript, and the subsequent willful (or not) misreadings of it became the basis somehow for the history of Aryan/German superiority and purity. This then grew into the concept of "volkisch" language, blood, and soil that culminated in the Nazi regime. These philosophies were often justified by references to Tactitus, whom, we find out early, had never even been to the areas in question.

Himmler wanted that manuscript...

It complements nicely another recent read, the more polemical Why The Germans? Why The Jews?, which is more about the German anti-Semitic mindset from mid-19th century on.

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is another one of those studies of how the "classics" have come to have modern influence, sometimes for reasons that differ greatly from the author's time or intentions. The focus here is on a short work by Tacitus named Germania, which is presented as a study of Germany and the people who live there. It is a descriptive - ethnographic -- portrait of the people east of the Rhine and thus never conquered by the Romans.

Krebs, the author, starts off by discussing how Tacitus described the norms and social structure of the Germans, as well as how the Germans were strongly identified with their particular geographic area and had not changes. Krebs then show how Tacitus never visited Germany and was not very accurate in Germania. What we know as the Germans are actually a variety of tribes, they were not just east of the Rhine, but also west of it as well. They had moved around frequently and changed over time. . . . so it was not a very good study.

Then, the real story is told -- how this description of Germany came to serve an important role in the development of a "German" identity in the 17th through 19th century and ultimately served as a key text for Nazi theories of Aryan supremacy. With the passage of time, this short and inaccurate account of the Germans morphed into a nearly sacred text of German nationalism the led to racial content in the 19th century and to the crimes of the Nazis. It was so important to the Nazis that Himmler sent out teams to find original copies of Germania during the second world war.

The book is well written and engaging for a largely scholarly treatment of a story that is not well known. Unless one is a specicalist, it is difficult to study a book like Germania is detail. After reading this, however, it makes me want to rethink my assumptions about classics in more depth, since it is unclear to me how we can get much insight into the times of authors only removed from the present by a generation or so, much less nearly 2,000 years. This book, while well written, required much focus to finish. It was well worth the effort.

[Steven Buechler · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must read for anybody with the most remote interest in either culture or communications. This is the story of how a Roman pamphlet became one of the most misreferenced and misquoted documents of all time.

-Page 19
... Tacitus's text was taken to illuminate the life and mores of those ancient German days. The light of dawn is mellow, and most readers formed a positive impression. No sooner had the Germania been retrived from the murky library of a German monastrey in the fifteenth century than it supplied what would quicly become the standard epithets for the German ancestors: simple, brave, loyal, pure, just, and honorable. When (Henrich) Himmler read the Germania twenty years before . . . it struck a rare chord in his soul: "Thus" like our Germanic ancestors, "shall we be again," he confided to his diary. He was but one of many on a long list of readers, starting with the Italian humanist Giannantonio Campano, who in 1471 called upon his German audience to rise to what they had once been. Many centuries later Hitler himself was to consider "Germanic Revolution" as a title for Mein Kampf. Although the Fuehrer, who in 1936 would ask Mussolini for the return of the Codex Aesinas, ultimately decided against this title, it would have reflected (only too aptly, for Hitler) an important ideological component for the many National Socialists who demanded a "homecoming" to former shores. In order to reach this German neverland, they - as well as generations of Germanophiles before them - relied on Tacitus as their involuntary helmsman."

[Διόνυσος Ελευθέριος · Rating 3 out of 5]

My interest in Christopher Krebs’ A Most Dangerous Book was first aroused in part because of my interest in Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve . Both promise to deliver an account of the history of a famous book of antiquity: in Krebs’ book, Tacitus’s Germania, and in Greenblatt’s book, Lucretius’ De rerum natura. However, whereas Greenblatt focuses more on the truly remarkable story behind the recovery of Lucretius’ work, Krebs focuses more on the historical abuse of Tactitus’ work (though, to be sure, Krebs does devote a substantial portion of his book to the Germania's recovery). Interestingly, Krebs’ title is deliberately misleading, or at least ambiguous. Is Tacitus’ Germania a most dangerous book? Is it most dangerous because—perhaps most importantly—it would eventually be used to justify National Socialist propaganda? Is it most dangerous because its authority was used to lend authority to claims of the superiority of the Germans “race”? No, and yes, Krebs seems to conclude by the very end: Tacitus “did not write a most dangerous book; his readers made it so” (250). No, Tacitus did not write a most dangerous book (because the dangers became dangers only through abuse and rampant infidelity to his text), but still yes, in a way: Tacitus’ readers who would use his book to justify their non-Tacitean ways made Tacitus’ book a most dangerous one.

[Absinthe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book pairs excellently with The Swerve: How the World Became Modern as both deal with the revitalization and preservation of classical texts. I believe A Most Dangerous Book rather succinctly and effectively outlines the dangers of humanity's habit of seeing only what it wants to. The Serve touches on this to some extent, but mostly it shows much of the positivity that comes from sharing and re-evaluating old ideas. This book does a really great job at situating the reader in the timeline so that they have more familiar events to give themselves and idea of when and where such things occurred/what the political climate was at the time. I learned so much from this book. Every country has a different view of how history occurred, and so I believe this book helped me see of a lot of the history of WWII that most Americans don't know or care about; they certainly don't teach it.

[AskHistorians]

Provides an interesting history of Tacitus's Germania from contextualizing its writing to how it was sought after in Renaissance Italy to how it was eventually used for propaganda purposes.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Krebs has written a most fascinating and compelling discussion of how one specific classical text (the 'Germania' by the Roman author Tacitus) has been used to construct and shape ideas about identity, race, politics, culture, language, society and nationality. In a detailed and deeply researched analysis of the reception of the first century C.E. monograph Krebs has revealed the power of classical reception as both a way to recast the ancient world for the modern, and as a way for the modern world to justify precepts as to to its structure and ideology based on a misappropriation of the ancient world. 'A Most Dangerous Book' also offers queries regarding the problem that one might call 'the German Question'; did the search for a German identity from at least the 15th Century CE, as navigated by the reception of the 'Germania', help foster the underpinning German nationalism that reached its apogee in the Third Reich?

There is no doubt that Krebs has produced a compelling dossier of historical information and analysis as to how the 'Germania' was used, or perhaps more appropriately, abused, by those wishing to find an answer to what constituted German identity since the rediscovering of the text in the 1400s. It is interesting to note how in each chapter he develops the reception narrative of Tacitus's work both in terms of the intellectual context of the relevant era as well as the socio-political background in what was, for the most part, a highly fragmented 'Germany'. Throughout this book Krebs makes highly pertinent observations as to how the 'Germania' was adapted and adopted by those struggling to find a way of connecting the ancient world to their contemporary world, and in the process also attempting to create a future. Each one of the intellectuals who embraced the 'Germania' are shown to have a desire to resolve some kind of existential crisis as to what being German meant. This is a challening and provocative point of discussion that Krebs does well to explore.

One line of thought that might be followed from 'A Most Dangerous Book' is that the 'Germania' had a direct input into the development of a nascent German nationalism that in turn became the extremist ideology of the Nazis. To Kreb's credit he doesn't allow this idea to remain unchallenged. This is particularly evident when in the latter chapters as well as the epilogue he discusses how the 'Germania' was not always seen as the absolute reflection of a German ideal by those who studied it. What is also important, and left unsaid by Krebs, is that the corpus of classical literature and the reception of ancient history has also led to similar revisionary approaches to national identity in other countries, other cultures. One only has to look at Mussolini's Italy, or the imperial literature of Great Britain in the 19th century to see how texts and history from ancient Rome or Greece were co-opted into nationalist arguments.

Thus it may be argued that whilst this book is highly valuable as a discussion of how one ancient text has helped inform the development of one country's identity, it's most important lesson is what it says about classical reception. The misuse of ancient history, the manipulation or misreading of Latin and Greek texts, whether conscious or not, creates new meanings that are not always either accurate nor helpful. Just as one might argue that the 'Germania' had a role in nascent German identity politics, so can texts about ancient Sparta underpin right wing extremism. it must also be noted that this doesn't just relate to political implications; the projection back onto the past of modern sexualities, or the adoption of ancient history as a means to validate modern sexual identities is just as problematic. At its heart 'A Most Dangerous Book' poses the question 'How is history misused and appropriated?', and this is a powerful provocation.

Krebs' prose is dense but still readable for those willing to engage with it. He has compiled a deep bibliography with copious footnotes, and this research has been integrated into his narrative with a mostly positive effect. There may be some minor errors here and there (one I picked up was the link between Hugo Boss and the SS) but one should look to the central discussion of the book as the overriding 'truth' of what has been written. 'A Most Dangerous Book' is a title that will appeal to classicists and those interested in German history alike, and deserves to be read by anyone interested in how literature and culture can form new, and at times troubling, connections year after year.

[Liam · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In comparison with other Greek and Roman accounts of foreign people -- like the ones produced by the speedy general Caesar, who came, saw, and wrote digressions on the Gauls as well as the Germanen -- the Germania appears to be as a mosaic of Greek and Roman stereotypes, arranged by a writer who most likely never went north of the Alps. ... Later celebrated as an accurate reflection of authentic German people, the Germania was written by a Roman in Rome for Romans." (49)

"Sixteenth century historians had celebrated their original people, seventeenth-century linguists their original language; now, at a time when the Romantics emphasized the genius's originality, [Heinrich Wilhelm von] Gerstenberg and like-minded writers included an original mythology in their heritage." (174)

"Believing the German people's existence to be in danger, National Socialist doctrine specified that a woman's 'natural and most important vocation' was to be 'a spouse, a mother, and a housewife.' Women who had borne an exceptional number of children received the Honor Cross for the German Mother, or, in street parlance, 'the rabbit award.'" (220)

[Patty · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 98 c.e., a Roman named Tacitus wrote up a description of the "barbarian" tribes up north of the Roman Empire, in the area we call Germany today. It was a fairly short description, about 25 pages, and consisted mostly of second-hand rumor, since Tacitus had never actually left the empire himself. This book, called "Germania", was somewhat well-regarded, but quickly faded into obscurity, nearly disappearing for a millennia and a half. Then the Renaissance came, and with it a passion for rediscovering Latin texts. "Germania" was picked up, copied and translated and illustrated and rewritten into poetry and textbooks and philosophic manifestos. It became a prime text for movements supporting German nationalism in the 1800s, and then a central standard for the Nazis, who took it as gospel.

A Most Dangerous Book tells this story in greater detail. Perhaps too much detail. I'm not sure there's actually enough of a story here to justify an entire book instead of an article. That said, it's well-written and an interesting read, the path of one little book as it grows and grows in importance and the unforeseen negative consequences it drags behind it.

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that would be comic if the consequences weren't so tragic. The author demonstrates an impressive breadth of knowledge, adroitly tracing a story from its antiquarian genesis to its horrific culmination in the mid 20th century. Throughout much of the western history, Germans were dismissed culturally by the elite: academics, church leaders, and monarchies. Desperate for a praiseworthy identity, some put pen to paper attempting to parse out a German identity they could be proud of. Unfortunately, many did so by drawing from a selective reading of Tacitus's flawed, politically charged, and embellished account of barbarian tribes. Krebs tells the historical tale of this task, which does have some high points, like Grimm's efforts to catalog German folktales. Nevertheless, in the 19th century, German nationalism gained greater momentum as they filled their historical void with a patchwork of bad history, Scandinavian mythology, and moronic pseudo-science.

[Steven Jaeger · Rating 3 out of 5]

The majority of this book talks about the long history of Germania's discovery and distribution. It is quite interesting and much more enjoyable than what I was anticipating. It is only the last two chapters where things become much less historical and much more opinionated. The Nazis are nearly impossible to read about without getting an unnecessary amount of vitriol. Since I am rather interested in that part of history, it is something I'm used to. Every author injects statements of opinion when writing about this topic so I was actually expecting more of that from this book than what I got, which made it all the more disappointing when it appeared. It was a rough ending to an otherwise good book. It was also interesting that he spent his time writing about Himmler and not Hitler, which I did appreciate. Realistically, this book is a 3.5 for me, but I would rather round down than up.

[Ruby Steele · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was literally the perfect book for my interests and a Godsend for my personal statement. I did find it maybe a bit too academic at times, as in I got lost in clever words and long German and Italian names, but I genuinely found it very moving and it reflected a lot of the views I have about Classical literature. This is the concluding sentence: "In the end, the Roman historian Tacitus did not write a most dangerous book; his readers made it so." I just find it so baffling but fascinating that a book written so long ago has been so influential (or has been so weaponised) over thousands of year of European history. I think it is what I would define as timeless, but maybe not because of any of the author's intentions. I wonder what Tacitus would make of it.

[Alexandra Rizzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came across this book rather accidentally and I'm glad I did. Being German myself it provided a glimpse behind the proverbial curtain of the Third Reich that I didn't know existed. I knew there were searches for the occult and other far-fetched ideas, but never did I realize that the ancient writings of a Roman observer had such a part in the devastating ideologies of the regime. These are the things they don't teach you in class. Well done.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

As is somehow not said enough, Nazis are dumb, their ideology dumber. This insightful work gives a detailed look into how the part of the Nazi ideology came to be, but as should not surprise anyone, the logic that lead to the foundationally racial superiority inherent in Nazism was a misdirection of intent and history. At times this book was a dense read, but the path laid out is a solid one, and I think one well worth reading.

[Stuart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who knew? The Roman historian Tacitus wrote about the Germanic tribes but how much of it was true or accurate we don’t know. Rediscovered in 1902 (the good parts of) its text became gospel truth to the nazis and shaped their image of the German people. Himmler was so smitten with the account that he sent a Raiders of the Lost Ark like SS mission to Italy to try and recover the only known copy.

A memetic text that shaped the history of Europe.

[Alexis]

(I read this for a class but I’m still counting it!) The idea that something written in the Roman Empire can have such an effect on the world in the nineteenth century is very intriguing but (especially in this instance) terrifying. I learned a lot about how history and historic writings can be abused, and I highly recommend this for anyone remotely interested in history - it’s terrifying but important.