In “Squaring Off,” Zócalo invites authors into the public square to answer five questions about the essence of their books. For this round, we interview Harvard classics professor Christopher B. Krebs, author of A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich.
Krebs tells the story of the Germania, Tacitus’s armchair ethnography of the German tribes, and how it wound up serving German nationalist agendas many centuries after it was written.
1) You refer to the Germania as a virus which, after 350 years of incubation, “progressed to a systemic infection” under the Nazis. But you also suggest it was the readers of the Germania, and not the Germania itself, that made the book dangerous. Which is it?
There is no contradiction, is there? Tacitus’s ideas – what he meant when he wrote, for example, that the Germanic tribes were a people unlike any other – were culturally coded, pretty harmless, and nothing like what they’d become hundreds of years later. What later readers made of them is what makes the book ultimately dangerous.
2) In the 19th century, German writers began to invest the Germania with racial connotations, using it to imagine “an ancient, pure, and unmixed original race.” Was that inevitable?
In the course of the 18th century, “scientific” racism was developed. The Germania was seen as a key to the understanding the specifics of the Nordic/Germanic/Aryan race, and the racial interpretation predated the German nation state by about 75 years. But don’t forget that the racial interpretation of the Germania was not limited to Germans – quite the contrary.
3) The desire for a mythologized past isn’t unique to Germans, so what makes the German experience distinct?
Mythologizing the national past is not at all particular to Germany (look at Scotland), but what makes the German case particularly ironic is that the Germania is a Roman’s document – written by a Roman for Romans in Latin – that came to be considered the sourcebook for what it meant to be truly German. (If this is true of other national myths, I do not know of them). Also, the Germania enjoyed the status of singular “evidence,” because for centuries there was no other extensive description.
4) Tacitus was, as you put it, an “armchair ethnographer” who had never visited the land or people. What gave the Germania such credibility and influence?
It’s a good question. We obviously can’t tell whether a different Germania would have had a similar impact. But one important quality of the text is the highly ambivalent and evaluative nature of Tacitus’ portrait of the Germanic lifestyle, which the author finds both laudable (the high morals) and reprehensible (the lack of culture, primitiveness).
Had Tacitus paid only passing attention to the Germanic “character,” the Germania would presumably have had a different impact. Then again, knowing how cavalier many of the readings of the Germania were, and given how desperate those interested in the German past were for any kind of information, perhaps a different text would have been interpreted to suit their purposes as well.
If there is one overall lesson to be learned of the afterlife of the Germania, it is that texts are subject to the their readers’ behest. The history of the Germania is above all the history of an unmet responsibility to read carefully and circumspectly.
5) How depressing to think that even a “different text would have been interpreted to suit their purposes as well.” Isn’t this the ultimate in deconstructionism, depriving the text of any meaning?
I disagree with that. While I write in my introduction that the meaning of a text is mediated by its readers and their “ability and alacrity to hear what the text has to say,” this does not mean that Tacitus did not invest meaning in the Germania himself. On the contrary, Tacitus, who viewed the Germanic tribes as a potent threat to the empire, was clearly politically motivated.
Of course, we can never entirely know what he meant with his Germania, but there are more and less convincing approaches to such an understanding. Even among his contemporary audience, there would have been more and less accurate comprehensions of his message. At our present remove, the problem is greater still, but it does not open the door to deconstructivism, which implies that all readings are equally valid.
Even at the height of nationalistic and racial interpretations there were still a few readers attempting to understand the Germania as a text written by a Roman author with an excellent literary and rhetorical training in Greek and Latin at the end of the first century. The fact that they were hardly heard does not mean that they were wrong; it simply means that those advocating a racial interpretation of it shouted louder. In other words, the fact that the afterlife of the Germania is primarily one of misreadings does not mean that there is no such thing as proper reading.
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*Photo courtesy of yhoitink.