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

by Krebs, Christopher B.

• ISBN13: 9780393062656
• ISBN10: 0393062651
• Edition: 00
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-05-02
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Summary

The pope wanted it, Montesquieu used it, and the Nazis pilfered an Italian noble's villa to get it: 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.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	p. 9
Acknowledgments	p. 11
Intorduction: The Portentous Past	p. 15
The Roman Conquest of the Germanic Myth	p. 29
Survival and Rescue	p. 56
The Birth of the German Ancestors	p. 81
Formative Years	p. 105
Heroe's Songs	p. 129
The Volk of Free-Spirited Northerners	p. 153
White Blood	p. 182
A Bible for National Socialists	p. 214
Epilouge: Another Reading, Another Book	p. 245
Notes	p. 251
Index	p. 287
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