An Innocuous Yet Noxious Text: Tacitus’s Germania

On December 31, 1933, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber climbed the pulpit of St. Michael’s in Munich. There was, one onlooker reported, “a breathless silence in the mighty room”:¹ the cardinal had the heightened attention not only of his audience—including journalists from around the world—but also of the newly installed Nazi regime. Leading National Socialists had watched wearily on the four preceding Sundays of Advent as the largest Renaissance church north of the Alps proved too small to host the cardinal’s congregation. His powerful language, said to be “welded in the fiery forge of the . . . prophets of the Old Testament,”² and his forthrightness, evidenced in his public praise of the people of Israel for having “excelled . . . by the sublimity of [their] religion,”³ attracted some and exasperated others. But what Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and others could not know was that this final sermon, addressing the relations between “Christianity and Germany,” would turn out to be the most unsettling by far.

On this last day of the year the Catholic leader shared with his audience his anxiety over the resurgence of a “Germanic religion,”⁴ which he considered a threat to the two established Christian creeds. He proposed to look more generally at the much vaunted culture and glory of the Germanic tribes—widely and problematically held to be the Germans’ ancestors—and how they had lived before the advent of the Christian faith. For that purpose he turned to “a small but valuable historical source,” the Germania, written by the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus in 98 A.D. With its help he portrayed these ancient Germans: their polytheism, human sacrifices, and other primitive practices. The admirable qualities Tacitus had mentioned—especially loyalty, hospitality, and marital fidelity—did not change the cardinal’s overall impression that there had been no hint of “any civilization properly so-called among the Germans of the pre-Christian era.” National Socialists quickly disagreed, many violently. In the following weeks, they vented their anger in journals like Germanien, Volk und Rasse, and Der Sturmtrupp: the speech was “a political crime,” and the speaker “a categorical and determined enemy of the national socialist state.”⁵ Nazis of all ages and ranks could not believe that the cardinal had dared to “attack our Germanic forebears and thus also our Germanic race and culture”⁶ and, for that purpose, to misread the movement’s most important and venerated document: the Germania.

Illustration from Arthur Murphy, ed., The Works of Cornelius Tacitus (London, 1836).

When Tacitus wrote the Germania at the height of the Roman Empire, he could not have foreseen that his highly rhetorical portrait of the Germanic tribes living east of the Rhine would centuries later be used as the gateway to the realities of the German past. A booklet rather than a book—twenty-five Oxford Classical Text pages “about the location and origin and mores of the Germans” (de situ et origine et moribus Germanorum)—it reflects its author’s cultural background, political position, and historical views. The result is an artful mosaic, mostly composed of stereotypes, casting the Germanic warrior as simple, moral, honest, and brave. These attributes Tacitus had culled from the Greek and Roman ethnographic tradition and arranged for persuasive effect. He might have consulted eyewitnesses in Rome—soldiers, merchants, slaves—but it seems most likely that he never visited the territory he so skillfully outlines with his first sentence: “Germany as a whole is separated from the Gauls and from the Raetians and Pannonians by the rivers Rhine and Danube, from the Sarmatians and Dacians by mutual fear or mountains; the ocean surrounds the rest of it.” A leading senator, one of Rome’s foremost speakers, and soon the greatest historian in Latin literature on the basis of his Annals, Tacitus never intended to produce a realistic account in his dealings with the Germani. And yet that is how the Germania would be interpreted by most of its readers, starting soon after its rediscovery in the 15th century and continuing into the...