Rome's Greatest Defeat

by Adrian Murdoch

  Arminius succeeded only as long as he was on his holy mission. As soon as he began to demand authority for its own sake, he had bitten the apple and had to be cast out. It is the eternally tragic motif of power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely. Within a generation all that was left was the memory of Arminius. He survived in song and legend, yet that has proved to be the most potent part of him. So seductive was this that even the Romans began to come under the spell. His obituary at the end of the second book of Tacitus’ Annals is one of the most extraordinary pieces of Latin prose to come down to us. In a few sentences, Tacitus manages to capture both the admiration and revulsion the Romans had for their most successful opponent with incredible pathos: ‘Make no mistake, Arminius was the deliverer of Germany, one too who had defied Rome, not in her early rise, as other kings and generals, but in the height of her empire’s glory. The battles he fought were indeed indecisive, yet he remained unconquered in war. He lived for thirty-seven years, twelve of them in power, and he is still the subject of song among barbarous nations, though to Greek historians, who admire only their own achievements, he is unknown, and to Romans not as famous as he should be, while we extol the past and are indifferent to our own times.’43

  SIX

  Germany’s Might

  The Nazis’ show of Entartete Kunst – degenerate art – to ridicule Modernism in the summer of 1937 stands out as one of the twentieth century’s more ridiculous and desperate exercises in censorship. The exhibition of 650 paintings by artists such as Paul Klee, Emile Nolde, Max Ernst and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner is now justifiably revered and was the century’s first blockbuster art show. During the two months it was on show in Munich, it was seen by some 2 million visitors, a larger draw than any exhibition before or since.

  But that summer’s contrasting exhibition, the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung, the Great German Art Exhibition, predominantly featuring works personally selected by Adolf Hitler, is largely forgotten. It opened the day before, on 18 July, to inaugurate Munich’s House of German Art, the first official building erected by the Nazis. Its opening was marked by an elaborate pageant called ‘Two thousand years of German culture’. The town’s Prinzregentenstraße was lined with 160 pylons, some 12m high, crowned with an eagle and a swastika. From the station to the centre of town, 243 flags were flown from flagpoles 10.5m high. Hundreds of thousands of spectators watched as 3,000 participants, 400 animals and a procession of huge papier-mâché heads, borne by people dressed as Rhine Maidens and Cheruscan warriors, paraded through the streets of the city.

  It was here, in the Nazi era, marching through Munich, that the apotheosis as well as the nadir of the image of Arminius can be seen. But the metamorphosis from mutineer to Teutonic superman is a long one. Over the years Arminius had been an excuse to attack Rome, then France, and eventually the whole of western Europe. He had been embraced by Protestants, then nationalists and finally by the National Socialists.

  The transmission of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest is so wide-ranging that this chapter will predominantly look at the way that Arminius has been politicised and how that in turn has influenced German nationalism. Of course it must be borne in mind that there is little consistency of imagery. Arminius was all things to all men. But it is possible to draw out some general themes. Richard Kuehnemund is right to point out that, for all of the nuances and complexities of the stories that have woven their way round the Cheruscan chieftain, two leitmotifs run though the entire corpus of literature about Arminius. The first is the message that death is preferable to slavery; the second that strength lies in unity.1 Taken together, these themes illustrate that Arminius has always been a symbol of nostalgic longing, of a proud, free Germany.

  It should not be forgotten that Germany was never entirely Romanised. While the provinces that the Romans called Germania Superior and Germania Inferior comprised the southern and western Länder of the modern states of the country, the north and east remained free. Nonetheless, connections continued even after the fall of the Roman Empire; indeed it is arguable that relations grew even closer after its collapse, based on strategic and cultural interdependence. When Charlemagne, the King of the Franks, was crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire on Christmas Day AD 800, it was by Pope Leo III and it was in St Peter’s in Rome. This is not to say that it was always a happy relationship. Medieval history is littered with spats between the emperor and the pope, each vying for the political upper hand.

  As mentioned in the introduction, Arminius’ modern life starts with the rediscovery of Tacitus’ Germania in the mid-fifteenth century. Although it is a mere 25 pages long, some 750 lines of Latin in modern editions, it is easy to agree with one modern scholar who calls it ‘the christening present of the ancient world to the peoples of the future’.2 A less charitable point could be made that if we consider the ratio of its length to its devastating political effect, it has given both Mao’s Little Red Book (twenty-five pages) and The Communist Manifesto (forty-one pages) a run for their money.

  Medieval manuscript-hunters had been aware of the manuscript’s existence in Germany for some thirty years previously, but it was not until 1455 that it was finally repatriated to Italy from the library of the abbey at Hersfeld, along with some works by Suetonius. The humanist cleric Aeneas Silvius, later to become Pope Pius II, was the first to allude to the text after its discovery. In a condescending letter, replying to complaints about papal taxation from the Bishop of Mainz, Silvius used the Germania as proof of how far Germany had evolved from its barbaric state under the guidance of the Church and that, no, the taxes would not be remitted. It is fortunate that the letter was not published more widely.

  When Germania was published in Venice in 1470, and in Nuremberg three years later (its first translation into the vernacular did not occur for another twenty-six years in Leipzig), it was the literary sensation of the century and caused a furore on both sides of the Alps. So popular was it that by the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648 it had run to twenty-six editions. Until then, Germany had been a country without a past. There was a broad presumption, fed by the obvious physical evidence of the remains in what had been Roman provinces, that Germany was a child of the Roman Empire. Most scholars believed that Germany was one of the heirs of the classical tradition. But this was the moment of birth of a true national consciousness.

  In 1492 Conrad Celtis delivered an inaugural address at the University of Ingolstadt. In that Bavarian town, the scholar and first German poet laureate of the Holy Roman Empire let Tacitus through the door of scholarship. He, in turn, was then able to start the twin fires of German patriotism and national consciousness. Celtis was the appropriate heir of Arminius in many ways. The son of a winemaker, he claimed to have been born in the ‘middle of the Hercynian forest’. Simultaneously he tried to distance the ancient Germans from the true barbarians further east (‘brutal as beasts of prey’, he called them), while pushing his country away from the corrupting decadence of Rome. It is an emotive call to his fellow countrymen to remember their own nobility and their own antiquity, far removed from decadent Italians. ‘German men, take on that ancient spirit of yours with which you so often terrified and scared the Romans and turn your sight to the four corners of Germany and think about her torn and broken territories,’ he said.3

  New editions of Germania began to pour out of the country’s presses and were soon joined on the bookshelves by histories of the country and its peoples. The effects were almost instantaneous. First, an awareness of a common ancestry began to emerge that was to foster national consciousness and already hinted at unity. Second, there was the presumption that past and present are inextricably linked. In other words, it was taken for granted that a classical author like Tacitus could be used to solve modern arguments of race and, significantly, territory. But most important of all was the self-realisation that the Germans had never been beaten by the Romans. All three ideas converged in the works of the Alsace-born humanist and theologian Jakob Wimpfeling
, whose 1501 Germania is a forceful tract, pointing out the differences between the unsullied north and the diseased south. It also puts the view forward, one that was to have repercussions, that the Rhine should not be seen as the boundary with France.

  Underpinning this was the rediscovery of Tacitus’ Annals, the first six books of which were published in Rome in 1515 (ordered by Pope Leo X). That same year, the German humanist Beatus Rhenanus discovered Velleius Paterculus’ Roman History in the Benedictine monastery of Murbach. Although Rhenanus complained that the manuscript was ‘so monstrously corrupt that no human ingenuity could restore all of it’, it was subsequently published in Basel in 1520.4 That edition also boasts the first modern pictorial representation of the battle. The images of Varus and Arminius are labelled, one of the last times in which that was to happen.

  These discoveries, what was now a wealth of classical source material, moved the arguments on to a more personal and combative level. With his reports of Arminius, the ‘deliverer of Germany’, as Tacitus called him, who ‘in war remained unconquered’, became the instant focus and hope for German aspirations. As this occurred, Arminius stopped being a half-remembered, semi-legendary figure and started becoming what one modern academic calls: ‘a sharply delineated historical personality’.5 This is not to say that his mythic qualities are not brought to the fore. As he comes out of the billowing smoke of legend, he emerges dressed in new robes, the ideal man and the defender of liberty.

  Under the German humanists, such as Ulrich von Hutten, Arminius stopped being a tribal leader from the dim and distant past, laying the foundations for his image as a national hero. The Cheruscan is resurrected as the embodiment of Germany, a unifying force, the symbol for the will internally to unify and externally to make a stand against invaders.

  In 1522 Ulrich von Hutten wrote the first dramatic account of Arminius, though it was not published until several years after his death. His aim was both to glorify Germany’s past and to call for unity against a common foe. In Arminius, the Cheruscan is ‘the most free, most invincible and most German of them all’.6 Hutten’s hatred of Rome was as virulent as that of Arminius. Hutten’s inspiration was the classical Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata and his Discourse of the Dead. In the original version, set in the underworld, Alexander the Great, Scipio and Hannibal argue over who deserves the title of the greatest general of all time. Hutten introduces Arminius into that ancient argument. With Tacitus as his second, the Cheruscan argues that he has been unjustly ignored. Inevitably in the dialogue, Arminius comes out top: he had fought the Roman Empire at its peak, he had done so with no thought of personal gain and, symbolically, he had won. King Minos, who sits as judge in both Lucian’s and Hutten’s versions, declares Arminius the winner.

  An important point to bear in mind, though, is that Hutten was arguing only to Europe’s educated class. There is no attempt here to engage the common man. Hutten wrote in Latin and his work was not translated into German until 1815. The first wholly German representation of Arminius appeared in 1543, when Burkhard Waldis published Illustrierte Reimchronik, tales of the twelve greatest ancient Germans, written in entertainingly bad rhyming couplets:

  Arminius, called Hermann in our tongue,

  a warrior hero, strong and brave and young,

  mature and true in action and in word,

  born in the Harz, a noble Saxon lord.7

  But as Arminius was increasingly being groomed as a nationalist hero, he also found himself adopted by another cause. October 1517 heard the hammer-blow that echoed round Europe as Martin Luther questioned the sale of indulgences and nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. With Arminius co-opted as a champion for the Protestant cause, the wars between Rome and Germany immediately became a parable for the struggle between Catholic and Protestant. What Arminius did was to give both authority and focus to the country’s long-simmering dispute with the papacy.

  At the same time, the sixteenth century also saw the increased Germanification of the story, as Arminius turned into Hermann. There remains some confusion about when this happened. The most likely answer is that it was Martin Luther himself. It remains one of the more controversial and debated name-changes in linguistic history. One modern historian claims that ‘the name [Arminius] certainly has nothing to do with the name Hermann’.8 This is nonsense. As discussed in chapter three, Arminius is a perfectly logical Romanisation of a name which has definite primitive Germanic elements and Hermann is a logical enough back-resolution of that Latinised name.

  Linguistics aside, up to now, Arminius had mostly inhabited the intellectual planes and religious nuances of Latin-based polemic. With the seventeenth century, he began his move from the ivory towers of European academia and started to reach out to the masses.

  Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein’s immense, apparently shapeless and nigh-on unreadable novel Magnanimous General Arminius, or Hermann may be seen as the first attempt to do so. Although unfinished at the time of the author’s death at the age of 48, it was published four years later – all 3,076 quarto pages of it – in 1687. Nowadays as little discussed as it is read, it stands as a parable for the social and political situation of Germany after the ravages of the Thirty Years War.

  Of the eighteen books which make up the novel, only four concern themselves directly with Arminius, though elsewhere other characters contribute to the background about his childhood and so on. It is Book I that contains the heart of the story. Much more than is seen in later literary versions, Varus is the catalyst and arguably the central character in Lohenstein’s novel. As a Roman he exemplifies the enemy, while his seduction of a Germanic princess provides the moral reason of the revolt. From the outset, the familiar figures are drawn with exaggerated characteristics: Varus is voluptuous, Segestes is selfish, Thusnelda is noble, Maroboduus is fickle and Arminius is heroic.

  There are fewer attempts in the novel to reconcile the views of the ancients with the mores of his own time, though Lohenstein knew his Tacitus and Velleius Paterculus intimately. Instead his Arminius betrays the great baroque theme of the beauty of the human soul and sets up the ideals of heroism in the face of fate.

  Arminius also now began to move out of Germany. The first French version of the play, Arminius ou les frères ennemis, by Georges de Scudéry, which focused on the relationship between Arminius and his brother, appeared in 1643. This was followed in 1685 by the stage smash hit Arminius, written by Jean-Galbert Campistron. Here the battle for freedom is background to a love triangle between Arminius, Varus and Thusnelda (Isménie in the play), and so popular was it that it played twenty-nine times in the next fifteen years.

  Understandably, though, here nationalistic tendencies are kept to the background and, in the grand scheme of things, this was little more than a foot across the Rhine. Almost as if the past few centuries had been a period of gestation, required for the idea of Arminius to take root, he began to grow and to flourish in the Germany of Frederick the Great. The Prussian king was one of the chosen children of the Enlightenment, an accomplished musician and philosopher, a friend to both Voltaire and Bach. His era was one of a great flowering of culture. It was the time of artists like Goethe and Schiller, while thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder led the charge against the supremacy of classical culture, calling instead for native culture from the vernacular arts.

  In this enlightened environment, Arminius began to change, particularly in the hands of Johann Elias Schlegel, the author in 1740–1 of the first full play on the subject of Arminius, called Hermann, written in Leipzig when he was in his early twenties. Gone are baroque flourishes and broader moral themes; instead the characters are recognisably human. The play’s main theme of the division of Germany into pro- and anti-Roman parties is reflected in the fact that most of the action takes place in a sacred grove before and after the battle. Dialogue focuses on the relationship and rivalry between Hermann and Segest. An intriguing nuance is that Flavus, Arminius’ brother, takes a
much more important role, having fallen in love with Thusnelda, though the love theme is not the core of the play. Segest is in many ways the central character, prepared to use the weak Roman commander and sell out his country.

  Hermann is a statement of independence rather than a call for autonomy, a quiet announcement rather than an aggressive declaration. Arminius is advised by his father to be guided by traditional German virtues (loyalty, magnanimity, love of freedom) and to protect his native land. Written only a few years after the accession of Frederick the Great, it is clearly influenced by that era. Arminius is being shaped, not to be a despot, but rather to be the first servant of the country.

  If Schlegel is the dominant apologist for Arminius in the first half of the eighteenth century, the lyric poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock made the second half his own. Sandwiched in between, a number of Arminius poets flourished. Justus Möser’s 1749 tragedy Arminius is a curiosity because of what it says about Germany at the time. It had little influence (it was never performed), but with its call for a prince to unite the country it holds up a mirror to a fragmented and disunified state pinning its hopes on Frederick’s rule. Most of the other works are barely of interest, even to specialists.

  But Klopstock raised the argument on to another plane. After the ravages of the Second World War it is difficult to see his obsessions with Norse mythology and his frequent use of words like ‘Volk’ and ‘Vaterland’ as anything other than sinister, despite the fact that his inspirations were more religious than political. In his youth, Klopstock wrote about Henry I, the German king who beat the Magyars at Lechfeld in 955, but from the 1750s onwards he fixated on Arminius. Not counting his many odes on the subject, half of his dramatic output deals with the themes of Arminius: Hermann’s Battle, published in 1769; Hermann and the Princes in 1784 and Hermann’s Death in the late 1780s. To call them plays as they are understood today is a misconception. The style of Klopstock’s dramas is called Bardiete, deliberately anachronistic and supposedly in the style of the ancient Celtic bards.