Rome's Greatest Defeat

by Adrian Murdoch

  It is his second play that remains the most interesting for readers today. The first play is, to modern eyes at least, a clumsy piece extolling the virtues of a united Germany, and the third is dramatically masterful, focusing on Hermann’s downfall, yet strangely dull. Hermann and the Princes takes a much more compelling approach, focusing on the inner strife and jealousy that surrounded a successful Hermann. It is set in AD 15, several years after the events of the Teutoburg Forest and during Germanicus’ campaigns of revenge, at the moment when the Germans are debating whether to attack Caecina’s camp. The play opens, significantly, with the Cheruscan chief absent. All of the other princes are sitting around, arguing the benefits of Arminius’ plan to lure the Romans into the swamps. The play’s tragedy lies in that it becomes clear that the princes would rather accept defeat than follow Hermann to another victory. It is a depressingly modern message: heroism and self-sacrifice can always be trumped by human selfishness and cynicism.

  Klopstock’s great theme is patriotic fervour. Although still not overtly political, he is resolutely national. One chorus of his first play, Hermann’s Battle, praises the strength of a united nation:

  You are the thickest, shadiest oak

  In the innermost grove

  The highest, oldest, most sacred oak,

  O fatherland.

  The key word is oak, a symbol for the battle, for Teutoburg Forest, indeed for Germany itself. Much in the same way that writers had been luxuriating in this kind of woodland nativism, we see the gradual evolution of the oak as a symbol for Arminius and his struggle in paintings of the time, just as medieval artists used the lion to symbolise St Jerome. The importance of this imagery and sylvan idealism is reflected in the Göttinger Hainbund, the Grove Leagues set up by students at Göttingen University in the early 1770s to spend nights in forests dreaming of a new Germany, and in the blue 100-mark note that, even a century later, portrayed Germania holding the emblems of commerce and industry, while watching battleships speed into the middle distance from under an oak.

  An almost innocent idealism comes through in visual arts of the time. Philip Clüwer’s engravings of early Germans were reprinted in several books from the early seventeenth century onwards. It cannot be an accident that his Germanic Couple recalls Adam and Eve. There is certainly something static and unthreatening in Hermann’s Triumph after his Victory over Varus by the court artist Johann Heinrich Tischbein the Elder, painted in 1758. As his men march past after the battle, some eagles held aloft, Arminius stands under an oak on a slight hill. Right arm raised, left hand on his hip, he is speaking to his men. To modern eyes, he looks a little incongruous, especially because of the red tights and pink singlet, but he is without doubt the hero.

  Tischbein’s painting is a general comment on heroism. Others focus much more on human aspects. The illustrator Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki, in a book from 1782, has Arminius in the moments after the Battle of Teutoburg Forest. Standing again under an oak tree with Thusnelda looking on and surrounded by druids, some of whom are holding Varus’ eagle standards, Arminius kisses a young boy mortally wounded in the battle. Despite the glorious victory the Cheruscan leader has the humanity to give his attention to an individual. The charming Thusnelda Crowning Hermann by the Swiss neoclassical painter Angelika Kauffmann, painted in 1786, similarly focuses on the individual. She puts Thusnelda, seated and dressed in white, centre-stage, but yet again she is under an oak tree.

  The shift to the more aggressive, less innocent imagery can in many ways be blamed on Napoleon Bonaparte. Nothing did as much to galvanise German intellectuals to think about what it meant to be a nation and to articulate the idea of German unification than French aggression towards Germany at the start of the nineteenth century.

  Arminius’ desire for freedom was clutched at by a nation that was politically fragmented, economically ruined and militarily humiliated. These stirrings were perhaps best articulated by the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte. After being disgraced at the hands of the French at Jena following Prussia’s ill-advised declaration of war on Napoleon in 1806, Fichte delivered a series of lectures, his Addresses to the German Nation, in Berlin on the steps Germany should take towards a recovery. In his idealisation of his country and his countrymen, Fichte develops and refines Rousseau’s theme of the noble savage. His fourth address ponders why it was that the German nation and Arminius rejected Rome. With flair, he concedes Roman brilliance, their refinements, their laws and their titles. But, Fichte concludes, ‘All those blessings which the Romans offered meant slavery to them because then they would have to become something that was not German, they would have to become half-Roman. They assumed as a matter of course that every man would rather die than become half a Roman, and that a true German could only want to live in order to be, and to remain, just a German and to bring up his children as Germans.’9

  With Fichte’s words echoing round the country, the German playwright Heinrich von Kleist began work on what remains the highest dramatic interpretation of the Arminius theme in literature: Die Hermannsschlacht. It was written between May and December 1808 for an intended performance in a Vienna that was mobilising against Napoleon.

  It is the first overtly political representation of the battle. In an extreme reaction to extreme times, Kleist calls for total sacrifice in times of total crises. The play is shaped to be a piece of propaganda (the author himself admits at the beginning that ‘it is meat for the present’), yet it is also the period’s most intriguing literary representation of the struggle in the Teutoburg Forest. The Romans become mouthpieces for Kleist’s views of France’s conquering intentions. From their point of view, the Germans are to be despised and their nationalist goals are to be ridiculed.

  An interesting nuance is that Marbod (Maroboduus) is brought into the story. If Kleist’s own time began to see the expression of Greater Germany, while Hermann stands for Germany, then Marbod is Austria. It is significant that at the end of the play it is Marbod who decisively beats Varus. Despite his victory, Marbod rejects Cheruscan homage and instead proposes that Hermann become leader of a united Germania. The question of who does ultimately succeed to power is left open.

  This is much more overtly political than the Arminius of the eighteenth-century poets. With themes of honour and integrity, Schlegel’s Hermann is an idealisation. In Klopstock’s trilogy, Arminius is only political in the sense that he is a national figure. But in Kleist we see a seismic shift. Forget any thoughts of gentility or Hamlet-style soul-searching. Kleist’s Hermann is an aggressively driven character. He is happy to get his hands dirty. He is an indignant and angry man; he is also a secretive, duplicitous operator. In other words he is a recognisable political character. The message he sends is that all means are acceptable if they achieve the ends of an independent Germany. All morality can and should be sacrificed in the interests of the national cause. Above all, there can never be any compromise with the Romans. ‘Hate is my duty and anger is my virtue as long as they defy Germany,’ Arminius says.10

  This shift in literary representations of Arminius is mirrored in art. In the eighteenth century, he is the ideal citizen, the ideal hero, the ideal man. But after Napoleon’s humiliation of Germany there is a shift from this chocolate box romanticism to much more aggressive, slightly sinister representations. If it were possible, paintings become even more overtly political following the Rhine crisis of the 1840s. The French government had suffered a humiliating diplomatic defeat in the Middle East. To divert the attention of its citizens from this foreign-policy debacle and to restore national pride, France declared its intention to recapture the left bank of the Rhine from the Germans and to re-establish the river as the country’s natural eastern border. The German response to this sabre-rattling was defiance.

  Lorenz Clasen’s Germania on Guard at the Rhine from 1860 is possibly the best-known example of the broader genre, but several artists focused specifically on the story of Arminius. The most arresting example is Wilhelm Lindenschmidt
’s particularly martial Hermannsschlacht, painted at some time in the 1840s and now in the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe. A barely armoured Arminius astride a white horse, a shimmering sword in his hand, is anointed with divine light. Despite the bodies of several warriors that feature in the bottom of the picture, and the chaos surrounding the Cheruscan leader himself, there is no doubt of the outcome. They may be pressed but the Germans will win.

  Friedrich Gunkel’s Die Hermannsschlacht, from 1864, takes a similar approach. Arminius, sword in hand, on a rearing white horse about to charge down some archers, is contrasted with a Roman, back to the viewer, falling off an injured black horse. There is the same crude, yet effective, use of light throughout: the Germanic army on the left of the painting, charging forward, is bathed in light, while the Romans, crouching, retreating and dying on the right, are in semi-darkness. Again the outcome of the victory is made clear. After Arminius, the viewer’s eye is drawn to action in the bottom right corner, where two legionaries are carrying off a wounded comrade.

  After German success in the Battle of Sedan in September 1870, which crushed the Second French Empire of Napoleon III and led to the establishment of the German Reich under the watchful eye of the Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismark the following year, the arrogance of a young, victorious nation comes through. In Karl von Piloty’s 1875 Thusnelda in the Triumphal March of Germanicus, Arminius’ wife and son stand uncowed before the Romans. They will never be beaten and have no intention of bowing to anyone. Friedrich Tüshaus’s Battle between Germans and Romans at the Rhine from 1876 shows the Romans at the moment of a rout. The intentions in the image are all too clear: any invaders of Germany will be pushed into the Rhine.

  The above examples are all by private artists. They reflect the political mood around them. But Arminius now began to appear in state-sponsored art; the connection was explicitly made between Arminius as the representative of the German people and the modern German state. An attempt had been made in 1848. An Arminius memorial coin was handed out on the occasion of the opening session of the first German parliament in Frankfurt, but the institution’s failure makes this a one-off. Between 1870 and 1873, however, the painter Peter Janssen was commissioned to decorate the town hall of Krefeld in North Rhein-Westfalia, with a series of eight paintings on the theme of Arminius. They are impressive pieces of art. As well as the obvious themes, such as the battle itself and Thusnelda in Germanicus’ triumph, one painting is of the goddess Germania, spear in hand, leaning on a shield, telling Drusus that he may not cross the Elbe. Another is of Maroboduus captive in Ravenna, being gawked at by his guards. The paintings survived Allied bombing during the Second World War; nonetheless it says something about their original nationalistic intentions that they have never been returned to the walls of the town hall.

  The emergent confidence resulted in a huge flowering of the arts as the youthful nation found its feet. A new country meant new museums and new literature that could all be funded by a rapidly growing economy, and that had an audience as the population of the cities boomed. Berlin’s population grew from 400,000 in 1800 to 4 million by 1900. At the same time, there was a tiny, yet significant shift away from the classical humanistic education. It was eventually voiced at the highest level by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who wrote on the school reforms of the 1890s that ‘we must educate young Germans, not young Greeks or Romans.’11 The politicians were using the Germani to make the distinction between ‘them’ and ‘us’. Of course they were capitalising on what, in retrospect, was a distinct trend. The trickle had started earlier. A journal entitled Thusnelda, devoted to the study of Germanic history, had been founded in 1807, followed in 1814 by one called Hermann. It is also possible to point to the numerous Arminiusstraßen in Germany. For example, the one in Moabit, the working-class district of Berlin, was named in 1879.

  It would be easy to regard the reverence accorded Arminius as a purely German phenomenon, but of course many European countries throughout the first half of the nineteenth century were searching for a national hero. Over a similar period, Britain saw the growth of the cult of Boudicca, and in France there was that of Vercingetorix, both of which provide counterpoints to Arminius. The ways in which these three Celtic heroes were represented in statues in the individual countries highlights very different approaches to nationalism and the past. Britain’s offering on Westminster Bridge is understated and unprepossessing; the French statue at Alise-Sainte-Reine commemorates the heroic but futile. But the Germans celebrated the valiant and victorious. There is little doubt that the Hermannsdenkmal on the Grotenburg near Detmold is a most dramatic physical representation of the Arminius myth, a sign of muscular Germanism.

  Suggestions for a heroic statue of some sort in Germany to celebrate the Battle of Teutoburg Forest went back centuries, but these ideas did not begin to coalesce until 1838, when Joseph Ernst von Bandel took on the job. ‘My memorial shall have but one object, the figure itself,’ he wrote. A devoted German patriot, von Bandel reveals himself as something of a mystic in his account of how he found the spot where he was to build his monument, two years previously:

  It was early on a beautiful morning in September, 1836, that I started to ascend the highest peak of the Teutoburgian forest, the Grotenburg. At the foot of the mountain I found by a little pond a twelve-year-old boy who agreed to take me to the top. He proved a talkative companion, and led me through thick and thin to the old stone wall. The higher I went the more surprised I was at the beauty of the mountain form. At last we came to the top of the peak, which was then entirely free from trees of any size, for only stunted pines showed themselves from the thick sweet-broom. The beeches and oaks just down the mountain were dead, partly from old age and partly from the beating of the storms. Only the lowest part of the peak was fresh and green with oaks and beeches. I knew this mountain peak, which lifted itself, cone-shaped, in the midst of the deepest valleys of the range (the poor Romans who were caught fast in these ravines even Jupiter himself could not rescue) as a fitting place for my memorial. From it one could look into all the valleys, and upon it a statue could be seen at the greatest distance. I found on the summit a pile of stones, and I said to my little conductor, ‘Here, boy, will I build a monument.’ Whereupon he looked at me as if he were astounded.12

  Bandel was not to know then that his vision would take thirty-nine years to realise – the rest of his life. Cruelly, like a monumental Beethoven, he was denied sight of his own genius, going blind in his final years. He started work in 1838, financed by donations not only from Germany, but also countrymen who had emigrated to Britain (Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, subscribed) and the United States.13 Although the impressive base was by then finished, by 1846 work had stopped for financial reasons. The work was given a new lease of life after the 1860s. The future Kaiser, Wilhelm I, supported it and the new German parliament underwrote a considerable part of Bandel’s vision. It was finished in 1875 in the afterglow of France’s humiliation by Germany in the Franco-Prussian war, and it was officially dedicated on 16 August with a vast pageant, Kaiser Wilhelm in attendance.

  Any visitor can see why it so easily grabbed the public imagination and has appeared on all manner of advertising from cigars to bottles of beer ever since. First, it is huge, as imposing as the Washington Memorial. There is virtually no ornamentation on the cylindrical dome-like base of the statue. Into the cylinder are cut ten Gothic-style niches that are flanked by triple-branching columns topped with oak-leaved capitals. Not only do they stop the effect from being too austere and subdued: the choice of oak reflects the myth and Germany’s Urwald.

  Upon the dome-shaped top is Arminius, ‘rising’ in Bandel’s intentions ‘from the mountain as naturally as the fir trees, so that upon it my Arminius may seem to stand free in the heaven’. Dressed in a short-sleeved tunic, a wide belt with sword chain and a winged helmet, the figure, 26.5m in height, is built up of more than 200 beaten-copper sheets (bronze was too heavy). These were then riveted on to great
iron cylinders which were bolted on to a socket plate.

  Standing on a Roman eagle and fasces, Arminius has his left hand resting on a shield. His right arm is raised and in his hand he holds a sword: Nothung, Siegfried’s blade. Specially built by Krupp, it weighs 550kg. The words ‘German unity is my strength’ are engraved on one side, ‘My strength is Germany’s might’ on the other. And the sword is not pointing south, as might be expected: it is aimed at France. Even without Tacitus’ epitaph for Arminius inscribed into one of the niches, a more blatant expression of nationalism is hard to consider and is unimaginable without the confidence given to the country by the reforms of the Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismark.

  When the German poet Heinrich Heine returned to Germany in 1843, after a time at a spa in the Pyrenees, he wrote his series of poems Germany: a Winter’s Tale. A joy to read, it is a witty attack on all things Prussian, mocking, in no particular order, the Church, the monarchy and German nationalism. Naturally enough, he visited the half-finished Hermannsdenkmal:

  This is the Teutoburg Forest

  as described by Tacitus,

  and this is the classical swamp

  where Varus got himself stuck.