Rome's Greatest Defeat

by Adrian Murdoch

  It was here that the leader of the Cherusci,

  Hermann, the noble thane, defeated him,

  and German nationality

  was victorious in all this mud.

  If Hermann and his blond hordes

  had not won the battle,

  there would be no more freedom

  and we should all be Romans!

  In our fatherland there would only be

  Roman customs and language;

  there would even be Vestal Virgins in Munich,

  and the Swabians would be called Quirites.

  Despite the satirical tone that mocks nationalist pretensions, Heine does confess in the end that ‘I contributed to it myself.’14

  If Fichte’s rhetoric at the turn of the century was the overt face of this growing national identity, Arminius found himself pulled at the same time in another, slightly different direction, into that of the people and people’s history advocated by Herder. The nineteenth century saw a growing interest in folk songs; myths such as the Ring Saga that were so to influence Richard Wagner, and fairy stories by such proselytisers as the brothers Grimm. These back-to-nature ideals saw the ancient Germans as ‘almost the [American] Indians of antiquity’.15 Jacob Grimm, a professor of philology as well as a publisher of folk tales, was one of the first academics to put Tacitus’ Germania on a university syllabus, where it remained, as much holy writ as set text. For all of these, the forest is both a place of change and of surprise, but also of resolution. Indeed it is virtually impossible to think of the Grimm tales without picturing a forest. The whole of Wagner’s Ring cycle can be seen to be about the wooden spear which Wotan carves from Yggdrasil, the ash tree of Life. Arminius was being absorbed, more quietly, by Romanticism.

  Even though many have tried to find a connection between Siegfried and Arminius, it is curious that the Cheruscan chief was not explicitly co-opted by Wagner.16 It would have fitted his themes perfectly. Nonetheless, the conflict has inspired a large number of operas but, as one commentator has written, ‘few of the composers will be familiar even to a devoted student of opera’.17 It is to be regretted that although the classical composer Christoph Gluck was moved by the settings he made for Klopstock’s dramas, he never set down the music, nor were they ever to become an opera. Some thirty-seven different operatic Arminiuses appeared in the eighteenth century, and a further eighteen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Domenico Scarlatti and Johann Adolph Hasse are among the few composers who will have been heard of and, in both cases, the operas are much stronger musically than dramatically.

  Only two have been recorded in modern times and inevitably both are called Arminio. The former, which counts as the first German opera, though sung in Italian, was written by the composer/violinist Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber at the end of the seventeenth century (the exact date is disputed) in Salzburg. The other is George Frederick Handel’s Arminio, written in the autumn of 1736 in a particularly fruitful period of the composer’s life. While, musically, it will satisfy the most jaded barocchisti, it is incomprehensible even by the shaky standards of opera – a matter not helped by the fact that the composer seemingly arbitrarily cut around a thousand lines of text from Antonio Salvi’s libretto. Suffice to say that the plot exists only in the composer’s imagination and that all’s well that ends well.18

  If Arminius kept a polite distance from so-called high culture, he found his niche in popular songs (the exception is Schubert’s ‘Hermann und Thusnelda’, a song for two voices and piano and based on a text by Klopstock). Two written in the mid- to late nineteenth century, one by Albert Methfessel and another by Viktor von Scheffel, are still sung today. ‘Gab’s darum eine Hermannschlacht?’ (‘Was this why Hermann won the day?’) was especially popular during the Second World War, while ‘Als die Römer frech geworden’ (‘Some Romans once got uppity’), by Viktor von Scheffel, remains well liked to this day (several of the author’s friends recall singing it in their youth) and the song-name sees regular use in newspaper headlines and as the title of lectures.19

  During the reign of Wilhelm II, up until the end of the First World War there was what one modern writer has called ‘an isolated intermezzo’ in Arminius imagery.20 Certainly it is true that in trying to position himself internationally as the successor to Augustus, the Kaiser was an enthusiastic admirer of Rome. Nonetheless, it is not strictly fair to see the period as a timeout. The 1,900th anniversary of the battle in 1909, for example, saw massive celebrations all over Germany. During the First World War, Arminius was drafted to remind the people of the sacrifice that was needed of them in a 1915 play called Die Varusschlacht by Adolf Römheld, while in the academic field 1900 had seen the publication of a commentary of Tacitus’ Germania that comes in at an almost grotesque 750 pages. Wilhelm II could no more halt imagery of Arminius than Canute could push back the sea. For nationalism to exist, there has to be some idea of a nation. By now Arminius was firmly in the public domain. The damage had already been done.

  Nationalism was only ever going to increase rather than recede in a Weimar Republic that felt embittered and humiliated by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The bellicose defensiveness that this had engendered saw yet another upturn of interest in German culture and history. Stripped of its land, with a ruined economy and social fragmentation, the country took refuge in the past, in what was called Deutschtum, or German-ness. One aspect of this was the growth of walking clubs and a reaffirmed idealisation of the forests. The Hermannsweg, the 156km-long Hermann Way, which starts at the Rhine and passes the Hermannsdenkmal, remains one of the most popular walking routes in Germany to this day. But it was also an ideal that was reflected in novels, music and art at the time. As the historian Simon Schama notes, this ‘all ensured that the Heimat had never seemed so leafy’.21 But the radicalisation of the German soul, their Volksseele, that had been identified by Herder was no longer an unchanging absolute; rather it was now increasingly thought to be under threat from non-German forces.

  The growing, black undercurrent, however, becomes ever more apparent throughout the period. The pastoral reverence of students and youth was preparing to pull on the jackboot. The celebrations in August 1925 of the 50th anniversary of the Hermannsdenkmal became the focus for 50,000 young ultra-nationalists to march on the monument, dressed in historical costumes and waving flags. Only two years previously, Die Hermannschlacht, the earliest surviving motion picture about the battle, was filmed. Shot in 1922 and 1923, and premiered in the Detmolder Landestheater in February 1924, it was made on location in and around the Externsteine in the Teutoburg Forest. As many as a thousand extras were used in the battle scenes of the film, which had been deemed lost until a copy turned up in the Moscow Archives in 1992. A tone of defiant hopefulness is seen at the beginning:

  Then comes a day of vengeance, when we thrust

  Our deadly enemy from the Saar and Rhineland shore

  Then shall we from our slavish fetters burst,

  be free and German as our fathers were.22

  But following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, both unemployment and Nazi support boomed. Within only a year, Nazi representation in the Reichstag went up from 12 to 107; within three, unemployment had gone up from 1.3 million to 5.1 million; and within four, Adolf Hitler had completed his seizure of power and this patriotic zeal became considerably more unpleasant.

  The sharp contrast from previous defensiveness to self-assured arrogance can be seen, if we stay with cinema, in the semi-documentary 1935–6 film Ewiger Wald (Eternal Forest), directed by Hans Springer and Rolf von Sonjewski-Jamrowski. Produced by the Nazi Culture Group it is an ‘allegory of our history and life’ that draws the parallel between the eternal forest and the eternal people. Broken into episodes, accompanied by a banal semi-poetic voiceover, the first part presents the Battle of Teutoburg Forest. This arboreal farrago is primarily of interest nowadays to cineastes. The special photography credit went to Ernst Kunstmann, who worked not only with Fritz Lang on Metropolis,
but also with Leni Riefenstahl on both Olympia and Triumph of the Will. What makes the film important is that the shift in tone is markedly more assured and less apologetic, seen in the film’s final line: ‘The people, like the forest, will stand forever.’

  German prehistory was becoming overtly political. The Nazi Party’s ideologue Alfred Rosenberg went so far as to describe German prehistory as the ‘Old Testament of the German people’. Archaeology was now a direct political tool and many scholars were to become both fellow travellers and the unwitting mouthpieces for the new political reality. Typical was one of the first academic dissertations to look at the Arminius motif in literature, which was published in 1937. It is a serious piece of scholarship and remains a useful work to this day, but within a few pages it is apparent that the author is overly obsessed with questions of race and the relationship between Führer and Volk. Other subjects were not immune either. A 1936 article about Gothic art begins, ‘Since Arminius the Cheruscan’s resistance against Rome, the German tribes have been fighting the same battle: the battle for German right and German freedom.’23

  Nay-sayers were given short shrift. Those who had the temerity to suggest that the Germani were hardly what one would call the bringers of culture were dismissed. Eduard Norden, the professor for Latin studies at the University of Berlin, was widely excoriated when his book Alt-Germanien was published in 1934 for daring to use archaeological and anthropological evidence to question the accepted party line on German prehistory. The Reich’s Deputy for German Prehistory and the leading Nazi archaeologist in the field, Hans Reinerth, described such views as ‘the great ideological enemy of national prehistory’.24

  Between 1928 and 1941 the number of academics in prehistory at German universities grew from thirteen to fifty-two. The groundwork for this had been laid by the writings of Gustaf Kossinna. Originally a philologist and librarian, then professor at Berlin from 1902 until his death in 1931, he was one of the first scholars to make prehistory an academic discipline. In a lecture in 1895 he asked the chilling question, ‘Where in the present day territory of Germany are we dealing with Germani and where with non-German people?’25 The expression of the notion that the boundaries of the ancient Germani had political relevance for the borders of the modern country as much as the distinction between German and non-German people was to have profound consequences. It is not possible to overemphasise Kossinna’s importance. He was so influential because he was deliberately writing for the people. He took prehistory out of the lecture theatre and brought it into the salons of Germany, so much so that his best-known work, Die deutsche Vorgeschichte (A Prehistory of Germany) went through eight editions between its publication in 1912, and 1941.

  What lay at the core of the Nazi attraction to Arminius was less his opposition to Rome and more Tacitus’ comments on German ethnicity. His one sentence, ‘I agree with those who deem the Germans never to have intermarried with other nations; but to be a race, pure, unmixed, and stamped with a distinct character’, has arguably done more to change Europe’s landscape than any other. It, of course, matched Nazi ideology of a pure race perfectly and was articulated throughout the period almost verbatim. To take just two examples, Walter Groß, head of the Nazi Party’s Office of Racial Policy, speaking before an audience of women at a rally in 1934, said, ‘In our Reich, we are separating that which belongs to us, because it is blood of our blood, from that which does not belong to us, because it is foreign.’ Julius Streicher, in his final editorial in the Nazi Party newspaper Der Stürmer in 1945, wrote, ‘The German people are the last stronghold of European civilization, thanks to the continuing effect of the German people’s inherited Germanic blood.’26

  Despite this, Arminius was never to be central to Nazi thought – as with everything that Hitler attempted, expediency overrode idealism – but he stayed within shouting distance, dressed up as a blond-haired Nordic pin-up. After Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, German youth began to be portrayed as the heirs of ancient German warriors and the Cheruscans were just one of the many totemic figures to the Nazis that could be called upon to support their perverted view.

  It goes without saying that Adolf Hitler himself admired Arminius. He mentioned him several times in private conversation, on one occasion calling him ‘the first architect of our liberty’.27 But if there is the feeling here that Hitler was in one sense paying only lip-service to heritage, he had recognised the value of early Germanic history for propaganda purposes. Even in Mein Kampf, written in the early 1920s while he was in prison in Landsberg Castle, the Führer had written, ‘The lighter its scholarly baggage and the more exclusively it is directed towards the feelings of the masses, the more effective its success will be.’28 That he never forgot this can be seen in the fact that he commissioned eight tapestries, 5.4m by 10m, from Werner Peiner, one of the best-known National Socialist painters. These were to be the artistic centrepieces of the new Reich Chancellery. The intention was to place the German Reich in a historical context for visiting dignitaries, and the theme for one of the tapestries (all of which were martial in nature) was the Battle of Teutoburg Forest. In the end, the factory in which the tapestries were supposed to be produced was never built, but in one sense the tapestries did exist throughout the Third Reich, because the art press continually published articles about them.

  It would be wrong to see the interest in Germanic prehistory just as a political tool or even as solely an educated-middle-class issue. There was a continuing awareness of prehistory that went right through every level of society. As well as displays in museums, touring exhibitions and the emphasis on the teaching of prehistory in the school curriculum, Arminius had become part of popular culture. For example, in 1934 the Dresden-based cigarette company Eckstein produced a series of cards celebrating German history from Hermann the Cheruscan to Charlemagne, six of which illustrate events from the battle. The Hermannsdenkmal is given a particular prominence in an illustrated map of Germany published by the German Railways Information Bureau in the 1930s for British tourists. Covers of women’s magazines displayed prehistoric themes, and Arminius was an image that was exploited on holiday brochures. Even household products emphasised their connection with the Germani either in their name or their advertising.

  Arminius had travelled so far that it is now fair to identify Arminius’ effect on popular culture. Novels about the Cheruscan became such an industry in their own right that between the end of the First World War and that of the Second World War, more than thirty novels were published, virtually all of them using the words ‘liberator’, ‘hero’ or ‘the first German’ somewhere in the title. It is irrelevant that from a literary point of view this phenomenon was an issue of quantity, not quality.29

  Paul Albrecht’s 1920 novel Arminius-Sigurfrid is a straight-forward retelling of the story, albeit mixed with elements of the Siegfried myth and written in the florid style popular at the time. The novel’s title is taken from the conceit that Arminius changed his name from Sigurfrid when he joined the Roman army. When it was republished in Berlin in 1935, however, Albrecht added an introduction. ‘If we have understood our mission correctly, then we must start again where the First Empire also started, to build up the edifice of Germanic greatness and get rid of any building-blocks that were alien,’ he writes. Kossinna’s lessons had been well learned.

  While some novels toned down the nationalistic tub-thumping (Walter Heichen’s Thumelicus, Arminius’ Son, published in 1939, for example, tells the story of Arminius’ heir from gladiator to freedom fighter in a comparatively straightforward manner), many more welcomed the spirit of the age with right arm held aloft. Hjalmar Kutzleb’s 1933 novel The First German: a novel of Hermann the Cheruscan wholly captures the thoughts of the Nazi period: the glorification of the leader, the strength of the people and the denunciation of lesser races. One of the Jewish characters, inevitably a merchant, is particularly unpleasantly drawn. At one point Arminius says, ‘Maybe it would be good if we wiped him and his type out be
fore they eradicate us.’ Its concept of the nation is entirely contemporary. The themes of Lebensraum come to the fore to the extent that at one point Arminius hatches a plan to invade Britain. It is a chilling novel for anyone with a sense of history.

  Yet others appear even more extreme in this day and age. Freerk Hamkens’ 1934 Hermann the Cheruscan: a tale from early-Germanic history is a particularly pernicious literary example of the Arminius myth, not just because it is more overtly political than the previous example (if that were possible) but because it is written for children. From a historical point of view it follows the events described by the ancients closely. It begins to diverge only after the death of Augustus. The campaigns of Germanicus and the capture of Thusnelda are compressed into a single year – AD 14 – while the suicide of Thusnelda is pure fiction.

  The stench of Nazi theories on German culture permeates the book; the long prehistory of Germany is emphasised, as are ideas of German glory. ‘If we need land and we don’t have any, then we take it. We will ask nicely. And if they don’t want to. Well then, war!’ It is a direct transmission of the policy of Nazi expansions. The messages to its young readers are about being true to yourself and your people. It ends semi-poetically, ‘People die, tribes fade. You will die as they did. I know one thing that lives for ever: reputation, won in death.’ This is political brainwashing masquerading as literature.

  All of this came to an abrupt end with the end of the Second World War. Naturally enough, postwar Germany was keen to suppress discussions of national heroes. But there are practical reasons, too, that went beyond the public rejection of Kossinna’s theories and the prosecution of leading Nazi archaeologists like Hans Reinerth, who became a scapegoat for the profession. Germany – indeed all European countries – had managed to lose an entire generation of archaeologists and classical historians. Those who had not been killed or had emigrated were involved in exonerating themselves. The institutions themselves had not escaped damage either. A significant number of museums and sites were badly damaged; the best-known example is the Römisch-Germanische Kommission in Frankfurt but smaller ones, such as Haltern, which had direct relevance for any discussion of early Roman involvement in Germany, was bombed in 1945. Within this ideology-free environment, Arminius and the Germanic tribes suddenly found themselves isolated and ignored. They were sent back into the forests.