The is a good example of why one has to make that extra click and actually read what it is one’s spiders have brought back. Despite the strange headline (see below), what this is is actually a reviewish sort of thing of Christopher Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book, which is all about how important Tacitus’ Germania was for all those Third Reich types (especially Himmler). The online article itself is rather meh, but there’s an attached podcast wherein Lewis Lapham interviews Krebs … very interesting stuff:
Tacitus and the Third Reich
It’s also a good reason why historians need to be taken more seriously.
The original idea of the Germans as barbarians who had only been civilized by Roman and Christian culture, was still propagated in Nazi times, e.g. by Heinrich Wolf in his book Geschichte der katholischen Staatsidee, where he tried to harken back to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, and tried to knit together a new national political concept based on both Christian faith and an state ideology derived from the rule of Augustus, who was after all adored by Mussolini and Hitler. But that was a minority opinion, anachronistic from a Nazi point of view, because (as with the Germania reading) the völkisch ideology had mainly taken over.
Thanks for pointing out the podcast–I probably would have skipped it based on the article. As you say, very interesting.
very interesting interview
the book itself is also extremely interesting (and great fun to read at that).