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German Horror Stories: Teutomania and the Ghosts of Tacitus

2014; Boston University; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/arn.2014.0005

2327-6436

Martin A. Ruehl,

Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez

German Horror Stories: Teutomania and the Ghosts of Tacitus* MARTIN A. RUEHL After the outbreak of World War II, the parody of a German folksong made the rounds among former members of the Burschenschaften (student corporations or fraternities) recently dissolved by the Nazi government.1 Its first two stanzas went like this: The ancient Germanen were camping On either side of the Rhine. They were sitting on bearskins and drinking, Drinking away their time. Then a Roman appeared among them And gave them the German salute: “Heil Hitler, you old Germanen! My name is Tacitus.” Soon enough, these merry Teutons convince their visitor to join in the carousing, and the song ends with a badly hungover Tacitus writing down an account of his initiation experience the morning after, “with shaking hands” (and some bitterness), in his famous ethnographic tract, the Germania.2 A drinking song, no doubt, but its politics are complex. The glorification of supposedly ancient German habits such as the heavy consumption of beer or “humor ex hordeo” (see Germ. 23) was typical of the often ardently patriotic fraternities most of which had been founded in the nineteenth century .3 The reference to Italo-German fraternization in the arion 22.2 fall 2014 *Christopher Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2011. 303 pages. second stanza arguably commemorates a more recent historical event, the formation of the Axis in 1936. The end of that stanza, however, marks a change of tone: The pointed anachronism in the penultimate line seems to mock Nazi attempts to revive allegedly Germanic customs like the “deutscher Gruß” (German salute) in the form of the “Hitler-Gruß” (Hitler salute).4 There is a subtle suggestion throughout the song that its action takes place in a timeless, mythical landscape and that these Germanen are very selfconsciously enacting a kind of double-layered legend: the one told by their original ethnographer at the end of the first century AD, and the one re-created, almost nineteen hundred years later, by the ideologists of the Third Reich. Christopher Krebs does not mention this song in his book on the German reception of the Germania. Perhaps because he was not aware of it (though it still has a certain notoriety amongst an older generation of Bildungsbürger),5 perhaps because it would have sat awkwardly with his earnest efforts to demonstrate that the Germania was a “bible” for National Socialists (214) and served as a blueprint for their genocidal policies. It is unfortunate that Krebs ignores documents such as this. They would have lent his book some color and a bit of nuance. But nuance is not what Krebs is after. He tells it straight, and he paints it black. No shades of grey here—his subjectmatter clearly is too somber for that. Krebs relates the reception of the Germania as a kind of pathogenesis, the history of a “virus” (24) that gradually spreads among Germany’s educated elites and eventually leads to a pandemic of ultranationalism and racism. The Germania virus, as described by Krebs, consists of three fundamental (and inter-related) beliefs: (1) the ethnic and linguistic continuity between the ancient Germani described by Tacitus and the modern inhabitants of the German lands; (2) the moral and physical superiority of the Germanic (and hence also the German) people over other peoples; and (3) the cultural and racial autochthony and purity of the ancient Germanen (or german horror stories 130 Teutons) and their latter-day descendants. These notions form the core of the Germanic ideology or Germanic myth, more commonly known as Teutomania or Germanomania. a most infectious book according to krebs, the birth of the Germanic myth coincides with the initial outbreak of the Germania virus in the sixteenth century, when several German humanists, led by Conrad Celtis and Jakob Wimpfeling, employ the recently discovered text of the Germania to formulate a catalogue of German(ic) virtues—steadfastness, bravery, piety, etc.—in order to contrast them with the supposed moral degeneracy of Italy and the Roman Church. The virus evolves in the Baroque with the writings of Philipp Clüver, Martin Opitz...