“The history of the Germans is a history of extremes,” wrote the English historian A.J.P. Taylor in his book The Course of German History, penned during the Blitz of London in the Second World War. “It contains everything except moderation, and in the course of a thousand years the Germans have experienced everything except normality.” To be more precise, for Mr. Taylor and like-minded historians, German history went astray from the main course of Western civilization in 9 AD. For, somewhere between the Ems and Weser rivers in the general region of Osnabrück-Detmold, the German chieftain Arminius (known to generations of NATO soldiers as “Herman the German”) over three bloody and rainy days defeated Publius Quinctilius Varus, the Roman governor of Germania, and slaughtered his three legions of at least 15,000 men. With one fell swoop, Rome lost 10 per cent of its military might. One can only surmise what the loss of 50,000 men in three days in Afghanistan or Iraq would do to the American psyche.
But Rome showed what a superpower was capable of: It shifted five legions to the Rhine River to guard against Arminius and his Cheruscans, and it created a sixth legion from forced recruitment in Roman jails and bars and bordellos for a similar deployment north of the Alps. For two years, beginning in 14 AD, Germanicus, great nephew of Augustus Caesar, led these forces in a bitter campaign of attrition across the Weser River. He buried Varus's dead and recovered two of the lost eagles. But he could not bring Arminius to a decisive battle; two years later, Emperor Tiberius recalled his nephew. Germania was thus denied the benefits of Roman rule, law, baths, vineyards, walnuts and asparagus.
The victors left no record of their deeds. Arminius was soon murdered by his own people. The Cheruscans disappeared from the pages of history. Thus, the “birth of the German nation” was a rather dismal affair – hardly the “turning point of European history” lauded by the great 19th-century historian Theodor Mommsen, or the global “big bang” proclaimed by Hans Ottomeyer, the current director of the German Historical Museum in Berlin.
The story of the battle between Varus and Arminius remained buried for 1,500 years – until Ulrich von Hutten, knight, poet and papal critic, stumbled across a manuscript in Rome that hailed Arminius as “unquestionably Germany's liberator,” a man “unconquered in war.” It was Tacitus's Annals. In short order, Hutten also came across the author's Germania. And so from the hands of the defeated, a national hero was born.
But where had the 9 AD battle taken place? Tacitus placed it in a mythical Teutoburg Forest (saltus Teutoburgiensis). Martin Luther's friend, Philipp Melanchton, identified that to be the Odingen Heights west of Detmold. Others suggested Bielefeld, Minden, Paderborn, or Rinteln. No matter, 19th-century nationalists, anxious to plaster over two centuries of French invasions, pillage, and theft, demanded a pilgrimage site. They chose the Teutoburg Forest (as the Odingen Heights were renamed) and there, in 1875, after countless bankruptcies and mismanagement, completed a 54-metre high statue, the Hermannsdenkmal. Not to be outdone, zealous German emigrants in New Ulm, Minn., erected a 31-metre high replica in 1897. Arminius was celebrated in ballads, novels, and operas. Friedrich Engels saw him as a “liberator” of the nation from foreign tyranny. Adolf Hitler wanted to name the new capital of the Third Reich “Germania.” East German historians depicted Arminius and his Germanic tribes as having brought about nothing less than “the revolutionary vanquishing of a slave-owner society.” Today, some 130,000 visitors annually make the trek to the Monument on the Teutberg – ignoring the fact that recent archeological finds suggest the battle took place north of Osnabrück.
The year 2009 demands tribute to a 2,000-year-old bloodbath. And so, under the national patronage of Angela Merkel, chancellor of what remains of Germania after its leaders initiated two world wars in the last century, the celebrations have begun. Since scholars still debate the actual site of the battle, the Merkel government, between May and October, will honour it with a series of commemorations in no fewer than three regional museums in the general vicinity of the erstwhile Odingen Heights: Haltern am See, a former Roman garrison town; Kalkriese near Osnabrück, site of the last battle of 9 AD and of Varus's suicide; and Detmold, home of the Lippisches Landesmuseum dedicated to the battle. And Mr. Ottomeyer's German Historical Museum in Berlin has set the general tone for the fetes. Under the East German dictators, the history of Germania began with an exhibit showing a Prussian noble (Junker) beating a hapless peasant; it now begins with the grave marker of Marcus Caelius, centurion of Varus's 18th Legion.
After two turbulent millennia, German history has come full circle.
Holger Herwig is professor of history and Canada Research Chair at the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.
