‘One constant in German literary nationalism of the last one hundred and ninety years has been an unwillingness to tolerate a historical figure without a tomorrow and a legendary hero without a past.’ R. Frank draws this conclusion from her survey of the attempts to identify the historical Arminius with the Siegfried-hero of the Nibelungenlied (‘Siegfried and Arminius: Scenes from a Marriage’, in C. Lee and N. McLelland [edd.], Germania Remembered, 1500–2009: Commemorating and Inventing a German Past [2012], pp. 1–26, at p. 25). The statement similarly applies to the story of Arminius, as started by Tacitus in his Annals about 1,900 years ago, when he credited the Cheruscan warlord with having ‘doubtlessly’ freed Germania (Ann. 2.88.2). It also fits to some extent the book under review, which treats the ‘Arminius-as-liberator’ myth as continuing up to the present day. Such a stance presupposes a notion of ‘myth’ wide enough to encompass accounts of the Roman–Germanic conflict in ancient sources, their nationalist and Nazi-instrumentalisations in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany and in postmodern ‘infotainment’ culture, all of which are covered and lavishly illustrated in W.’s weighty monograph.
W.’s project is a massive and ambitious undertaking, which is only partly fulfilled, mainly due to overstretching the concept of ‘myth’. W. never defines his central category succinctly, but instead invokes it in many different nuances and amalgamates it with the different notion of the imagistic representation of history. In the process, the concept of myth covers any form of historical narrative that goes beyond witness-evidence and offers an interpretative and evaluative ‘take’ on historical events. Tacitus is singled out as having ‘launched [Arminius] on his mythical career’ (p. 31), on account of having interpreted the Cheruscan's ‘lifetime achievement’ as resisting Imperial Rome's first-century campaigns to colonise the main part of ancient Germania, especially in his initial victory over three Roman legions in the ‘Battle of the Teutoburg Forest’ in a.d. 9. But why is this narrative supposed to be a myth, rather than a biased story?
Tacitus' pronouncements on Arminius in the Annales and on ancient Germany in Germania have been re-interpreted many times since their discovery in the late fifteenth century and have gained notoriety for their instrumentalisation in German nationalism, which projected modern concerns onto ancient history. They may well be called modern nationalist myths on account of their anachronism, but Tacitus can hardly be blamed for that. W. rightly relies on studies that have advanced critical perspectives against the nationalist tradition. They have highlighted that Tacitus' agenda in writing his works was not the praise of a barbarian warlord but a response to the political and cultural context of second-century Rome, that the Roman officer Arminius' victory was based on deception and technically constituted mutiny, that Arminius did not repel Roman armies for good and that the decision by later emperors to abstain from colonising all ‘barbarian’ Germany were mainly based on cost–profit calculations (pp. 31, 47–52). These studies are, however, by no means recent – they date from the 1970s and, although their ‘revisionist’ outlook was initially an object of dispute, have largely been taken on board by present-day mainstream historians (see R. Wolters, Die Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald. Arminius, Varus und das römische Germanien [2nd ed., 2009], p. 199). To suggest, as W. does (p. 39), that ‘modern historians' still subscribe to the heroic-nationalist Arminius myth is, at best, an exaggeration.
What, then, about the popular, film-based mythification of Arminius and his battle? It is here where W.’s expertise lies, given his track record of research on films about Roman history, such as Spartacus and Gladiator. Unfortunately, his material in this book consists mainly of obscure second- and third-rate films. The first example is a once-screened ‘Hermannschlacht’, which premiered in February 1924 and was so ‘successful’ that it was ‘soon forgotten or had become unavailable for screenings by the following year’ (p. 157). W. views it nonetheless as a ‘manifestation of the collective [nationalist German] mentality’ because it was forbidden in the then French-occupied Rhineland (ibid.) and because it received an enthusiastic welcome in the provincial town of Detmold, centre of the district of Lippe-Detmold in present-day North Rhine-Westphalia. What is so significant about Detmold? The town is situated near the Osning hill ridge, which was speculatively ‘identified’ by locals in the seventeenth century as Tacitus' saltus Teutoburgiensis, i.e. the battle site of a.d. 9 and has kept this identification since. On one of its hills stands the monument to Arminius (who had been germanised into ‘Hermann’ in the sixteenth century), the 54 metres high Hermannsdenkmal, which was inaugurated in 1875 and became a rallying point for celebrations of German nationalists before and after WW1. It is thus no surprise that a film about Arminius as hero, however amateurishly produced, received a warm welcome from a local audience in the 1920s. W. acknowledges the film's mainly ‘local impact’ (p. 129) and asserts it was merely ‘nationalist’, i.e. not yet a ‘Nazi-type film’ (p. 158).
The latter type is exemplified for W. by a 1936 Nazi homage to the ‘Eternal Forest’ (Ewiger Wald). It shows an Arminius-style victory of Germanic farmer-warriors over decadent Romans as part of a glorification of the Nazis' ‘blood and soil’ ideology. Here the Arminius story is clearly integrated into an attempt at anti-modernist mythologising by the Nazis. It is telling, however, that all identifiable historical references have been eliminated, and that it is the unity of nature and people that gains the victory over the invaders, rather than a prominent leader-figure. There is no discernible Arminius myth here at all, but W. still tries to suggest that the Nazis were especially keen to include it. To this end, he adduces two sets of evidence, namely Nazi film publicity material and propaganda presenting Arminius as the ancient forerunner of Hitler, and celebratory literature about their surprise victory in the regional elections in the federal mini-state of Lippe-Detmold in January 1933, which had made the NSDAP the strongest party with 39.5% of the vote. W. credits this local victory with having ‘made possible the turning point that came two weeks later’, i.e. Hitler's appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933 (p. xv), on the basis of diary notes of Goebbels and local party publications from 1939 and 1943 that stylised the Lippe result as a ‘breakthrough battle’ for the national victory. Rather than analysing these dubious sources critically, W. only presents ever more photographs, postcards, party slogans etc. to show that the Nazis did use their propaganda to link Hitler to Arminius, but the alleged special Nazi-ideological significance of the supposed Arminius myth remains unclear.
W.’s third film example is a 1967 Italo-German production, whose Italian title tellingly confuses the Teutoburg Forest with the Black Forest (Il massacro della foresta nera) and which, as W. himself states, ‘lacked all political aspects’ and ‘was barely screened’ (p. 197). So why spend nearly 30 pages on it in a book about the Arminius myth? The remaining chapters are filled with comments on various further post-war artistic and multimedia attempts to tell the Arminius story (ranging from Anselm Kiefer to children's TV series), only to end on US-American neo-Nazi groups using Arminius references for their own mythology of white supremacy on the internet. W. rightly pronounces the Arminius story several times ‘liberated from ideology’ and degraded to ‘infotainment’ and ‘spectacle’, only to proclaim its ‘resurrection’ by fringe fanatics. Given the arbitrary and atomistic evidence that he presents for this last aspect, the Arminius myth thankfully never seems to have regained consciousness.
