The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest was virtually forgotten during the Middle Ages, when traditions of recording history and of reading and writing declined. Some vague memories of it probably survived in songs and legends, such as the stories of Siegfried the Dragon Slayer, most familiar today in the form of Wagners Ring Cycle of operas. Though little known during the Middle Ages outside of religious establishments, many ancient texts were preserved, and copied when manuscripts deteriorated, in monasteries and churches. It was not until the Renaissance, about 1300-1550, when manuscripts of the ancient Greek and Roman writers were sought out, rediscovered, read, translated, and circulated, that the story of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest became familiar again.
Interest in the ancient inhabitants of northern Europe, whom the Romans called Germans, and in Arminius in particular, became especially intense following the discovery, during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, of two texts written by the Roman historian Tacitus. By 1425, news had spread among scholars, particularly in Italy, that monasteries in Germany and neighboring regions north of the Alps preserved important manuscripts of Roman authors. Poggio Bracciolini (1380—1459), a prime mover among the Italian humanists, contacted a monk at the monastery of Hersfeld, in central Germany, about gaining access to manuscripts by Tacitus (see map i). He visited manuscript collections in monasteries and churches at Cologne, Fulda, Hersfeld, and Reichenau in Germany and at St. Gall in Switzerland. It is not clear to what extent he copied manuscripts, or arranged to have them copied, and to what extent he acquired them. In his letters, Bracciolini wrote that he intended to "liberate manuscripts from the dungeons of the barbarians"—his way of saying that he wanted to get them out of the monastic libraries of northern Europe and into the hands of the humanists working in Italy. This sentiment suggests that he acquired some original manuscripts. At least one modern scholar has compared this activity to the more recent acquisition by European muse-
Map I. Map showing places mentioned in chapter 2.
Ums of art treasures from the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, and Mesopotamia.
The most important description of the peoples whom the Romans called Germans is in Tacitus's work known as the Germania, written around A. D. 100 and found by Bracciolini at Hersfeld. In 1431, a colleague of Bracciolini's, Niccolo Niccoli, created a handwritten copy of it. Either the original or a copy was brought to Rome, perhaps by Bracciolini, perhaps by an associate, sometime in the 1450s. There a number of scholars copied the Germania by hand. It was first published in 1470 in Venice and in Germany in 1473, in Nuremberg.
The reason why this work could have such a large impact is that at just this time the printing press was being adopted in cities throughout Europe. Movable type was developed by Johann Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany, in the early 1450s, and by 1455 he had printed a Bible. In the following decades, the technology of printing spread rapidly, so the versions of Germania published in Venice and Nuremberg could be produced in quantity and disseminated to many readers. These publications offered relatively large numbers of Renaissance scholars their first glimpse into the world of the ancient Germans.
The effect on the national consciousness of German-speaking Europe was immediate and profound. Many late fifteenth - and sixteenth-century Germans, who were struggling to establish a national identity to create a cultural and political unity among the German-speaking peoples, enthusiastically embraced Tacitus's descriptions of peoples they deemed their direct ancestors from the time when Europe's history was just beginning. Tacitus's Germans gave them a counterpart to the ancient Gauls described by Julius Caesar and to the Romans whose fame had never waned during the millennium since the end of the Empire.
Not long after the discovery and publication of the Germania, sources that specifically mentioned the battle came to light. In 1470, the manuscript of a military history of Rome written by
Lucius Annaeus Florus was found in Paris. It contained a description of the defeat of the Roman general Quinctilius Varus at the hands of the Germans. An account of the discovery, by the Roman general Germanicus, of the site of the battle six years after it was fought, contained in the Annals ofTacitus, was discovered in 1505 in a ninth-century copy preserved at the monastery at Corvey, in central Germany. That manuscript was brought to Rome about 1508 and published there in 1515-This account by Tacitus is the only one that provides a description of the location of the battle, near the headwaters of the Ems and Lippe Rivers, in northwestern Germany, near what Tacitus calls the saltus Teutoburgiensis, the Teutoburg Forest. Tacitus is thus a central figure, both in contributing important details about the story of Arminius and in providing us with our only ethnography of the ancient Germans.
The same year that Tacitus's Annals were published, 1515. the German humanist Benatus Rhenanus located, at the Benedictine abbey at Murbach, in Alsace, a manuscript of the Roman History by Velleius Paterculus. Unlike Tacitus and Florus, that author was a contemporary of the battle, and he probably even knew personally both the victor, Arminius, and the defeated Roman governor, Varus. This manuscript was published in Rome in 1515 and in Basel, Switzerland, in 1520. In it, the author provides the critical details about the number of Roman units that were annihilated in the battle—three legions, three cavalry units, and six infantry cohorts. Velleius describes Arminius and his cunning plans and lays the blame for the catastrophe on the incompetence of the Roman commander, Varus.
The humanists' discovery and publication of these manuscripts had important literary and political effects. Arminius became a favorite literary subject. In the 1520s, Ulrich von Hutten composed a drama about Arminius in which the Germanic hero argues, in the warrior's heaven Elysium, that he deserves to be considered history's greatest general, grander even than
Alexander the Great and Hannibal. In the context of political and religious struggles of the time, Hutten and other writers seized especially upon Tacitus's description of Arminius as the "liberator of Germany" to create a hero of national proportions.
Martin Luther was enmeshed in his own struggles with Rome, both over theological doctrine and over what he considered the right of Germans to manage their own church affairs independently of the powers in Rome. In his writings, he expressed admiration for Arminius and his deeds, crediting him as the savior and liberator of his people. Luther may have been the first writer to Germanicize the Latin name Arminius into "Hermann," the name by which the increasingly mythologized hero was known to later generations of nationalistic enthusiasts. The ruling elites of German-speaking Europe eagerly adopted the elaborate mythology that developed around the idea of Arminius/Hermann. He emerged as the guarantor of German freedom against the outside aggressor, and his heroic victory over the Roman army was viewed as a great unifying theme for what was, until 1871, a culture divided into a large number of small political entities, unlike the centralized kingdoms of England and France.
Numerous woodcuts, engravings, and paintings representing Arminius and the battle provided visual imagery to associate with the developing legend (see illustrations 1-2). The first known picture of the battle is a woodcut produced in 1517 for the title page of Benatus Rhenanus's edition of Velleius Paterculus's Roman History, published in 1520. Between 1676 and 1910, no fewer than seventy-six operas about Hermann were written and performed. By the late eighteenth century, the Hermann theme had achieved immense national popularity, and Heinrich Kleist's play Die Herrmannsschlacht (Hermann's Battle), first performed in i860, became widely staged and extremely popular at a time when the nations of Europe were struggling to define their national identities. The German public easily saw a connection between the ancient hero Hermann and the current chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the unifier of Germany in 1871.
Two months after the establishment of the German Empire in that year, the distinguished Roman historian Theodor Mommsen made an explicit connection between Arminius's fight for freedom against Roman domination and the unification of Germany in his own time. In a lecture presented that year about Augustus's policy in Germany, Mommsen referred to the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest as a turning point in world history.
The clearest sign of nineteenth-century enthusiasm for Arminius/Hermann as national hero was the erection of an enormous statue of him high on a hilltop in what is today called the Teutoburg Forest near the small city of Detmold, in northern Germany (see illustration 3). The name Teutoburger Wald (Teutoburg Forest) was adopted in the seventeenth century from Tacitus's term saltus Teutoburgiensis, which he located only vaguely, and given to the hilly landscape that now bears that name. As the new archaeological discoveries demonstrate, it is twenty miles south of where the great battle took place. The foundation stone was set in 1841, and the statue was finally dedicated in 1875, just four years after the unification of Germany. The copper figure of Hermann is 87 feet tall (the sword he holds aloft is 23 feet long), standing on a stone base 88 feet high, all atop the Grotenburg hill, 1,300 feet above the surrounding plain. (The Statue of Liberty in New York harbor, also made of copper, was erected in 1886 and stands 152 feet high on a 150-foot pedestal. The Statue of Liberty is thus bigger, but it is not situated on top of a 1,3oo-foot-high hill.) Hermann's raised sword points westward, toward France, another outside power that had threatened German independence several times in the preceding century. Inscriptions in niches in the monument base commemorate wars of liberation fought against Napoleon in the years 1813-15 and subsequent conflicts with France in 1870 and 1871. Today the monument is described as the most popular tourist site
In Germany, with between one and two million visitors each year.
In the fervently nationalistic nineteenth century, the legend of Hermann the liberator and embodiment of German identity reached beyond the borders of Germany and the shores of Europe. When in 1840 a group of N ew Yorkers of German ancestry founded a nationwide organization to help preserve their language and traditions, they named it the Sons of Herman. The organization grew rapidly during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Members in southwest Minnesota sponsored a half-size replica of the Hermann statue, completed in 1897, which still stands, sword raised on high, overlooking the town of New Ulm. Like many German-oriented cultural entities in the United States, the Sons of Herman declined in popularity during and after World War I. Yet, the organization still survives in many local configurations. For example, the Order of the Sons of Hermann in the State of Texas boasts 78,000 members today.
In Germany at the start of the twentieth century, "Hermann, the liberator of Germany," was a part of the historical instruction in the elementary school curriculum, an indication of how familiar to all the story was at the time. Historians mark the end of the greatest enthusiasm for Hermann at 1918, with the end of the First World War and of the German Empire. But under the Nazi regime, with the official emphasis on the special character of German prehistory and early history, the importance of Hermann's liberating of Germany again came to the fore.
After the Second World War, as school plans were developed anew in the 1950s and 1960s, emphasis in the teaching of early German history was placed on the cooperation between Romans and Germans, not on their conflicts. In a new curriculum introduced in the state of Baden-Wuirttemberg in 1979, for example, the old theme of "Arminius and Varus" was lacking entirely, a profound change from the past.
World History
