Tacitus germania himmler biography
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Himmler’s Antiquity
Alison C. Traweek discusses the racist origins of classics as a discipline.
IN 1924, as a sekreterare and propaganda assistant for the ung Nazi Party, Heinrich Himmler was spending a great deal of time on a tåg as he traveled Bavaria promoting his party. He had with him a small treatise on the German race called de Origine et Situ Germanorum, or On the ursprung and Situation of the Germans. The treatise was written in 98 CE by a Roman medlem av senat named Tacitus, and Himmler read it avidly, finding in it eloquent bevis of the superiority and purity of the German race. In Tacitus’s description of the tall, blond, rather savage northern tribes, Himmler saw the superior Aryan lager whose preservation and dominance motivated the Nazis. “We will return to being what we were,” he wrote in his diary, and he vowed to rediscover the “nobility of our ancestors.”
The Germania, as the treatise is commonly known, remained an important source of ideology and pride f
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A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich
The riveting story of the Germania and its incarnations and exploitations through the ages. The pope wanted it, Montesquieu used it, and the Nazis pilfered an Italian noble's villa to get it: the Germania, by the Roman historian Tacitus, took on a life of its own as both an object and an ideology. When Tacitus wrote a not-very-flattering little book about the ancient Germans in 98 CE, at the height of the Roman Empire, he could not have foreseen that the Nazis would extol it as "a bible," nor that Heinrich Himmler, the engineer of the Holocaust, would vow to resurrect Germany on its grounds. But the Germania inspired—and polarized—readers long before the rise of the Third Reich. In this elegant and captivating history, Christopher B. Krebs, a professor of classics at Harvard University, traces the wide-ranging influence of the Germania over a five-hundred-year span, showing us how an ancient text ro
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A Most Dangerous Book. Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich | Jewish Book Council
April 23, 2012
When the historian Tacitus wrote a not-too-flattering little book about the ancient Germans in 98CE, at the height of the Roman Empire, he could not have foreseen that the Nazis would extol it as a bible, nor that Heinrich Himmler, the engineer of the Holocaust, would vow to resurrect Germany on its grounds. Yet the Germania had inspired and polarized readers long before the rise of the Third Reich. After its mysterious rediscovery in the 15th century, European intellectuals found therein the German past: simple, heroic, moral, and pure. Re-read and re-interpreted by subsequent generations of writers, inside and outside Germany, the Germania profiled the Aryan race and ultimately fueled the Nazis’ Germanic Revolution. A Most Dangerous Book traces the wide-ranging influence of Tacitus