Buchbesprechung: A Most Dangerous Book : Tacitus' ‘Germania' from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich

Book review: A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus' ‘Germania' from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich. By Christopher B. Krebs. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. 2011. 303. It is a rare experience for historians to shock other people simply by doing their work. I was on an aeroplane holding a book in my hands, when an elderly English lady on my left asked me with unveiled suspicion and in a rather loud voice, ‘What on earth are you reading?' In my puzzlement, I showed her the cover, and then I realized. There was a red Swastika on the front, and it was next to the title ‘A Most Dangerous Book'. It took me quite a while to convince the lady that the title referred to another book and that I was not a closet Nazi. In the end, she even seemed to believe me that, for an academic book at least, it was not a boring read at all.

A Most Dangerous Book deals with a short and sober ethnographic description written almost two thousand years ago by the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus. The Germania, as it became to be known in modern times, did not seem dangerous to anybody for centuries, and neither does it today. Yet, Nazis in general and Himmler in particular liked it a lot, and this is what earned it a place in an (imaginary) top-hundred list of ‘most dangerous …