A Most Dangerous Book

In 98 C.E., Roman senator Cornelius Tacitus (56–117 C.E.) wrote the short Germania purporting to describe the fierce tribes beyond the Rhine who resisted Roman conquest. Nobody knows where Tacitus got his information or if he ever visited German territory. In the turmoil following the collapse of the Roman Empire, the book disappeared until 15th-century humanists turned up a single surviving manuscript in a monastery in what is now central Germany. From the moment of the book's discovery, it became the founding document of a hoped-for German nation. Krebs (classics, Harvard; contributor, The Cambridge Companion to Tacitus) shows an impressive mastery of five centuries of theories about Germanness that used and misused Tacitus's account of a brave and unlettered fighting people. This book's title suggests the world might have been better off if Germania had never turned up, but the text reveals that Krebs himself doesn't feel Tacitus's book is "dangerous" or the urtext of Nazi ideology or even an ethnography, but a stereotypical Roman view of the outsider.