A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich

The New York Times Book Review Editors Choice. Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. Choice Outstanding title. Winner of Phi Beta Kappas 2012 Christian Gauss Book Award. “A model of popular intellectual history. . . . In every way 
A Most Dangerous Book is a most brilliant achievement.”–Washington Post 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 nobles 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 rose to take its place among the most dangerous books in the world. 14 black-and-white illustrations