Germany's Ancient Pasts

Archaeology and Historical Interpretation since 1700

Brent Maner

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226593104
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In Germany, Nazi ideology casts a long shadow over the history of archaeological interpretation. Propaganda, school curricula, and academic publications under the regime drew spurious conclusions from archaeological evidence to glorify the Germanic past and proclaim chauvinistic notions of cultural and racial superiority. But was this powerful and violent version of the distant past a nationalist invention or a direct outcome of earlier archaeological practices? By exploring the myriad pathways along which people became familiar with archaeology and the ancient past—from exhibits at local and regional museums to the plotlines of popular historical novels—this broad cultural history shows that the use of archaeology for nationalistic pursuits was far from preordained.In Germany's Ancient Pasts, Brent Maner offers a vivid portrait of the development of antiquarianism and archaeology, the interaction between regional and national history, and scholarly debates about the use of ancient objects to answer questions of race, ethnicity, and national belonging. While excavations in central Europe throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries fed curiosity about the local landscape and inspired musings about the connection between contemporary Germans and their "ancestors, " antiquarians and archaeologists were quite cautious about using archaeological evidence to make ethnic claims. Even during the period of German unification, many archaeologists emphasized the local and regional character of their finds and treated prehistory as a general science of humankind. As Maner shows, these alternative perspectives endured alongside nationalist and racist abuses of prehistory, surviving to offer positive traditions for the field in the aftermath of World War II. A fascinating investigation of the quest to turn pre- and early history into history, Germany's Ancient Pasts sheds new light on the joint sway of science and politics over archaeological interpretation.

PART I

The Discovery of Germany’s Ancient Pasts

CHAPTER ONE

The Sources for Prehistory

Texts and Objects in the Eighteenth Century

In 1754, an article in a Hannover gazette discussed how one might seek out antiquities “most successfully” and describe them “most usefully.”1 The author did not suggest searching texts by Greek and Roman authors. Instead, he advised readers to pay more attention to their surroundings and especially to rural villages as places where “the ancient” (das Alte) had maintained itself the longest. Local actors should investigate the physical remains left by earlier peoples and study legends passed down as oral traditions. Even the names of rivers, valleys, and caves could contain clues to past events. The author opened with two specific questions that this approach might address: “Where did Charlemagne encounter our ancestors, and where did they live the longest?”2

Questions about Charlemagne and “our ancestors” represented two new ideas about the ancient past. First, the author did not equate das Alte with the classical past of Greece and Rome. He ascribed value to the ancient events that transpired north of the Mediterranean world and viewed the premedieval inhabitants of the area around Hannover as the distant relatives of his eighteenth-century readers. Second, the author proposed a methodological break from the practices of classical philology. The article advised readers to look for sources other than texts, concluding that “the entirety of German history would become clearer and many of its gaps would be filled if one would describe the old artifacts [die alten Denkwürdigkeiten] of our villages more diligently and more often.”3

History has not been particularly kind to the individuals who answered the call to collect and describe old artifacts. Nineteenth-century novels, like Walter Scott’s The Antiquary (1816) and Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836), poked fun of antiquarians obsessed with the miscellany of history. Their efforts appeared pointless and comical because they did not contribute to a deeper understanding of history. More authoritatively, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Archaeology claims that many amateurs caused more harm than good. It reports that “while the aristocrats of northern Europe travelled to the Mediterranean to develop a refined appreciation of classical civilization, at home less exalted antiquarian interests continued to flourish. . . . A few of these early excavations were well conducted, many much less so. With hindsight, terrible damage was done to the prehistoric monuments of western Europe by people who thought nothing of digging half a dozen burial mounds before breakfast.”4

Classicist Arnaldo Momigliano has offered a much greater appreciation for the antiquarian. Writing primarily about the study of ancient Italy, he noted that antiquarians contributed to the new, more skeptical history of the Enlightenment era. Scholars before the eighteenth century commented on ancient texts, but they generally assumed the validity of their sources. They read Livy, for example, as the history of ancient Rome without subjecting his work to historical criticism. Eighteenth-century antiquarians, on the other hand, initiated new questions by documenting inscriptions and monuments, and scholars came to use this nonliterary evidence to test their interpretations of ancient authors. Momigliano also noted that antiquarians could suggest entirely new fields of research. The study of pre-Roman peoples, and especially Etruscan culture, arose in the eighteenth century because of the antiquarian attention to archaeological sources. In these ways, the antiquarian “could turn himself into a historian or could help historians to write histories of a new kind.”5

In central Europe, antiquarians provided new primary-source material to a scholarly world focused on texts. They understood burial grounds and ancient ruins as the physical evidence of peoples described by classical authors, and they posed new questions about cultural changes in the distant past. Their work also contributed to a new kind of territorial history during the eighteenth century. The modernization projects of enlightened absolutism, like roadbuilding, canal dredging, and land reclamation, brought state administrators into greater contact with archaeological material. This awareness fed a growing desire to investigate the cultural and historical forces that held princely territories and kingdoms together. With increasing frequency, states commissioned historical works that went beyond the story of rulers and their deeds to describe the resources, customs, and people of the ruler’s lands. Archaeology fit neatly into this new engagement with territorial history. Princes and monarchs increased the number of artifacts in their royal collections, and they supported the work of scholars who discussed these artifacts in cultural, historical, and scientific publications like Hannover’s Gelehrte Anzeigen.6 This activity established a new relationship between texts and objects and represented a critical first step toward seeing archaeological artifacts as valuable historical sources.

The Divide between Texts and Objects before the Eighteenth Century

During the Middle Ages, historical writing focused on the classical world and the spread of Christianity. Chronicles placed events in relation to key religious turning points, and barbarian history received little attention. In the wake of the Reformation, however, new national historiographies broke away from this older paradigm and replaced points of origins associated with the classical world and the Christian church with genealogical links to the barbarian past.7 This transition was further encouraged by the rediscovery of works by Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman historians during the Renaissance. These writings inspired great admiration for the achievements of the classical world, but they also provided glimpses of life north of the Mediterranean. Scholars became familiar with the vivid details of the military encounters in central Europe between the Romans and barbarians in Julius Caesar’s The Gallic War, Livy’s History of Rome, and Cornelius Tacitus’s Annals. Renaissance scholars also appreciated the geographical descriptions of ancient Europe provided by Strabo and Ptolemy.

The text that provided the most detail about central Europe’s ancient past, though, was Tacitus’s Germania. Around 98 CE, the great classical author composed an ethnographic description of the peoples who lived to the north and east of the Roman Empire. The book’s first twenty-seven chapters describe the cultural practices and social structure of “the Germans.” Tacitus included comments on the languages of these people, their pride in their common descent, and their relative strength. He also provided colorful commentaries that associated general “Germanic” characteristics with specific groups.8 Tacitus explained, for example, that the Batavi are “foremost in valour” (88); that the Chauci are “a people of great renown among the Germani. . . . Devoid of greed and recklessness, orderly and aloof” (91); that the Chatti grow their hair and beards long until they have slain an enemy (89–90); and that the Semnones established the Germanic religious rituals centered on the forest grove (93). Throughout the text, Tacitus highlighted the Germans’ readiness for battle, their respect for nature, and above all their commitment to the defense of family and community. In the second half of the Germania, Tacitus, moving along the Rhine from south to north and then around the North Sea, reviewed the names and locations of twenty-three Germanic tribes and several subgroups among the Suebi.

Contemporary historians of the Roman Empire and the early history of Europe note major problems with reading the Germania as a straightforward ethnography of the peoples who lived east of the Rhine River in the first century of the Common Era. Tacitus probably did not travel in these lands, so his coverage is not based on direct observation. His text gave “the Germans” a collective name that the peoples themselves did not use, and it suggested a unified culture by describing character traits and rituals and declaring what “the Germans” eat, drink, do, believe, and value. As many historians have noted, it is critical to handle this cultural portrait carefully. Tacitus was a master rhetorician, and he was writing for a Roman audience. He used his description of the Germanic peoples as pure, vital, and close to nature to chastise what he saw as the decadence of the empire.9 Yet these features did not prevent Renaissance scholars and many subsequent readers from deriving a clear portrait of the ancient Germans from this text.

Tacitus’s Germania had been lost for several centuries when, in the mid-fifteenth century, Italian manuscript hunters confirmed that a copy of the text existed in the Hersfeld monastery (near Fulda, Germany). Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (who later became Pope Pius II) offered the first influential interpretation of the text in 1457 when he published passages that recounted the barbaric nature of life in pre-Christian northern Europe. He used the Germania to argue that cultural development in Germany had occurred through contact with the Catholic Church.10

Other commentators read the Germania in dramatically different ways. German-speaking humanists treated Tacitus’s ethnographic and geographic information as hard facts, and they devoured the vivid details about the vigor and nobility of the “ancient Germans.” Conrad Celtis (1459–1508), a widely traveled scholar and poet and one of the most influential German humanists, set out to create a native history that contrasted the liberty and purity of ancient northern Europe with the sensuality and greed of Roman civilization. He planned a massive topographical project called Germania illustrata that would connect the ancient locations of the peoples named in the Germania to the forests, villages, and towns of his day. This would be accompanied by a genealogical section that would trace the descent of fifteenth-century rulers, including the current Habsburg emperor, from early tribal chieftains. After the Germania was translated into German in 1526, several other historical works, inspired by Celtis’s cartographic idea, suggested connections between the ancient locations of tribes and present-day villages.11

This wave of scholarship offered a new interpretation of the German landscape. Tacitus had described the land north of the Roman Empire as cold and barren. As he famously pronounced, the area was so desolate that only a native would choose to live there (77). The patriotic humanists of the sixteenth century, however, reimagined the forests “as domesticated woodlands, intersected by arable land and orchards.”12 They viewed this territory, not as the home of rough barbarians, but as a natural setting that nurtured the virtues of the ancient Germans.

Tacitus also provided important details about the military event that would become so influential for later interpretations of early German history. In 9 CE, Publius Quinctilius Varus, the Roman governor of the Rhineland, and three legions of soldiers were ambushed by a coalition of Germanic peoples under the leadership of Arminius, the Cheruscan chief. Roman historians recorded this major defeat and offered commentaries on Varus’s competency and imperial policies along the Rhine.13 In the Annals, Tacitus’s history of the Roman Empire from the reign of Tiberius to Nero’s suicide, Tacitus referred to the saltus Teutoburgiensis as the place where “the remains of Varus and his legions were said to lie unburied.”14 In accounts of the event from the seventeenth century onward, this location was referred to as the Teutoburger Wald (Teutoburg Forest).15 Furthermore, the Annals provided a portrait of Arminius’s career after the battle, and Tacitus closed his assessment by describing Arminius as “[t]he liberator of Germany without doubt, and one who challenged not the formative stages of the Roman people, like other kings and leaders, but the empire at its most flourishing . . . , and [he] is still sung among barbarian races, though unknown to the annals of the Greeks, who marvel only at their own, and not celebrated duly in the Roman, since we extol the distant past, indifferent to the recent.”16 In later interpretations, the moniker “liberator of Germany” gained great significance, as Roman-German relations were depicted as a fight against imperial expansion and for the preservation of freedom that was won because of Arminius’s ability to unite the Germanic peoples against a common enemy. As the comments about Greek and Roman annals suggest, Tacitus was conveying a more complicated point about the lessons of history and the kinds of events that enter into the collective memory. For many subsequent readers in Germany, though, the battle in the Teutoburg Forest offered a clear message that strong leadership and unity ensured liberty.

The search for ancestors among the ancient peoples of northern Europe was not limited to German-speaking lands. The London antiquarian William Camden, for example, replaced legends of Trojan origins and the Roman tradition with a new narrative about the Anglo-Saxon heritage of the British people in his Britannia (1586). Around the same time, French historiography disputed stories of Trojan origins and increasingly placed the beginning of French history during the migrations of the early Middle Ages. Polish and Czech scholars followed suit, referring to ancient Slavs and the early medieval origins of their territories.17 The key sources for these native stories of origins were the sixth-century author Jordanes, who told of the great deeds of the Goths and traced their heroic lines; Gregory of Tours, also from the sixth century, whose History of the Franks related Clovis’s military victories and conversion to Christianity; and the Venerable Bede, who provided a similar plotline for Great Britain and Ireland from the eighth century.18

As with the interpretation of Tacitus’s Germania, modern scholars have raised serious doubts about interpretations that use early medieval sources to connect ancient peoples to later cultural groups. These treatments transform ancient peoples with no clear sense of a group identity into clearly demarcated groups or tribes. They also ignore the context of the authors, who often had goals in mind other than supplying the beginning of a national narrative.19 Yet this reinterpretation of Europe’s early past established the general belief that European nations were created in the early medieval period and that sixteenth-century populations were related to the earlier inhabitants of their lands.

Humanist scholars exhibited an interest in the early history of Europe, but only a few engaged the physical evidence available from this distant epoch. In Britannia, William Camden used the stone formations, Roman walls, and ruins on the British Isles, along with finds of coins and place-names, to verify Roman geography.20 And Ole Worm (1588–1654) prepared a six-volume work on Danish monuments based in part on his own excavations and his personal collection of antiquities and curiosities.21 These individuals were exceptional, though, and most of the knowledge about the prehistory of central Europe was based on texts, not objects.

From the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, the most common (but least documented) encounter with prehistoric objects came not in scholarly works but in the lives of peasants. Each spring, farmers and laborers turned up burial urns and other prehistoric material as they tilled their fields. Rural legends portrayed these artifacts as part of the natural environment or even as magical objects. Hammer-heads and ax-heads were known as “thunderstones” that fell from the sky during violent storms, and local stories described burial urns as “magic crocks” that possessed the power to increase the fertility of seeds or to make milk fattier and perfect for butter making. Another legend claimed chickens that drank water from prehistoric vessels would never get sick.22

Myths also explained prominent markers in the landscape, like the former defense walls of the Roman Empire. Common people in southern German states called these ruins “the devil’s wall” (die Teufelsmauer). According to legend, the devil had requested a piece of earthly territory, and God offered him as much land as he could enclose in a single day. The devil then went to work but at the end of the allotted time was still extending his wall instead of connecting it to surround his share of land. God mocked the devil’s greed by crumbling all his walls, leaving them in the ruined state that locals witnessed.23 As these stories demonstrate, local populations were certainly aware of urns, burial mounds, and ancient ruins. But the material remains from the distant past were part of a rural mythology that enchanted the landscape, not sources for the writing of history.

On the other end of the social ladder, royal houses showed some interest in archaeology. Rudolf II, the Holy Roman emperor fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• part i.  The Discovery of Germany’s Ancient Pasts
• part ii.  The New Empire and the Ancient Past
• part iii.  Between Science and Ideology
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index