In AD 98, the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus (56 – 117) wrote a text called “About the Origin and Mores of the Germanic Peoples,” or Germania, as it came to be called. All copies of Germania were lost during the Middle Ages, but a single, hand-lettered copy resurfaced at an Abbey in present-day Germany in 1455. It was brought to Italy.
Zoom forward 500 years.
In the 1940s, the Germania was taught in German schools and widely celebrated as a comprehensive account of the ancient Germanic people. The slim work was available in translation throughout Germany, and although Tacitus’s description of early Germanic tribes was not universally positive, he did laud their warlike qualities, and the book had become an important part of the Nazi ideology. The Nazis liked the description of their ancient ancestors as simple, brave, loyal, and pure. Remember, there had been no Germany before 1871. It had been a sort of a murky part of the Holy Roman Empire. But in Germania, they found a description of people they could call their forbears (21).
In 1943, agents of Heinrich Himmler, the head of Hitler’s SS and the second most powerful man in the Third Reich, tried to steal the one remaining copy, which had been hidden under the floor of a kitchen in the Villa Fontedamo on the Adriatic coast of Italy. They broke down the doors and ransacked the Villa, but didn’t find it.
The manuscript remained in Italy after the war. It was damaged in a flood in 1966, but is now safely housed at the Museo Nazionale in Rome.
What’s really ironic is that Tacitus probably never even set foot in Germany.