Christopher B. Krebs

Christopher Krebs' book takes a look at the way another has been used and misused over time: Tacitus' Germania, from the period of its composition during the first century CE to its apotheosis as a text naturalising Nazi claims to German racial superiority during the Third Reich. I thought it a useful and informative piece, which gives the general reader a sense of how and why scholars are interested in the history of a text's reception over time. I could see it being useful paired with Tacitus in an undergraduate history course, or the last chapter—on the ways in which the Germania was selectively edited, translated and framed for schoolchildren in 1930s and 40s Germany—used to hone in on the ways in which fascists regimes twist history to suit their own ends.

That said, A Most Dangerous Book felt padded at points (the process by which some early modern humanists Latinicised their surnames is rehearsed several times) and yet presumes a little too much at others (I think parts won't be very clear to you if you've not read the Germania first). Krebs was, I suspect, pushed by his publisher to make the book "sexier" by having the book open with Heinrich Himmler's search for the oldest-known manuscript of the Germania at the height of WWII, but that's not really what most of the book is about. It also has the unfortunate effect of making it seem like the book's main historical import is because it somehow sets Germans on a path that ends with a kind of race-based psychosis and genocide, which is just teleology-as-history and the Sonderweg thesis under another name.

There were also a number of points at which the prose was clunky or even difficult to parse—perhaps a function of the fact that Krebs is not a native English speaker, though a good editor should have caught most of them. But then there are some declarations which seem to point to a failure on Krebs' part to define the terms that he was using and to apply them consistently. For instance, when talking about Johann Friedrich Blumenbach as representative of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century racial pan-Germanism, Krebs writes:

“Blumenbach was not a racist. A monogenist, he believed in the unity of human kind; a clearsighted scientist, he saw through allegedly impermeable lines between races and vociferously spoke out against the supposedly innate intellectual deficits of “Negroes.” And yet he regarded the Caucasian race—eponymously named after Mount Caucasus, thought to be its original habitat—not only as the original form of humankind, but also as “the most handsome and becoming.” Elevating Caucasians to aesthetic superiority, Blumenbach implicitly suggested that degeneration was decline and difference deficiency. ” (259, Kindle ed.)

That's racism, sir. It doesn't matter if Blumenbach was the benevolent, paternalist kind of racist or if he critiqued stronger proponents of scientific racism: he was still racist.… (más)