In the National, Clay Risen probes the perplexities of contemporary Germany’s relation to its forsaken national mythos, which are coming to a head this autumn with the 2,000th anniversary of the Hermannsschlacht, the Germanic tribes’ improbable defeat of the Roman legion in 9AD:
The events surrounding Hermann, though, are a weird mix of the two, presenting a revised, sanitised, consumer-friendly warrior, a national hero recast as neither “national” nor a hero. “To me, he is just a garden gnome,” Schafmeister said during an interview in his office, his desk piled with Hermann chocolate bars and other paraphernalia. The exhibits and plays organised for the anniversary no longer depict Hermann as the founding father of the German peoples: instead he appears as a minor warlord who got lucky, an interesting figure with no relevance to the present. “He is really history,” says Herfried Münkler, a historian at Berlin’s Humboldt University and the author of The Germans and their Myths. “He is no longer relevant to the question of German identity.” It’s a thin line to walk—a year of festivities for a man no one thinks is worth celebrating. “We don’t even call it an anniversary, because that implies a celebration,” said Schafmeister. “It is just a recognition of something that happened from 2,000 years ago.”
But Schafmeister’s assessment is undercut by his own success. The trio of exhibits has been one of the country’s most successful in decades, drawing 500,000 visitors—overwhelmingly German—to an obscure patch of the country. “Even we were surprised at how popular the exhibit has been,” said Gisela Söger, director of press relations at the Kalkriese Museum, one of the three venues hosting Hermann exhibits. So far 35 books on Hermann and the battle have been published this year alone. Scores of school groups visit the Kalkriese museum each week; I counted seven during my two-hour visit.
Germans have long struggled with the idea that their country was on a “special path”—one that led directly from the 19th-century founding of the Second Reich through the hell of Nazism into a sort of permanent postwar purgatory, in which they were condemned to endlessly confront and apologise for their past. So what to make of today’s Hermannmania? Germany regards itself as being post-patriotic, and certainly cured of all the militaristic nationalism that Hermann once represented. And yet the hundreds of thousands of Germans visiting Detmold aren’t simply looking for a theme-park character—nor are they seeking a new militarism. So what are they looking for?