Rudolf Much's 1937 edition of the Germania provides a telling contrast to Fehrle's. The Germania of Tacitus is the most extensive account of the ancient Germans written during the Roman period, but has been relatively neglected in the scholarship of the English-speaking world. It also places the Germania in the context of related National Socialist publications, primarily Fehrle's own and those from his publisher. The Germania begins with a description of the lands, laws, and customs of the Germanic people (chapters 127) it then describes individual tribes, beginning with those dwelling closest to Roman lands and ending on the uttermost shores of the Baltic, among the amber-gathering Aesti, the Fenni, and the unknown tribes beyond them. Their prefaces and illustrations are especially revealing.

This article examines Fehrle's ideological background and academic career and assesses the different editions. Tacitus in Renaissance Political Thought (Chicago) Christopher B. A posthumous edition (1959) is instructive about the process of postwar whitewashing. The Germania of Tacitus (Middletown, Connecticut American Philological Association) (textual and manuscript analysis) Kenneth C. Fehrle's first version (1929) presaged what was to come in the updated editions he published during the Third Reich (1935, 1939, 1944). The twentieth-century editions of the work by the classicist and ethnologist ( Volkskundler) Eugen Fehrle are particularly revealing as a case of ideological appropriation of Tacitus in Nazi Germany. Tacitus's Germania has played an influential part in German cultural history since the sixteenth century, primarily in political ideology rather than in historical or classical scholarship.

Germania book tacitus