A thoughtful piece in the Irish Times on the role that Arminius played in the creation of modern Germany.
Was the Battle in Teutoburg Forest the moment when Germany was born or was it merely the birth of a German legend?
As social philosopher Herfried Münkler points out in his study, The Myths of the Germans, it is hard to think of a more compelling founding myth: a threat from outside, a call to unity and a proud victory. “Yet this battle to rescue a language and a nationality has a distinctively threatened air about it,” he writes. “It appears quite fragile, and has to assert itself against the permanent danger of extinction.”
Simply put, the Teutoburg Forest triumph came far too early to have the effect of the storming of the Bastille or the Boston Tea Party, followed as it was by anxious centuries defending the nationless German identity from attack, during the Thirty Years War and after Napoleon’s defeat of Prussia in 1806.
A campaign to grant him full hero status, with his own statue, was successful after the 1871 Prussian victory over France that led to German unification under the Prussian king, then kaiser, Wilhelm I. The statue, designed by Ernst von Bandel, was unveiled in 1875 near the city of Detmold.
Full article here. BTW the attribution to the picture is total nonsense, but I am away and can't check the reference.
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