As for the Germans themselves, I should suppose them to be indigenous and very slightly blended with new arrivals from other races or alliances; for originally people who sought to migrate reached their destination in fleets and not by land; while, in the second place, the leagues of the ocean on the father side of Germany, at the opposite end of the world, so to speak, from us, are rarely visited by ships from our world. Besides, who, to say nothing about the perils of an awful and unknown sea, would have left Asia or Africa or Italy to look for Germany? With its wild scenery and harsh climate it is pleasant neither to live in nor look upon unless it be one's fatherland. ^*

Medieval studies requires students to know at least Latin, German, and French, along with any other languages required for your specialty like Italian or Greek. My medieval history professor told me she never really learned German and only took an exam, and even with her shaky knowledge she managed to get a 96. Why? Because after a few lines she realized the text she was given to translate came from Tacitus' De origine et situ Germanorum or On the Origin and Situation of the Germans. And any medieval student worth his salt has read that at least nine or ten times because it's the first ethnography of the Germanic tribes lying on the borders of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the Common Era. Academics pour over it, trying to get some sense of the people who would eventually overrun the Romans and change Europe from a classical world into a medieval one.

But apparently it's also one of the justifications the Nazis gave for the purity and superiority of the German race. That passage I gave above is literally how Heinrich Himmler argued for the unadulterated German race. Whereas Tacitus is saying that Germany is such a crappy place that he can't imagine anyone else but Germans willing to live there, Himmler would say Germans haven't dirtied their blood by mixing with others like the British or the Spanish.

I look at this and laugh. Nowadays Tacitus wouldn't hold up in an academic sense; he never traveled to Germany himself and most of his sources were from hearsay from people who didn't even speak German. And you can tell pretty early on he's not only writing this as a sort of ethnography but also as a way of comparing the supposed German probity with Roman immorality. For example, he says the German women are particularly chaste, practically glaring at the Roman women from his own culture. So the Nazis would look at that and say Germans were fucking amazing from the beginning because Tacitus hyped them up.

Afterward some people have tried to suppress Tacitus as an origin of insidious thoughts. For me, it's hard to conceive how people could be obsessed with him either way. He's a Roman writing about a culture he didn't really know that well, much like a lot of ancient authors from Herodotus to Jordanes. Putting modern labels on him and his work is anachronistic. That wasn't his intention, he probably was wrong in a lot of aspects, and there's no fucking way he could even conceive of a modern German state or Nazism.

I guess that's why I get pissy when people say the humanities are useless. Okay, my field will never create a better battery or make an agricultural breakthrough that'll save millions of people. But at least I can be the person in the room who can turn to someone and say, "Stop making shit up about the past to prove your point. That has nothing to do with your point. You just want something to back you up, but in reality you have no proof about that. It's just nonsense." It's like when Sarah Palin fucked up about Paul Revere. There has to be someone who can step forward and bring reason to the argument. Otherwise you've got Nazis breaking into people's houses for a book that really doesn't relate to them to begin with.

^* Tacitus, Germania, trans. M. Hutton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 131