The Battle That Created Germany

Archaeologists have made a fascinating discovery that could rewrite the history of a legendary battle between Germanic tribes and the Romans in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD.

[caption id="attachment_4983" align="alignnone" width="1800"] A scene to remember. Source: The Battle of Teutoburg Forest, Paja Jovanović, 1899[/caption]

For four days the battle raged, stretching along lines up to 100 kilometers long through the dark and foggy Teutoburg Forest in northwestern Germany. It was the year 9 AD, and the Roman general Publius Quinctilius Varus, governor of Germania, was following the advice of a Germanic chieftain he knew and trusted, because the German had long fought in the service of the Romans. His name was Arminius – Hermann, in German. But Arminius was using his knowledge of the Romans to lure Varus into a trap, vanquishing three legions so completely that only handfuls of the 20,000 Roman troops escaped.

Those captured were enslaved or sacrificed to gods, their severed heads nailed to trees. Varus himself fell on his sword on the fourth and final day of the battle. Arminius, of the Cheruscan tribe, sent Varus’ head to Maroboduus, king of the Suebi, another Germanic tribe. The message was simple: the Romans can be beaten, join me. But the king declined the offer and sent the head to Emperor Augustus in Rome.

The battle of Teutoburg Forest changed history, its impact visible to this day. It stopped the Romans from colonizing the wild lands east of the Rhine – Germany even now is divided between a wine-loving south and west and a beer-swilling north and east. But the war cries and clang of swords also echoed through the ages in other ways: as a creation myth – glorious and catastrophic at once — that later forged the German nation.

The battle’s tale was spun into myth and retold in poems, plays, operas, books and paintings that hailed Hermann as Germany’s first hero. Many experts think that Siegfried, a hero in German mythology like Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon, is based on Arminius. The cult around Hermann the German peaked in 1875, when a gigantic monument of him was completed near the town of Detmold. This copper hero holds aloft a sword seven meters long and faces France, Germany’s old foe, beaten four years earlier in a war that had finally ushered in German unification.

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