Listen free for 30 days
-
A Most Dangerous Book
- Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich
- Narrated by: Mark Ashby
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wish list failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
A Most Dangerous Book
Buy Now for $25.00
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Publisher's Summary
Winner of the 2012 Christian Gauss Book Award
The riveting story of the Germania and its incarnations and exploitations through the ages.
The pope wanted it, Montesquieu used it, and the Nazis pilfered an Italian noble's villa to get it: the Germania, by the Roman historian Tacitus, took on a life of its own as both an object and an ideology. When Tacitus wrote a not-very-flattering little book about the ancient Germans in 98 CE, at the height of the Roman Empire, he could not have foreseen that the Nazis would extol it as "a bible", nor that Heinrich Himmler, the engineer of the Holocaust, would vow to resurrect Germany on its grounds. But the Germania inspired - and polarized - people long before the rise of the Third Reich. In this elegant and captivating history, Christopher B. Krebs, a professor of classics at Harvard University, traces the wide-ranging influence of the Germania over a 500-year span, showing us how an ancient text rose to take its place among the most dangerous books in the world.