The Most Dangerous Book

What Hacker News says

1. NoImmatureAdHomJun 2021
   There's an excellent book about this by Kevin Birmingham, "The Most Dangerous Book"

   https://www.amazon.com/Most-Dangerous-Book-Battle-Ulysses/dp...

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2. masswerkOct 2017
   Complementary reading: "A Most Dangerous Book. Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich" by Christopher B. Krebs (W.W. Norton & Company, NY, 2011)

   (German translation: "Ein gefährliches Buch. Die 'Germania' des Tacitus und die Erfindung der Deutschen"; DVA, München 2012)

   Especially interesting for pointing out a rather ambiguous role of early humanism (as related to the reception of the Germania) in German history.

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3. mandevilNov 2024
   I've really been fascinated with how explicitly people set out to build nations in the 19th Century. I read Christopher Krebs' _A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich_ and it traces a different lineage in the same process- the process of turning someone who, say, lived in Mainz and thought of themselves as Hessian in 1800, into the person who lived in the same building in 1900 and thought of themselves as German.

   In some ways, I've long suspected that there was a lot of freedom in that to build a culture ideally suited for the then present situation. "Fuenf minuten vor der Zeit, ist des Deutschen Puenktlichkeit" (1) in particular always struck me as something invented because it made the factories and the trains run better. It was first written down in 1880, attributed by a Silesia newspaper to Pomerania, and I really don't know that many people 100 years earlier, say, would have had a conception of what a "German" was in that sense. And before trains and factories, in an era when time is primarily told by the bells of the town clock tower and looking at the angle of the sun, no one would have had a real conception of what five minutes meant. So it couldn't really have been some ancient saying, carried down for hundreds of years. It had to be invented right around 1880.

   1: German "on time" is five minutes before it starts.

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4. masswerkSep 2021
   This works both ways, compare the "Germania" by Tacitus, which was really about a fictional foil to contrast with the Julian dynasty, but became a historic document and origin story for a few centuries. (Sad to say, but humanists had a decent share in this.)

   Related literature: Chrisopher B. Krebs, "A Most Dangerous Book. Tacitus' Germania from Roman Empire to the Third Reich", W.W. Norton & Company, NY, 2011.

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