Word: teutoburg
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...Nazi program of culture as total propaganda. There are vitrines of banned books and Nazi catalogs, and tape loops of old newsreels of cultural parades in Munich: triumphal processions of kitsch, with huge papier-mache Greek heads borne by people dressed as Rhine Maidens and warriors of the Teutoburg Forest. There are screenings of films whose display is still illegal in Germany, such as Hitlerjunge Quex, 1933, and Jud Suss, 1940. One can listen to a duet from Act I of Lohengrin, conducted by the young Nazi virtuoso Herbert von Karajan, or to SS marches...
...variety of Germanic tribes lived in a land that, according to Tacitus, "either bristles with forests or reeks with swamps." Even then, German tribesmen had a reputation as fearsome fighters, and it was immensely important to the future history of Europe that they annihilated three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest in A.D. 9, leaving the Rhine as the frontier between the Roman and Germanic worlds. But it was the Romans who originally invaded those forests to "pacify" the Germans, as they had pacified Gaul and Britain...
...thousand years ago in the piney fastness of the Teutoburg Forest, near where the city of Bielefeldr is today, an army of German tribesmen lay in wait for three Roman legions advancing from the Rhine. Led by the chieftain Arminius, the Germans ambushed the veteran legionaries and massacred them. Rome never again tried to extend its empire far beyond the Rhine. The Roman historian Tacitus called Arminius' ferocious style of warfare the furor Teutonicus: given to drinking and fighting, the Germans, he wrote, were tough, hardened warriors "fanatically loyal to their leaders." Concluded Tacitus: "Rest is unwelcome to the race...
...didactic ten or so years ago, he could be remarkably opaque. Ways of Worldly Wisdom, 1976-77, attempts to create a whole genealogy of German nationalism starting with Arminius, who in A.D. 9 wrecked Augustus Caesar's policy of German occupation by destroying three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest. As a primal hero of German history, Arminius was a great Nazi favorite, but here Kiefer conflates him with awkward portraits of all manner of later German "descendants" like Blucher, who fought against Napoleon; Schlieffen, whose strategy for the westward conquest of Europe was the basis of Hitler's blitzkrieg...
Citation: "Unlike Quintilius Varus, who lost his Roman eagles when surrounded in the Teutoburg Forest of Germany, this distinguished general raised his American eagles to heaven. When ringed in Berlin by the might of Russia, and in an epic destined to live long in American annals, known as the Berlin Airlift, he dropped manna from heaven to the cause of freedom...