Message #165274

[Bianca]

A bombastic, 53-metre high monument to Hermann erected in the 19th century, when Germany consisted of dozens of states and was striving to unite, testifies to the power of the cult. The statue holding its 7m sword in the air and glaring ominously towards France became a rallying point for nationalists.

The hero featured in more than 50 operas and plays and was portrayed as a blonde, muscle-bound warrior in the art and literature of the 19th century. The myth was aided by a lack of known facts – there are no eyewitness accounts of the battle because the Romans were all killed and the Germans had no written culture.



The truth does not live up to the legend, though. Far from uniting the German nation, Hermann did not even manage to unite his own tribe, the Cherusci, and was killed by relatives a few years after the battle.

Besides, the more than 50 Germanic tribes were the forefathers of many European nations, not just the Germans. And the battle was not the only factor that led Rome to abandon plans to turn Germania east of the river Rhine into a Roman province. Undeterred by the defeat, Roman legions repeatedly struck deep into hostile Germania after 9AD and won major victories there.



But Roman histories do indicate that the battle shook the empire. Three of Rome’s 28 legions were wiped out and excavations at Kalkriese have confirmed the scale of the defeat by revealing evidence that the Roman dead were thoroughly stripped. “We have been finding traces of plundering rather than of fighting,” said Susanne Wilbers-Rost, the chief archaeologist at the site. Her work has gained international attention because it is providing insights that can be applied to battlefields of all ages.



“The excavations have revealed small items torn off when the Germans were stripping the Romans as they lay dead or wounded.

“Things like buckles, hinges, connecting parts of body armour and chain mail. You can only imagine this kind of brutal stripping of the dead when the defeat was total,” she said.

“The Germans had all the time in the world, although the stench of the corpses must have soon been terrible. But they weren’t disturbed.”