A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich - Rilegato

Krebs, Christopher B.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0393062651 ISBN 13: 9780393062656

Casa editrice: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2011

Riassunto

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—readers 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 five-hundred-year span, showing us how an ancient text rose to take its place among the most dangerous books in the world.

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Recensione:

A fascinating story of how a book could be used and especially abused over two thousand years, as enemies saw it aspresenting Germans as brutish and barbarian, while German nationalisticpride extracted a quite different message of a nation that was simple, virtuous, and pure.... beautifully told byChristopher Krebs. --Christopher Pelling, editor of "Greek Tragedy and the Historian"

Krebs writes with panache, a vocabulary that puts many native speakers of English to shame, and a Tacitean predilection for epigram. [...]this is the first substantial treatment in English, and the first to condense so much into a single, accessible narrative. --Christopher Whitton, Times Literary Supplement

L'autore:

Christopher B. Krebs is a classics professor at Harvard University whose academic publications include extensive work on the ancient historians and a recent contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Tacitus.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Data di pubblicazione: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0393062651
• ISBN 13: 9780393062656
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 303