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and sixteenth-century scholars – and for many others since then – the modern Germans (or Deutschen, as they are called in their own language) were the direct lineal descendants of Tacitus’ Germani. And so, for humanists in German-speaking countries, Tacitus’ Germania offered a hitherto undreamed of prospect – a window onto Germanic antiquity for its own sake, rather than as a mere adjunct to the Graeco-Roman past. In the fifteenth century, the Germanic past could only be conceived as a somewhat shady analogue to Roman history, but the discovery of Tacitus – who after all reported that the Germans were a pure race – legitimated the search for separate, unmixed German origins and led back to other texts that could provide insight into a specially German past. German humanists used Tacitus, medieval authors like Jordanes, Gregory of Tours or Einhard, and stray references in the classical sources as the basis for extrapolation and invention, which allowed them to posit a Germanic past that was older than, and therefore could not depend upon, a Roman past.

The Reformation sharpened discussions of the ancient Germans, as the German Protestant reaction against the contemporary Roman Catholic church seeped into discussion of ancient German resistance to the Roman empire. Thereafter, the increasing domestic impact of European colonialism and imperialism also served to change perceptions of northern European antiquity, largely because it encouraged new ideas about the ranking of civilizations into hierarchies. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans began for the first time to have regular dealings with Asian and (especially) New World cultures which were understood as primitive according to European norms. In the same way that the myth of the ‘noble savage’ seemed to be validated by the imagined purity of New World primitives, unbesmirched by European decadence, so too were the ancient Germans fitted into a myth of primitive nobility and moral virtue. That Tacitus had used his Germani for precisely this purpose was no end of help, and it was easy enough for moralists and polemicists to take the step from the primitive virtues of the Germani to the modern virtues of the Deutschen. However, it was only with the rise of Romanticism towards the end of the eighteenth century that the study of Germanic antiquity began to ask the questions that still condition scholarly debates today.

Romanticism and the Rise of Modern Historical Scholarship

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, Romanticism became the reigning intellectual paradigm for German-speaking thinkers and artists. Romantic ideas about the intrinsic qualities of individuals and whole peoples helped to articulate a sense of belonging and identity in German-speaking lands where – unlike France, Spain, or Britain – no modern nation-state had developed. For that reason, Romantic ideology was an inextricable part of German nationalism throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In one of history’s most fertile accidents, the rigorous and professional study of the past developed in the German-speaking world at precisely this time. The idea that history is a professional scholarly discipline, with a set of analytical methods appropriate to it, goes back to Germany in the early nineteenth century, and is particularly associated with Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), who insisted on rooting statements about the past in documents and popularized the radical new approach to teaching through seminars. As this innovative Rankean model of scholarship was adopted throughout Europe, and as history became a professional discipline in universities across the continent, so too did Romantic ideas about the past – ideas that were closely connected to German nationalism – filter into the wider world of nineteenth-century scholarship. In other words, German Romanticism helped to shape basic concepts about how the historical past should be studied during the very years when history was becoming the formal academic discipline it remains to this day.

Herder, the