Review of Stefan Rebenich’s book “The Germans and their antiquity” – culture

It can get very gloomy when you look at how Germans used to refer to antiquity. The Spartan general Leonidas, who drove his soldiers to sacrificial death in a bottleneck in the battle of Thermopylae two and a half thousand years ago, was invoked in Adolf Hitler’s bunker and in Stalingrad as a model for irrepressible perseverance. There was talk of the “ethical greatness of the Doric people” (Werner Jaeger). In the Weimar Republic, philologists hostile to democracy stylized ancient Roman concepts of value as buzzwords for the conservative revolution. The military drill for the fatherland in German grammar schools alternatively drilled through on tender boys, in grammar exercises and Horace verses.