Charlie Graves

Robert McEachnie February 10, 2014 LBST 1201 Response to Tacitus Germania When reading this I was not very far until I found myself making a very interesting connection. I came to realize that the Germani of this time were very similar to the Nazi Germans during World War II with a few things that were different but overall I found them to be alike in many ways. I think Tacitus views of ethnicity is expressed when he tells of the name of the nation was more important than the race of the people to the Germani. The correlation that I saw between the Germani and the Nazi Germans was how the Germani never allowed their country to be Tainted intermarriage with other nations and like the Nazi Germans there was a distinctive physical difference of them as a whole from the rest of the countries surrounding them. When I read of this was when I really saw the role that ethnicity and race played with the Germani, because it was very similar to the Nazi Germans Arian race in which you could easily point them out if you saw them. The Germani had clearly stated their independence in saying that they were going to be the way that they saw was fit. The Germani did this by having very little interaction with other nations and rarely participating in

trade or immigration. The other corresponding factors I saw in the two was how the Nazi Germans like the Germani believed in having a warlike atmosphere and dying with honor, because the unwarlike were viewed as cowards. The Germani believed in respecting their dead so if anyone ever disgraced the bodies of soldiers they were drowned. Inside the realms of the Germani nation there was very little deviation in the views of different people. Even the Nobles and the priests saw themselves as servants to the god. Every person in the Germania was held to the standard of being very friendly in the sense that at any point in the day if someone were to stop by then the host is expected to give them a gift and have them stay for the meal. People are just allowed to show up without being invited. The slavery even was out of the ordinary the Germani slavery was done in a way where it was not people that were captured but it was the youth that became the servants of people households. From all of this reading I saw that the views if Tacitus in race and ethnicity showed how the Germani were very similar to the Nazi Germans in the sense that they would not expand beyond the borders of Germania and they already believed that they were the way they were supposed to be which is where I made the correlation to the Nazi Germans Arian race.