A journey to the heart of modern Germany

FINDING GERMANY: PART 1:Twenty years after unification, Germany still struggles to define its identity. In the first of the series, DEREK SCALLYbegins his travels around the country to explore what being German means in 2010

IT MIGHT JUST be the jaunty winged helmet, but you never forget your first encounter with Hermann the German.With an aquiline nose and full beard, his imperious gaze is fixed westwards and, playing around his lips, is a smile of satisfaction at past triumphs.

The 27-metre copper statue of Hermann stands in a whispering forest near the western German city of Detmold. He is a world away from the German Hermanns who visit Ireland each year. Yet that horde, in their multicoloured rain jackets, might not exist as we know them without our friend in the winged helmet.

Just nine years after the birth of Jesus, the 25-year-old Hermann (known then as Arminius) led his soldiers into battle and slaughtered three Roman legions – that’s more than 20,000 soldiers – in just four days, an unprecedented defeat for the all-powerful empire, which ended its westward push into Europe.

The triumph of the ancient Germanentribes over the Romans was retold again and again as a touchstone on the long road to a German nationhood. After several attempts in the last 140 years, all of which either began, ended or were bookended by war, modern Germany has decided to have another go. Exactly two millennia on, the Arminius-Hermann story is being retold to young Germans as the genesis for a new, peaceful Germany, two decades after its peaceful unification in 1990.

This modern Germany is determined to be different from the past, but that means knowing where is it coming from and where it wants to go. And, above all, knowing what, if anything, is German.

A seemingly innocent question such as this can heat up German dinner-table talk, as I learned recently. The French could, with some grumbling, agree a French common denominator between the starter and the main course – the monarchy, the revolution, Voltaire, Coco Chanel – but Germans would rather let their dinners grow cold arguing over whether “German” even exists and, if so, whether it’s even a good idea to go there.

“Unlike other peoples we have neither the beautiful continuity of history nor the pliant binding of national conviviality,” remarked author Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1922. “We are nothing but contradiction, but perhaps therein lies our being.”

But where’s the fun in being a contradiction?

The first mistake is to try and tackle the thorny question of German identity head-on, for “what is German?” is a question the country’s great minds adore posing but loathe answering. An 1878 Richard Wagner essay on this very question ranted for several pages before the author concluded “I can find no sufficient answer” and returned, thankfully, to composing.

Dramatist and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe could talk for hours about Italy, “the land where the lemons blossom”, but admitted bashfully: “Germany? Where does it lie? I know not how to find it.”

After a long hunt, a satisfactory answer comes from contemporary author Martin Walser. “When the talk turns to Germany, things usually take a turn for the worse and I fall out with everyone,” he confesses in a 1988 essay. “In this conversation, everyone is dealing with their own story.”

That is perhaps the core of the issue. As a classic “belated nation”, forged in 1871 in a fashion that had more to do with political will than popular demand, the modern German state has few of the classic trappings of nationhood, such as the memories of empire or narratives of suffering that hold together its European neighbours. Instead, it has the baggage of triggering two World Wars.

Germany’s long history as a loose collection of kingdoms persists in today’s 16 federal states, populated by peoples with starkly contrasting temperaments, traditions and narratives. The Germans are, at heart, an unwilling nation of hardcore individualists.

The only sensible way to begin trying to understand Germany is to hop on the train and head back to the beginning: our hero standing on a hill in the Teutoburg Forest. Arminius was a Cherusker, one of the dozens of Germanic tribes that occupied the northern Rhine region around today’s city of Hanover. He went to Rome at a young age, possibly as a child slave, and was trained as a military commander.

Returning to Germany as a young man, he hatched a plan for an uprising to put Spartacus and "Braveheart" William Wallace in the shade. First he accomplished the unlikely feat of uniting at least 11 embattled Germanic tribes into one army (or Heer), with him as its leader ( Heermann, later Hermann) against the common Roman enemy that had pushed forward to the Rhine.

On an autumn day in AD 9, as a 10km-long Roman cavalcade passed through a narrow passage in the forest, the Germanenambushed them from all sides. After four days of carnage, a Roman messenger escaped to give the bad news – and, in a sack, the head of Roman general Varus – to the despairing emperor, Augustus.

More than a dozen battles followed in the next seven years. But the Germanenrefused to submit and the Romans withdrew, leaving Germanenculture to develop on its course to its present form without having to adapt Roman traditions.

“Arminius prevented the Romanisation of the Germanic regions and saved the German language,” said historian Alexander Demandt. “Without him we would have had no Goethe or Shakespeare.”

Arminius proved in four days that the Romans were not invincible, but the battle to interpret his victory has been fought continuously here ever since. Was he a turncoat for leading a mutiny against his Roman masters, as some historians claim, or the first German to attempt a united Europe – a task first realised 800 years later by Charlemagne?

Was the Battle in Teutoburg Forest the moment when Germany was born or was it merely the birth of a German legend?

As social philosopher Herfried Münkler points out in his study, The Myths of the Germans,it is hard to think of a more compelling founding myth: a threat from outside, a call to unity and a proud victory. "Yet this battle to rescue a language and a nationality has a distinctively threatened air about it," he writes. "It appears quite fragile, and has to assert itself against the permanent danger of extinction."

Simply put, the Teutoburg Forest triumph came far too early to have the effect of the storming of the Bastille or the Boston Tea Party, followed as it was by anxious centuries defending the nationless German identity from attack, during the Thirty Years War and after Napoleon’s defeat of Prussia in 1806.

A campaign to grant him full hero status, with his own statue, was successful after the 1871 Prussian victory over France that led to German unification under the Prussian king, then kaiser, Wilhelm I. The statue, designed by Ernst von Bandel, was unveiled in 1875 near the city of Detmold.

AND THERE HE STANDStoday, as green as the Statue of Liberty, his back haughtily turned to approaching visitors, his sharp sword raised pointedly at Germany's westward neighbour. The message is clear: "First the Romans, then the French. Any other challengers?"

For anyone unable to take the hint, on his sword is the inscription: “German unity, my strength; my strength, Germany’s power.”

With the statue already a huge tourist draw, last year's 2,000th anniversary of his famous battle made Arminius the cover boy of choice in the German press and star of a €13 million exhibition, Empire – Conflict – Myth.Two millennia after the battle it seemed Germany was, for the first time in its troubled history, in a fit state to take measured stock of Arminius and his achievements.

Most importantly, two decades after unification reopened a barricaded door of national identity, ordinary Germans demonstrated an unquenchable thirst for information about the Battle of Teutoburg Forest.

“The anniversary was an important step, to remember without having to constantly justify ourselves for doing so,” says Wolfgang Thevis of Detmold Tourism, who helped organise the 2009 events, standing in the shadow of the huge statue. “We cannot erase the fact that this is a memorial to two military victories – against the Romans and the French – but we can sharpen people’s senses to the knock-on effects in Europe, and that, today, we have a Franco-German partnership.”

Undoubtedly, Arminius stands at the start of Germany’s story – but where next?

The destinations on this summer journey were chosen arbitrarily, in the hope that they would help answer the question: Where is Germany? There are just two simple rules along the way: no Berlin and no Nazis. Both are crucial to the German story but attract ample exposure on their own, not to mention tourists.

But as visitors to Germany venture beyond the Berlin-Nazi twin towers, a vast country awaits. As one of Hermann’s guardians, Wolfgang Thevis, remarks: “I hope we plant a little seed in people’s minds that will grow, a plant of a different approach to history.”

Contradictions? Germans in quotes

"The German's fate: to stand before a counter. The German's dream: to sit behind a counter." – Kurt Tucholsky, author and satirist

"We Germans have a deep mistrust of everything that is easy. In the German language, even the word 'perhaps' sounds fatal." – Bertolt Brecht,playwright and poet

"Even in a revolution, Germans would seek to fight for tax-free status and never for freedom of thought." – Christian Friedrich Hebbel, playwright

"Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth." – Mark Twain, author

"I married a German. Every night I dress up as Poland and he invades me." – Bette Midler, entertainer

Series continues on Monday – Aachen: Charlemagne and the first European Union