Barbarians, Season 1
Reviewed by Katrin Thier, independent scholar
[Contains mild spoilers]
The recent release
of Barbarians season 2 on Netflix (German: Barbaren; 2020–)
invites a rewatch of the first season of this Roman-period historical drama set
in northern Germany. At this point, I should probably apologize for sharing my
musings in this forum, as the setting appears to disqualify the show from being
medieval by the very definition of the European Middle Ages as post-Roman. However,
in spite of its early setting, it contains much that is familiar from medievalist
drama. Some of this is in the conventions of storytelling - when the Romans
ride into the village to demand tribute, it is a scene familiar from more than
just the various adaptations of the Robin Hood legend. On another level, the
show also deals with a national myth of the kind that otherwise often hearkens
back to the Middle Ages, and which is traditionally associated with this mode of
storytelling. And last but not least, the early Middle Ages of northern Europe provide
a ready source of material to fill in the substantial gaps in our knowledge of
the non-Roman peoples of earlier centuries.
The plot is set just over 2000 years ago, during
the expansion of the Roman Empire to the north-east, across the Rhine and into
regions that are now largely part of Germany, where indigenous resistance
culminates in a major battle that annihilates three Roman legions. This battle
is a matter of historical record and was a key part of a series of events that eventually
established the Rhine as a boundary of the Roman Empire, shaping the further
history of the region.
It probably works in the writers’ favour that
very little is known of the events surrounding the battle, providing much scope
to fill in the blanks without much risk of colliding with recorded history
directly. The surviving accounts fill a handful of pages, and except for one
short piece, these were all written at least a century later, by writers with
their own political agendas (the Annals of Tacitus being the most
prominent among them)[1]. A
small group of the show’s central characters have been taken from these texts:
Arminius (Lawrence Rupp), his father Segimer (Nicki von Tempelhoff), his wife
Thusnelda (Jeanne Goursaud) and her father Segestes (Bernhard Schütz), his
brother Flavus (so far only seen in flashbacks as a child), and his adversary
Varus (Gaetano Aronica). Everyone else is fictional.
It probably also helps that the series rides a
wave of English-language offerings such as Vikings, The Last Kingdom,
and (Roman-era) Britannia, in which the past is presented as an
essentially alien world, at the same time ancestral and (attractively) exotic,
far closer to the medieval-inspired fantasy worlds of Game of Thrones
than to the reality of the viewers’ lives. And while the general dearth of
information can be a blessing for the plot, it can also be a curse when it
comes to making the setting credible, and this is where the series relies most
heavily on the medieval – or on established perceptions of what the medieval
should be.
Visually, this is fairly overt: most of the
Germanic characters look like they have wandered over from an early medieval
reenactment event. Which is not necessarily a bad thing; it makes much of the
clothing look more believable than the costumes in some other shows in the
genre. Noticeably, Barbarians is much lighter on leather and furs (although
use of the latter increases with time). Instead, some cues have been taken from
Tacitus’s ethnography Germania, such as cloaks pinned at the shoulder,
and bare-armed women’s dresses, but the gaps in the written record are largely
filled in by a generic “medieval everyman” look of trousers and tunic (to the
point of ignoring relevant archaeological evidence for the period in question[2]),
but tempered with some items that seem to owe more to the 1960s than to
antiquity (like the sheepskin vest in episode 1). The hairstyles follow the familiar
“barbarian” stereotype of beards and long hair also seen in other shows of the
genre, here contrasted with (historically plausible) short-haired and
clean-shaven Romans. But although a simple combination of long hair and beard
should appear timeless, many of these are cut in more inventive ways that would
not look out of place on a 21h century street (or re-enactment
event). What does look out of place, by contrast, is the authentic ‘Suebian
knot’: a hair knot on the side of the head worn by a small number of (mainly
background) characters, and actually attested from the period in both texts and
archaeology.[3]
A more successfully alien past can be found in
the world of religion, but where Vikings and The Last Kingdom cast
paganism against Christianity, this is not an option for Barbarians,
which is set at the same time as the gospel stories. Instead, Germanic religion
is contrasted with Roman rationality (channelling modernity). While the supernatural
underpinnings of Germanic life are hinted to be real, even if this is sometimes
awkwardly realized, the Roman gods are ineffectual, and Roman science and
technology are portrayed as largely irrelevant, and in the end, defeated.
Some aspects of Germanic religion in the series are
clearly based on the classical texts (especially Tacitus), but again, the
information is sketchy and open to creative interpretation. Tacitus’s repeated reference
to the high status of female seers allows the series to largely sidestep the
shieldmaiden stereotype: while Thusnelda is portrayed as a competent fighter (and
accepted as such), her claim to leadership comes from her (alleged) connection
to the gods and the resulting gift of prophecy. Tacitus also identified two
deities, which are generally taken to be forerunners of the gods now most
widely known in their Scandinavian guises as Odin and Thor (to fans of Vikings
and Marvel alike). This apparent continuity (backed up by other sources,
textual and archaeological) allows the writers to import more detail from the
mythology surrounding these deities in medieval texts, such as Odin’s sacrifice
of an eye, taken from later Scandinavian texts. This seems legitimate in the
context of dramatic license, especially as the series uses the name forms Wodan
and Donar, taken from related medieval languages of what is now Germany[4],
so more appropriate to the setting of the plot.
Language on the
other hand, is used to create both familiarity and difference. The consistent
use of Latin by Roman characters has been widely commented on; by contrast, the
use of modern German on the Germanic side establishes the non-Roman point of
view of the narrative: the viewer is expected to readily understand one side while
relying on subtitles for other, in a way that occasional Old Norse and Old
English ‘flavour’ scenes in other shows cannot achieve. The specific identity
of the modern language is immaterial; German is primarily just the language of
the country in which the show was produced. That said, the accents (even of the
Austrian lead) are northern, as appropriate for the geographical setting; and
when Germanic characters pronounce Latin as it is still taught in German
schools, Varus comments in disgust; his own pronunciation is based on a more
recent academic tradition (familiar to modern British learners), and is
delivered by an Italian actor. Medieval influence can be seen in the names of
several (though sadly not all) of the fictional characters; these have been
taken from attested names in various medieval Germanic languages (e.g. Berulf,
Folkwin, Ansgar, etc.). The most unfortunate exception is Arminius himself, for
whom we only know this Roman by-name, which has no recognizable Germanic
origins. The solution to just call him Ari somewhat grates, as it is so
obviously not in synch with the more complex names of other characters. However,
the alternatives would have been either to make up something completely
different, which would have created unnecessary distance, or to fall back on a
longstanding (though linguistically untenable) association with the German name
Hermann (Middle High German Heriman)– which poses a rather
different problem.
This is because there is a significant further angle
to the very existence of this series: for all the global reach of Netflix,
which doubtlessly had to be considered in its conception, Barbarians is
a German production, written first and foremost for a German audience. Germany
has had a complicated relationship with the story of the battle and its
characters: there is no medieval tradition, but since the scarce Roman accounts
were (re)discovered in monastic libraries in the late 15th century,
they have provided material for countless
adaptations, focussing variously on the individual characters and on grand
politics, with the protagonist being renamed Hermann from an early date.
The collaboration of disparate Germanic tribes against an overwhelming Empire
also supplied a focus of national identity for a politically disparate German
people, first during the Reformation against the Roman Church, and later more
politically in the resistance against invasion from Napoleonic France. The
story also played a part in the eventual formation of a unified German state in
1871 - before being made complicit in the country's worst crimes in the mid-20th
century. And while its historical significance made it impossible to ostracize
it entirely, after 1945 it was deliberately pushed back into the realms of
historiography (or at least, non-fiction), with the Roman name of Arminius
(rather than Hermann) largely reinstated[5]. Against
this background, the series needs to be read as another step in an ongoing
process of reclaiming an abused national myth, made possible by international trends
in historical drama.
Arguably, the rehabilitation of the material began
in 1970 with a detailed reassessment of the scarce historical sources, including
the new suggestion that the battle was not the result of a highly coordinated
campaign, as it had traditionally been presented, but a revolt of Germanic
military units within the Roman army[6] - two
narratives which the series manages to interweave into a consistent whole. When
in the late 1980s, a major battle site of the period was discovered in Northern
Germany, it was quickly interpreted as the location of this battle, and while
this claim remains contested[7],
it helped to (re-)capture the public imagination: to many German viewers, the
ceremonial mask Arminius wears during his first scene is instantly recognizable
as a reproduction of the most spectacular find[8]. But
despite this renewed interest, the bimillenary celebrations in 2009 were
low-key and marked by exhibitions designed to educate about Roman history and
the pitfalls of myth making: recasting this particular tale as fiction is still
a risky undertaking.
The writers elegantly deal with one of the more
difficult aspects of the tradition, the nationalist notion that the many Germanic
‘tribes’ had always been part of a one larger people, unitedly standing up to an
external invader. In the show, the concept of a Germanic people is only
mentioned once in the German dialogue, at a gathering of leaders, who mock the
Romans for using a single name – because they clearly can’t tell them apart. The
German dialogue here uses the word Germanen, which now exclusively denotes
the ancient peoples (as opposed to Deutsche, members of the modern
nation); however, this distinction is obscured by the use of ‘German’ in the
English subtitles. Otherwise in the German dialogue, the various Germanic
peoples are referred to by their separate (and historically recorded) names,
with only the Romans falling back on (Latin) generalizations.
The writers have taken care to refer back to the
framework of history by references to the surviving texts, grounding the
fiction and lending credibility, even though changes have been made even to
this scant material. An example is the marriage between Arminius and Thusnelda,
whom he is reported to have abducted at an unspecified point in time, but after
she had already been ‘promised to someone else’[9].
The intended husband is given his own subplot, using information Tacitus
provides about marriage arrangements, but while the eventual match with
Arminius in the series is primarily political, Segestes mutters that his
daughter has been stolen – tying the plot back to its source.
Beyond this, the
fictional part, which makes up the majority of the plot, concentrates not on
grand politics, but on the lives of individuals, and especially on the motivation
for the lead himself. Arminius is presented as an individual caught between two
cultures, that which he had been born into, and that which he had known for
most of his life. He and his brother are shown (in flashbacks) to have been
brought to Rome as child hostages, one of several historiographical theories to
explain their presence in the Roman army. The series adds the idea that they
were fostered by Varus himself, adding a personal dimension to events, which serves
to override more abstract questions of cultural identity: on one level,
Arminius is forced to choose between one family and another. In addition, his
personal ambitions of leadership are firmly established before his defection
and remain unchanged: after first working for his advancement as a Roman
officer, he then succeeds in becoming the head of his own people (for which the
series uses the reconstructed word reik[10]),
and eventually talks of kingship, of leading more than one group.
In the end, the
battle feels more like a stepping stone towards this aim than the decisive event
as which it has often been presented – and again it feels as if this was a
deliberate choice. Although it features the hyperviolence and fantasy elements
that are prerequisites for the genre, the battle is over surprisingly quickly (while
the ‘original’ is thought to have lasted several days). It is also largely presented
in hindsight, with Arminius’s reflections after the event as voiceover
narration, again bringing history down to a personal level. The final
cliffhanger further reminds us that the battle is not the end of the story,
neither for the fictitious characters, nor in the historical records. The new
series (which I am avoiding until I have finished writing this) has plenty of
plot threads to pick up, along with the well-recorded Roman reaction. And
Tacitus’s account of Arminius’s confrontation with his brother, who remained loyal to Rome, is unlikely to go ignored.
[1] near-contemporary: Velleius Paterculus,
Roman History 2, 117-19 (Latin: https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/vell2.html);
later especially: Tacitus, Annals 1, 59-62 (English and Latin: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.02.0077),
Cassius Dio, Roman History 65, 18-23 (Greek: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a2008.01.0593)
[2] for an archaeologist’s opinion, cf. (in German): https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wissen/archaeologie-altertum/archaeologen-schauen-serie-barbaren-varusschlacht-auf-netflix-17025446.html
[3] for details on this style see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suebian_knot
[4] Old Saxon and Old High German, respectively
[5] for an English-language discussion of some aspects of the reception
history cf. Martin M. Winkler (2016), Arminius the Liberator - Myth and
Ideology, Oxford University Press.
[6] Dieter Timpe (1970), Arminius-Studien, Heidelberg: Winter.
[7] on the debate cf. e.g. (in German) S. Burmeister (2015) ‘Die
Örtlichkeit der Varusschlacht: Eine anhaltende Kontroverse’, Archäologie in
Deutschland (Sonderheft: Ich, Germanicus), 17-23. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/26321966)
[8] cf. https://www.kalkriese-varusschlacht.de/ (in German; the
English version appears to be inactive)
[9] alii pactam, Tacitus Annals I.55: for Latin and
English versions cf. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0078%3Abook%3D1%3Achapter%3D55
[10] if it existed, this would be related to Latin rex ‘king’ and
Old English rice ‘realm’.
