Customer Reviews

Germanic Tribes: The Complete Four Hour Saga

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

It is sad that the other reviewers do not see the value of this series. There is such little material about these early tribes because they did not have a written history. We have to rely on Romans like Tacitus to give us an account. Not to mention that the culture borrowed heavily from the Romans and the Greeks, etc. They didn't live in a separate world and they constantly intermingled. This is an excellent series with a solid foundation in recent research and archaeology.

This miniseries manages to give an excellent introduction to the state of archeological and historical scholarship on the contact between Germanic and Roman cultures. The authors present the viewer with a comprehensive picture of how the Germanic tribes might have perceived themselves and how they were perceived by those they came in contact with. This series is relevant for anyone who is interested at all in how the late ancient/ early medieval contact zones between peoples shaped the political, cultural and linguistic histories and literatures of a multicultural Europe.

I enjoyed this series. The Germanic Tribes keeps to a standard of providing evidence for the facts stated, and the videos of the archeological sites are fantastic. I would recommend this to anyone interested in German history or Classics.

I agree with at least one other reviewer in that this documentary "is more about contact between the two groups, rather than showing Germans as they saw themselves." I also share the view of others in that origins of Germanic tribes are not really examined. Some tribes such as the anglo saxons are not even mentioned. That said, I still recommned highly this documentary as it incorporates some new views (to me at least) in that contact between Rome and peoples living right outside their territorial limits were pacific or of mutual interest, to some extent. Digital reconstruction of towns and fortifications to guard imperial limits are cool and enjoying. Good picture quality, no subtitles provided.

The documentary is broken into four 50 min (approx) parts, each covering progressive time periods of history. The first deals with Julius Caesar's Gallic wars and offers some general information on the nature of the Germanic tribes. The second part deals with Rome's further expansion into and subjugation of Gaul and the revolt at Teutoburg forest. Part three deals with the frontier world of the Pax Romana, how Rome and Germania managed to coexist. And part four deals with the end of the Roman world and the birth of the Germanic kingdoms that became the realms of medieval Europe.

Most of the negative comments made about this documentary concentrate on the series's brevity or lack of coverage of a particular tribe or event. With more than 500 years to cover, I think the filmmakers did a more than honorable job. They offer enough details and discussion of research and excavation results and techniques to be scholarly, while at the same time weaving a narrative story through the material to aid in delivering the information. There is admittedly enough real history to populate many more hours of coverage, but not many documentary filmmakers would have the funds for a project of such scope, nor could they find a big enough audience to justify the expenditure. The outline followed in the four parts, I thought, worked brilliantly to form a well documented and cohesive, albeit compact, telling of the history of the Germanic tribes. It may have left me wanting for more, but I'll seek that more with further reading.

I found the first part to be the most interesting, mostly because I could now see those pillar idols that may have been the same as Ibn Fadlan and Tacitus had referred to. The first person narrative ties each episode together, but I found this to be rather detracting, because it allowed for quite a bit of conjecture. On the other hand, the treatment of the archeological evidence is bountiful and well done - the first episode made the entire series worthwhile for me, since it focused on the Germanic tribes, their religions, and practices. It should also be mentioned that the production value is top-notch and much of the conjecture is then followed up by supporting evidence via the archeological finds.

The video has a somewhat narrow focus on a particular german tribe - the Suebi/Suabi/Suevi - and pretty much ignores the tribal migrations that were a big part of germanic tribal history.

I do not penalize the series' score based on my own misunderstanding. I was under the impression this was a historical documentary, but a good 90% of it is pure archaeology. To a military historian like me, I simply DO NOT CARE about the angle of holes in skulls indicating how a person was killed in combat. I just don't. The documentary gives me far too many instances of this.

The reviews complaining about this being too Rome/Latin-centered... what the hell do you want? The Germanic tribes wrote nothing, drew nothing, sculpted nothing, anything and everything they did was purely contemporary, or else lost, destroyed, or too incoherent to be understood (like runes).

Tacitus is cited frequently in the first two parts of the documentary because he's LITERALLY one of the only sources of information we have on the Germanic tribes in this period!

But my problem is perhaps one that is indeed my fault; everything covered in this "saga" is absolutely 100% unremarkable, and has been covered far better and more thoroughly in other works, books, documentaries. The entire second part is devoted SOLELY to Arminius and the Battle of Teutoberg Forest. The vast majority of the first part is barely concerning the Germanic tribes until Caesar's contact with him during the Gallic Wars.

As usual with "pop history", there is NO MENTION AT ALL of the Teutones, Cimbri, and Marcomannii, the three marauding Germanic tribes that flooded into Gaul in the early 100s BC, then attacked Rome in 107 BC and inflicted the heaviest amount of casualties Rome had ever suffered, more so even than the Battle of Cannae---80,000 at the Battle of Arausio minimum to the 50,000 at the Battle of Cannae minimum.

And the amount of time it would have taken to cover these events could have easily been fit into the first part if they'd just NOT covered Caesar's Gallic Wars, which involved GAUL about 90% of the time.

The rest essentially takes random artifacts, such as the head of a spear, or a bracelet, and creates a FICTIONAL CHARACTER out of it to journey around ancient Rome and Germania, telling a fully fictional story based on a real world, focused so much on archaeology that I was just plain BORED most of the time.

It really bugs me intensely that they essentially make a historical fiction out of their documentary, doing what authors like Steven Saylor does so much better---creating a fictional character based in an entirely real place, on entirely real events, and placing him more or less alongside or at the center of these events. One of the FICTIONAL CHARACTERS is even depicted as Arminius's closest bodyguard, who saved his life at the Battle of Teutoberg Forest.

It doesn't hurt to try to characterize some random people, but it just bugged me, and it felt like the documentary could have done without this half-hearted attempt at a personalized narrative that always managed to fizzle out about 3/4ths of the way through some of the parts.

And the vast majority of the archaeological things are presented as these SHOCKING and REVOLUTIONARY discoveries, and maybe it's because I'm not an archaeologist, but these discoveries amount to bits of metal or a necklace or a skull with a coin lodged in its teeth, and it tells us... nothing new. Something discovered in 2005 is presented as though it's a wholly new discovery, and it's something I knew about from a book written years earlier. Maybe it's PHYSICAL evidence of it, but it sure ain't presented as such half the time.

Part 3 was probably the most vapid, blank, and just plain empty documentary I've ever seen on the subject of "barbarians" as it was literally filled with nothing but archaeological finds on Romanized Germanic artifacts, showing us that some Germanic tribes were Romanized around the 200s AD. And in that sentence, I've summed up the entire 50 minute piece. There was literally nothing to it except explaining that some Germanic tribes were Romanized, and adopting Roman style and custom and architecture.

They went all out with production values but as a historical documentary, it's an empty and pointless replacement to a quick book.

It was okay, but found it to be more related to archaeological than historical information.

In watching this work, I could tell that all the experts interviewed were German, but it was only when the credits rolled that I learned that this was a German production. Even though this was a German production about the German past for a German audience, it was not full of "Ra! Ra! Ra! We're so great!" The computer graphics, reenactments, and fictional storylines were impressive and not annoying. It was a challenge to sit through a documentary series more than three hours long, but many will find the viewing worthwhile and informative.

Here's my concern. Many accounts of dinosaurs act as if they were not important until that meteor hit the earth. Many works on Native Americans only begin with their contact with Europeans; they problematically assume Native Americans had no story to tell before then. I read a great book by Robert Aldrich called "Colonialism and Homosexuality." The point of the book was to say that many Western men of the past did not recognize their sexual preferences until they were in the non-Western world. Though the book is great, it was irritating to hear everything from the white men's perspective and never hear from the men of color with whom they got busy. Then again, it was the Westerners who were consistently literate, so I didn't find the book purposely biased. This documentary follows that same path: this is Germanic history as told through Roman eyes.

I guess the Romans were literate at much higher rates than the German tribes, so the work is not purposely skewed. However, the work is more about contact between the two groups, rather than showing Germans as they saw themselves. There's a big section on Germans in Roman coliseums. The work says Romans thought Germans made for good bodyguards. It was interesting to see how cultures connect and influence each other, but the work almost assumes there would have been no ancient Germans if it weren't for blessed Romans and that's just not true. At one point, a Germanic figure prays to a god called Woten and I'm almost sure that might be a Germanization of the Norse god Odin. So why not speak about the German tribes' relationships with Scandinavian ones, rather than just Rome? I've seen works about ancient Brits that bring up Hadrian's Wall and the Romans, but they never act like the Brits were nothing without Roman contact. So why make this false statement about Germans?

If this were a French, Spanish, or Portuguese work, I could see how those nations see themselves as the descendants of Ancient Rome, but for a German documentary to imply that seems quite odd. This work seemed very top-down. Perhaps Dr. Spivak's contention that "the subaltern has no voice" is played out in this European and ancient context.