A Triumph Over the Romans Seen as the Birth of the German Nation

From the Alps to the North Sea everyone would probably be speaking a mixture of French, Italian and Spanish, and it is unlikely there would ever have been a German Empire. History would have taken a different course, and Europe would be a very different place, if the Varus Battle had not taken place.

This battle - 1,994 years ago, in AD 9 in the Teutoburg Forest - stopped the expansion of the Roman Empire into Germania, and sent the advancing Romans reeling back toward the Rhine, from where they would never venture north again. In the 19th century it became an important part of the mythology of German nationalism, and many patriotic Germans continue to see Arminius's victory over three Roman legions as the birth of the German nation.

Hence the interest in a new exhibition at the Archeological Museum Frankfurt on the legend of the Varus Battle, centering around numerous relics found by archeologists almost two millennia after this historic event.

Over the centuries, as many as 700 towns and places in Germany and the Netherlands have claimed that they were the site of this devastating defeat for an empire accustomed to victorious triumph. Today, however, almost all historians and archeologists are in agreement that the ravines, thick forests, marshlands and bogs where the Teutons trapped the armies of the Roman governor Varus were north of the present-day Lower Saxony city of Osnabrück. Specifically, between a forest and a bog at the foot of the Kalkriese hill.

The great German historian Theodor Mommsen suspected this as early as 1885, though other experts on Roman history did not believe him, and only a decade earlier a giant statue commemorating the battle had been built some 80 kilometers (50 miles) to the south. It took a British amateur archeologist and a couple of Roman catapult projectiles and coins that he dug up in 1997 at the foot of the Kalkriese to convince archeologists that a systematic excavation of the area might be worthwhile. They started their work in 1989 and soon thereafter found the iron mask of a knight.

Since then some 6,000 relics have been excavated: bones, weapons, everyday utensils, jewelry and coins. Some of the coins bear the mark VAR, for Varus, and historians have confirmed with certainty that they were minted between AD 6 and AD 9.

The relics and coins are the strongest evidence that the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest was fought at the foot of the Kalkriese. The Teutons, who in a straight head-on encounter would probably never have defeated the much better equipped Romans, benefited from the uneven topography and the stormy weather, as well as the element of surprise on troops far from home and, historians also say, the defenders' ferocity. Streaming down from the Kalkriese, they attacked as their enemies passed through a bottleneck between mountain and a large bog on their other flank. According to historians, the fighting lasted three days and spilled into other areas in the region, and by the time it was over the 17th, 18th and 19th legions had been destroyed.

It was, the Roman historian Paterculus wrote, the worst defeat to strike the empire in centuries, of such a scale that the three legions were never reconstituted.

All this is explained to the visitor to the exhibition, the strength of which lies in its broad approach and focus on the essentials. Not the whole treasure of coins is displayed but only half a dozen, arranged along a time scale. The visitor is not faced with a myriad of bones but with one skull, split by a sword, and a collarbone that shows traces of such violence that there can be no doubt that terrible fighting took place.

As has been common practice after battles over the centuries, the victors stripped their dead enemies of their insignia, weapons and any other useful items. Many have since been found buried among the ruins of old Germanic settlements around the Kalkriese.