So, last night we finished watching the Netflix series Barbarians, and it was quite a bloody spectacle. It no doubt was the cause of a dream in which I was about to be beheaded by some black clad executioner at, of all places, Disneyland. (I had also seen a news story about Hong Kong Disneyland during the day, so there is a reason.) It started with me glumly accepting my fate, only to start worrying that it was really going to hurt a lot before I lost consciousness because his axe didn't look sharp, and arguing that I would prefer to be shot. (Finally, I realised that I hadn't been convicted of a crime, only accused of one, so I didn't deserve execution at all. I think I successfully convinced him as I woke up.)
Anyway: I went into watching the series only seeing that it had quite good reviews. I had a vague idea that it was based loosely on real events, but did not bother, until now, to check that out. (It's always best to leave reading the real story until after a movie or series is finished, as the degree of invention is often a tad disappointing - especially if the events are particularly well documented.)
I did like the show overall - and part of the fun of watching it was trying to work out whether it was pandering to German nationalism, or not. I mean, it did paint the Romans as being pretty terrible and ruthless in their local rule, but on the other hand, it made the Germanic tribes look very technologically inferior, unpleasantly fractious, and much more into religious "woo" than the Romans. But the whole story is about a successful underdog attack on the Romans, so put that into the "pro-German" column.
Now that I have gone looking for historical commentary, at the top of the Google list is this fantastically detailed assessment on a blog by a young American Midwest university history student who seemingly really knows his stuff. If you have finished the series, I strongly recommend reading Spencer McDaniel's post.
To my surprise, the series is basically much more accurate than I expected. Sure, it has added fictional details (including ones about a couple of key relationships); but overall, I am quite delighted to read that the show's producers have obviously taken way more care than is common in adding historically accurate details - or when inventing details, at least making them possible and not entirely implausible.
I also had no idea of the nationalistic importance of the story of the battle of the Teutoburg Forest, but Spencer explains all of that as well. His blog Tales of Times Forgotten, seems to have quite a lot of interesting content, actually.
I see that a lot of people have discussed the show's accuracy. Another nerdy guy has made a Youtube video about it, and he seems overall to be quite impressed as well.
So, well done, everyone.
And all the Wodan talk in the show makes me keener to see The Ring Cycle at the end of this year. (It was COVID delayed last year.)
4 comments:
I quite enjoyed it, and - along with almost everyone else, it seems, noted the odd choice - a proto-nationalistic German tale in these post-Nazi times? Can they really do that? Actually I think they handled it very well... Arminius is not a simplistic hero, he’s completely tormented and torn between two worlds; his principal motivation seems to be a rather grubby ambition; he’s basically a traitor to both sides, and the various Germanic tribes are all incredibly treacherous to one another (pretty sure that’s in keeping with what we know of the Germanic tribes at the time). It’s very cynical in a modern Germanic sense.
Yes, I think that's right, Tim. And did you read in the post I linked to where he argues that Arminius' final speech to his dead Dad is more a plea for multiculturalism than nationalism. (I wasn't sure how I felt about it at the time - my son thought he had become Colonel Kurtz by this time, and I was distracted by that thought.)
That’s a fair thought, it’s probably a message the writers wanted to weave into the show, though it doesn’t even seem true to the Arminius in the show - his only ambition seems to be to be the potentate of a bunch of related tribes.
The combination of the battle scene with the extended speech of Arminius seemed pretty contrived. It seemed the producers were pretty embarrassed by the battle but knew they couldn’t do without it.
Yeah a bit contrived, but some of the battle imagery worked well. (The seer boy standing in the middle of it, I thought.)
I did like the show, but partly because "the past is a different country" aspect of it allowed me to make lots of wisecracks to my son. I mean, when the Romans got mean they got really mean; and when the Germans wanted to eat testicles in victory, they just ate them. Even the name Folkwin Wolfspeer seemed amusing, no?
I think this is why I so surprised by the article to find how much accuracy, or plausibility, was in the show - I had been watching it thinking it was over the top a lot of the time, but it seems that is not really the case.
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