“Through its forests terrible, through its marshes horrible”, thus characterizes the Roman historian Tacitus “Germania”, the area incognita beyond the Rhine. The natives there, the Germanic Tribes, were not in fact primeval barbarians, nor were they heroic Wagnerian figures, and they were certainly not the progenitors of a racist weltanschauung.

How they actually did live, what Gods they worshipped, their combative and collaborative relationship with Rome, what they wrote in their runes and how they became Christians are all topics explored in the Gruppe 5 production “The Germanic Tribes“.