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Arminius: The Hidden Truth About Our Ancestors Revealed
By Ingrid Rimland, Ed.D.

(First published in the September/October issue of The Barnes Review)

Ancient "wisdom" has it that if we were ever to learn of the accurate origins and truthful substance of our race, our world would instantly be shattered. But is that really true? Or is this yet another "road flare" put in our way by alien forces? Why should we be forbidden to delve too deeply into primeval, intuitive knowledge, on fear of "retribution" leading to lifelong misery and grief?

Some of us, fearless or foolish enough to call ourselves Revisionists at a time when conformity is the prevailing modus operandi, are thinking of charting alternative ways to heal ourselves from falsehoods. Like many maxims that we used to take for granted but learned to question lately, perhaps the time has come to question this one, too. Just who might have an interest in keeping our spirits lethargic, in keeping us from learning who we are, where we come from, what we are really all about? Your guess is as good as my guess.

Perhaps the very opposite is true. If we would ever see a truthful portrait of our past and trace our steps back to our exceptional forebears - what they believed, what powered them, why they would gamble on the muscle of the racial spirit that waxed and waned, according to the challenges of time - perhaps we might yet discover the Fountain of Youth. By that I mean not only beauty of body and infinite health but racial youth, ancestral energy, political vigor, the everyday gusto of living that comes with folkish cohesion.

I say that one way to find back to our roots is to cherish our myths that give us a mock-up of heroes for us to emulate. Today, we live in an era depleted of myths and of heroes to nourish our souls, and it shows. We are yearning inside without knowing what it is that we lack. We feel vaguely that there is "something" we are missing, but our longing for that "something" does not even have a name. Science helps us to understand parts of the real world - to wit, that healthy soil needs minerals to keep bodies from getting too flabby, but few of us have even an inkling that our souls will grow anemic if there is lack of proper foodstuff for the spirit. To simplify a complex need, let me propose that we need cryptograms in our folkish memory of heroes of our past, to be called forth as models we can emulate in times of mortal combat.

Few people are aware that war is waged against Western societies' myths as real as a war using cannons. We are in the midst of wall-to-wall war against spirit. The weapons against the folkish spirit are ridicule, demonization, derision, mockery, slander, and scorn. We all feel the assault, day-in and day-out, but we can't seem to reach for our weapons of defense. Clarity of strategy against covert assault aggressively destroying the very essence of our being is a rare commodity these days.

Yet souls have to breathe, and myths provide the oxygen. Where there's no oxygen, there is no life as we know it. Nature instructs by example that all things that have life "want" to live. A life force exists - perhaps that is why helpful legends persist and myths refuse to die. Our myths are ours for the asking to rekindle the spiritual flame - if only we know what they are. They are our folkish treasure and need to be passed on - more so in times of insidious spiritual malaise.

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One such is the saga of an extraordinary man called "Arminius" in books not yet forbidden but hardly known and cherished. Some politically incorrect Germans of the olden mold still call him "our Hermann" - fearful of even uttering the phrase without having to look over their shoulders. For such is the clout and command of PC in much of our Western world infested by an alien spirit that passes for our pal.

How is it possible that we have become so washed-out as a people?

That this has happened was no accident - in Germany it even has a name. It's called re-education.

Who was Arminius, this mythical hero of our past we are hoping to bring to the screen? I was "introduced" to him, though not by name and only as a fleeting phantom, as a small, hungry child in post-war Germany. I sat by the window of an unheated room in a small village near Detmold, Westfalia - and if I strained hard and squinted to see better, for I was born severely nearsighted, I could "see" a towering statue in the far distance on a mountain range called the Teutoburg Forest. It was November 1946 - the sky outside was dreary. Mama sat on our raggedy couch, Oma to her left, my little sister, Wally, on her lap, all three as cold and as hungry as I.

"If we could climb the mountain and gather beechnut seeds, eleven pounds would trade us a liter of oil," announced Mama.

This was a time when all of what was left of Germany was rubble, its people struggling to survive on hunger rations - as I remember it, 900 calories a day. Our staple food were potatoes we kept at night in our beds - that's right, beneath our blankets! - so that they would not freeze and, thus, become inedible. Our food ration coupons allowed us to trade for some very salty fish - Bücklinge, we called them. (Nomen est omen - now that I think of it, a "Bückling" is not just a smoked herring; it's how you genuflect...) Even with food, the Allies kept Germans on a very short leash. I remember very little else we ever had to eat for three long post-war years except, in my case, a once-a-day watery cereal our one-legged teacher ladled into my rusty can in a school for the gifted in Detmold.

I asked him once where his other leg was, and he said he had left it in Russia.

"On the bloody Eastern front of that unholy war," is how he put it quietly. I pondered that. His voice was calm, but his face was grim. "You are precocious," he added wistfully, and put a heavy hand on my head.

I tucked a brand new word away into my treasure trove of words that helped me make sense of my world. I was ten years old and had hardly ever been to school, a skinny refugee from Soviet Russia. Today I know that teacher was an angel in disguise. He was reluctantly PC, because only those Germans who kowtowed to the Allied version of the war were even allowed to be teachers.

That one-legged teacher gave me something priceless. He let me know that being "precocious" translated to an obligation to make something useful of myself. I did not understand it then, but now I know that this was done by means of an abiding respect for the myths and past heroes of our culture, because all earthly goods had vanished irretrievably in the mountains of rubble of war. Myths were to be the firewood for our minds and souls to help us forget we were hungry.

Thus our one-legged teacher, whose name I have forgotten, taught us the myths of our ancient past such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, and a fantastic chronicle, the Nibelungenlied, the story of a handsome hero who fearlessly confronted a dragon, decapitated him with his sharp sword, then took a bath in dragon's blood to make himself invincible - except for one small spot between his shoulder blades where an oak leaf had landed and stuck. That was the spot, we learned, where he was stabbed by his best friend and follower, a member of his tribe turned traitor.

The name of this hero was "Siegfried" - translated literally, peace after victory.

To come back to Mama's plan for us to gather beechnut seeds to we could fry up our precious potatoes with honest-to-goodness real oil. One dreary afternoon, we braved the clammy misery outside, the four of us, to climb the mountain near where the statue stood depicting a Germanic hero of the past. I remember that day very well. A thick carpet of wet, decaying beechnut leaves covered the slopes. An icy wind howled through our coats, and then it started to snow. It is a memory too dismal to even describe.

We didn't last long. In a matter of minutes, my little hands were frozen, and I started to wail, as loudly as I could. Oma was gray in the face. Wally, five years of age, was battling with a runny nose. Mama collapsed on a stump. I don't think we even gathered one miserly pound of those slimy beechnut seeds - it was just too hard and too daunting. Defeated, we slunk back into our unheated apartment consisting of two tiny rooms, where the four of us crept into blankets in one huddled heap to thaw out. To this day, our brief excursion to the foot of that stately monument of Hermann der Cherusker is painful to behold.

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New sequence and new setting. The place was a religious colony called Volendam, in the depths of the Paraguayan jungle where 1900 Russian-German Mennonites had landed on a rickety river barge in 1948 at Puerto Mbopiqua, translated - Hole of Bats. And no wonder. It was the opposite of what we left behind - unbearably hot, prickly, infected with insects galore, devoid of water fit for drinking, intellectually a wasteland of thorns.

There I spent several years, a teenager so hungry by then, not for potatoes but for some nourishment for my young mind, I thought that I would lose my bearings. Don't ask me why or how - but I became a storyteller. Many a night my young friends and I would gather under paraiso trees where I would regale them with snippets of the Nibelungenlied and the amazing hero who had slain a dragon and bathed in his blood - and then, because of this one vulnerable spot between his shoulder blades, he lost his shiny life to a dreadful traitor of his tribe. When I made my friends cry, I was proud. That's what it meant to be precocious. I had an identity. See?

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Spin forward sixty years, four decades of which spent on this continent. I hardly ever thought of "Siegfried" any more except in passing, and it was only recently that I discovered that the dashing hero of my youth called "Siegfried" was actually a mythic transformation of Arminius, the man who drove the Romans out of what is now called Germany and whose magnificent statue still towers to this day above the Teutoburg Forest.

By then, I had become am ethnic novelist, and Ernst, my husband, in a German prison for speaking Truth to Power, kept urging me to do a documentary about a legendary German prince because an anniversary was coming up, and our folk, he pointed out, were starved of truthful history and needed a bona fide hero. Only then, maybe two years ago, did I realize that the saga of "Arminius" aka "Hermann der Cherusker" who lived 2,000 years ago, gave birth to the myth around the Nibelungenlied and "Siegfried" - "born" after yet another thousand years had passed.

I stand in awe of the power and longevity of myth. The hunger of our people for heroes has kept that myth alive.

In our day and age, where we no longer know our roots and our ancestry, it is politically incorrect to state with pride and admiration that one of "us", a talented composer, Richard Wagner, transformed myth into music in the late nineteenth century. I bet you know the reason why that amazing gift for our cultural treasure trove by one of our own is hardly known to your young - its force of emotion brought tears to a much-maligned dictator's eyes.

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Behold the cast of characters:

ARMINIUS, a handsome prince of the Cheruskan tribe, the classic leader of a suppressed, downtrodden people. Re-educated by the Romans as a child with a false history, he is sent back to do the Romans' bidding. Will he succeed? Or will be be brought low by his own tribal members' treachery and perfidy?

Arminius, as I see him on the screen, will be a marvel of charisma, youth, good looks, a man of principles, a very quick study. Though badly mistaught by his people's occupiers who hope to use him for their own benefit to keep his own people enslaved, he still has the leadership instincts he needs. Watch him unite his folk!

His counterpart is VARUS, the Roman Governor sent to Germania to run the occupation. He is the jolly tyrant who will smile jovially while hoarding his ill-gotten gains. Varus examplifies the stereotype of a dishonest bureaucrat, bloated with wealth, corrupt to the core, vile sexually, yet limp and flabby of spirit.

MARBOD, King of the Markomanni, a neighbor of the Cheruskans. We see a self-made man, selfish and hungry for power, easily threatened, unwilling to share.

SEGESTES, a Cheruskan nobleman. Segestes is the craven creature compromising for the benefit of Rome, doing its bidding, drooling subservience. Segestes will walk over corpses to get where he intends to go. He is willing to rape his own spirit to stay there.

TIBERIUS, Emperor of Rome and the richest man on earth. Tiberius is a cold and calculating ruler, incapable of giving or receiving love, paranoid to the hilt - yet a superbly practiced Roman strategist who has that rare capacity to discern where the limits of power might be.

INGOMER, uncle of Arminius - your sterotype turncoat, thown off his haunches as a candidate to legitimate succession as the designated leader of his tribe when a young and determined Arminius arrives at the scene.

THUSNELDA, wife of Arminius. She is the quintessential Aryan woman - highly intuitive, utterly loyal, steadfast in good times and bad, willing to sacrifice her happiness for the man she respects and adores.

FLAVUS, Brother of Arminius - a devoted supporter of Rome. Flavus mouths every platitude that Rome puts in his mouth, unaware that he is merely a pawn in the game.

GERMANICUS, Supreme Military Commander of the Roman Army and Fleet. Your typical invading psychopath - bloodthirsty, reckless, arrogant, determined to run down and sully the Germanic tribes he despises. To his own detriment, he doesn't factor in Arminius who fights as though there is no tomorrow - and gets the upper hand!

Let us do likewise, friends! There won't be a tomorrow for us and our children, unless we get the upper hand by reclaiming our myths - and with our myths to emulate, our rightful place in the sun!

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