I once had a professor of Canadian politics, a charming older man who wore a bow tie, who liked to ask his students if we’d seen the historical drama TV series The Tudors. “I started watching that show,” he said. “And I was so disgusted that such violence, sex, and nudity were being broadcast on public airwaves that I immediately shut off the television, got in my car, and drove to a store to buy the DVD boxed set.”
Starting with Rome (2005), the cable-watching masses (and later the streaming masses) have been treated to a seemingly endless supply of shows copying that winning formula: Take an interesting historical period, dramatize its internal politics and court intrigue, and bring it to life with a gritty authenticity that hovers somewhere between realism and titillation. Hence The Tudors, The Borgias, Medici, Marco Polo, Vikings, and many others that I’m probably forgetting.
The Germans, not to be outdone, have now gotten in on the act. Netflix’s Barbarians (Barbaren) is a six-part historical miniseries (recently renewed for a second season), set in 9 A.D., about the Germanic tribes that challenged the Roman Empire. The show is in German, with occasional dialogue in, impressively, Latin.
As Barbarians opens, the Germanic tribes of the Teutoburg Forest are warring with each other but in an uneasy peace with the Romans, who treat the tribes as semi-autonomous vassals, left mostly alone in exchange for paying a hefty tax. Weakened by rivalries with its neighbors and the gentle decline of its aging chieftain, or reik, the Cherusci tribe is already having a tough time paying its annual tribute. So the Cheruscis are outraged when Roman soldiers ride up one day and announce that their tribute has been raised to an even more unreasonable amount, effective immediately. In an added humiliation, the Romans demand that the Cherusci leaders bow and kiss the Roman standard, a metal eagle.
The “Barbarians” of the title are the Germans, whom Rome regards as heathens and little better than animals. This is, of course, soon turned on its head: By the end of the first episode, the unsympathetic Romans have committed enough wanton violence and general snobbery to put most viewers firmly in the barbarians’ camp. But there’s a complication: One of the most disciplined and feared officers of the local Roman garrison, Arminius (Laurence Rupp), is actually German. His father is the chief of the Cheruscis, Segimer (Nicki von Tempelhoff), who, years earlier, surrendered him and his brother as hostages to the Romans to secure peace. Raised as an adoptive son of a Roman general, Varus (Gaetano Aronica), Arminius has always thought of himself as more Roman than German, but a series of incidents tests that assumption and forces him to reconsider his loyalties.
The other players include Segestes (Bernhard Schutz), a Cherusci nobleman who pretends to be Segimer’s right-hand man even as he maneuvers secretly to negotiate a separate peace with the Romans and install himself as the new reik. His more principled and defiant daughter, Thusnelda (Jeanne Goursaud), however, is determined to wage guerrilla war against Rome — a prospect that becomes more feasible when the disunited German tribesmen come to regard her as a seer. Thusnelda’s lover, Folkwin Wolfspeer (David Schutter), also a childhood friend of Arminius’s, agrees to help try to join the tribes into a coalition capable of driving out the Romans.
The result of this concoction is an entertaining and historically interesting, if not altogether compelling, melodrama that is more “battle axes and furs” than “swords and sandals,” with a lot of scenes of people running around in dark forests and shouting. The show’s bilingualism, which juxtaposes the visceral earthiness of German and the crisp, slightly Italianate tones of vulgar Latin (the Roman characters are played mainly by Italian actors), nicely underscores the tension between the Germanic barbarians and their ostensible Roman civilizers. Arminius, riven as he is by Oedipal conflict, is the only character I found especially interesting. With the exception of Thusnelda, there are no significant female characters, a lack that feels more pronounced as the show progresses.
For a series made in the post-Game of Thrones era, Barbarians is relatively free of sex and nudity. The violence, on the other hand, is frequent, bloody, and a bit off-putting — there are only so many beheadings and crucifixions one can endure per television hour. It’s a fun watch for history buffs, and it’s nicely accessible. People less interested in the history, on the other hand, may find the show competent but mostly unremarkable.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
