The prologue of Invisible Fatherland examines how Weimar Germany has become a metaphor for democratic failure and is often remembered for its catastrophic collapse and the rise of Adolf Hitler. This narrative overshadows the nuanced and sophisticated efforts by Weimar contemporaries to build an open and forward-looking democracy amid social, political, and economic turmoil. Written from Charlottesville, a city grappling with its own history of democratic challenges, the prologue reflects on the vibrant practices of Weimar democracy by looking at the Republic from its hopeful beginning rather than its tragic end. At the same time, it also acknowledges the challenges Weimar faced, as authoritarian and illiberal ideologies exploited its legal and cultural vulnerabilities. Setting the stage for the book’s broader argument, the prologue asks readers to reconsider the meaning of democratic fragility — not as a weakness, but as a strength that fosters flexibility and adaptation. This reflection is especially urgent as democracies worldwide confront rising authoritarianism and polarization.

This chapter considers the ideological aspects of classical education, exploring how the shifting political and cultural landscapes of Gaul changed the way Gallo-Roman aristocrats practiced and perceived education, and how this is reflected in our sources from the fourth to sixth centuries. While in the fourth century classical education is valued mainly for its tangible rewards and is closely linked to imperial structures of power, throughout the fifth century Gallo-Romans increasingly highlight the personal and ideological uses of education in shaping and affirming their status and identity. Teachers of grammar and rhetoric are more closely linked to aristocratic literary circles, which goes hand in hand with an increased blurring of the distinctions between grammatical and rhetorical teaching and a narrowing of education and literary networks. These changing attitudes and practices of education reflect the underlying political and social transformations of fifth-century Gaul and Gallo-Roman aristocratic anxieties and responses to them.

In the first paragraph of the modern translation of the Rationale divinorum officiorum of William Durand (c. 1230–1296) are markers of the change this book seeks to chart. One is immediately visible. The translator, Timothy M. Thibodeau, chose to distinguish through the use of italics what he then identifies, through the use of brackets, as biblical texts. Those italics and those brackets do not simply mark the modern sense of “source,” of a particular relationship between Durand and Scripture, that postdates Durand himself. They distinguish Scripture and, in so doing, obscure Durand’s understanding of revelation and its relationship to “ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus ac ornamentis.” There in the opening paragraph of the Prologue and throughout the Rationale, Durand presents a different relationship entirely among ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus and ornamentis, and biblical history, prophecies, psalms, Gospels, and Epistles.

This chapter focuses on the practical aspects of education, such as the organisation and funding of the classical schools. It traces the status of classical education as a public institution in the late imperial period, during the transformations of the fifth century, and within the early barbarian successor kingdoms. The chapter begins by establishing the extent of direct involvement of the imperial government in education, arguing that cities and individuals had always played a far more important role in patronising and funding classical schools. It then considers opportunities for ‘graduates’ of classical schools in late and post-imperial Gaul, the crucial difference between literacy and literary education, and emphasises the important connection between classical education and structures of power that promote and demand literary training.