Usually, bad history is spread with ideological motives. A blatant example is that of "Hermann, der Cherusker" and German nationalism.

During the 19th century, this Germanic auxiliary leader (“The Romans called him Arminius, because they couldn’t pronounce Hermann”, or at least that's what I was told as a child) from roughly turn of BC/AD was hyped up as the great liberator of the Germanic people against foreign oppression, who annihilated several Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest. Unfortunately, making somebody a national hero who heralded from a time about 1700 years before nationalism took actual shape is problematic to say the least. Hermann/Arminius would probably have regarded e.g. the Prussians or Austrians as equally foreign as the Romans. And even if Hermann/Arminius thought in German nationalist terms, then his followers and allies certainly didn’t. That did not stop the nationalists of the 19th century from building monuments in his name.

Unfortunately, the narrative goes on that Hermann’s victory over the Roman general Varus lead to the Romans abandoning all plans of ever conquering Germania. Instead they were supposed to have fallen back and sheltered behind the Limes in fear.

This is very problematic. E.g. it ignores that Rome could still have conquered Germania. They had suffered much worse by Hannibal and only took it as an incentive to win next time. It ignores that Germania was economically backwards even by the standards of what the Romans called “barbarian” and mostly did not possess anything that the Romans actually wanted (except slaves and a few raw materials, but these they could get anyway, see next point). It ignores the rich interactions between Romans and Germanics and the trade that flourished along the Rhine and Danube. It ignores that the Romans simply had other richer lands to conquer, until they made contact with the Parthians/Sassanid Empire, who then became their actual nemesis and occupied Rome’s attention.

Also, the 9th Legion’s fate in Britain (whatever it was) on which so many recent movies were based is just straight-out ignored, because it would make Hermann less unique.

Finally, I have to contradict Wikipedia:

Following World War II, however, schools often shunned the topic since it had become associated with the militant nationialism [sic] of the Third Reich, and many modern Germans have not heard about Arminius.

We talked about Hermann in High School. Also, once every few years the debate about where the actual battle took place was rekindled in the newspapers by some new excavations, which reminded everyone of the event. The most recent mention in the news that I can think of was actually due to another battle that took place after the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, further derailing the “and they left Germania for good” Happy End. And there were several documentaries on the battle in the German equivalent of the BBC. Although neither of these examples indulged in 19th century nationalism. Because it is true that nationalist myths like Hermann have much less traction in today’s Germany, thanks to WW2 and European integration. Whether European integration will in turn spawn its own myths (e.g. about Charlemagne) is a story for another day.

Finally, bad history like the flat earth myth was still present in Germany in the 90ies (Out of curiosity I recently went through some old children’s books of mine in which the flat earth was mentioned and I dimly remember learning it in school, too), though I cannot tell whether this was due to lingering Protestant hegemony in the German education system or a bleed-over from English-speaking literature. Also, the distorted “science vs religion” narrative of Galileo is perpetuated in German classrooms by literature analysis classes on Berthold Brecht’s “Das Leben des Galilei”/”Life of Galileo”. Brecht was a socialist writer and thus had obvious stakes. I do not blame him so much as I blame the person who wrote the teacher’s master key to the novel without calling out the glaring errors.

While I encourage you to leave this up here and I hope you get a lot of interesting responses, you may also wish to try asking on /r/badhistory , as they will naturally be familiar with the subject.

I will just link you to this archived thread about the "our ancestors the Gauls" trope in France, with a great explanation from u/Dinalant. This trope is well and alive in France, In litterature (Astérix) or politics (it still pops up in some speeches on immigration).

Rome collapsed dramatically (possibly due to Christianity, or immigration, or homosexuality) and was followed by hundreds of years of desperate barbarism comprising entirely of dirty savages hitting each other with badly-made weapons.

this view is pretty widespread in Italy too, together with the idea that the Roman Empire was a millennium long uninterrupted and immutated pax augustea. the idea that late antiquity was in many cases worse than the early middle ages and that the Bizantyne had a major role in destroying civilization in Italy than the "barbarians"

Hi there folks!

Please keep in mind, this thread calls for a discussion of historiography and influential historical concepts / misconceptions in continental Europe. Miscellaneous examples of "here's a silly trope from Country X" may be interesting, but without contextualisation and appropriate discussion they are more suited for our Friday Free for All than for an /r/AskHistorians question thread. Please put the effort into providing a proper, in-depth discussion of the topic, rather than simply listing misconceptions you're aware of.

Thanks for your understanding!