This article tells two stories; one about the actual battle and it’s archaeology and one on its impact centuries later (”But the war cries and clang of swords also echoed through the ages in other ways: as a creation myth – glorious and catastrophic at once — that later forged the German nation. […] The cult around Hermann the German peaked in 1875, when a gigantic monument of him was completed near the town of Detmold. This copper hero holds aloft a sword seven meters long and faces France, Germany’s old foe, beaten four years earlier in a war that had finally ushered in German unification”)

The title, I think, only refers to the latter.