Walter Goffart Quotes

[M]any scholars of today in Europe and the United States still cherish the existence of a "Germanic world" long antedating medieval and modern Germany.

Experts in Germanic literature... solemnly assent: emigration from Scandinavia is an authentic "tribal memory"...

If Europe has had a supreme invented tradition, that of the Germans before Germany is it-so much so that most people who speak about it do not realize that they are dealing with fiction.

[The] theme-the "early Germans"-is still far from being repudiated.

Superfluous... is the unthinking modern transposition into history of a common "Germanic" language family-a concept borrowed from comparative philology. The history of a language as known to philologists has nothing to do with that of human beings... No discernible benefit comes from our being reminded again and again in modern writings that many of these barbarians at each other's throats probably spoke dialects of the same language. The G-word can be dispensed with.

[Gustav] Kossinna's ideas about the early Germans, which have long circulated apart from his name, have been only superficially purged from the writings of today.

The myth of the Germans before Germany is hard to suppress because, owing to its great age and genesis in the sources themselves.

Strange as it may seem to hear it said, there were no Germanic peoples in late antiquity. The illusion that there were can be outgrown.

The faith in Germanic continuity has prevailed for many centuries, damaging everything it has touched: Germans and other Europeans need to be assured that they can dispense with a link to the Germanen, that there is such a thing as historical change, and that the transgressions of national pasts can indeed be outgrown.

Germanic collectivity exists in linguistics but never existed anywhere else... [A]n "early Germanic world"... had no existence anywhere until it took form in the minds of scholars in sixteenth-century Europe and was thoughtlessly espoused by everyone else.

[Hewrig] Wolfram is listened to with approval in all countries that care about this subject.

What we call the Fall of the Western Roman Empire was an imaginative experiment that got a little out of hand.

The prehistoric Germans never existed... they are an illusion of misguided scholars. The nonexistence of ancient Germans is perhaps the most important thing one can say about the barbarians of late antiquity... The "Germanic world" is a damaging modern invention and usage that badly needs to be abandoned.

As long ago as 1972, I expressed a wish that someone should write a history of the Migration Age detached from German nationalism... Nothing has happened since then to fill this desideratum. On the contrary, the front of the stage has been occupied by talk of "ethnogenesis" and of the importance of ethnicity in late antiquity. Philology, archaeology, comparative religion, etymology, and whatever else have been exploited in the tried and true fashion of deutsche Altertumskunde in efforts to render the "tribes" more tribal than ever. As little thought as possible has been given to making them less resolutely German... This model... found regaining strength after World War II in the Gottingen historian Reinhard Wenskus, in the Cambridge classicist A. H. M. Jones, and in hundreds of scholars outside as well as inside Germany, all agreed in seeing an existing "Germanic world" getting the better of a "Roman world." That vision of outsiders intruding successfully where they were not wanted is an illusion fostered however innocently and festering ever since the sixteenth century.

[D]eutsche Altertumskunde... [is a] still honored "science" of German antiquity.