Walter Goffart Quotes

The main goal of this book is to reform thinking and writing about the barbarians in late antiquity by driving out the anachronistic terms "German" and "Germanic" and the baggage that goes with them.

The adjective "German;' an umbrella term for many of the diverse northern barbarians of the late Roman period, is the key to such unifying compounds as "the Germanic world;' "Germanic migrations;' "Germanic peoples;' "Germanic style;' "Germanic law;' "Germanic grave goods": wherever it turns up it simplifies and unifies, and presides over collective actions that did not take place... "German" will not go away by itself; it has to be stubbornly shown the door.

I would be content if "German" and its derivatives were banished from all but linguistic discourse on this subject.

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.

My central concern in the present book is... to liberate barbarian history from the German nationalism that has suffused it ever since the sixteenth century and, in whatever disguises, continues to do so today.

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