Rome's Gothic Wars_ From the Third Century to Alaric - Michael Kulikowski [23]
The most important figure in this historical Romanticism was Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). For Herder, the Volk – the people – was the focal point of all history. The Volk was not a constructed or merely political entity, but rather an organic whole with an eternal core identity expressed in language, art, literature and characteristic institutions. All these were expressions of the Volksgeist, the unique spirit of the Volk. The Volksgeist could not be changed by conquest or by borrowings from other cultures, because it was essentially pure and immutable. Herder’s emphasis on language as a marker of the identity of the Volk had a particular importance for the subject of this book. At the same time that language was taking a leading place among the many attributes of the Volk, so too was a new scientific philology – what we would now call historical linguistics – being developed. Of particular importance was the discovery that many living spoken languages were related both to one another and to other languages that had once existed but were now no longer spoken. The idea of language families that could be plotted in a sort of genealogical table fitted in perfectly with the nineteenth-century search for national origins. Close linguistic community – as, for instance, the various members of the Germanic language family – could be invoked as evidence for deeper sorts of political or ideological community. When retrojected into the distant past, evidence for linguistic community could be used as evidence of politically conscious community action in the past.
It was these linguistic arguments that anchored the Goths firmly to the study of a Germanic past. As we saw in the last chapter, our ancient sources never regarded the Goths as Germans, but rather as Scythians. In the nineteenth century, however, philologists discovered that Gothic belonged to the Germanic language family. It was thus a relative not just of medieval and modern German, but of other Germanic languages like Dutch, English, and the different Scandinavian tongues. This meant that the Goths could be annexed to the world of the ancient Germans on philological grounds. Once that was possible, they could take a central role in a history of the German Volk. That Romantic ideal of a single German Volk helped provide a conceptual framework for the political unification of German-speaking lands that was brought about by Otto von Bismarck in 1871. With the creation of a united Germany, the study of a German national past became even more important. The chieftain Arminius, who had destroyed three Roman legions at the battle of the Teutoburger forest in A.D. 9, emerged as the most potent symbol of an eternal German spirit; in his modern nationalist incarnation as Hermann the German, Arminius became the subject of a beautiful and famous monument, the Hermannsdenkmal, put up near the town of Detmold as a tribute to a free German nation.[29]
Pre-war and Post-war Scholarship
Given how important the ancient Germanic past was to the national formation of modern Germany, it will come as no surprise that ancient history was also used to justify some of the nastier manifestations of German nationalism. Nazi foreign policy made much of the purity of the German race rooted in the very remote past. The wide distribution of ancient Germans across the European continent could justify the conquest of modern Germany’s neighbours as a ‘reconquest’ of the former lands of the German Volk. Proving the ‘Germanic’ nature of eastern Europe’s original population – on the basis of ancient texts or on the basis of archaeology and physical anthropology – had modern political significance. For that reason, historians and archaeological services followed in the wake of the Wehrmacht as it subjugated large tracts of Europe. The story of a Gothic migration from Scandinavia to the Polish Baltic to the Ukraine was, for obvious reasons, a precious testimony to the true extent of German Lebensraum. We nowadays recognize that there was no way for a German historian