The Concept of Germanic Antiquity

Summary

The Study of Germanic Antiquity (Germanische Altertumskunde), both as a concept and as a problem, is a peculiarly German affair. This is demonstrated by the fact that there is no entirely appropriate English translation of the term. It is worth considering why, and to what extent, the founders and subsequent representatives of this discipline saddled themselves with a conceptual term that exercises critical attention, today more than ever. Such critical considerations are concerned with both aspects of the term: “Germanic” on the one hand, and “antiquity” on the other. The Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, which began to appear in its second edition in 1973 under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen and which is scheduled to be completed in 2005, may serve as an immediate point of reference.

The Concept “Germanic”

The term “Germanic” in classical historiography represents an initial problem. Historians in the ancient world, from Poseidonios, to Caesar and Tacitus follow the tradition of a Germanic ethnonym. Alongside the scholarly discussion that continues to this day, there has been, since the humanist reception of Tacitus’s Germania, a national adoption of the terms Germani and Germanic, which increasingly became more exclusively German. There were two main reasons for this: Tacitus’s Germania covered a geographical area that allowed the German humanists to identify themselves within these boundaries. The then contemporary views of the geographical location of Scandinavia and the eastern areas in 1500 further promoted this identification of Germania with Germany. Scandinavia, by contrast, was linked with the sixth-century historian Jordanes and his ethno-geographical perspective, within which the Goths played a leading role.

Renaissance humanism led to a conscious nationalism in which the Germani rose to become a unique source of popular Germanic thought and culminated in the formula: Germanic equals German. The continued existence of this equation in subsequent centuries, down to the present, represents an important and much debated topic of recent German intellectual history. The ethnic and nationalistic view of antiquity was significantly consolidated by a new academic discipline that was beginning to establish itself at the start of the nineteenth century and, based on the name of the Germanen, termed itself Germanistik.

Jacob Grimm (1785–1863), one of the founding fathers of Germanistik, not only helped to give this discipline its name, but also ascribed to it a patriotic mission.