16 quotes
I would be content if "German" and its derivatives were banished from all but linguistic discourse on this subject.
Barbarian Tides (2010)
The myth of the Germans before Germany is hard to suppress because, owing to its great age and genesis in the sources themselves.
Barbarian Tides (2010)
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.
Barbarian Tides (2010)
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.
Barbarian Tides (2010)
What we call the Fall of the Western Roman Empire was an imaginative experiment that got a little out of hand.
Barbarians and Romans, A.D. 418-584 (1980)
There was no Germanic world before the Carolingian age.
Barbarian Tides (2010)
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.
Barbarian Tides (2010)
Experts in Germanic literature... solemnly assent: emigration from Scandinavia is an authentic "tribal memory"...
Barbarian Tides (2010)
[Hewrig] Wolfram is listened to with approval in all countries that care about this subject.
Barbarian Tides (2010)
[The] theme-the "early Germans"-is still far from being repudiated.
Barbarian Tides (2010)
[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.
Barbarian Tides (2010)
[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.
Barbarian Tides (2010)
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.
Barbarian Tides (2010)
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.
Barbarian Tides (2010)
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.
Barbarian Tides (2010)
[D]eutsche Altertumskunde... [is a] still honored "science" of German antiquity.
Barbarian Tides (2010)