page_title: Germanic peoples
section_title: Modern debates
hierarchical_section_title: Germanic peoples / Later debates / Modern debates
context_page_description: The Germanic peoples are a category of north European ethnic groups, first mentioned by Graeco-Roman authors. They are also associated with Germanic languages, which originated and dispersed among them, and are one of several criteria used to define Germanic ethnicity.
  Although the English language possesses the adjective Germanic as distinct from German, it lacks an equivalent distinct noun. The terms Germanic peoples and Germani are therefore used by modern English-speaking scholars to avoid confusion with the inhabitants of present-day Germany, including the modern "German" people and language.
  Starting with Julius Caesar, several Roman Empire authors placed their homeland, Germania, roughly between the Lower Rhine and the Vistula Rivers, and distinguished them from other broad categories of peoples better known to Rome, especially the Celtic Gauls to their southwest, and "Scythian" Sarmatians to their further east and southeast. Greek writers, in contrast, consistently categorized the Germanic peoples from east of the Rhine as Gauls.
context_section_description: During the Renaissance there was a rediscovery and renewed interest in secular writings of classical antiquity. By the late 15th century, Tacitus had become a focus of interest all around Europe, and, among other effects, this revolutionized ideas in Germany concerning the history of Germany itself. Tacitus continues to be an important influence in Germanic studies of antiquity, and is often read together with the Getica of Jordanes, who wrote much later.
  Tacitus's ethnography won the attention it had formerly been denied because there now was a Germany, the "German nation" that had come into existence since the Carolingians, which Tacitus could now equip with a heaven-sent ancient dignity and pedigree.
  In this context, in the 19th century, the famous folklorist and linguist Jacob Grimm helped popularize the concept of Germanic languages as well as of Indo-european languages. Apart from the well-known Grimm's Fairy Tales, collected with his brother Wilhelm, he published, for example, Deutsche Mythologie attempting to reconstruct Germanic mythology, and a German dictionary, Deutsches Wörterbuch, with detailed etymological proposals attempting to reconstruct the oldest Germanic language. He also popularized a new idea of these Germanic speakers, especially those in Germany, as clinging valiantly to their supposed Germanic civilization over the centuries.
  The subsequently popular modern assertion of strong cultural continuity between Roman-era Germani and medieval or modern Germanic speakers, especially Germans, assumed a strong connection between a family trees of language categories, and both cultural and racial heritages. The name of the newly defined language family, Germanic, was long unpopular in other countries such as England, where the medieval "Teutonic" was seen as less potentially misleading. Similarly, in Denmark "Gothic" was sometimes used as a term for the language group uniting the Germani and the Goths, and a modified Gothonic was proposed by Gudmund Schütte and used locally.
  This romanticist, nationalist approach has been rejected by scholars in its simplest forms since approximately World War II. For example, the once common habit of referring to Roman-era Germanic peoples as "Germans" is discouraged by modern historians, and modern Germans are no longer seen as the main successors of the Germani. Not only are ideas associated with Nazism now criticized, but also other romanticized ideas about the Germanic peoples. For example, Guy Halsall has mentioned the popularity of the "view of the peoples of Germania as, essentially, proto-democratic communes of freemen". [Peter Heather]] has pointed out as well that the Marxist theory "that some of Europe's barbarians were ultimately responsible for moving Europe onwards to the feudal modern of production has also lost much of its force".
  Further, some historians now question whether there was any unifying Germanic culture even in Roman times, and secondly whether there was any significant continuity at all apart from language, connecting the Roman era Germanic peoples with the mixed new ethnic groups who formed in late antiquity. Sceptics of such connections include Walter Goffart, and others associated with him and the University of Toronto. Goffart lists four "contentions" about how the Germanic terminology biases the conclusions of historians, and is therefore misleading:
  1. Barbarian invasions should not be seen as a single collective movement. Different barbarian groups moved for their own reasons under their own leaders.
  2. The pressures on the late Empire did not have a united source, and often came from within.
  3. The classical Germanic peoples lacked any unity or center, and so they should not be seen as a civilization in the way Rome is.
  4. We should not, according to Goffart, accept Jordanes as preserving an authentic oral tradition about a migration from Scandinavia.
  On the other hand, the possibility of a small but significant "core of tradition" (Traditionskern) surviving with the ruling classes of Roman Germanic peoples, in the societies of new med
caption: Map of the Nordic Bronze Age culture, around 1200 BCE
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