Walter Pohl (born 27 December 1953) is an Austrian historian who is Professor of Auxiliary Sciences of History and Medieval History at the University of Vienna. He is a leading member of the Vienna School of History.
Pohl is well known for his theories about the Germanic peoples. He regards the category 'Germanic' as a primarily linguistic one, and doubts whether ethnicity is useful as a concept in analyzing the early Germanic peoples.[3][4] Pohl treats the Germani strictly as a Roman construct existing from the 1st century BC to the 6th century AD.[4] He does not consider language and culture as defining the Germani, and instead stresses fluidity, flexibility and ambiguity.[5] He partly follows the ancient, contemporary, definitions of the Germani which did not include the Goths, Vandals and Merovingian Franks.[5][6]
Criticism
Pohl's work has faced some opposition. Wolf Liebeschuetz called his work "extraordinarily one-sided" and a form of ideological "dogmatism" evincing "a closed mind", which he believed to be a reaction to Nazi racism.[7] Liebeschuetz agrees with Pohl's view that the early Germanic peoples did not form a racial unit, but he opposed the increasingly popular idea among modern scholars such as Pohl that the early Germanic peoples had no single shared set of institutions or values of their own, because this idea conflicts with Liebeschuetz's belief that these peoples should be considered a single entity that made a major contribution to the emergence of Medieval Europe.[8][4]John F. Drinkwater has suggested that Pohl's theories on Germanic peoples are motivated by a desire to accelerate European integration.[5]
On the other hand, members of the Toronto School of History, led by Walter Goffart, have accused Pohl of not going far enough in his denials of the existence of a single continuous Germanic ethnicity in late antiquity. They charge Pohl and his colleagues at Vienna with perpetuating older German nationalist scholarship in an improved form. According to them, some of Pohl's theories on Germanic peoples are still ultimately derived from nineteenth-century germanische Altertumskunde, via scholars such as Otto Höfler, and have not changed significantly since Reinhard Wenskus.[9] These charges have been denied by Pohl, who argues that ethnogenesis theory "has come a long way" since Wenskus, and that his own critique of Wenskus is in fact parallel to the critiques which are, in his view wrongly against him.[10] As evidence of how far the Vienna ethnogenesis paradigm has changed, he wrote:[11]
It was precisely Herwig Wolfram who underlined the Roman foundations of the Gothic kingdoms, contrary to the views held by Höfler, Schlesinger, and Wenskus. Patrick Geary's ‘mantra’ that ‘the Germanic world was perhaps the greatest and most enduring creation of Roman political and military genius’ sketches a new paradigm that is contrary to all that Höfler ever believed.
^Maas 2001, p. 76 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFMaas2001 (help). "Walter Pohl, Wolfram's successor in Vienna, is influenced by ethnogenesis theory, but he does not accept all of Wenskus's and Wolfram's ideas... [H]e rejects the idea of a German(ic)Volk or people, comprised of various tribes, as anything other than a linguistic abstraction... He raises a question that would have shocked Wenskus..."
^ abcDrinkwater 2002, pp. 348–350. "Pohl's Germani are not all Germani, but those encountered by the Romans on the Rhine and the upper Danube from about the first century B.C. to the sixth century A.D. He does not consider, for example, the Goths or the Franks of the Merovingian kingdoms... [Pohl] is dismissive of language and culture as determinants... of ethnic identity. He stresses fluidity, flexibility and ambiguity... As I read P.'s book, I was frequently struck by the thought that this is the conviction of those urging faster and closer European integration... Perhaps attempting to convince people that the societies they belong to are no more than ephemeral historical artefacts may in the end prove to be just as misguided as praising them for their racial, social and institutional purity."
^Kulikowski 2002, p. 70. "Pohl... explicitly excludes the Goths and Vandals from the Germani he is meant to be treating, before proceeding to retail their history at length."
^Liebeschuetz 2015, p. xxi. "Walter Pohl, had a completely closed mind to any view that admitted that these northern gentes had genuine histories and traditions of their own. Not content to demolish the view that these tribes were essentially racial organizations, they relied on sociological theory that ethnicity is nothing more than a negotiated system of social classification... to deny these peoples any institutions and values of their own, and so to reduce their contribution to medieval Europe to nothing at all. Such dogmatism is easily explained as a reaction to Nazi racism but it is nevertheless extraordinarily one-sided..."
