Talk:Vienna School of History

Toronto School

When I first planned to write this article back in 2013 (see here), I was going to include the Toronto School in the same article. Just a suggestion. Srnec (talk) 16:03, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

This makes sense to me. What would you propose calling it? Is there a standard name for their debate?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:05, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Critics

This page relies too much on the school's critics. How is "not having any culture of their own" consistent with a belief in the Traditionskern? And "a rejection of primary sources" cannot be taken seriously, especially in light of "considers Old Norse literature and works such as Getica by Jordanes to be of some value". In fact, the critics of the Vienna School (like the Torontonians) are typically much more bearish on Germanic culture and the primary sources for early Germanic history (as the article shows). Srnec (talk) 16:39, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for your observations. I have adapted the article accordingly. Krakkos (talk) 22:03, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

The article still basically only cites critics of the Vienna School. Why not cite more works by Pohl or others associated with that school or at least some defenses of that school, instead of only relying on outsiders' polemics? There's an interesting article by Bas Ter Haar Romeny in a bundle by Pohl et al from 2012, Visions of Community etc, which may be useful to add. The current section on "theories" draws basically entirely on hostile representations of those theories instead of statements from the theorists themselves, it's pretty bad. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 13:01, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

IIRC Pohl wrote a defense article on a book mainly dominated by Toronto oriented folk? Might be useful for this article.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 23:20, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Should it be K Wenskus or R Wenskus?

Sorry, in a hurry so I can't check. BTW Guy Halsall somewhere associates the critics with Toronto, where some of them have a connection.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:06, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

No mention of Goffart?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:08, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Halsall, Barbarian Migrations, p.18 "Goffart, Callander Murray and their colleagues at Toronto have established a 'school' of younger scholars re-engaging critically with the history of the barbarians and addressing in particular the work of the 'Vienna School' and its model of ethnogenesis."--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:17, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Goffart and the Toronto School are mentioned. Srnec (talk) 22:41, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Wolfram quote

The quote from Wolfram's The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples (German: Das Reich und die Germanen) is given heavy prominence in this article, so it seems to be considered by the editors who have contributed to this article as a kind of summary of the school of thought of the Vienna School of History. But is it really representative of anything particular to the Vienna School? My answer is no.

Basically, the quote has a statement and a context. The statement is that many European/Mediterranean nations have a Germanic componenent in their respective histories. Nothing more, nothing less. For a better understanding, a few lines further above Wolfram writes: "The Germanic peoples have left traces in large areas of Europe and around the Mediterranean, even where their languages have long ceased to be spoken." Most modern historians will agree to this, even the critics of the Vienna School. Wolfram does by no means say that all these nations in the list have an equal degree of Germanic history (which would be highly objectable for most scholars). Here again the quote in full (emphasis mine): "The present-day Germans have as much a Germanic history as do the Scandinavians, British, Irish, French, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Hungarians, Romanians, Slavic nations, Greeks, Turks, and even the Tunisians and Maltese." Note well, he does not write "The present-day Germans have as much Germanic history as do the Scandinavians..."; the tiny article "a" makes the difference. Wolfram even lists the nations with an implicit downward gradient, starting with the (allow me the simplistic labels) "most Germanic" Scandinavians all the way to the "least Germanic" Tunisians and Maltese.

The context is section 3 of the Introduction to Wolfram's book. It is about the long "tradition" of appropriation of Germanic history by German ideologists, including the Nazis. A broad summary of Wolfram's brief discussion: the history of the Germans may well begin with the Germanic peoples, but the heritage of the Germanic peoples does not exclusively belong to the Germans. Again, this is hardly objectionable even for the critics of the Vienna School.

In short: Wolfram's quote is hardly representative of anything particular to the Vienna School. It's a beautiful and actually rather trivial statement with a quite traditionalistic wording, but is doesn't serve the purpose for this article.

Yes, I agree. It's a bad quote in the lede. I've expanded it with the context you offered it, but honestly it shouldn't be featured that prominently. It isn't *that* representative. It does, however, fit the narrative this article initially appears to have promoted of the Vienna School as a subversive school of postmodern deconstructionists intent of voiding the term Germanic of all meaning, which is an incredibly narrow and unencyclopaedic view of the Vienna School. I have tried to adjust it somewhat, but generally speaking it is still pretty bad and does a bad job at describing the theories of Wenskus, Wolfram, Pohl et al. neutrally. The dependence on Liebeschuetz is telling. He of course is a good scholar, but also a harsh critic of the Vienna School, and should not be the first reference to look for what this school stands for. The notion of these schools (Vienna/Toronto) merits problematization in and of itself; they are not as monolithic as the article presents them. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 13:15, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Criticism section and Liebeschuetz

I have three questions:

1. Why are Liebeschuetz and Shami Ghosh placed at the beginning of the criticism section as though they somehow summarize it. Ghosh was educated at Toronto so he is certainly a member of the Toronto School if anything.
2. Why is Liebeschuetz being used to criticism the Toronto School in an article about the Vienna School?
3. Why is Liebeschuetz being used to summarize the positions of other scholars when we can just cite those scholars?

--Ermenrich (talk) 00:24, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

@Ermenrich: it is a peculiarity of the history of the article. This article was mentioned in discussions on the Germanic peoples talk page, and my honest interpretation is that it was originally an attack piece written in response to controversies in other articles. There were similar burst of questionable activity on other negative articles about academics such as Walter Goffart, and about the schools themselves. Such articles have subsequently been tweaked and watched by others including myself but not completely reworked. Liebeschuetz's predominance is therefore related to his predominance in debates about Germanic peoples. He is on the other hand a well-known critic of both Vienna and Toronto, who used quite strong accusations that are reasonably notable? I think that what you are calling for is a broader use of sources, and I can't imagine anyone being against that.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:47, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

Is Liebeschuetz prominent in this debate though? He wrote a book that gets endlessly cited here because it’s so polemical against the Vienna and Toronto schools, but do they ever bother to respond to him? Who cites him on this besides us? I’ve never noticed his name coming up anywhere beside WP.—-Ermenrich (talk) 13:05, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

I realize this isn’t a great diagnostic, but if you look at what Google Scholar says about citations for his book, you’ll find 77 citations. [1] I scrolled through 7 pages of them and I saw maybe one or two papers in Spanish on barbarian identity. Nothing by anyone prominent. People appear to be citing other chapters of the book, but not the diatribe about how, among other things, Vienna school is being guided by a desire for European integration.—-Ermenrich (talk) 13:26, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

You might be right, but I seem to recall that Peter Heather cited Liebeschuetz? Heather's publications have been influential. I also have a feeling he might have been cited in some of the various Toronto/Vienna-oriented essay collections which have appeared over the years. In any case I think if we are aiming to report a well-known argument then you also have to look at the people who crafted the debating points that then spread. People like Liebeschuetz, Heather, Halsall and Goffart might have an extra importance because of their talent and passion in such debates? But I am not certain if there are others who should be cited. Having said all that I think Liebeschuetz's argumentation about European money doesn't seem to have convinced academia. Even at the time he wrote as someone who was criticizing the majority. To me personally it all comes across as a bit like the "war on Christmas".--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:57, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

I've taken a first stab at de-Liebeschuetz-izing the article, anyway. More should be done.--Ermenrich (talk) 15:26, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

The more I to try to edit this the worse it seems. All of the positions and quotations are quoted from page ranges like "80-100". With that level of summarizing how is anyone meant to confirm anything in the article? Why give that sort of range when including specific quotes? Why is the European Science Foundation being alluded to constantly in such a way as to suggest it's some sort of hydra directing researchers in a particular direction? Etc.--Ermenrich (talk) 15:45, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

I'm not convinced we need Halsall's accusations that Heather is, essentially, a crypto-nationalist here as well. He's not really a member of either school and this is a highly polemical framing of the debate about the reality of mass migration.--Ermenrich (talk) 18:00, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

I should add: Heather speaks positively of Wenskus and ethnogenesis in the places where I've seen him discuss it. He takes issue with Wolfram and Pohl mostly. Thus framing him as the archenemy of the Vienna school is not really accurate. I'm trying to get my hands on the source currently being cited for Heather, but I think we're distorting his positions by mostly citing him via Kulikowski (from 2002!) and Halsall. What Heather disagrees with is the notion that migrations in the migration period were not "real" mass movements of people, mostly. The only scholar who seems to reject this idea entirely is Liebeschuetz, who had been a professor emeritus since 1992 when he published his book in 2015.--Ermenrich (talk) 18:23, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

I get everything you are saying, and the problem is widespread over a lot of articles which were created or moved in this direction during 2020. I've come to accept that it is going to be fixed slowly. I think the record leaves no doubt about my concerns about quotations taken from ranges of pages, or positions being explained by quoting critics. I think it overloaded a lot of editors because the problem built up so quickly. Editors don't all have time to follow such things, and they got sick of hearing about it. We will need years more to repair it. If you want a challenge maybe you can take a look at Goths eventually? :) No one edits there any more, but I and others have left a lot of proposals about how to re-do the opening sections. Many were based on Heather. (It was actually his original field of expertise.) Coming to the recent edits I think your points are spot on. It is not good to say Heather is anti-Wenskus, even though he is a critic to some extent of the later Vienna tradition. It just isn't that simple. Even Liebeschuetz admitted that they had a point. Halsall had a point about Heather's way of connecting these issues to modern memes but I think it is not needed in this specific article. I think Kulikowski has also cooled his tone significantly, and other historians involved in this debate (such as Halsall) are also a bit more careful now. A valuable younger Vienna school professor is Roland Steinacher. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:40, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

The heated polemcics are a thing of the past. The very idea of "schools" was part of the polemics, essentially dumbing down the discourse for the sake of having a handy way to "attack" the "opponent". Any attempt to base this article directly on the intellectual lows of any scholar involved in the debate turns it into the caricature that this article long has been.

The section "Toronto School" is a positive model to follow, as it is built on secondary sources reflecting the different positions, instead of echoing (or more bluntly speaking, aping) partisan fluff from primary sources. –Austronesier (talk) 20:25, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

Heather doesn't mention the Vienna school at all in the article cited, and of the Vienna scholars he only cites Wolfram (and not to criticize him, ethnogenesis, Traditionskern, or anything remotely associated with the Vienna school). I've thus removed the claims that he called the Vienna school a political motivated project as synth. It seems to me only Liebeschuetz has done that. I've also removed the bit from the main section about the "shadowy" connections of the group to that secretive cabal known as the European Science Foundation, which seems designed to provoke tinfoil-hat "black helicopters" sorts of thoughts. The rest of the section on Heather needs more work as well. I think I've found at least one source, but it might count as "hostile". Does Heather mention the Vienna school explicitly anywhere?--Ermenrich (talk) 19:38, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

I just checked Liebeschuetz. This is what he writes: To demolish the view that the Dark Age tribes had an identity based on ethnic core-traditions, the authors of the Gillett volume devote a great deal of energy to disqualifying the scholarship of earlier generations as distorted by mainly nationalist ideology. Yet they show no awareness that their own positions are very strongly ideological, deriving from the rejection of nationalism and the acceptance of multiculturalism, that are conspicuous features of cur- rent western values, and which find practical expression, among other things, in the downgrading of national patriotism in the interest of the European ideal. My own ideology is that the possession of shared traditions of one kind or another is necessary for the functioning and survival of any human society. He's talking about the Toronto school (which makes the criticism even stranger, since the Toronto school is based outside of Europe).--Ermenrich (talk) 19:50, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

The only explicit mention of the Vienna School by Heather that I could dig up is in the chapter "Merely an ideology? Gothic identity in Ostrogothic Italy", in the 2007 volume The Ostrogoths from the Migration Period to the Sixth Century: An Ethnographic Perspective. On page 33, he sympathetically credits Wenskus and "the so-called Vienna School gathered around Herwig Wolfram" with "successfully torpedoing [the] cheerful old consensus", by which he refers to the pre-WWII essentialist view on ethnic group identities in the Antiquity as static, unchanging and objectively measurable. –Austronesier (talk) 22:12, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

If Heather has not actually criticized the Vienna school (which he does not appear to have done), I suggest simply removing the text about him differing from them, which is not sourced to anything he himself has said. He certainly disagrees with some of their ideas, but that's not the same thing.--Ermenrich (talk) 22:36, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

Ermenrich FYI in case you did not notice it the Gillett volume is really more of a Toronto thing. Liebeschuetz also mentions Pohl rather than Vienna I think? I have read so much Heather that it would take some time to remember where he said what but he has certainly written about the trends which he sees Wenskus as starting. He also does not necessarily mention Vienna, but his thinking is clearly that after Wolfram they all went too European and "reactionary" against the old Germanic peoples idea. FWIW there has also been some criticism by Toronto school academics of the Vienna school.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:43, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

In this chapter [2] he does disagree with some of the conclusions of Wolfram and unspecified others, but he never mentioned the "Vienna school". And you're right about Liebeschuetz.--Ermenrich (talk) 22:57, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

there has also been some criticism by Toronto school academics of the Vienna school: this is already covered in the article, based on Harland & Friedrich. A very personal account from Halsall (in: "Transformations of Romanness: The northern Gallic case") reads: "The debate – maybe dispute would be better – between Walter Pohl and Walter Goffart is well known. It causes me some distress [...] Most of the rudeness has come from the western shore of the Atlantic [...] This confrontation has long perplexed me, largely because I have strained to see exactly what the ‘Toronto School’s’ objection to the ‘Vienna School’ was." –Austronesier (talk) 23:06, 6 December 2023 (UTC)