What's ‘German’?

Years ago, when I was contributing to a miscellany on medieval archaeology, the editors suddenly became aware that there was a wide range of implicit assumptions on what might be ‘medieval’. They asked us, an international set of contributors, what we meant by ‘medieval’. I bravely answered what ‘medieval’ implies in German history, art history and archaeology. Weeks later the editors thanked me for my response, but – consciously or unconsciously – didn't cut away their internal email correspondence regarding my original answer. And there was this line, which I remember very well still today: ‘Thomas is very German. He knows what he means.’ As I was never proud of being German – I still feel uneasy about being ‘very German’ – in this case it might have been a compliment. At the beginning of their paper, Hofmann and Stockhammer take the same ‘very German’ approach – they accurately define their topic. And I still adhere to my Germanness as I comment on their definition.

Indeed, it is tricky to approach something like German(-speaking) archaeology without coming under suspicion of essentializing 19th-century nationalism. Instead of warming up such völkisch essentialism, however, the authors take a very pragmatic approach of defining GSA as archaeological research done by persons ‘who enjoyed most of their academic education in prehistory and protohistory at a German-speaking university’ (p. 2), disregarding those ‘who have been working mostly outside German-speaking institutions’ (p. 2).Footnote ¹

But Hofmann's and Stockhammer's definition leaves us with the question of why something like a typically ‘German’ archaeology would exist. They explicitly refer to academic education as the common ground. This is a rather doubtful assumption if education refers to a unique and shared curriculum at German-speaking universities, as German university curricula in the wake of the Bologna Accord exploded into a myriad of rather incompatible local sets of courses. Disciplinary education, however, is more than a curriculum. It means socialization within a disciplinary community of knowledge (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu and Panofsky1967, 147 f.). This includes learning and internalizing the specific habitus of a discipline, its modes of speaking, its modes of thinking, its modes of arguing and its modes of practice. These modes constitute the dispositifs (Deleuze Reference Deleuze, Lawlor and Nale2014) of the disciplinary discourse; they control the orders of speaking and silencing and classify what is ‘in the true’ and what is not (Foucault Reference Foucault1971). At the same time, academic disciplining is connected to mentalities and discourses within the larger society – e.g. to specific forms of politeness (cf. the German Sie instead of ‘you’), political awareness (cf. a raised awareness towards national chauvinism in great parts of German society) and reasoning. Admittedly, this asks us to accept that there are (still) specific differences in behaviour, culture and thought between countries, not for essentialist reasons, but because of traditions reaching back into at least the 19th century and beyond, that still roughly coincide with today's state borders.

Mentalities and discourses not only are matters of language and thinking, but also manifest themselves in institutions, and institutional settings reaffirm mentalities and discourses. Tom Bloemers (Reference Bloemers and Härke2000) in his seminal, although little esteemed, analysis of German archaeology at the end of the second millennium has brilliantly demonstrated how general mentalities in German society also govern German archaeology. In his eyes, German society and thus German archaeology are dominated by the proverbial German Angst. Bloemers pays special attention to the institutional landscape as an important dispositif of discourses, and argues that the institutions of German archaeology focus on stability and the avoidance of risk, on the continuity of institutions and hierarchies. Accordingly, incentives for self-reflection, productive(!) competition and innovation are insufficiently represented, with a general lack of positive attitudes towards experiments; if nothing else, this results in a fearful research promotion with almost no venture capital (ibid.).

Sixteen years after Bloemers's evaluation of German archaeology, Hofmann and Stockhammer draw a much more optimistic picture of GSA and its mental setting, because – as they claim – the Excellence Initiative from 2007 has fostered many innovative research ventures in terms of interdisciplinary and inter-institutional projects.Footnote ² I agree as far as concerns the three main projects with archaeological participation – the Topoi (Berlin) and Asia and Europe in a Global Context (Heidelberg) clusters of excellence and the Human Development in Landscapes (Kiel) graduate school. These large-scale projects indeed promote and conduct much more or less innovative research, while cutting across disciplines. But the two clusters and the graduate school should be seen as islands of bliss and as a rather closed and selective spaceship of richly funded archaeonauts who have little in common with the poor and sticky soils of GSA in general. If Hofmann and Stockhammer suggest that antiquarianism is vanishing in German archaeology, with archaeological theory ‘still’ not the mainstream of GSA, this is a gross misrepresentation. In fact, apart from a few universities, antiquarianism is still the prevailing theory in GSA – as can easily be proven at almost any German archaeological conference. And if there is any theory, e.g. as there already was in so many writings of Georg Kossack, one of the main exponents of ‘traditional’ GSA (Bintliff Reference Bintliff2001), it was and still is bad manners to speak about it. Instead, the scientific reasoning is stuffed into an empiricist–inductive camouflage to conform to the positivist paradigm (Mante Reference Mante, Gramsch and Sommer2011, 117).

Regardless of different opinions on the state of archaeological institutions, the institutional infrastructure is an important asset of German archaeology, as it is the structural expression of the attitudes of wider German society and as such enables and limits German archaeological research. As its structural basis, this justifies speaking of a specific ‘German’ archaeology and should be an integral part of its definition.

‘Speaking’

Matters of reasoning and plausibility connect to the question of language. Surprisingly enough, the authors write about German-speaking archaeology, but miss what would be the easiest criterion for GSA: to speak and publish (and sometimes teach) in German. This perspective not only avoids territorializations, but also brings the matter of language to the fore:

Further, ‘language, thought and culture are deeply interlocked, so that each language might be claimed to have associated with it a distinctive worldview’ (Gumperz and Levinson Reference Gumperz, Levinson, Gumperz and Levinson1996, 2; see also Hill and Mannheim Reference Hill and Mannheim1992). In the light of criticism on a purely lingual constructivism, this conviction of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis might sound exaggerated today, and Gábor Győri (Reference Gábor Győri, Niermeier and Dirven2000) suggests an updated linguistic–cultural co-evolution of the world: language as a means of understanding the physical, social and cultural environment is transmitted and thus offers ready and traditional knowledge about the world, shaping thought and practice. But, likewise, language is permanently refreshed in order to adapt to a changing environment. Thus differences between languages indicate differences in sociocultural contexts.

With this background, it hardly comes as a surprise that the choice of language deeply influences modes of argumentation and patterns of plausibility. Most authors – at least in the humanities, with its focus on interpretation – who publish in different languages have already experienced that it is hardly possible to translate papers with a complex flow of arguments (cf. Eco Reference Eco2003a; Reference Eco2003b). It usually requires rewriting and rearranging the arguments in order to get to the same conclusions. Otherwise, the literal translation appears logically distorted, or associative at best, with much meaning lost in translation. Take, for example, the writings of Martin Heidegger, who actually celebrates a revival as a stylite of neo-realism/neo-phenomenology within the material turn: in the German text, Heidegger's dull romantic backwardness with its fascist connotations and allusive associations is immediately obvious, while the English translation (with so many words missing appropriate equivalents) appears much more consistent and modern and camouflages the intricate entanglement of Heidegger's philosophy with National Socialist ideology.

Each language, due to its structure, grammar and vocabulary, has strengths and weaknesses; it encourages or hinders specific modes of arguing and some lines of thought can only be thought and adequately expressed in a specific language. Compared to English, the German language provides hardly any synonyms, but each and every word, as closely related as they may be, has a slightly different meaning. This allows for extremely nuanced argumentation and – even more – requires permanent, distinctive reflections on which word fits exactly compared with other closely related words with slightly different meanings. As a result, (good) German papers tend to be highly precise, making full use of the wording capacities – and a German author usually has to know exactly what s/he means since otherwise s/he gets lost in the jungle of similar words. Moreover, German academic writing requires the connection of sentences mostly with Adverbien,Footnote ³ frequently indicating reasons (Kausaladverbien), while English writing rarely uses adverbs to connect sentences. As a result, German writing requires an explicit and precisely arranged order of arguments, since otherwise the Kausaladverbien do not connect logically. Thus I argue that the German love of precise definitions is not in the end an outcome of German language, which fosters and even requires such definitional precision. In contrast – perhaps symptomatic for English-speaking archaeology? – Colin Renfrew is afraid that ‘it might be pedantic to spend too much time in the formulation of definitions’ (Renfrew Reference Renfrew and Kyriakidis2007, 112; cf. Meier and Tillessen Reference Meier, Tillessen, Meier and Tillessen2014, 153).

Hofmann and Stockhammer hardly address such matters of language. They seem – at least in the way that I understood it – to celebrate ‘the establishment of English as lingua franca also in archaeology’ (p. 22 n.1). And they interpret English becoming ‘more popular as a language for publication’ (p. 4) as a sign of the internationalization of GSA. Consequently, the authors ‘would appreciate an increase of comprehensive publications in English, but’, they admit, ‘we are nevertheless convinced that traditional multilinguality is also an advantage of GSA, which should not be abolished in favour of writing only in English’ (p. 21). This multilingual advantage of GSA seems reduced to the ability to receive non-anglophone publications – which, of course, is a fundamental necessity in archaeology. But with the deep connection between language and thought in mind, I want to argue that not English as a lingua franca, but actual multilinguality is a necessary asset for a truly international archaeological discourse. In my experience, English publications are still read by rather few archaeologists in GSA (not to speak of French, Spanish or Russian publications),Footnote ⁴ while German publications are completely ignored in the anglophone sphere (cf. Meier and Tillessen Reference Meier, Tillessen, Meier and Tillessen2014, 154–58). It comes as a big surprise to me that the authors postulate an existing international archaeological community while several studies since the 1990s (e.g. Lang Reference Lang2000; Kristiansen Reference Kristiansen and Kobyliński2001; Kristiansen, Cornell and Larsson Reference Kristiansen, Cornell and Larsson2004) repeatedly show that such an assumed community is counterfactual. ‘International’ means nothing more than a rather exclusive anglophone arena of discourse – with all the strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats that the English (and only the English!) language brings to academic reasoning. Using English or any other language as the only language of internationality deprives academia of other modes of thinking and marginalizes anyone with a different mother tongue. Today language barriers and especially English monolinguality within wide academic fields are probably the largest obstacles for the exchange of ideas, and establish ‘borders of ignorance’ (Kristiansen Reference Kristiansen and Kobyliński2001). Especially large archaeological communities like Britain, the USA, Germany and France tend to encapsulate themselves within their language universes, perverting the terms ‘international’ or ‘transnational’ into synonyms for language chauvinism – mistaking their parochial and ignorant navel gazing for internationality. If we accept the base assumptions of these arguments, speaking German indeed makes a difference to speaking English, French, Spanish, Russian or Chinese, and language as an important asset of mentalities is a solid basis to define a German-speaking archaeology.

To sum up: in my eyes, German-speaking archaeology is more than academic education at a German-speaking university: it is the sum total of archaeologies actually practised at German institutions – universities (including their research bodies), heritage boards, museums, research institutes etc. It includes speaking German and thus sharing related patterns of plausibility and a world view, and it includes the institutional constraints and liberties in Germany. It is a specific community of knowledge practices.

German potentials

Hofmann and Stockhammer arrange most of their survey of GSA in terms of five topics. I am completely fine with these themes as they – appropriately – reflect the authors’ expertise and interests. Much more important than adding one or another additional issue which is equally debated in GSA (religion, power, economies, heritage or the relation of archaeology to written sources and/or the natural sciences), a more fundamental question is whether there is something specific, something which only GSA could offer, to a truly international debate. When reading through the article I've asked myself whether it would read differently if the authors aimed to draft a sketch of anglophone archaeology in the early 21st century – except for other names in the bibliography. Although the authors make an effort at the end to discuss each theme in order to emphasize the specific German perspective, these perspectives look to me like minor nuances of the general anglophone discussion. From reading the authors’ account of GSA, one gets the impression that during recent years, GSA has mainly dissolved into the ‘international’ (i.e. anglophone) mainstream.

More substantially than such debatable details, Hofmann and Stockhammer do not see long catalogues and footnotes as habitual hangovers from an antiquarian past, but they re-evaluate these techniques as an opportunity, as a strength in dealing with material culture – although rarely as a concept and with a severe lack of theorization. The long German antiquarian tradition needs not to publish on conceptual issues alone, but to combine concepts with ‘case studies which introduce a practice-oriented perspective’ (p. 16). Finally, this may turn out to be a major contribution to closing the actual, wide and much-lamented gap between highly theoretical concepts and dirty archaeological practice (e.g. Kluiving and Guttmann-Bond 2012, 27; Johnson Reference Johnson, Kluiving and Guttmann-Bond2012). Moreover, the exultant praise for the ‘current theoretical approaches in GSA’ mixing ‘a multitude of approaches’ and the ‘flexibility and the related lack of dominant theoretical schools of thinking … without feeling the need to promote one approach and abolish others’ (p. 19) perfectly corresponds to John Bintliff's (Reference Bintliff, Bintliff and Pearce2011a, esp. 17 ff.) more general plea for theoretical and methodological eclecticism instead of intellectual monotheism. However, I cannot do away with the impression that this theoretical ‘flexibility’ is frequently not the result of a superior mastership of theories, but is grounded in a severe lack of awareness of theoretical problems and (in)compatibilities …

The yardstick by which theories in GSA are measured – reflected or not – is anglophone archaeology despite Bintliff's warning: ‘If German scholarship is to stand up as an independent and lively contributor to global debates on archaeological method and theory, it has to find a distinctive voice and not run after the disappearing image of core theorists in other countries’ (Bintliff Reference Bintliff, Bintliff and Pearce2011a, 172). With this warning in mind I return to the issue of language and thinking as an extremely high potential for GSA, because there is a long, vibrant philosophical tradition specifically connected to German language and thinking. Let me – arbitrarily – mention again Martin Heidegger, who today is excavated by neo-‘realists’ and neo-phenomenologists; Edmund Husserl should be added. In contemporary philosophy, Ulrich Oevermann (2005) relies on Husserl and Heidegger in developing his project of ‘objective hermeneutics’. Admittedly, this philosophical concept is so far poorly received and Oevermann is hardly known in GSA, although he himself has already applied his concept to archaeological material. The same holds true for other theoretical concepts like the Sattelzeiten of Reinhard Koselleck (Reference Koselleck and Conze1972) or Niklas Luhmann's (e.g. Reference Luhmann1997; Reference Luhmann2004) theory of social systems, which are – sad to say – all poorly received in GSA. Another field of special expertise would be the matter of bridging the divide between the two academic cultures of the humanities and the sciences. While anglophone debate traces back the idea of such a categorial divide to a lecture of C.P. Snow in 1959 (Snow Reference Snow1961), it was already a subject of debate in 19th-century German academia. Finally, the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (Reference Dilthey1883) coined the dichotomy of scientific explanation (Erklären) through empiricism versus hermeneutical understanding (Verstehen) in the humanities. Ever since then, debate in German academia on how this divide could be bridged has not dwindled. After claims of an alleged unity of all academic reasoning (e.g. Mittelstraß Reference Mittelstraß, Bachmaier and Fischer1991; Reference Mittelstraß and Reinalter1999) could hardly be substantiated, today's attempts prevail to find intersections and/or platforms of exchange between the two cultures; they range from blurred terminologies (e.g. vulnerability: Collet Reference Collet, Collet, Lassen and Schanbacher2012) and nature–culture hybrids (Zierhofer Reference Zierhofer, Gebhardt, Reuber and Wolkersdorfer2003) to the concept of social ecology, with humans themselves, as biological and cultural entities, being the nature–culture intersection (Fischer-Kowalski and Erb Reference Fischer-Kowalski and Erb2006), while the philosophy of transversal reason (Welsch Reference Welsch1996) has not yet been explored as a tool of interdisciplinarity. With these intellectual debates in philosophy, sociology and other disciplines, German archaeologists are in a brilliant position to profit from their own theoretical standing. With German as their mother tongue they have the best access to these writings and intellectually they belong to the same community of language and thinking. Adopting and translating a theory from its disciplinary place of birth into another discipline requires considerable rethinking and remodelling of this theory and is theory (trans)formation in itself. The rich German tradition of philosophy offers a great potential to GSA to contribute significantly to theoretical debates.

National disclaimer

In this comment I claim that German-speaking archaeology is and should be much more than Hofmann and Stockhammer present. I explicitly do not complain about a missing book or an underscored/overemphasized theme. I do argue, however, that GSA is a specific community of knowledge practices formed by German education, institutions and language and is controlled by German mentalities, discourses and manners. I also argue that GSA has the potential to significantly contribute to archaeology not by running ‘after the disappearing image of core theorists in other countries’ (p. 34) but by the intellectual power of German-speaking academia as a whole.

To be clear, my enthusiastic claims that there is more to GSA and there should be even more to it is not driven by parochial or national pride. I would ask for very similar contributions from French, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Russian or any other archaeologies to bring their specific strengths into the debate. Quite on the contrary, I am driven by the ideal of a truly multivocal archaeological discourse fuelled by as many regional and theoretical perspectives as possible. Since the 1960s, theories in archaeology have been mainly set up by anglophone, mostly British, archaeologists, frequently on the basis of translations of philosophies from other languages (especially French and German). During the last decade, this innovative power of anglophone archaeology has slowed down remarkably. It is time for other language communities to step out of the shadow of anglophone discussions as the yardstick by which theory is measured and involve themselves in symmetrical entanglements of transnational and multilingual discourses based on the diversity and equal value of ideas, logics and traditions of all archaeological language communities.