Snobbishness on the part of continental European scholars: it has to stop. In a Facebook exchange about what misimpressions teachers and writers might need to correct among neophyte students, one writer, after I pointed out that many new students think that the word feudalism is based on the English usage of word for a vendetta (i.e. a feud), rather than Latin said “ I see from the last two comments that it is obviously possible to study Medieval History without any knowledge of Latin in English speaking countries, or how else those misconceptions of words originating in Latin? How do you deal with source material over there? Do you need everything in translation? How do any research then? I am afraid I hit the roof and replied: The word actually originates from (to quote) the Medieval Latin feudalis, from feudum feudal estate, of Germanic origin (cognates: Gothic faihu property, Old High German fihu cattle), so there is no real reason why people learning classical Latin at high school would know it. But, more broadly thats the kind of snobbish comment that makes it so hard for German educated scholars to get jobs in the English-speaking world. With that attitude to students, no one, quite rightly, would hire you. Have you even read The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel ) by Herman Hesse? Long before Schlink and Der Vorleser, Hesse was someone who shone a light in the individual destruction wrought on the pysche by moral failure of German bourgeois culture and its over-demands on secondary school level students. I will mention in passing the apparent widespread failure of many tenured (in US terms) professors in Germany even now actually to deliver comprehensible lectures. Cambridge was once like that, but Wittgenstein would not get a job there today. In Britain and the US - the two major world powers over the past two hundred years you seem to have failed to notice - in the mitteleuropäische fantasy in which you seem to be living - it is extremely uncommon for any but privately educated students (and most often not even then) to have any Latin or Greek at high school. Nor, if you need to be told, do chemistry students still have to study German in any part of the Anglophone world. For obvious reasons the reputation of German scholarship is not what it was in the 19th century, although of course there are still many excellent world-surpassing German scholars. In England, it would be usual even today, for university-bound high school students to have only 4 A-levels and not have any languages. That is probably too narrow a focus *for people to bring the necessary breadth of knowledge to study and write history*. (I suppose languages alone are enough for introverts who will cope with their condition by becoming philologists.) The broader Scottish system is almost certainly better: Scotland was of course the first nation to achieve universal literacy (by 1750) and was long able to support four universities when there were only two in England. In the US, where the Ph.D. system was modelled on Germany (and Agassi was allowed to make an idiot of himself in the mid-19th century), the entire educational system looked up to Germany until 1917. After that German was scarcely taught in state schools (even though émigré intellectuals probably gave the language a boost 1935-1965). Latin also, although long preserved in the widespread Roman Catholic education system before 1970, has become increasingly rare. Students who become interested in the Middle Ages have to learn Latin as teens, or very often only when they decide to undertake postgraduate study. Often in the UK students become interest through visiting cathedrals and castles. Many in the US become interested after reading Tolkien or through the distribution-required courses they must take as a requirement at many US universities. Game of Thrones will probably have an influence in the near future. This is increasingly the case in the UK. Without such courses, which you so despise here there, there would be no market whatsoever for highly-educated medievalists. I really suggest you consider what you wrote, your worldview (Weltanschauung), and any future you might want to consider teaching in the English-speaking world. I am not at all anti-German, but I think it worth letting continental European scholars know how they come across when they make comments such as this.
Posted on: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 16:23:42 +0000
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