Otto Höfler’s Characterisation of the Germanic Peoples is an intellectual biography of the Austrian folklorist Otto Höfler (1901-1987), a brilliant scholar whose impact is still felt today, primarily in the German-speaking and Nordic academic worlds. It was submitted and defended as a dissertation in the Department of Nordic Philology at the University of Munich in 2021 and is an impressive example of German scholarship, written by a Canadian and published in English (!). It is a challenge to read.
The book focuses throughout on Höfler’s Germanenbild, i.e., his characterization of the Germanic peoples (NB: plural). It is divided into two major sections, with three sub-chapters in each. Part I, titled Contextualising Otto Höfler’s Germanenbild, introduces Otto Höfler and presents details of the concept historically and in twentieth-century philological scholarship. Part II, Analysing Otto Höfler’s Gemanenbild, represents the central and a most problematic thesis concerning the role of ancient cultic men’s bands, Männerbünde. A final section, Significant Aspects of Höfler’s Germanenbild, looks in detail at significant aspects included, or not included (e.g., women), in his scholarly career.
Regarding Part I: On page 29, the author, Courtney Marie Burrell, presents a diagram with three somewhat overlapping circles, each of which includes names of the scholars who have reacted to Höfler’s scholarship, and whose response is then detailed in the text. The circles are: 1) Contextualization & Analysis, 2) Adoption and Reception, and 3) Discussion and Analysis. The list of names (circa sixty-five of them) suggests how widely Höfler’s work was known, and the date of the response is indicated, thus allowing for identification in the Works Cited section of the book. Many names appear more than once, some in each of the three circles, but it should be noted that all of these names come from the last part of the twentieth century (earliest 1962) and the current century (latest 2013), an indication of the continuing reception of Höfler’s scholarship, although there was a considerable response from earlier years. When he published his Habilitation in 1934 there were around fifty reviews in professional literature.
Burrell says her choice to write in English, aside from the fact that she is a native speaker, is to make the scholarship by and about Höfler available outside the German and Nordic worlds. Her list of works cited documents this: Höfler is not known to any degree outside Europe. I would like to endorse her decision by reviewing this study in a way that helps people understand this man, who was in essence a poly-everything.
Otto Eduard Gotfried Ernst Höfler was comfortable in all Germanic languages and moved about easily in several disciplines, including Volkskunde, ethnology, philology—including Indo-European—medieval and ancient history, and especially the study of religion. He was familiar with all of old Nordic literature, including of course the Old Norse of Iceland, and, when necessary, he also included Old English sources. He frequently quoted or compared motifs, legends, and myths from all of these languages. Höfler was a part of the Viennese School of ritualists that included Richard Wolfram, Lily Weiser-Aal, and Robert Stumpfl, who died in a car accident in 1937. Höfler married Stumpfl’s widow and adopted their children. All were students of Rudolf Much and their primary interest was the mythologization of the primitive Germanic cults, from rituals. Burrell writes: “Höfler’s emphasis on a symbolic way of thinking at the core of how the Germanic people conceptualised history, and thus their religiosity, represents a red thread throughout his research theses ... [indeed] the core of every facet of Germanic society” (283). This “red thread” appears three previous times, on pages 126, 229, and 272, and is central to understanding the book, the scholar, and, more intimately, the man himself.
Utilizing Burrell’s presentation, particularly as set out on pages 226-227, we see that Höfler’s concept of the ancient Germanic Männerbund is based on his argument for a correlating of folk legends, mythology, social organizations, and folk traditions. Always at the center of the cults are the "bands," including the Kultische Geheimbünde. In the past I have mostly and somewhat naively translated this simply as “secret societies,” but after reading this book I accept Burrell’s translation as “sacred men’s bands” as more precise. She argues that "legends are not simply literature or folk tales, but evidence of actual religious-social customs and beliefs,” and describes these bands as composed primarily of unmarried young men who become a dominant force in their communities and assume “a militant, policing function in their society.” During their rituals, for example, initiations and calendar processions, and through loud music and dancing to the accompaniment of bells and noisemakers (still popular in calendar customs), individual limitations are transgressed thus allowing one to enter into a communal bonding, Ekstase, with the dead, with one’s own ancestors. The band, being touched or possessed by a superhuman force, feels bound to higher, numinous, daemonic, or divine powers, experienced as ultimate reality. Burrell quotes Höfler to the effect that this is a “source of religious, ethical and historic-political forces of enormous power.” This is the real red thread in the book: an unbelievably intelligent and highly educated man, at one of the best universities in the world, is possessed with clairvoyant communication with the dead. This particular thread occupies nearly 150 pages in the book! Burrell’s treatment of such a complex conceptualization of Germanic culture is nothing less than amazing. We could wish that all scholarship is so thorough.
In the final chapter, “Significant Aspects of Höfler’s Germanenbild,” the author addresses some details alluded to throughout the book, actually in all of his research: his overall concept of culture, the band versus the Sippe (clan, kindred, extended family), the individual versus the community, the absence of women and the domination of men—a carefully documented reading of his entire oeuvre. All of which is very informative.
Burrell states near the end of the book that the “assumption of an unbroken cultural continuity, embedded in an ideological view that champions the history of the Germanic peoples and their socio-political and cultural force—strongly paralleling the ideals of the Third Reich and völkisch [racial] movement—must be recognized and warrants caution” (236). Otto Höfler joined the National Socialist Workers Party two times (in Austria the NSDAP was suppressed from 1932-34, then banned in 1933, but revived after the annexation in 1938). He was promoted by Heinrich Himmler to professorial positions and remained a person of interest because of his ideas on Germanic antiquity. He did not, however, become a member of the SS-Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Inheritance) because of his Catholicism. Does this make him a principled Nazi? In postwar years he returned to academia and in the 1950s he continued his research along the same lines, changed only modestly, but his work no longer served to justify or legitimize a dictatorship. In my own work I have referred to this material as “handle with care.”
Otto Höfler’s Characterisation of the Germanic Peoples is an impressive study of a man, his conceptualization of Germans, and his impact on scholarship, as well as a look at how such detailed scholarship has been perceived before, within, and after a tumultuous era in the world. Students in all the disciplines mentioned in this review will profit from Courtney Marie Burrell’s research.
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[Review length: 1213 words • Review posted on April 1, 2024]