“The main goal of this book is to reform thinking and writing about the barbarians in late antiquity by driving out the anachronistic terms "German" and "Germanic" and the baggage that goes with them.”

— Walter Goffart

Source: Quotaes, Barbarian Tides (2010), p. 6

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Walter Goffart 11

American historian 1934

Walter Goffart (1934) American historian

Source: Quotaes, Barbarian Tides (2010), p. x

“Goes a long way and a goal! It's him again! Thomas Müller with his tenth World Cup goal in history, to put the Germans ahead!”

Ian Darke (1950) British association football and boxing commentator

Brazil v. Germany (8 July 2014).
2010s, 2014, 2014 FIFA World Cup
Context: Klose, with a corner. Goes a long way and a goal! It's him again! Thomas Müller with his tenth World Cup goal in history, to put the Germans ahead! Well Brazil were behind in their opening game of the tournament against Croatia and came back to win. But, it might be a much harder job. Chasing Germany, of all the players.

“My central concern in the present book is... to liberate barbarian history from the German nationalism that has suffused it ever since the sixteenth century and, in whatever disguises, continues to do so today.”

Walter Goffart (1934) American historian

Source: Quotaes, Barbarian Tides (2010), p. ix

“There are Germans and Poles in Europe, and they ought to live together in agreement. The Poles cannot think of Europe without the Germans and the Germans cannot think of Europe without the Poles.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Speech in Berlin (24 October 1933), quoted in The Times (26 September 1939), p. 9
1930s

“Fine specimens of humanity, those Germans, and to think that I am actually one of them!”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

9 October 1942
(1942 - 1944)

“The happiest and most glorious hours of my life with books have been with German books.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

The Observer (24 April 1966)
1960s

“The biggest mistake of Hitler, I have to say the main fault, was that under his government these terrific exterminations of men happened, which went on behind the backs of the German nation, which would never have tolerated them, but the government kept these crimes completely secret from the German people.”

Karl Dönitz (1891–1980) President of Germany; admiral in command of German submarine forces during World War II

The World at War: the Landmark Oral History from the Classic TV Series (2007) by Richard Holmes, Page 316.

“I've always been fascinated with the one question: Did the Germans know? … The scariest book I ever bought was Mein Kampf. I bought it because I wanted to answer that question. The answer was "Yes, they knew." I think the Germans, however, were an awful lot like we are now. We're kind of living in a denial, "no that can't really be happening, no that really—" You don't want to believe some things, but you have to. You have to actually think about them.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

2000s, 2009

“The rediscovery of Spinoza by the Germans contributed to the shaping of the cultural destinies of the German people for almost two hundred years. Just as at the time of the Reformation no other spiritual force was as potent in German life as the Bible, so during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries no other intellectual force so dominated German life as Spinozism. Spinoza became the magnet to German steel. Except for Immanuel Kant and Herbart, Spinoza attracted every great intellectual figure in Germany during the last two centuries, from the greatest, Goethe, to the purest, Lessing.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

S. M. Melamed, Spinoza and Buddha: Visions of a Dead God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933)
M - R

“The Treaty of Guarantee came out of a proposal by Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, at the allied conference of Paris as a compromise to Marshal Ferdinand Foch's insistence that the Franco-German border be pushed back to the Rhine. Foch felt that this new border would prevent another German invasion into France. The Germans had invaded France from across the Rhine five times within a century in 1814, 1815, 1870, 1914, and 1918. Its terms called for solemn guarantees by Britain and America of the French frontier against future German aggression.”

William L. Shirer book The Collapse of the Third Republic

The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969)

“The main goal of this book is to reform thinking and writing about the barbarians in late antiquity by driving out the anachronistic terms "German" and "Germanic" and the baggage that goes with them.”

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Walter Goffart 11

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