The Strange Story of Alexander Brückner

Alexander Brückner (1856-1939) was born to a family of a minor Austrian official in Brzeżany in the Austro-Hungarian partition of the then-former Polish state.  He studied in Lviv and then, in 1881, moved to Berlin where he spent the rest of his life researching Slavic topics.  He is most famous for rediscovering the Holy Cross Sermons (Kazania świętokrzyskie) in the Petersburg Library (probably taken during the partitions of Poland – if not earlier).

Brückner worked hard and generated numerous works which to this day serve as excellent compilations of ancient sources.  He had an encyclopedic knowledge of facts and contributed copiously to publications such Archiv für slavische Philologie.  He wrote an etymological dictionary of the Polish language.

That’s on the plus side.

Under a looking glass, however, a less flattering portrait emerges of a nimble careerist and a loyal citizen of the Prussian state; a man whose reputation is besmirched with chauvinistic, borderline racist, tendencies; an arrogant man whose vast erudition was too often mistaken for intelligence and whose debating style consisted of a spectrum running from disdainful scoffing, through harsh sneers towards outright derision.

A man trapped by his arrogance but, perhaps, too by other circumstances.

We have discussed some of his failings here and here but, given his role, more needs to be said.

A Political Creature

To an outside observer it might have seemed that Brückner spent his entire life avoiding any involvement with political causes.  Some people thought that this aloofness can be excused by Brückner’s desire to remain above the fray for the sake of appearing unbiased in his research – the quest for the the truth and all that.

The reality was that Brückner was very much aware of the limits of free speech in Berlin and understood that the relationship of the German governments to the Slavic peoples within their borders in the 19th century was a very real political issue.  Before he was appointed to his position at Berlin University he had to give a loyalty oath explicitly promising that he would not agitate for the Polish independence cause and, for the most part, he stayed true to that promise.

Thus, in his writings he complained about the state of Polish democracy before the Polish partitions.  He thought the “republic of nobles” ridiculous and responsible for its own downfall.  While that view was hardly original with much truth to it, Brückner seemed blind to the fact that the ridiculousness of that republic’s political system had been continuously enhanced and largely maintained by Poland’s neighbors.  Instead, in Brückner’s writings, Poland deserved its fate.  Although Brückner bemoaned the barbarism of Russia, it wasn’t so much the barbarism of the act of partitions but rather the barbarism that followed.  In other words, Poland deserved its fate but it did not deserve to be under Russian domination.  Poland had to be fixed but the Russians weren’t the ones who could do it right.  This view produced one giant blind spot as Brückner was, in effect, excusing any Prussian (i.e., German) (or Austrian) culpability for the Polish collapse and endorsing continued German occupation.  German barbarism was better, in his mind, or was not barbarism at all.  Yet, while Russia certainly grabbed most of the land area of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, most of the historic lands of the Polish Piast kingdom ended up going to Prussia and Austria – not to the Russian Empire.

When it suited him, Brückner was not above getting dirty and raising his voice in support of Slavic causes.  It just so happened that this “suited him” at those times when it also “suited” the German imperial government.

Thus, when World War I started, he was asked by Wilhelm Feldman (who was born into a Chassidic Jewish family and seemed to exhibit more concern for Poland than Brückner) to help lead an effort to convince the German government of the usefulness of creating an independent Poland, Brückner refused, claiming that, having kept his aloofness from all things political, he would not be trusted by the Polish minority in Germany.  This may well have been true but then he also claimed that the Germans were completely uninterested in anything Polish – which given the politics of the day was clearly false.  Moreover, Brückner went on to express outrage at the fact that the Warsaw Poles did not rise up against the Russians after the German defeat of the Russian armies at Tannenberg, claiming that this showed that Warsaw has been “russified” and to top it off spoke about the “ingratitude” of the inhabitants of Poznan to Germany.

When, however, later in the war the German Kaiser and the Habsburgs declared that they would reconstitute a Poland as a puppet state out of the provinces of the Russian Empire that the Germans and Austro-Hungarians took over, Brückner, as a loyal citizen of Imperial Germany, did take up the mantle of selling this to the Polish populace, though in a way that was less noteworthy for its few meagre squeaks on the topic of Polish independence than for an impeachment of Imperial Russia:*

“And once again it is shown that, stronger than race, it is culture and common development that binds peoples onto one another.  Poland is set between two worlds; with the eastern one connected through a problematic blood- and real language-unity; but through history, culture and belief completely separated from it; strongly divided from the western [world] by blood and language and yet indivisibly connected with it through a common development, traditions and faith so that it harvests today the fruit of its persistence.”

[* note: this comes from his ambitiously titled pamphlet “Slavs and the War” which, in turn, was a version of a lecture he gave under the same title, i.e., Die Slawen und der Weltkrieg]

Thus, according to Brückner, while the Poles shared blood and language with the Russians, the Poles themselves were culturally closer to the Germans.  And since, in Brückner’s mind the war was, to cut to the chase, between German civilization and Russian barbarism (the English, the French and others were almost bystanders in Brückner’s telling), the Poles – so Brückner – could be made part of that civilization as a sort of a younger brother, perhaps along with other “smaller” nations that, more or less, could coexist with the Imperial Teutons.  In some ways this was a pro-Polish (and pro-Slavic) pamphlet in that it correctly pointed out the abuses of Imperial Russia.  But in other ways it clearly showed a path for the Poles (and other “small” Slavs) only as an appendage of Germany.

It was clear that Brückner said as much as the German government would have wanted him to say and nothing more.  While he was opposed to the Kulturkampf policies of Bismarck, Brückner nevertheless continued to have a blind spot as to Germany the size of Jupiter’s GRS.  (See also Maria Rhode’s essay in Kollegen, Kommilitonen, Kämpfer: europäische Universitäten im Ersten Weltkrieg).

Anyhow, events began to move faster than anyone anticipated and once Pilsudski’s legions refused to swear allegiance to the Kaiser, and Poles started asking about former Polish provinces on German territory, Brückner was no longer seen agitating for Poland.

Unser Mann in Berlin

After the war Brückner, refused offers of employment from universities in Warsaw, Poznan and Vilnius and remained in Berlin.  One might view this as an academic choice (Germany was, even after World War I, the center of the world’s academic life).    And having been called a “Stockpole” by some of his German colleagues, Brückner also seemed like a sympathetic case of a representative of the Polish cause in Germany.   In fact, some in Poland might have thought this a better result – viewing Brückner as “our man in Berlin”.

Indeed, Brückner was seen as our man in Berlin but he was seen that way too by various German scholars.  For them he was “ours” – our Slavist – that was better than the “Slavic” Slavists.  Some of them enjoyed using “their” guy to stick it to the “irrational” Slavs.

Here is one citation where the writer claims that:

“one of our best Slavists, Prof. Brückner in Berlin, responded to a letter query presented to him with staunch firmness against the derivation of the word from the Slavic.”

Just to be clear about this “controversy”: The word was the name of the Thuringian Forest during the Middle Ages.  It was Loiba, Leuba, Leube.  And the question was whether it was Slavic.  A much  more balanced view appears in Reinhold Schottin‘s “Die Slawen in Thüringen” where, as we wrote previously, the author concludes:

“What a difference of opinion!  I can’t see why one wants to force this name to be a German one since, after all, it it was used in an avowedly Slavic territory, was explicitly called a Slavic word by the Braunweiler monk, and otherwise it is commonly found even today in many previously Slavic words – but not in purely German areas.”

Why was Schottin, a German, able to write the above whereas Brückner, who so often is made into an honorary Pole, was so entscheiden that the word could not be Slavic?  See below for his argument regarding the monk.

This is not to say that Brückner always took the “German side” (he did not), it is merely to note that his view of German culture and his personality made him far less “scientific” or “objective” than he wanted to portray himself as.

A Culturalist Snob

Brückner’s role in Prussian academia – whether conscious or not – was more of a “good cop” to the “bad cop” of Kulturkampf and related endeavors.

He clearly regarded Germany to be the carrier of Kultur in those days and various Germanic peoples to have been the carriers of Kultur throughout history.  The smaller nations of Europe could partake in this German enterprise but only as hangers-on.  His language would make most of today’s observers rather uncomfortable.

Thus, when discussing Ketrzynski’s work, he mockingly criticized the latter’s methods (without, which is characteristic of Brückner, actually saying specifically why) concluding that:

“[with such methods] one can also try to show that Mecca and Medina were Slavic; no land in the world would be safe from this Slavic plague.”

He then went on to dismiss Ketrzynski’s etymologies seemingly on the grounds that “one has to look at the totality of the circumstances,” i.e., on no specific grounds at all:

“But the modern German research does not limit itself to doubtful etymologies, or the explanation of controversial places in Tacitus (for example, over the name of the Germanen) or interpolations (for example, in the famous Pythaeus fragment).  To the philological work attaches itself too, for example in the works of [Gustaf] Kossina, the archeological [work], the taking into account of the, still otherwise not understandable [with philology] or silent, discoveries of prehistory.”

It is hardly believable that Brückner was unaware of Kossina’s theories of the Slavic Unkultur or his theories on the German “Aryan” race or his completely results-oriented research (interestingly, Kossina never actually did any field work).  And yet, of all the German archeologists he cited Kossina.  Why?  Only two options present themselves.  Either Brückner really thought Kossina was right or, more likely (Brückner clearly wasn’t that dumb), he wanted to use this as an opportunity to ingratiate (redeem?) himself with the German academic establishment (after all, these were the days during which the dean of German historians – Mommsen – stated that “Czech skulls were “impervious to reason, but … susceptible to blows” and called Czechs the “apostles of barbarism“).

Either reason makes Brückner look like a smaller man than he should have been.

(In 1919 Kossina supposedly sent a copy of his book “The Vistula Area, an ancient homeland of the German people” to the participants of the Versailles Conference in order to emphasise that territory claimed for the new Polish state should be German.  The fact that, as his name indicates, Kossina was Polish himself (a Germanized Mazurian) – your basic self-hater type, makes him the aptest case for the use of the Polish word gnida – look it up).

But Brückner’s borderline racism (and, apparent, dullwittedness) continued unabated when he stated:

“Even ‘documented’ information must not be given weight sometimes; if Qazwini places Soest and Paderborn in Slavic country, then we know, what we should think of such imprecision of the Arabs; his report is worthless.”

What exactly Brückner means by the imprecision of “the Arabs”?

And his engagement with his “fellow” Poles was not the only questionable use of language in the service of politics by the apolitical Brückner.  Employing language reminiscent of later Nazis, he had no qualms about calling the Ukrainians an “ethnographic mass” which was incapable of forming its own state.  (“Der ‘Ukrainische’ Staat: Eine politische Utopie,” Das Neue Deutschland, March 13, 1915, 157-160).

He was disdainful too of the culture of the Balts and Finns.  He wrote:

“It is revealed that Slavs, Lithuanians and Finns borrowed from the Goths words that were many and important, [these words] established the appearance of a new, different and higher element.”

If there is a common thread here it is that of Brueckner’s dismissive view of all the “little peoples”.  All of which raises a question:  Why should someone who was so dismissive of much of the cultures he studied, keep studying these cultures?

An Overreaching Etymologist

Brückner went on to claim that kuningas and mekus were Gothic borrowings in Finnish, Estonian, Lithuanian and Polish.  That the former appears related to the Scythian kagan and the latter’s etymology has been disputed ever since the above type of claim was made (most recently, see Lewicki) should show, at the very least, that Brückner accepted the teachings of German scholarship at face value.  That, at the same time, he spent his life picking holes (most often with dismissive arguments along the lines of the above “because I said so”) in the theories of those scholars that disagreed with his positions, is telling even of a certain peculiarity of character or of something worse.

Brückner also claimed that mleko was a Gothic borrowing; if one accepts that tree name borrowings are suggestive of the answer to the question of “where the Slavs came from”, one would have to conclude, following Brückner’s “dairy” assertion, that the original Slavs were not mammals at all – perhaps lizardmen, hence Sauromatae?

A Cantankerous Old-Young Man

Brückner’s personality drove his debating style which was full of ornate word choices and hot air that, more often than not, signified little.

Thus, in the above discussion where Brückner calls Qazwini’s report “worthless” one can’t help notice a peculiar line of argumentation, one that always reaches its intellectual crescendo with the phrase “because I said so”.

Thus Brückner wrote when discussing Ketrzynski:

“If a history of an abbey from the 14th century calls the Westphallian Ruhr ‘Rura australis sue slavica,’ I will not begin to guess from where this crazy [word] combination may have come from.”

Read: “These facts are beneath me so I will not even address them”.

Further on he says:

“Just as little am I impressed with the other cited places, for example about the Saale: ‘flume quod slavica lingua Sale dicitur’ from the Annals of Reinhardsbrunn – what should this in the best case prove?”

Err…. well, that the “German” name “Saale” is itself of Slavic origin?  But hey, what does that matter? 

Coming back to the mention of Slavs in Thuringia, Brückner says:

“False is the report of the Braunweiler monk who claims of the Thuringian forest: ‘in saltu Sclavorum qui iuxta linguam eorum Lovia (Levia, as per Pertz) dicitur quique infinitam ursorum nutrit multitudinem,‘” 

Read: contemporary accounts are only value when they do not clash with my views.

Moreover:

“That Suevi were Germans and could only have been Germans, we know from Caesar and Tacitus and no false etymology will shatter our conviction, at least if we should not altogether give up our reliance on these sources.”

This is of course just plain dumb…

First of all, it is clear and  does not dispute that in both Caesar’s and Tacitus’ minds the Suevi were “Germans”.  What Ketrzynski is saying however is that by Germans Caesar and Tacitus understood everyone East of the Rhine (and some West) and north of the Alps.  Neither Caesar nor Tacitus say anything about the biological or linguistic nature of these “Germans” that would make it impossible for them to have been today’s Slavs (or at least most of them).

We know today that the name “Germany” was not an ethnic but rather geographic name.  Those that we – today – call “Germans” have consistently referred to themselves as Deutsche – but never (until recently) as Germans.  If tomorrow the Belgians were to try and appropriate the name “European” for themselves, and we went along with this, we would nevertheless not then suddenly conclude that the rest of the denizens of the European continent must have wondered into it at some point recently in the process displacing the native European (i.e., Belgian) population that used to stretch from Spain to the Urals.

Of course, the situation with “Germans” may be worse than that…  If Ketrzynski is right, a better parallel may be that of the Prussians.  The Teutonic (i.e., Deutsch) Knights’ state became Prussia and its citizens became Prussians – notwithstanding the fact that the Baltic Prussians had largely been exterminated or assimilated by the very same people who then picked up their name.  In the 19th century Prussians were Germans but clearly that was not the case before the 14th.  If Brueckner in the 19th century were to find someone in Prussia who spoke Baltic Prussian, presumably he would have concluded that, at some point, a strange new people must have entered Prussia (probably not from the Pripet marshes because that’s reserved for the Slavs but maybe from beyond the Urals) settling among the German Urbevoelkerung… Indeed, Ketrzynski concluded his work by noting with genuine surprise it seems, that there must have been a time “when there were no Germans [meaning Nordics/Deutsche] in Germany”.

Second, as we pointed out before, no one is claiming that you have to throw out Tacitus and Caesar as sources.  This is another one of Brueckner’s red herring arguments.  If tomorrow we were to conclude that the Mona Lisa is not in fact Leonardo’s depiction of Lisa del Giocondo but of some other woman (or of Leonardo!), that obviously does not mean that the painting is now somehow to be thrown into the garbage chute!

Finally, Brueckner’s appeal to his “conviction” appears to be evidence of his belief in what the truth is rather than a measured, rational judgment.  The questioning of that belief seems like an affront to him and so he won’t believe some Ketrzynski.

This is a reaction not of a scientist or scholar but of someone who is a member of a cult who fits all facts that he hears into his preconceived cultish matrix of truth for the alternative would, literally, blow his mind… We all do that to some extent – use new facts merely to confirm our preconceived notions but we expect rather more from people who try to present themselves as our scholars.

All this brings to mind the words of Theodor Pösche:

“I have brought up the words of Tacitus.  But I am being reproached that words and names mean nothing.“,

Indeed.  If the facts don’t fit the theory, ignore the facts.

In all of the above statements Brückner does not even try to address the arguments – he just says:

• “I will not begin to guess from where this crazy [word] combination may have come from”
• “Just as little am I impressed with the other cited places”
• “What should this in the best case prove?”
• “False is the report of the Braunweiler monk who claims”

Brückner seemed to have believed that the point of someone else’s scholarly work was supposed to have been not so much to contribute to scholarly discourse and establish a case as to impress him – Brückner – the final arbiter of all things.

If he did not approve of something, all he had to say was:

“Balderdash!”

A Noble Soul or a Man in Fear?

There is another curious aspect of Brückner’s life.  For the longest time he refused to marry.  Then, suddenly, he married his housekeeper.

Why?

We are told that he thought he got her pregnant.

Ok, so a noble (or just plain decent) gesture?

Perhaps.

(We might quibble that a person in a position of authority should avoid abusing that authority by entering into a relationship with a subordinate but that would be applying today’s standards to the behaviours of yesteryear).

She – described as a simple woman (and hardly a model) – seems to have been an unlikely intellectual or physical companion of a man of Brückner’s stature (in the last days of his life, she apparently had a lot of her family spend time at hers and Brückner’s house – a number of which visitors turned out to be Nazis or Nazi supporters – whom Brückner, by all accounts, could not stand).

But there is something else.

Read the above one more time.

Wait, how is that again?

He thought he got her pregnant?

Would he have married her just based on what he thought?  Wouldn’t he have waited to see if she was actually pregnant?  (And assuming, for some strange reason, he would not have, wouldn’t he try to divorce her after he found out about the false alarm?)

What if there was another reason to marry her?

This is speculation, of course, but an unmarried man back in the Germany of early 20th century might have raised questions.  Questions, the answers to which, we today shrug our shoulders over but which answers – back then – might have resulted in loss of academic position and, certainly, loss of status.  Would such a risk have been acceptable for someone as career focused and driven as Brückner was?  Was he a homosexual and his wife then just his beard?

Did she blackmail him into a marriage to get a stable life out of this deal?  Would the Preußische Geheimpolizei have been aware of any of this?

What would they have done with such information regarding the West’s most prominent Slavist?