After publishing his study “About the Slavs who once lived between the Rhine and the Elbe, Saale and Czech borderlands” (O Słowianach, mieszkających niegdyś między Renem a Łabą, Salą i czeską granicą), Wojciech Kętrzyński went on a book tour and gave a speech regarding the reasons for having written his pamphlet. A portion of that speech is worth quoting here:
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“It is well known that there is currently a debate as to when the Slavs settled the wide spaces they currently hold, for according to theories proposed by Deutsche scholars all of Central Europe was previously held by Deutsche nations.* There was, thus, no room for the Slavs, who could only have moved into these spaces [according to the Deutsche theories] once the Deutsche left them, which is supposed to have happened in the 6th, though maybe already in the 4th century A.D.”
[* note: Kętrzyński uses the Slavic word niemiecki for the common English adjective “German”. For the sake of clarity, we thought of retaining the usage of the word “German” in this translation. In light of Ketrzynski’s arguments, however, at least in this article it seemed hardly fair to let a people who’ve always called themselves just Deutsche appropriate the word German or Germanic entirely for themselves.]
“From the Slavic side there was frequently opposition to such a theory, though [such opposition] was not always effective. So too the little pamphlet of this author “Die Lygier” [“The Lugians” though it should be “The Legians” legiorum!], published in 1868, had the same goal and the same result, i.e., it remained completely unaddressed. To this day one opinion meets another opinion though the Deutsche are in ascendance for they fight using linguistic evidence, which tend to impress, for no one can challenge them [i.e., without also assailing linguistic theories]; it is on such [linguistic theories] that they build their hypotheses and to fit such [linguistic] theories do they correct the [writings of] ancient authors; and yet linguistic evidence, in and of itself, cannot serve to establish a sufficient historical proof but rather can only be an additional, auxiliary argument.”
“It is for this reason that the author believed, that the entire matter should be placed on a new foundation which in the here mentioned work I’ve tried to do.”
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“It has been known for quite a long time that the Elbe and Saale as also the Czech [Bohemian] border did not separate the Slavic and Deutsch peoples but that even beyond this line towards the West there exist Slavic place names. It is for this reason that the author decided to collect them all in one place, taking into account primarily the suffix itz [Deutsch] = ica, ici, ice [Slavic], as also names such as Winden, Wenden and those containing them, which the Deutsch scholars too have agreed indicate Slavic settlements.”
“The author was able in the process to gather together approximately 800 such names between the Rhine and the above-mentioned [Elbe-Saale] line, between the North Sea and the Alps; their placement has been shown on 4 maps.”
“Deutsche scholars explain this phenomenon in two ways: 1) they claim that they [the Deutsche] so love foreign names [!] that they immediately Ge-deutsch them as their own; 2) usually, however, they assert that these were Slavic colonies, formed under orders of the Deutsch masters, among the Deutsche.”
“As regards the first point, the author shows [in his pamphlet] that Deutsche, everywhere where they encountered the Slavs (and also too in places where the Slavs had not been conquered by the Deutsche) they Ge-deutsched local place names, the proof of this stretches from Czechia, to Silesia to West Prussia and so forth, as it is also shown in the current behaviour of Deutsche regarding Polish place names.”
“Villages, founded by war prisoners and other unfree peoples in areas that were supposedly purely Deutsch could not have had Slavic names since what a place was called was in the oldest times determined by the surroundings [peoples?], later still by the lord and owner but a slave without any rights could neither force his will nor his language onto the locally dominant peoples/nation.”
“Villages, even in otherwise Slavic parts, that were founded by unfree Slavs but established for a Deutsch master, received Deutsche names.”
“Thus, if such place names could not have come about during the time of Deutsche dominance over the Slavs, their origin must predate such time…”
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The talk given by Kętrzyński continues but for the purposes of this post, we do not need to continue with it. Suffice it to say that the same Deutsche arguments that so annoyed Kętrzyński over a century ago are to this day made by various German scholars. So, for example, we have this from Roland Steinacher’s brief summary (Wenden, Slawen, Vandale, Eine fruehmittelalterliche pseudologische Gleichsetzung und Ihre Nachwirkungen) of his longer doctoral theses:
“Such toponyms are to be found also far removed from the Slavic settlement area and show the settlement of Slavic servants by Frankish landowners.”
Steinacher, like his predecessors over a century ago, neither disputes the Slavic character of such villages nor offers proof for the old theory that these were “new” settlements of Slavic war captives. Of course, that theory is based on nothing other than the supposition that this must be the case because the alternative (Ketrzynski’s, i.e., that these were remnants of Slavic villages dating to Roman and pre-Roman times) would upend at least two centuries (but not much more – pre-19th century scholars displayed a more modest approach and showed less blind certitude!) of German scholarship.
Incidentally, Steinacher is also an author of a new book about the Vandals which, thankfully, begins its tale in the 4th century. Here he appears mildly wistful but, in the end, mostly resists the urge to write his Vandalic history in the subjunctive:
“If one could factually establish a connection between the Vandili of Plinius and Tacitus and the Przeworsk culture, were these peoples connected with those who hundreds of years later appeared on the Danube and the Rhein and eventually conquered Carthage, then the Vandals would have had a long pre-history. But such connections are not provable.”
As we know, there is no mention of Vandals, as a people, by Tacitus and Pliny’s slim mention of Burgundians (though in all but one Ptolemaic manuscript – Buguntians without an “r”!) provides only the most ephemeral evidence of Vandals being in Poland (as opposed to somewhere in the Elbe area – which, if they came from Vendsyssel, would seem the logical place to put them). In any event, Steinacher, notwithstanding his silly repetition of the “merry Slavic captives” theory, scores here a touch above Wolfram whose work on the topic is in the realm of historical fiction.
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