The Goths

1.

To assert of someone that they are “dead” can sometimes be intended, beyond the bare biological fact this might report, to mean that that person no longer matters, that they now belong to an irrelevant past. Yet when, in the 1979 Bauhaus dirge, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”, Peter Murphy attached this epithet to one Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó, born in 1882 into a Hungarian community in the Transylvanian town of Lugoj or Lugos, in context it functioned not as a final nail in the old ghoul’s coffin, but rather as an act of revival — a word, you will note, containing the Latin root for “life”.

Nor was this the first Gothic revival in history. When Murphy and Siouxsie Sioux and Andrew Eldritch and the others grew out this branch of the post-punk musical tree, they were only participating in a much broader 1970s rediscovery of a whole suite of aesthetic and cultural innovations of the Weimar era that had long been suspended by wars hot and cold. The silent films of the UFA studios at Potsdam, not least F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), provided much of the look and feel of the music videos of the Gothic subgenre, even to the extent that archival footage from Weimar, when it is used in YouTube “fan videos”, can often be so effective as to make us forget that the pairing is an afterthought — consider for example this perfect match-up of image and sound using scenes from Murnau’s film set to the Sisters of Mercy’s splendid Gothic ballad, “Marian” (1985).

But Murnau and others of his generation were themselves engaged in a revival as well — namely, a transfer to the screen medium of a sensibility that had emerged much earlier in literature. We often cite Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto, as the first volley in the genre of the Gothic horror tale, and we see this genre as reaching its pinnacle of excellence in the early 19th century with Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe, and others. As I argued in my 2017 book, Vampires: Lovesick and Bloodthirsty (don’t ask), the sources of Gothic horror as a literary movement extend back more than a century before Walpole, and in their earliest instances are exclusively non-fictional. The initial impetus for the flurry of early modern texts on the undead and related phenomena, to be precise, was the expansion of the Habsburg administrative apparatus into newly annexed regions of the Balkans, and the assignment to mostly hapless Austrian clerks of the task of sending reports back to the capital on the peculiar customs of the South Slavic villagers.

The vampire myth is thus born out of proto-ethnography, as the natives periodically grew restless after reported nocturnal sightings of some poor old widow’s dead husband, and sought to remedy the problem with garlic, crucifixes, and wooden stakes driven through the hearts of exhumed corpses, and as the lowly Beamter sent news of these queer goings-on all the way back to Vienna. Serbian peasants were supposed to have been long-since Christianized, and part of the fascination their practices triggered, among the metropolitans, arose from the realization that, evidently, this Christianization had never been fully completed. All around the backwaters of Europe, the common lot of people were still engaging in folk practices of which the church could make no sense, and for which it had no room.

Curiously, many of the edifices in which that same church conducted its own affairs were also said to be “Gothic”, which brings us back again to an even earlier chapter of this label’s long history. The building style that today goes by this name reigned throughout the late Middle Ages, notably in cathedral architecture, having both evolved out of, but also replaced, the style we call “Romanesque”. The signature trait of a Gothic cathedral is its pointed arch, but in explaining the use of the name, we must not consider only the visible properties of the constructions, but also how these looked to the Renaissance critics who resented them. In the era of Gothic dominance the style was typically described as “Frankish”, but this is a demonym with a famously fluid denotation —for example, to this day when you use a proper toilet in Anatolia you are said to do so a la franga, while a simple hole in the ground compels you to do your business a la turca— and by the 16th century the great Italian painter and art historian Giorgio Vasari was in the habit of calling the cathedrals in question, variously, “German”, or, which amounted to the same, “barbarian” or indeed “Gothic”. That is, roughly speaking, the Gothic is that strand of European history that does not trace its roots back to Rome, but rather interrupts and obstructs classical aesthetics by importing a sensibility shaped in the heathenish forests somewhere to the North and the East.

2.

If you visit the Bulgarian city of Ruse, on the South bank of the Danube just across from Romania’s Giurgiu, you will find several testimonia, in museums and statues and so on, claiming that this is the “birthplace of German literature”. How can that be? My grandmother-in-law was 17 when the Great War ended, and used to be escorted across the river on pontoon bridges by young German soldiers who were, by all reports, perfect gentlemen. But that occupation was mercifully brief, and anyhow German literature had a long and distinguished history already by that time. The explanation for this apparently audacious claim from the proud city of Ruse (home also to the great German-language writer Elias Canetti) is that it was in that settlement’s vicinity that, in the 4th century AD, a certain 𐍅𐌿𐌻𐍆𐌹𐌻𐌰, known to us as St. Ulfilas or St. Wulfila, produced the first Gothic translation of the New Testament. Because Gothic is ancestral to what would become Old High German, Wulfila’s work seems as good a place to start our histories of German literature as any other.

In Wulfila’s world, to be a Goth was little different from being a Hun; recall, here, that as late as 1945 this latter remained a common derogatory term for German soldiers. Both were barbarian tribes pressing down upon the Roman Empire; both were commonly conflated with the even more ancient Scythians; both preferred to have Mauritanian dwarves in the role of court jester, delighting their chieftains with polyglot puns; and both valued nothing more, at a feast celebrating some great new conquest, than the delicacy of a thousand squabs drowned in honey, and aged there thirty years, even their innards, even their feathers, slowly transforming, like wood become stone in the dark abyss of time, into delectable candies in the perfect likeness of a baby bird.

Though their latter-day descendants would for a while get hung up on the fantasy of racial purity, the Germans were in fact born out of just this sort of Eurasian mongrelization. Herwig Wolfram, author of the magisterial History of the Goths (1988), in fact argues that the proto-Germanic language would best be classified as a proper creole, an ad-hoc lingua franca hammered out to facilitate minimal inter-barbarian exchanges. This is exactly what one would expect of an ethnic group whose identity and whose place in world history are shaped through its diasporic radiations.

As near as can be determined the earliest wave of Germanic conquest throughout Europe, and somewhat beyond, began when the inhabitants of an island off the East coast of Sweden, Gotland, began to spread from their homeland as early as the 1st century BC, a process first described in the 6th-century Gothic-Latin historian Jordanes’s Getica. It is not true, as many have tried to claim, that the “Got” in this island’s name has any etymological connection either to “good” or to “God” (nor that these two terms have any connection among themselves). What is true is that the dim consciousness of a Scandinavian homeland, written into history by Jordanes but circulated mostly in the vein of legend, gave rise to a variety of “Nordicism” centuries earlier than this imagined community’s notorious ideological turn in the era of Nazi “racial” “science”. Jordanes himself had already referred to Gotland as the vagina nationum,¹ which we might timidly translate as “the womb of nations” — that is, the source of so many of the ethnies that by the 6th century made up the map of considerable portions of the continent. In the period of Swedish imperial ascendancy in the 17th century, the polymathic author Olaus Rudbeck took this idea from late-antique historiography and developed it much further, claiming in his Atlantica (1679-1702) that Gotland was nothing less than the island of Atlantis first evoked by Plato, who purportedly learned of it from a wise old Egyptian.

By the early modern period most of Germanic Europe, beyond Scandinavia, Germany, the Low Countries, and to some extent the highly mongrelized British Isles, had been assimilated by surrounding populations: the Visigoths had long since been Hispanicized, the Ostrogoths from Wulfila’s region of Europe long since Slavicized, Turkicized, and of course Latinized. As G. W. Leibniz writes in his text On the Origins of the Nations of Transylvania of 1697: “Indeed the Goths, Gepids, Longobards, and other Germanic peoples settled in Pannonia, not to mention that it seems plausible that before the ancient Dacians —also known as Gets (if we are to believe Strabo and others)— there was a Gothic or Germanic people there. But whatever was German in that place, it may be supposed, was long since eradicated by the migrations of peoples.”

Still, considerable interest remained, for Rudbeck and others, in finding whatever surviving pockets might be left. This interest had been piqued, in particular, by the 16th-century travel reports of a certain Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, a French diplomat to the Ottoman court who, in his Four Turkish Letters of 1581 reported encountering a surviving group of Goths in, of all places, the Crimean peninsula currently disputed by Russia and Ukraine. Thanks to Busbecq we now have a list of 101 words of the Crimean Gothic language (e.g., plut, hoef, reghen) along with their Latin translations (sanguis, caput, pluvia).

Over a century later, G. W. Leibniz will compose a list of “Desiderata pertaining to the languages of nations”, with concrete instructions given to travelers passing to the North of the Black Sea on their way to Central Asia, “to discover the semi-Germans in Crimea and elsewhere in the area of the Black Sea”. When the Italian diplomat and Orientalist Giovanni Batista Podestà makes this voyage to far Karakalpakistan in the early years of the 18th century, bringing with him the precise instructions Leibniz had laid out, he is disappointed to discover no surviving remnants of the community Busbecq had visited.² The last of the Goths seemed by then at long last to have gone extinct.

But is that really the end of the story?