Talk:Walter Pohl

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German translation

This was a "quick and dirty" translation of the Wikipedia German article using translate.google.com - some if it was not translated, please feel free to improve and expand. -- Stbalbach 14:01, 4 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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Problems with due balance and POV

This article's relies on some words from a critic who is himself in a minority, and I am thinking the words have even been taken out of context and made stronger in effect also? That criticism is also about only one aspect of Pohl's work. It would be good to get more material for a better balanced article. I suppose Goffart and people who agree with him would criticize Pohl in almost the opposite way. I don't see any reason to say that Liebeschuetz is a more important authority than Goffart.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:49, 7 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Andrew Lancaster: Yes, just as at Vienna School of History. I have rewritten some parts of the article to weaken the POV a bit and make it slightly more encyclopaedic, but a more thorough rewrite would be most welcome. Some of these articles on Vienna and Toronto School historians are politically charged and acrimonious as hell, hardly worthy of an encyclopaedia claiming a neutral point of view. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 13:42, 6 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

explanations of some changes today

I will not explain every tweak, but there are some systematic problems with misreadings of sources which deserve listing out. For one thing, other editors may be able to more quickly improve things further by seeing what my concern was...

Old wording: He argues that the ancient concept of the Germani did not include the Goths, Vandals and Merovingian Franks.-> The wording implies that the ancient concept is one of the points Pohl disagrees with other scholars on. This is not correct. As we have no scholarly debate to report on this we can simply report how the classical concept worked (Drinkwater and Pohl do not disagree).
Old wording Liebeschuetz disagrees with Pohls view that the early Germanic peoples formed a racial unit. This is actually the exact opposite of what Liebeschuetz says. Various critics of Pohl all agree with him on this! (It is described by all his critics, including Liebeschuetz, as a step forward made by Pohl's predecessor Wenskus, but the Toronto school complain that the approach of Wenskus still allows or even implies, a racial understanding.)
Old wording: He [Liebeschuetz] furthermore opposes the idea that the early Germanic peoples had no institutions or values of their own, and made no contribution to the emergence of Medieval Europe - ideas which he believes are fundamental to Pohls views. Misleading. The key point of disagreement is that Liebeschuetz is opposed to most of the field, in demanding that historians should write AS IF there was a single, long-lasting set of institutions or values shared by ALL peoples ever referred to as Germanic in modern (not ancient) literature. He also makes it clear that his big problem with the normal rejection of this idea is that it conflicts with his controversial belief that historians should write as if these peoples were a single entity that made a major contribution, jointly only with the Romans, to the emergence of Medieval Europe. Even though he admits they were not really a single entity, he writes that "the concept of Germanic remains useful even indispensable". Without that context, we were making Pohl looking like a scholar with an unpopular and logically and emotionally striking position, whereas Liebeschuetz himself makes it clear that it is the other way around.
Old wording: have accused Pohl of not going far enough in his denials of Germanic ethnicity. This is very inexact language, to the point of arguably saying the opposite of the truth. The specific debate is not about whether there was ever any Germanic ethnicity. It is about whether there was one which survived into the Middle Ages, in a form which was still unified.
Old wording: They charge Pohl and his colleagues at Vienna with seeking to perpetuate German nationalist scholarship behind a phony veil of political correctness. According to them, Pohl's theories on Germanic peoples are ultimately derived from Heinrich Himmler. This is an example of the extraordinarily insensitive and deliberately inflammatory types of distortions which plague Wikipedia on these topics. Neither Pohl's critics nor Pohl mention any accusation of his ideas coming from Himmler. (Himmler is mentioned by Pohl and Callander Murray, as a monster who was a patron of Höfler.) I also could not find any reference to "political correctness" which is obviously a current pop culture term, used to make people angry.
A reader of the older version would not have realized that Pohl's 2002 article was a response to Callander Murray's article which was a critique of Wenskus, in the same volume which was not cited. I have added that. The reader would also not have realized that Pohl actually counter-argued that his critics under-estimate how much he agrees with them and disagrees with Wenskus. Once again, Wikipedia editors seem to be dedicated to telling a polarizing story.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:21, 13 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]