Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method by Carlo Ginzburg

Author:Carlo Ginzburg
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 1989-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Germanic Mythology and Nazism

Thoughts on an Old Book by Georges Dumézil

A reevaluation of the so-called culture of the right has been under way for a number of years now. In the process, the absurd elimination of a number of old problems considered incompatible with the dogmatism of the left has been replaced by an attitude that indiscriminately dredges up, with few subtleties, a variety of problems and solutions. This confusion between questions and answers is not always involuntary, nor innocent. But the rejection of solutions does not necessarily mean that the problems are nonexistent or irrelevant. Even racism, to take an extreme example, is one answer (scientifically unfounded and with a monstrous practical outcome) to a very real question related to the connection between biology and culture. Similar distinctions are imposed even on the historian of human societies. To this day, in some quarters, research into extended cultural continuities is not only suspect, but inherently unacceptable because it has been controlled for so long (with a few significant exceptions) by scholars more or less tied to the culture of the right.

The case of Georges Dumézil illustrates the complexity of the question beautifully. His work is important, of great breadth and has stood up well for more than half a century.

On a number of occasions, Dumézil has pointed to 1938 as a year marking a crucial break in his intellectual development. In the books and essays on comparative Indo-European mythology written before that date, he recognizes signs of struggle in research seeking to find the right road. The caesura, profound and irreversible, followed from the encounter some years earlier with Marcel Granet, the great Sinologist.1

One of the first fruits was Mythes et dieux des Germains (Paris, 1939); in the introduction Dumézil openly acknowledges his debt to Marcel Mauss and Granet. A second, radically revised edition, entitled Les dieux des Germains (Paris, 1959), appeared twenty years later. In his introduction, Dumézil justified the new work by pointing to the hurried and premature character of the 1939 book, as well as to the scholarly progress of the intervening years.2 Self-criticism and constant revision are, after all, typical features of Dumézil’s method. It is significant, nevertheless, that in the preface to the second edition he should reiterate the break constituted by the year 1938: Mythes et dieux des Germains was in fact proclaimed as a work of the author’s full maturity.

In a recent perceptive article, Arnaldo Momigliano observed, “It is almost certain that, from the beginning, an element of political discord separated Dumézil from his Durkheimian teachers.” He adduces as evidence both the dedication of Dumézil’s first book, Le festin d’immortalité, to Pierre Gaxotte (Maurras’s secretary, later close to the Vichy government), and the book Mythes et dieux des Germains, about which Momigliano states: “It reveals clear traces of sympathy for Nazi culture.”3 The message here is clear, although specific passages of Mythes et dieux are not cited. Then too, the book has not only been out of print for quite some time, but is difficult to locate, even in the better libraries.

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