1. Roland STEINACHER
Dealing with ethnic labels from Late Antiquity, let alone historical concepts like migration period, makes it necessary to discuss sources of the Principate, the late antique and early medieval texts, as well as five hundred years of scholarship from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Many Greek scholars simply classified Celts and Scyths in the northwest and northeast of the Mediterranean. Despite the ambiguity of the antique term Germani, an enduring identity spanning from the constructed Germani in prehistory to the modern German nation became part of German self-perception up to the present day. The (Roman) sources, however, intended to classify the societies with which Roman troopers, politicians, and bargainers were dealing. As these sources have a very different background than our research interests, problems naturally appear. Prehistoric sociological structures interacted with the urban, Mediterranean culture and it was out of these processes of integration and confrontation lasting for centuries, the transformation of the Roman World, that medieval Europe emerged. Modern scholarship has to discuss every individual and every ethnic name (gens) on its own terms, considering the specific historical circumstances.
This is a far-from-easy task since ethnonyms in general and especially terms like Germani, Scythi, or Sclavi used for groups of peoples by Roman and Greek authors raise more questions than they answer. Furthermore, modern western historical and especially medieval scholarship tends to forget that the barbaricum was much more than just ‘Germanic’. It implies a misunderstanding of the Roman point of view, a look only at the Rhine and Danube frontiers. Arab, Berber, Scythian, Hunnic, or Iranian groups interacted with the Romans in very similar ways as the so-called ‘Germanic’ groups in Europe. The Armenian and Georgian client states, as well as the political entities of Berber groups in fifth- and sixth-century North Africa, make up as much a part of the Roman sphere of influence as the barbaricum east of the Rhine and north of the Danube.

2. Stefan DONECKER
The idea of a particular “migration period”, a “Völkerwanderungszeit”, has often been ascribed to the antiquarian curiosity of early modern scholars. Humanists such as Wolfgang Lazius, the Habsburg court historian an author of De gentium aliquot migrationibus (1557), were allegedly the first to formulate a coherent concept of “tribal migration”, and to designate the period between the 4th and the 6th century AD as the exceptional “age of migration”  – thus inventing a key motif in historiography that reached the peak of its importance among 19th and 20th century German nationalists and their glorification of migrating Germanic tribes.
In this paper, I intend to focus on the way human mobility was perceived during the early modern period, and to summarise the conceptual considerations on migration that were formulated between the late 15th and the early 18th century. To early modern scholars, human migration was amongst the driving forces behind all human history  – from the restlessness of Cain and the first wanderings of the Noachids after the deluge to the barbarian invasions that shattered the Roman Empire, and up to the present. In its ethical implication, migration was judged rather ambiguously: It could be seen as a corrupting influence that caused man to lapse into idolatry and barbarism and estranged him from the paradisical state he had once enjoyed – but also as a thoroughly positive indicator for the valour, bravery and piety of colonisers and conquerors. By documenting these contrasting images of migration in early modern thought, I hope to provide some insights on the conceptual “prehistory” of a crucially important and extremely problematic term in modern political discourse. The theoretical reflections on migration undertaken by early modern scholars are, at the same time, an important and often overlooked aspect of the early development of migration studies as an academic discipline.

From Staats- and Nationalkörper to Volkskörper and sozialer Körper – the history of a political metaphor

Andreas Musolff, Durham University

Abstract:
Migrants and other minorities are often stigmatized metaphorically as parasites, vermin or other illness-inducing agents (3) (4) (12) (19) (21) (22) (24) (25). The conceptual metaphor underlying this imagery is that of the nation as a (human) body, which has a long history in Western political and social philosophy. Its terminological traditions in English and French, which are based on the expressions body politic and corps politique, have been the object of “History of Ideas” studies but also more recent discourse--analytical approaches (1) (2) (5) (6) (10) (11) (13) (14) (15) (17) (18). German traditions of this metaphor complex have been less well researched; it has even been claimed that German political literature lacked the equivalent of body politic imagery (8) (9) (20).
The paper argues that this assumption is in fact unwarranted; corporeal imagery in German political philosophy and discourse can be traced back to the early sixteenth century, i.e. to the same time when the English phrase body politic became established and similar developments took place in other European languages. However, the German tradition did take a kind of ‘Sonderweg’ insofar as it included terminological variation that prevented the entrenchment of a key-phrase such as body politic. Instead, competing terms emerged, which selectively highlighted political, social, cultural-linguistic and racial aspects (7) (8) (15) (16). The paper gives an overview over the development of the body-nation metaphor in German discourse history from the sixteenth century to the present day with a view to establishing if a continuous conceptual-discursive trajectory can be found and how body-based political metaphors have contributed to creating and shaping racist attitudes.

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