Art of Prehistory and Early History: Germanic Art

Germanic art belongs entirely to the prehistory and early history of art and not to the actual art history of the Nordic peoples. This is because this art history is not treated as "Germanic art history," but rather as the art history of the nations that the Germanic tribes eventually became and that still exist today.

The various Germanic tribes, from Lombards to Vikings, who populated Europe from Italy to the far north, never achieved a high culture. Culture, yes, with gold coins and even more gold, women's graves (why only women?), helmet plates and cavalry stones, various art styles such as Borres style , Jelling style , Mammen style , Oseberg style , Ringerike style , Runestone , Animal style , Urnes style and Vendel style , disc brooches, bird brooches, and swivel wheels, but not a high culture.

One might argue whether tiny gold plates covered in intricately decorated figures, rendered with a delicate touch, are not decidedly more sophisticated than a Warholian collection of tin cans; but a high culture encompasses much more: a unified writing system and language, a calendar system that, together with culture and religion, forms a shared way of thinking and feeling; agriculture including trade and storage; the development of cities and sciences; a politically organized society with an organized and purposeful system of government, law, and administration;

Division of labor among citizens; education of specialized social classes; a powerful military with professional soldiers; the creation of sophisticated artistic achievements in the fields of literature, music, fine arts and architecture.

The Germanic peoples may have lacked some characteristics of high culture; especially in terms of cities, science, and architecture, their societies were not yet as advanced. But they were certainly politically organized, particularly if one considers the original meaning of the term – any activity or intellectual construct that concerned the community of the “ancient Greeks,” the polis.

There were also beginnings of an organized and planned system of government, law and administration (and perhaps the person who immediately thinks “approaches probably worked better” is not wrong), a powerful military with professional soldiers and the regularly associated training of specialized social classes (to provide for washed-up military leaders) anyway, and the ambition or lack thereof of artistic achievements may also be in the eye of the beholder, even if the artistic achievements were made a long time ago.

In retrospect, the non-scientist might find reasons to question the scientific assessments (following the motto: better a few fingernail-sized gold flakes than a 40-million-dollar inflatable poodle); he might even ask whether the cultural high of 2017 hadn't already become quite low.

While we do not lack sophisticated achievements from authors and architects, artists and musicians, the recognition of these achievements depends more on the marketing skills of the artist (author, architect, musician) and their will and determination to present themselves in the media than on the merit of the achievement itself.

Working citizens are working themselves to exhaustion, divided into different trades; unfortunately, this is creating more and more skilled workers who are only trained in highly specialized fields without a sufficiently broad foundation, because broad training is expensive, and the crux of the matter is that the fruits of this hard work increasingly only accrue to those for whom broad training is too expensive.

The powerful military has now been exposed as a scourge of humanity, and the army of professional soldiers as a good way to produce hardened psychopaths, emotionless social cripples, or other internally or externally acting traumatic burdens.

With the specialized social classes, problems increase the more specialization "making a lot of money" comes to the fore; the politically organized society is apolitical or disappears into echo chambers; the organized and planned governmental, legal and administrative system cannot manage to build an airport and a train station in the time it takes the Chinese to rebuild half their country.

Cities are becoming increasingly uninhabitable for ordinary citizens, science is subject to the market, agriculture is destroying the land and groundwater, and trade has secretly taken over.

Stockpiling gives way to zero ownership caused by forced auctions; a unified script and language, calendar system, culture and religion only form a common way of thinking and feeling for those who do not barricade themselves in fear… perhaps the definition of high cultures should be reconsidered.