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This England: how Arts Council England uses its investment to shape a national cultural ecology, by Arts Council England, 2014, published online at

With the upsurge of theories about a 'Germanic Europe', we enter a bizarre territory. First came the suggestions that classical Greece had collapsed because of racial mongrelism-intermarriage with slaves, for example. Later came the notion of a 'Nordic Hellas'-that the Athenians of the fifth century BC, for instance, were in fact blonde, blue-eyed Aryans from the north. Kossinna began to find dolichocephalic skulls in Greek tombs and on Greek busts; French research into the remains of pigment on statues was distorted to become evidence for fair hair and blue eyes. Greek architecture was traced back to Germanic hut design, and the publicist Willy Pastor wrote in 1916 that the Megaron temple was 'a gift from the Nordic-Germanic world-empire'. But it's important to put this rubbish into perspective. First of all, much nineteenth-century German scholarship about Greece was both original and sound (even if Greek patriots still turn pale at the name of Fallmerayer). Second, many other nations in northern Europe were playing with the same fantasies. In his final sections, Wiwjorra describes how this conviction of autochthonous racial 'Germanity' went into a truly imperial expansion in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both the Celts and the 'old Slavs' were recruited into the Aryan-Nordic world, on the hypothesis that their Aryan origins had later been extensively contaminated by interbreeding with inferior races. Then came the wildest phase of all: the projection of ancient Nordic presence into other continents. 'Blondness' was detected all over the world: in the extinct aboriginals of the Canaries, in the 'dolmen builders' of the Neolithic Atlantic and Mediterranean, in Libya at about 3000 BC, and even in Polynesia. Here, certainly, was an enthusiasm that carried straight through to the SS Ahnenerbe and the racial research commissioned by Heinrich Himmler in Tibet or central America. But, once again, many other nations were playing this game, especially after the great imperial expansions of the late nineteenth century. In every colonial continent, there arose tales of 'white-skinned, fair-haired conquerors' or 'lost tribes with blue eyes'. (They are still with us, as any watcher of fantasy-archaeology on television can testify). Reading this book, I was reminded that the elements that were eventually to compose the völkisch-germanisch world-view were not unique