Abstract
Reviewed by: Johannes Dafinger, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
‘The West’ certainly belongs to a set of concepts that can be called, according to Reinhart Koselleck, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Basic Concepts in History). Today there is a renewed interest in historical semantics, and ‘the West’ as a concept has been discussed in recent studies from Russian, East European, US-American, British and non-European/American perspectives. The collection of papers under review here focuses on the history of ‘the West’ in German discourses: What did German liberals, conservatives and socialists associate with the term ‘the West’? When and why did they use it? How did they think Germany related to ‘the West’?
The 17 chapters of this book are arranged in five sections. The first section contains essays that give an overview of the German discourses on ‘the West’ in the long nineteenth and the short twentieth century – the time period covered in this book. Liberal, conservative and socialist concepts of ‘the West’ are then discussed in more detail in three separate sections. The volume is supplemented by analyses of the special discourses of German Jews (Stefan Vogt) and of German Orientalists (Douglas T. McGetchin) on ‘the West’ that are very much worth reading. The publishers have placed these chapters in one section together with an instructive essay on the nineteenth-century Russian discourse on ‘the West’ and its connections with the German discourse (Denis Sdvižkov). An excellent introduction by Riccardo Bavaj and Martina Steber locates the topic of the book in a wider historiographical context and summarizes the key findings of the individual contributions.
‘The West’ as a concept emerged in German discourses as late as the first half of the nineteenth century. It was uncommon before 1830 to homogenize local, regional or national spaces under the Kollektivsingulare (collective singulars) ‘the West’ or ‘the East’ (see the chapter by Bernhard Struck). Rather, Europe was seen as divided between ‘North’ and ‘South’. In the two decades prior to the Revolution of 1848–1849, though, an East–West dichotomy began to develop. ‘The West’ and ‘the East’ became politicized and temporalized. ‘The West’ on the one hand, generally comprised of France, Great Britain and later also the USA, was associated with progress, liberty, civilization and modernity. On the other hand, Russia moved on mental maps from the ‘North’ to the ‘East’ of Europe. Older stereotypes about Asia and the Orient – backwardness, tyranny, unpredictability, danger, violence, etc. – were henceforth projected onto Russia too (see the chapter by Benjamin Schröder).
These stereotypes remained more or less stable from then on. There was no consensus, however, on the definition of the relationship between Germany and ‘the West’ (and implicitly also ‘the East’). Neither liberals nor conservatives nor socialists regarded Germany as fully part of ‘the West’ until after the end of the Second World War. Liberals embraced the political traditions and ideas associated with ‘the West’ and thought that Germany needed to learn from them, but at the same time they insisted on cultural differences between Germany and ‘the West’ and hoped that ‘Germany could find its own culturally and nationally distinct path to universal political modernity’ (169). Conservatives, however, perceived this modernity as a threat to ‘the old ways’, to ‘traditions, beliefs and natural communities’ (202). During the long nineteenth century, they lamented that Germany itself was divided and internally fragmented as a result of the influence of modernizing developments. However, from the beginning of the First World War in 1914 they projected their criticisms solely onto a ‘Western’ modernity that was, according to them, at odds with the ‘heroic’ path Germany had chosen (209). Socialists, more precisely German Social Democrats, did not attach as much importance to the concept of ‘the West’ as did liberals and conservatives. It was only in exile in Western countries during the Second World War that many of them came to the conclusion that Germany had to become part of ‘the West’ (see the chapter by Stefan Berger).
It was not only the discourses in the Socialist camp that changed; those among liberals and conservatives changed decisively after 1945, anchoring Germany firmly within ‘the West’ (see the chapters by Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Riccardo Bavaj and Martina Steber). Nevertheless, the idea that Germany stood between ‘the West’ and ‘the East’ did not entirely disappear, but lived on among left-wing intellectuals who hoped that Germany (or the whole of Europe) could serve ‘as a kind of … mediator’ between ‘the East’ and ‘the West’ (262). Another ‘inbetween’ characterized the discourses on ‘the West’ in the German Democratic Republic, namely ‘the conflict between antipathy and attraction to the West’ (277).
Building on existing literature and primary research, this book is the first comprehensive collection of papers on the historical semantics of ‘the West’ in Germany. Everybody interested in this topic will find rich material in this pioneering publication.