Abstract
The subtitle is important in this remarkable volume. For it does ‘not seek to settle the question of Germany’s “actual” relationship to the West.’ It is rather the history of the concept of ‘the West’ in Germany that is the focus: ‘When have Germans … talked about “the West”? What have they meant by it? Why have they referred to it in the first place?’ The methodological approach most in evidence is Begriffsgeschichte (history of concepts). Discussions of the West in the German language have the additional complication that there are different words usually translated as ‘the West’ in English but which did not mean the same thing in the original German: der Okzident, das Abendland, der Westen. The volume focuses on the emergence and the subsequent history of the uses of the last of these terms, without neglecting the connections with uses of the former two.
Many people assume that ‘the West’ is a twentieth-century concept, but the editors and contributors to this volume correctly argue otherwise. After an early phase from the 1820s to the 1850s when ‘the West’ first made its appearance as a socio-political concept and when it was associated with notions of progress, liberty, civilization and modernity, a period of ambiguity followed in the mid-nineteenth century. During that time liberals did not agree as to Germany’s position in the East–West divide that had emerged in the previous decades. Some, especially radical liberals on the left, ‘emphatically embraced the notion of a free “West”’. Other liberals, however, preferred to position Germany in Europe’s ‘centre’ between a French ‘West’ and a Russian ‘East’ (p. 12). Conservatives had less time for the concept of the West at that time. Then, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the concept was marginalized in German discussions. After the Crimean War, it was the nation, and emphasis on Germandom, and the spread of racial theories and ways of thinking that coloured discussions. Mark Hewitson shows that between 1890 and 1914 the attractiveness of the nation state was such that supranational identifications such as the West had little purchase. Meanwhile, though neither ‘the West’ not ‘Okzident’ or ‘Abendland’ were much in use, most German commentators were clearly differentiating Germany from ‘the East’ or ‘the Orient’. But another strong tendency was to differentiate German Kultur from the Zivilisation of countries such as Britain, France, and, most prominently, the United States of America.
During the First World War uses of ‘the West’ made a spectacular comeback, but in an unambiguously hostile sense: ‘The West’ with its superficial, materialist Zivilisation, was the enemy of German Kultur. The West was identified with ‘the ideas of 1789’ against which German ‘ideas of 1914’ were juxtaposed. The importance of German–Russian intellectual entanglements, the influence of Nietzsche, geopolitical visions of Germany between ‘East’ and ‘West’, the rhetorical needs of German imperialism, and the impact of new theories of Kulturkreise (cultural areas) are identified as having influenced Germany’s new self-image as ‘the West’s’ other’.
After the Treaty of Versailles the negative uses of ‘the West’ survived, at least for some years. The West was mainly discussed in constitutional terms; as parliamentary democracy was identified as the regime imposed by the Allied forces of the West. But anti-Westernism was not dominant. Philipp Gassert’s chapter shows that it ceased to be important in the rhetoric of the National Socialists from the mid-1920s onwards. As far as liberals were concerned, Austin Harrington shows that they embraced ‘the West’ in terms of commitment to republicanism but opposed ‘Western’ (US, French and British) political hegemony over Germany, juxtaposing a ‘European’ solution. Most social democrats were not particularly interested in ideas of the West until after 1945.
Not that things were straightforward after 1945. In the first years following the war some of the left-wing intellectuals, rémigrés included, articulated conceptions of a ‘Europe’ acting as a ‘third force’ between US capitalism and Soviet communism. But the intensification of tensions with the onset of the Cold War led to most German intellectuals eventually adopting the option of integration with the West, represented in German conscience primarily by the USA (with active and orchestrated encouragement on the part of the latter).
It is impossible to do justice to each chapter and contributor in the space available. They are all remarkably clear and well written and extremely informative. A couple of chapters, though most interesting in themselves, focus mainly on the attitudes of Germans (individuals or groups) towards particular nations component of what came to be known as ‘the West’, but not on attitudes towards ‘the West’ as such. But this is a really minor quibble in a volume composed of 18 well-researched scholarly articles on an extremely complex theme. For a collective enterprise of this sort, the volume is remarkably well structured and well organized. The Introduction, written by the two co-editors, does a strikingly good job in terms both of bringing all the parts and chapters together into a coherent whole and of presenting the reader with a summary of the state of the art of scholarship in an ever-increasing and fascinating body of work.