Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies by Ian Buruma, Avishai Margalit Read Free Book Online Page B

Napoleon’s army and the universalistic claims of French civilization was to see itself as the nation of Dichter und Denker, poets and philosophers. French writers, artists, and jurists might think they had the right to set common European standards. French republican values, French law, French literature, French Enlightenment, might, in French eyes, be the model of rational universal civilization, but German poets and thinkers begged to differ. They stood up for Kultur, roots, and the kind of heroic Romantic idealism already discussed. Abbt and Herder were interested in culture and a national spirit. But by the latter half of the nineteenth century, German idealism had taken a military turn. With the Prussian victory over France, the founding of the German Reich, and the crowning of Kaiser Wilhelm I in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, all in 1871, Germany began its long march to Langemark and finally, in 1945, to almost total destruction. German liberals, in parliament, the press, the arts, and even in industry, did try, sometimes heroically, to deflect their country from this course and build a more liberal society, but their attempts ended in failure. From the late nineteenth century, generals, courtiers, and a large variety of official promoters of the warrior state insisted that German Kultur stood for martial discipline, self-sacrifice, and heroism.
    In fact, the distinctions between Germany, the land of heroes, and its neighbors were in many respects more imaginary than real: France and Britain, too, had their propagandists of sacrifice and valor. German businessmen were no less eager for profit than their British rivals. France and Britain had their share of Romantic and Counter-Enlightenment thinkers. And Abbt, in any case, did not see himself as an enemy of the West. But later nationalists did see themselves this way, and that is what made German heroic propaganda different from its counterparts in western Europe, the idea that Germany was different, the Reich in the middle, culturally distinct from the West, beyond the civilizing borders of the old Roman Empire. This is what made Konrad Adenauer, the conservative but unromantic German politician from the western Rhineland, mutter “Asia” every time his train crossed the Elbe into Prussia.
    A key document of Germany’s war against the West was written in the second year of World War I, by the eminent social scientist Werner Sombart. It is entitled Händler und Helden, ( Merchants and Heroes ). Sombart begins his book by describing the war as an existential battle, not just between nations, but between cultures and worldviews, or Weltanschauungen . England, the land of shopkeepers and merchants, and republican France represent “West European civilization,” “the ideas of 1789,” “commercial values”; Germany is the nation of heroes, prepared to sacrifice themselves for higher ideals. Merchants and Heroes is worth looking at in some detail, because it is in every respect a prime example of Occidentalism.
    Sombart, like all people who shared his views, was quite emphatic about the nature of this deadly Kulturkampf. He wrote: “German thinking and German feeling are expressed in the first place by a total rejection of everything which even approaches English or indeed West European thinking and feeling.” 3 But what is this Occidental thinking and feeling? The “ideas of 1789” speak for themselves. Or do they? The French Revolution and the merchant mentality might strike one as inimical, even incompatible. In Sombart’s view, however, “ ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ are true merchant ideals, which have no other aim but to give particular advantages to individuals.” 4 It is about the “merchant Weltanschauung ” that Sombart waxes most eloquent. The typical merchant, he says, is interested only in “what life can offer him” in terms of material goods and physical comfort. Sombart uses the term “ Komfortismus ” for the bourgeois