Noble Continent? German-speaking nobles as theorists of European identity in the interwar period

Aristocratic writers such as Coudenhove-Kalergi were well represented in the ranks of Europeanists in the interwar era. Expelled, expropriated or deprived of their remaining privileges, a number of prominent German-speaking noble publicists such as Hermann von Keyserling, Prince Karl Anton Rohan, and Coudenhove himself began to look to Europe in order to reverse or redress some of the most nefarious proclivities of modernity, as they perceived them. The views of European history and politics displayed by such nobles had three points in common: first, the notion that states and their governments were secondary in international politics to private networks; second, the idea that the nation could only be accepted as a temporary political paradigm, and that a form of supranational identity was needed in Europe; and, third, the recognition that the social foundation of Europe's cultural achievements, which rested on the contribution of pre-war aristocratic societies, needed to be reinterpreted because old elites had failed to respond to the pressing problems of their times. Such writers insisted that Europe could be the site of a reinvigoration of politics and culture, drawing on the vital sources of the past, by a new type of Nietzschean 'aristocratic society', open to the most original and strongest willed, and based on former nobles as the supposed guardians of European culture and opponents of the levelling effects of nationalism and mass politics. Analysts of contemporary national institutions in journals such as Rohan's Europäische Revue and Coudenhove's Paneuropa evoked a perpetual sense of crisis, yet they generally sought solutions in a renewed European past – corporatism, aristocracy, charismatic leadership, high culture – rather than in a radically different future

Olympian or Pathologist? Cassirer, Gundolf and the Hero Myth

This article analyses Ernst Cassirer's ambivalent relationship with a member of the Stefan George circle, the literary scholar Friedrich Gundolf.It suggests that the subject of hero worship confused the otherwise clear divide between liberal supporters and conservative enemies of the Weimar republic that we are familiar with from the work of dominant scholars of this period

Adel als Berufung: Adlige Schriftsteller im deutschsprachigen Europadiskurs, 1919-1945

The phenomenon of the 'aristocratic writer' points to a new way of contextualising Max Weber's understanding of 'vocation': rather than seeing it as a statement of modern politics, his famous lecture on Politics can fact be rooted in neo-aristocratic discourses of early twentieth-century German thought. Based on a typology of German writers on European identity who came from an aristocratic background, the paper traces the conversion of aristocratic identity among German-speaking nobles

European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917-57

Who thought of Europe as a community before its economic integration in 1957? Dina Gusejnova illustrates how a supranational European mentality was forged from depleted imperial identities. In the revolutions of 1917 to 1920, the power of the Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Romanoff dynasties over their subjects expired. Even though Germany lost its credit as a world power twice in that century, in the global cultural memory, the old Germanic families remained associated with the idea of Europe in areas reaching from Mexico to the Baltic region and India. Gusejnova's book sheds light on a group of German-speaking intellectuals of aristocratic origin who became pioneers of Europe's future regeneration. In the minds of transnational elites, the continent's future horizons retained the contours of phantom empires

Europe To-Morrow: The Shifting Frontiers of European Civilization in the Political Thought of Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi

This paper revisits the political thought of propagandist Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894-1972), examining his idea of a Pan-European Union in the light of past and present crises of European identity. Looking at his changing conceptions of Europe’s frontiers, this article argues that Coudenhove’s case offers many insights to those who seek to understand the cultural prehistory of the Cold War frontiers. His movement constitutes an example of what Michael Freeden has called a ‘thin-centred ideology’, and the article proceeds by contextualising Coudenhove’s activities in the light of this paradigm. The article also reviews how historians’ interest in his work has been shaped by present crises in European integration. The history of Pan-Europa also offers a contextualisation of such phenomena as the rise of populism and the emergence of global panmovements in the wake of political crises

From Kantian Cosmopolitanism to Stalinist Kosmopolitizm: The Making of Kaliningrad

This chapter contrasts the cultural memory of Königsberg, the city we associate with Immanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt, with its transformation to Soviet Kaliningrad. In the period right after World War II, during the Soviet annexation and repopulation, there developed what might be called ‘negative cosmopolitanism’, a set of political ideals and practices geared towards separation and disenfranchisement of the element construed as ‘foreign’. As populations become victims of ethnic cleansing, retributive violence, statelessness, stigmatization and political suspicion, a new public culture emerged. In it, the descendants of Kant were subjected to ethno-national cleansing, and those who came to replace them were incited to hunt down fabricated spies and purify their consciousness of any interest in foreign culture. One of the contributions of this chapter, therefore, is the uncovering of ways in which the authoritarian Soviet state hijacked the cosmopolitan ideal of the Enlightenment, interpreted it negatively and turned it into a state technology in the service of the expansionist politics of space. A detailed reading of everyday interactions in the post-war Kaliningrad in the paper is accompanied by a set of curated photographs from the era which show how Kaliningrad’s residents make their lives among the ruins of Königsberg

Concepts of culture and technology in Germany, 1916-1933: Ernst Cassirer and Oswald Spengler

While recent years have seen a renaissance of interest in works by Cassirer, Spengler’s works have generated considerably less academic attention, to the extent that they are left out of accounts of Cassirer’s political thought. A detailed comparison between their concepts of culture (and technological progress) has not been undertaken before. Cassirer saw in Spengler an important intellectual opponent, and undertook a detailed reversal of Spengler’s propositions. As this essay shows, the tensions between the two thinkers, set in the context of the contemporary political climate, invite a reconsideration of the common characterization of Cassirer as a predominantly apolitical scholar, and emphasize that Spengler’s work ought to be taken far more seriously as a contribution to a philosophical and political debate in late Weimar Germany