The West is a central idea in German public discourse, yet historians know surprisingly little about the evolution of the concept. Contrary to common assumptions, this volume argues that the German concept of the West was not born in the twentieth century, but can be traced from a much earlier time. In the nineteenth century, the West became associated with notions of progress, liberty, civilization, and modernity. It signified the future through the opposition to antonyms such as Russia and the East, and was deployed as a tool for forging German identities. Examining the shifting meanings, political uses, and transnational circulations of the idea of the West sheds new light on German intellectual history from the post-Napoleonic era to the Cold War.
Preface
Introduction: Germany and the West: The Vagaries of a Modern Relationship
Riccardo Bavaj& Martina Steber
PART I: RISES AND SILENCES OF 'THE WEST'
Chapter 1. In Search of the West: The Language of Political, Social and Cultural Spaces in theSattelzeit, from about 1770 to the 1830s
Bernhard Struck
Chapter 2. TheKaiserreich and theKulturländer: Conceptions of the West in Wilhelmine Germany, 1890-1914
Mark Hewitson
Chapter 3. World War I and the Invention of Western Democracy
Marcus Llanque
Chapter 4. Perceptions of the West in Twentieth-Century Germany
Anselm Doering-Manteuffel
PART II: EAST-WEST ENTANGLEMENTS
Chapter 5. Russian and German Ideas of the West in the Long Nineteenth Century: Entanglements of Spatial Identities
Denis Sdvizkov
Chapter 6. Orient and Occident, East and West in the Discourse of German Orientalists, 1790-1930
Douglas T. McGetchin
Chapter 7. German Jews and the West: Identification, Dissimilation and Marginalization around the Turn of the Century
Stefan Vogt
PART III: LIBERAL AMBIGUITIES AND STRATEGIES OF 'WESTERNIZATION'
Chapter 8. Between East and West? A Liberal Dilemma, 1830-48/49
Benjamin Schröder
Chapter 9. Before the West: Rudolf von Gneists English Utopia
Frank Lorenz Müller
Chapter 10. Weimar and the West: Liberal Social Thought in Germany, 1914-1933
Austin Harrington
Chapter 11. Germany and Western Democracies: The Spatialization of Ernst Fraenkels Political Thought
Riccardo Bavaj
PART IV: NATIONALIST SELF-CENTEREDNESS AND CONSERVATIVE ADAPTATIONS
Chapter 12. The West in German Cultural Criticism during the Long Nineteenth Century
Thomas Rohkrämer
Chapter 13. No Place for the West: National Socialism and the Defence of Europe
Philipp Gassert
Chapter 14. The West, Tocqueville, and West German Conservatism from the 1950s to the 1970s
Martina Steber
PART V: SOCIALISTS BETWEEN 'EAST' AND 'WEST'
Chapter 15. The West as a Paradox in German Social Democratic Thought: Britain as Counterfoil and Model, 1871-1945
Stefan Berger
Chapter 16. Bridge over Troubled Waters: German Left-Wing Intellectuals between East and West, 1945-49
Dominik Geppert
Chapter 17. Antipathy and Attraction to the West and Western Consumerism in the German Democratic Republic
Katherine Pence
Selected Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
