Kulturmacht ohne Kompass: Deutsche auswärtige Kulturbeziehungen im 20. Jahrhundert by Frank Trommler (review)

The aptly titled book Kulturmacht ohne Kompass is about the tension between the power of Germany after 1871 and the much broader realities of German culture, whether in Europe (especially in Eastern Europe) or in the Western hemisphere. Frank Trommler is a professor of German literature, but this is very much a historian’s book that belongs on the shelf next to Berghahn, Jarausch, and Bartov. It is a book that everyone with an interest in German culture has unconsciously been looking for— a book that puts the incompatible elements of German culture together in a single, seamless narrative. It is a massive book, but one that holds the reader’s attention page after page. “German culture” is a surprisingly multivalent notion, but Trommler does justice to its complexities over the course of a century of dramatic changes in German political and cultural life. Although he addresses the political and administrative creation and implementation of cultural policy, Trommler is also concerned with interactions between cultures throughout Europe and the world. This transnational history deals not simply with the administration of cultural politics (through institutions such as daad and Humboldt) but also with the many levels of culture and cultural relations in all matters German.

Trommler divides his subject into six chapters: two on the new Reich and the situation of German culture around 1900 and four on the two world wars and their aftermaths. Most of the book is devoted to the first half of the twentieth century, and it is largely a book about war and its impact. Trommler emphasizes the regionalism and internationalism of German culture before 1914, at a time when elites thought of German culture primarily in terms of high culture and modern science. In the international exhibitions of this period, two contradictory conceptions of German culture that set the tone for the new century became prominent: the German creation of a modern style in the applied arts and the ominous concept of a Kulturmacht, personified by Kaiser Wilhelm II. The role of the Werkbund is a prominent theme throughout the book; Trommler follows the progress of German culture from being associated primarily with its military force to a culture associated with its modernizing influence on everyday life. The First World War intensified the identification of German culture with the military power of the German Reich, bringing out the dislike for Germans elsewhere in the world and identifying German culture with barbarism. Trommler follows the activities of German intellectuals inside and outside the Reich and the sympathy of Jews for the central powers until the revolutions of 1917 and the Balfour Declaration, and he points to the failures of German policy, especially regarding science and Eastern Europe.

The Weimar Republic set out from the enormous decline of Germany’s position in the world of science and scholarship in a political culture of confrontation that did not allow for a stable agreement about culture. Despite the lack of a coherent cultural-political mission, the new Republic made a strong effort to move toward a more democratic style and more international cooperation, including the creation of the Goethe Institute to represent German culture in many foreign locations. Bismarck had foreseen no role for the foreign office in promoting German culture, but a cultural section was added to the foreign office in 1920, as some leaders attempted to present Germany as an intellectual and spiritual leader rather than a Kulturmacht.

Hitler’s regime began, of course, with the exile of much of Germany’s intellectual and scientific community, and Trommler provides an impressively dispassionate account of German propaganda during the Second World War. He is right to treat Hitler’s cultural politics as seriously as that of any other period of the twentieth century, if only to show the links to preexisting institutions as well as to continuities into the Federal Republic, and the book drives home the degree to which Nazi cultural policy was directed against [End Page...