The Germans and the East

The “Germans and the East”

421 The฀“Germans฀and฀the฀East” Back฀to฀Normality—But฀What฀Is฀Normal? ◆฀฀฀Eva฀Hahn฀and฀Hans฀Henning฀Hahn฀฀฀◆ “In my view, humanizing and balancing these desires is preferable to trying to abolish the one in favour of the other or to denying both in the name of some abstract cosmopolitan ideal.”1 In his book on Anglomania in Europe, Ian Buruma tells a story about his visit to Walhalla, the large temple on the banks of Danube near Regensburg; it was built in 1807 in the classical Greek style, and inside, along the walls, as the author put it “ranked like soldiers, are marble busts of great German personalities.”To his surprise, he did not find Shakespeare among the many marble busts of gods in toga—“Gods of the German tongue,” as he put it—exhibited there. But why should he expect to find Shakespeare there? This is his answer: “For, by the time Walhalla was built, Shakespeare had become a German playwright.”2 Ian Buruma describes the period of Shakespearomania in Germany around 1800 and how it happened that Shakespeare’s universal appeal was ascribed to the Geist of the German language. He reminds us that Schlegel’s famous translation of Shakespeare has been hailed not just as a translation, but as a transmutation; with this linguistic metamorphosis, a new German creation was born out of Shakespeare’s words that proved to some Germans the superiority of their language. They claimed that Shakespeare’s genius had been rediscovered in German, that he really should have been German and, indeed, was German. In contrast to the English language, Buruma believes, the German language became the object of a nativist cult in the early nineteenth century.3 Ian Buruma’s Walhalla story reminds us of one of the most troublesome problems in modern German history: attitudes towards the eastern part of the European 422 ◆ EVA HAHN AND HANS HENNING HAHN continent. While many Germans believed that their culture flourished wherever the German language was spoken, the concept of the “German East” similarly inspired the hearts and minds of many Germans very much like the Shakespearomania some decades earlier. Therefore, the idea of Christianization, medieval colonization, Enlightenment, or industrialization was viewed as a way in which the Germans supposedly brought the superior Western culture and civilization to the less “civilized and cultured” neighbors in the “East.” The German nativist cult of language has not been shared by all Europeans, and this is why when, say, Czechs visit Walhalla or read German history books, they are often surprised to find a great number of personalities there whom they usually consider Czech “Gods,” in very much the same way as Shakespeare is generally viewed as being an English—and not a German—playwright. Some Czechs dislike the Germans’ exhibiting Czech-born “Gods” in their history books as if they had been Germans, such as Emperor Charles IV, the great general Albrecht Waldstein (Wallenstein), the famous botanist Gregor Mendel, or the technician Josef Ressel. Many Czechs do not like Germans talking about the University of Prague as the “oldest German university” or the history of the Bohemian lands as a part of “German history.” Although Czechs no longer worry too much about the Walhalla, their dislike for German attitudes towards Czech history has been growing in the past few years. This has come as a surprise to many, who point to the widely spread acknowledgement in Germany in recent years, that the “German East” has been lost due to the two great wars of the twentieth century. Czech anxieties focus instead on the fact that German minds still do not seem to be troubled by how “German” the “German East” had become. Hans-Ulrich Wehler expressed this attitude in a SPIEGEL interview, stressing that no one lays claim to the former eastern territories any longer: “These territories which had been inhabited by Germans for centuries are lost to us.”4 Like many others, not even the historian Wehler raised the question why territories such as the so-called Sudetenland should have been considered as “ours” in the first place; his somewhat threatening worries that, in the view of the EU-Enlargement, the Germans might ask themselves why they should be accepting the “children of the perpetrators” in the EU did little to contribute to the dissipation of the Czech anxieties. Such anxieties cannot be overlooked. Even some of the leading Czech historians have repeatedly voiced their worries with respect to what they consider “endangerment...