Suchergebnisse

This article examines the Spanish and German contexts of philosopher José Ortega y Gasset's Europeanizing cultural mission before the First World War, culminating in his first published book Meditations on Quixote (1914). Ortega saw in the genius of Cervantes' Don Quixote both a source of latent European cultural ideals preserved in Spain's past and an exemplar of tragicomic heroism fit to defend these ideals in the face of twentieth-century modernity. Using Georg Simmel's concept of 'the tragedy of culture' as a way to give shape to the problem of decadence and the idea of cultural salvation in Spain and Europe in and around 1914, I show how Ortega seized on the German ideal of Bildung as the European cultural ideal to regenerate Spain, after which Spain would save Europe. Here the idea of Europe served as both the vehicle and the aim of cultural salvation. By analysing Ortega's project of overcoming decadence and saving culture in the decade leading up to the war, I show how the discourse of European identity took shape in relation to the search for the authentic identities of self and nation.

This article interprets Thomas Mann's Reflections of an Unpolitical Man (1918) as a document of the reimagining of self, nation and Europe during the First World War. In this messy and mostly forgotten work, Thomas Mann created an identity that he adopted for the rest of his life: the artist-intellectual as the self-overcoming decadent and saviour of culture. He did this by mapping his heroic vision of Germany as the saviour of Europe onto his own artistic ethic of the self-overcoming decadent. I show how the Reflections allowed Mann to probe the unanswered questions operative in his own work and in his conflicting identities as an artist, an intellectual, a German and a European. Constructing the crisis of modernity according to the opposition of décadence v. Bildung, Mann called for a particularly German and artistic irony to mediate this conflict and preserve the authentic identities of self, nation and Europe. This heroic irony – used as a conservative defence of German culture during the war – would become, ironically, the basis of Mann's endorsement of the Weimar Republic in 1922 and his future identity as a defender of liberal Europe.