Abstract

Criticism of ‘the West’ and of ‘Western civilization’ in Germany in the early 20th century is generally most familiar today as a conservative force of the age. It is well-known that at the outbreak of war in August 1914 a longstanding German complex of resentment of the Western European powers exploded in a call to arms. Yet it needs to be stressed that not all prominent German bourgeois writers endorsed a wholly militant reading of the motif of German national-cultural ‘protest at the West’. By 1918 an array of voices could come to discern another kind of salient work of contention that refused apology for any kind of violent Kulturkrieg. The thesis defended in this article is that in sophisticated humanistic writing of the era, a German mood of antagonism with the West represents not a regressive ideology but the productive and intelligent outcome of a longstanding preeminence of philosophical questioning in German academic life since the later 19th century about European world pictures and their claims to universal validity on the stage of world history. A range of statements are shown here to anticipate debates of the present day about ‘late’, ‘reflexive’ or ‘post-Eurocentric’ conditions of Western modernity