Intellectual Potential from the Other Side of Europe's Colonial and Nationalist Past: Cultural Science/Kulturwissenschaft around 1900 and its Relevance for Cultural Relations

Abstract

Currently cultural policy is increasingly determined by ideological controversies in which different theoretical programmes irreconcilably collide and Europe's history and culture - or more generally 'the West' - have become the most controversial subjects. After the past decades have witnessed a rapid sequence of different theories - critical theory, cultural studies, deconstructionism, new historicism, visual studies, post-colonialism, new materialism, to name just the most influential schools – the debate is presently becoming increasingly normative. It is morally charged by references to the European hegemonic and colonial past, and emotionally charged by identity politics and questions of belonging, based in ethnicity, gender, and origin. Against this background, this paper aims to remind us of the cultural-political and epistemological potential of a particular movement in intellectual history named Kulturwissenschaft (cultural science), which emerged from the reverse side of the nationalist and colonial European culture at the end of the nineteenth century and during the first third of the twentieth century, and was then abruptly interrupted by the rise of national socialism. Destroyed and dispersed in 1933, it today inspires artists and scholars in different regions and fields, who are attracted by the work of Kulturwissenschaft scholars - and, as a side effect, also gain a new interest in the German language.