Kultur and the World War (1996)

Abstract

The two decades that preceded the outbreak of the Great War present a puzzling blend of vastly expanded international cultural contact and enormously increased nationalist chauvinism. Bitter colonial rivalries and the British–German naval arms race broke out just as Europeans of the middling sort were seeing more of one another than ever before, in photographs and at international exhibitions, by means of faster, cheaper transportation routes, and the expanding embrace of the popular press. Commerce among European and American scholars accelerated as international conferences and scholarly organizations grew in number. The reverse side of this expansion, however, was the demand for equal access to information (and, as we have seen, equivalent ownership of objects) by national groups and institutions previously dependent on others for scientific and cultural materials. Paradoxically, as scholarly advancement became more and more dependent upon international contact, it also came increasingly to be regarded as a national bragging point. On the eve of the First World War, then, Kultur and Wissenschaft were both more international in scope and more nationalist in sentiment than ever before. Coinciding with and complexly related to the rise of this curious mixture of extended contact and narrowed mindset was the increasing activity of the German state in cultural affairs, as patron, organizer, and publicizer. During the tenures of Richard Schöne and Friedrich Althoff, the Reich had vastly increased both its generosity and its control in the cultural sphere. But the state had not acted alone or without encouragement from cultural interest groups that saw the state as the guarantor of scholarly autonomy against the incursion of party-political demands (vom Brocke 1980: 89). In fact, much of the cultural reorganization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took place at the insistence of commercial interests or para-academic organizations such as the Prussian Academy of Sciences, the Deutsche-Archäologisches Institut (DAI), and the Royal Museums. Of course, these groups did not turn to the state merely to avoid the politicization of their causes; specialization and escalating international rivalries required high levels of investment to build laboratories and provide research materials, particularly in ‘applied’ fields such as electro-magnetics, medicine, and agronomy.