By Wolfgang Schmale Cultural Transfers Have Occurred in All Historical Periods, but It Is Possible to Discern Trends and Distinc

by Wolfgang Schmale Cultural transfers have occurred in all historical periods, but it is possible to discern trends and distinct periods. It is only through these transfers that history can become European (or global). Concentrations and accumulations of these transfers can be under- stood as a transcultural history of Europe and ultimately as Europeanization. The entities transferred can be defined in concrete terms as culturemes and structuremes. In many cases, the most diverse cultural references, which make concrete transfer easier and more efficient, are available. Cultural transfers continuously give rise to new coherences, which in some cases connect with one another over large areas – resulting in macro-coherences or clusters of coherences, as one finds in the context of the process referred to as Europeanization. However, these coherences can also remain restricted to local areas, without creating further "con- tagions". Cultural transfer research makes the rigid, linearly delimited, and strictly systemic elements of each cultural phenomenon permeable, thereby revealing the hybrid and composite nature of cultural phenomena. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Europe and the Nation as Historiographical Frames of Reference 2. Cultural Transfer Research: Approach and Foundations 3. Macro-History and Micro-History of Cultural Transfers 4. Cultural Transfer Research in the Context of Other Cultural Sciences Approaches 5. Outlook 6. Appendix 1. Literature 2. Notes Indices Citation Europe was defined as a culture in the singular for the first time in the 18th century.1 The concept of Europe (ᇄ Media Link #ab) as an entity no longer depended on Europe being equated with Christianity. Instead, Europe was viewed as a historical and cultural entity which played a specific role in human history. Essentially, Europe was viewed as leading the way in terms of progress. The definition of Europe was therefore still essentialist in nature and remained based on an essentialist geographical definition of the continent, which also informed definitions of the borders of Europe's culture and history. Ÿ1 Geographical essentialism made it possible to integrate a diversity of states, languages, religions, civilizations and nations in spite of Europe being perceived as an entity. The idea of Europe was subdivided by imagined (ᇄ Media Link #ac) and often cartographi- cally visualized linear borders, which defined the sub-entities of states, national cultures, languages, and confessions or religions. But these borders did not call into question the imagined commonality in human-historical progress. Ÿ2 Gradually, however, asymmetrical concepts entered into Europe's happy concept of itself. The slower pace of modernization in east-central Europe, southeastern Europe and in eastern Europe as a whole resulted in a feeling of superiority in western Europe and central Europe (now referred to as the "West" (ᇄ Media Link #ad)). The "West" was generally industrialized (ᇄ Media Link #ae) and transformed by the effects of the French Revolution (ᇄ Media Link #af) and the Napoleonic era. The nation-state began to become the dominant paradigm and became linked with constitutionalism, which contributed to the stabilization of this new type of state. Throughout the West, the pre-revolutionary feudal society was transformed into a post-revolutionary society of citizens. Ÿ3 In the "East", on the other hand, the traditional social structure governed by the landowning aristocracy remained far more dominant for far longer. In general, industrialization did not play a significant role in the East. After the partitions of Poland (ᇄ Media Link #ag), three empires ruled eastern Europe: the Russian Empire, the Austrian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Initially at least, nei- ther the nation-state nor constitutionalism could establish themselves in these empires. This divergence between western and eastern Europe also manifested itself in other indicators of modernization (ᇄ Media Link #ah): literacy (ᇄ Media Link #ai), diversifica- tion of the system of education (into primary and secondary levels, with third-level institutions which provided a range of distinct courses and studies, which were either general or professional training), the reduction of differences between rural and urban areas, the rapid and pervasive technologizing of everyday life, the expansion and development of the various kinds of infrastructure, and others. There was a degree of convergence between western and eastern Europe during the second half of the 19th century, but the asymmetrical gaze of western Europe on eastern Europe had become a long-established habit by then. An increasingly prevalent racism (ᇄ Media Link #ak) denigrated the Slavs and reinforced the imagined hierarchies. Ÿ4 The collapse of two of the empires in eastern Europe – the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire – and the transfor- mation of the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union, the instability of the nation-states that were founded under the peace treaties of 1918/1919 and pervasive political and ideological conflicts (which gave rise to frequent violence) did not discredit the idea of Europe as a culture in the singular, as described above, but this idea no longer corresponded to the objective reality. Ÿ5 However, one concept did gain general currency throughout Europe: the nation-state with its assumed coterminosity of ethnic group, state territory and national culture. Though initially a fiction, by 1945 the culturally and ethnically homogeneous nation-state was made a grim reality by means of ethnic cleansing, expulsions (ᇄ Media Link #al) and the Holocaust. Nearly 70 years later, mi- gration (ᇄ Media Link #an) and other factors have reduced the presumed homogeneity of nation-states in 1945 to fiction again, though states continue to assert this fiction, albeit in a milder and – in most cases – less aggressive form than before. Ÿ6 As a result, the nation-state has been an essential frame of reference in historiography. The view of Europe (ᇄ Media Link #ao) has been, and continues to be, defined by the conglomeration of nation-states which remains predominant in Europe. At the same time, over the last three decades various methodological approaches have been employed which challenge assumptions regarding the nation-state without denying the influence which the nation-state has had. Cultural transfer research is one such approach. Ÿ7 Among the seminal texts of cultural transfer research are a number of articles published by Michel Espagne (*1952) (ᇄ Media Link #ap) and Michael Werner (*1946) (ᇄ Media Link #aq) in the mid-1980s.2 Both authors pointed out the connection between cultural transfer research and research into colonial (ᇄ Media Link #ar) cultures, which, just a few years before the five-hundredth anniver- sary of the landing (ᇄ Media Link #as) of Christopher Columbus (c. 1451–1506) (ᇄ Media Link #at) in America, was in itself political. The attempt to research transfers between national-cultural spaces and between regional-cultural spaces was also political in nature. However, these cultural spaces were not treated as objective incontrovertible facts. Instead, the broadly held assumption that these spaces are incontrovertible facts, which is at the core of national myths in Europe, has been – and continues to be – con- tested, if not dissolved, by cultural transfer research. Ÿ8 To this extent, the approach of cultural transfer research is conceptually emancipatory and – to a certain degree – political in character. For this approach, effectively everything that is connected with the debordering of categories plays an important role, like for example interconnections and the formation of networks. This is stated most radically by Zygmunt Bauman (*1925) (ᇄ Media Link #au) in his book Liquid Modernity, in which he describes a "process of liquefaction" in the history of modernity and in contemporary history.3 Without making the approach of "Liquid Modernity" a child of cultural transfer research, he further developed the basic idea which the latter research had tried to implement during a period when the national frame of reference was still very prevalent in the historical cultural sciences, its primacy being supported by universities and other institutions. Then, as now, cultural transfer research focused on the "non-national" aspects of the national, on the genuinely intercultural or métissage character of every culture, which has been – and continues to be – systematically denied or excluded for national-political reasons. This also shifted the pa- rameters of "foreign cultural influence": The transfer of cultural references or, to put it materially, of culturemes or structuremes4 of various dimensions, becomes a basic technique of all European cultures, which are consequently – contrary to regional (ᇄ Media Link #av), national and continental (self-)identifications – always intercultural or métissage in character. The debate about so-called alien influences in the first half of the 20th century, however, which was often very ideologically coloured, assumed the existence of fixed cultural identities, to which these influences were – depending on one's ideological standpoint – either a danger or enriching. This attitude remains common to this day, and there should be no illusions concerning a supposedly fundamentally positive attitude towards that which is "alien" in the culture. Ÿ9 Cultural transfer research can therefore have an enlightening side, which remains useful and appropriate. This means

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