Nikolaus Hasse’s essay “What is European?” – Culture

In a rousing speech on the “idea of ​​Europe” in 2004, George Steiner linked it to the establishment of the coffee house: “As long as there are coffee houses, the European idea has a content”. How nice! So civil, casual, low-threshold, but at the same time so rich in tradition, literary, urban – one automatically thinks of Vienna and Paris, of Karl Kraus and the Sartre-Beauvoir couple. Even Emanuel Macron quoted Steiner’s motive. Too bad that the coffee house is actually a Muslim-Oriental invention that was imported from Mecca and Cairo via Damascus and Istanbul to Venice and Vienna in the early modern period, a classic example of cultural transfer.

Dag Nikolaus Hasse, who wrote this example in a very stimulating little book on the big question “What is European?” cited, is Middle Latin and Arabist specializing in the history of science. That predestines him for precise counter calculations when the big Europe equations are opened. They are equations that combine a geographical area with “ideas”, moral and cultural “values” and certain traditions in order to gain an offer for identification. From the Atlantic to the Urals, from the Bosporus to Gibraltar, great syntheses – Athens, Rome, Jerusalem – or civilizational achievements – enlightenment, reason, human rights, separation of powers – are said to have been won and become predominant.

Decolonization and de-romanticization are urgently needed for our ideas about Europe

The result is canonical lists of books and works of art, but also of practices and institutions that are supposed to make up “Europe”. But the equations don’t work out, Hasse shows. Either these ideal conglomerates do not cover the whole of Europe, or they are not exclusively European. As a result, that may be trivial, but what is interesting is how Hasse spells this out in such a small amount of facts.

Hasse arranges his arguments under the headings of “decolonization” and “de-romanticization”, both of which are urgently needed for his ideas about Europe. Decolonization means the dismantling of the pride of reason against supposedly less enlightened cultures and parts of the world, which are exoticized in this way – the notorious “Orientalism” is the most glaring example. Here the connoisseur of Arabic and Indian science and the lover of Chinese traditions have an easy game. Such enlightening self-arrogance only inherited the religious front position of the late Turkish war around 1700. But it had an effect on the missionary features of European colonialism, in contrast to the “savages” and the “civilized”.

The Enlightenment was followed by the formation of romantic traditions, which again defined Europe as Christianity, but less denominationally than culturally and aesthetically. This increases to the “occidental” Athens-Rome-Jerusalem myth, the connection of Greek art and science with Roman law and the state, as well as the Christian conception of love for one’s neighbor and human equality before God. Big chord, pedal low.

But “Jerusalem” or more precisely “Golgotha” inherits the ancient Orient. Greek culture left most of its traces in the desert fringes from Mesopotamia to North Africa; its sources were already due to oriental hiking experts who brought alphabet letters and mathematics. “Rome” took up this, but also ruled in Africa and the Middle East. And “charity”, ethical ideas of reciprocity, can be demonstrated in numerous non-European cultures from India to Africa. In the end, the most suggestive European celebrations – Hasse presents Milan Kundera and Rémi Brague in addition to Steiner – always show only particular depictions of individual spiritual homes. The Catholic Brague excludes Lutheranism, the Czech Kundera the Orthodox East. There is still no talk of rich European Islam.

But some of Hate’s victories are too easy. Because one could argue – and has done – that what makes Europe so special is the tension between unity and diversity, for example in its multi-part, modern state system, its associated multi-confessionalism, i.e. more of a structure than a body of ideas. And if Hasse maintains against the caricature of religious absolutism in Islam that it never knew ecclesiastical rulers in the manner of the European church states, then the answer could be: The churchization of religion in Europe (i.e. its Roman) has the prerequisites for separation and secularization Created: You can conclude contracts with a church, but not with a religion that is intertwined with the world of life. And the legalization of the separation then also facilitates the liberation of the worlds of life from religious requirements, think of women and gay emancipation. That would mean Heinrich August Winkler’s concept of the “West”, which Hasse is not concerned with at all.

Hasse rejects cultural amalgamations and the dominant culture; he pleads for cooling off

What is his alternative? Hasse would like to return to a spatial concept of Europe that the Middle Ages already had. But at the same time he would like to pluralize the spaces as areas of the most diverse cultural practices. As examples, he cites the Ionic column order (spread as far as the Ganges), the sonata form in music (initially in Austria, Hungary, Germany), the medical doctrine of the four juices (from Tibet to Latin Europe) or the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew prayers , which extended over southern France to Tripoli. None of these spaces are congruent, the edges become open, the overlaps seem to be almost infinite.

This amounts to an enormous expansion of the canon – away from Steiner’s Proust-Musil-Beethoven Europe to completely different mixtures, which could also include Nordic heavy metal. In the end, Hasse sees the unity of such diversity exemplified in the multi-ethnic cities that have always existed. Hasse explicitly does not call them “multicultural” because that would suggest amalgamations that he rejects just as vehemently as the idea of ​​a hegemonic “leading culture”. Hasse prefers the cool idea of ​​a legally ordered “coexistence” in which it is not “loyalties” but “obligations” that secure the coexistence of the different. Judith Shklar’s treatise amounts to this distinction.

A Europe as a legal community, not as a community of values, is Hasse’s result, which does not allow even the smallest piece of tradition to be lost, does not limit its own intellectual potential and does not exclude that of foreign cultural areas. Different things stay good. In this way, “Europe” changes from a warm to a cold term. But as it is in the oriental-European café: Here the conversation should go into the next round.