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Contemporary Cultural Theory

GERMAN CULTURALISM: HERMENEUTICS AND HISTORICISM

In its German formation, what we have termed ‘culturalism’ has
three relatively distinct aspects: Romanticism, historicism and
hermeneutics. All three developed by way of reaction against the
variously rationalist, mechanistic and neo-classicist ideals that
had characterised the eighteenth-century European Enlighten-
ment and its political articulation in the American and French
Revolutions. The term ‘Romanticism’ refers very generally to this
broad international movement against the Enlightenment, as it
appeared in the arts and in philosophy. For our purposes, its most
important thematics were a view of the artist as a uniquely
creative individual, a genius and visionary, and a belief in the
superiority of art, as Kultur, over the mechanism of everyday
civilisation. The key figures in German Romanticism included
Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), Novalis (1772–1801) and, most
important of all, Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832).

Historicism
The term ‘historicism’ originally referred to the view that histor-
ical events can properly be understood only in the immediate
context of their occurrence, rather than as instances of some kind
of universal, abstract theory, such as that propounded by the
Enlightenment. This stress on the specificity of human historical
contexts echoes the more generally Romantic preoccupation with
human individuality. Moreover, these immediate contexts were
often seen as distinctly ‘national’, so that historicism often seemed
readily compatible with cultural nationalism. In principle,
Romanticism need be neither historicist nor nationalist: Goethe
himself hoped that the ‘increasing communication between
nations’ would produce a ‘world literature’, Weltliteratur, capable
of superseding individual national literatures (Goethe, 1973, p. 7).
But German culturalism tended, nonetheless, to connect cultural
specificity and uniqueness with the native language, and with
notions of nationality. The key figure here was almost certainly
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who sought to define and
legitimise the autonomy and individuality of German culture as

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