Negative Cosmopolitanism by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Embedded Cosmopolitanism: Tolstoyan and Goethean Ideas of World Literature during the Two World Wars

Dina Gusejnova

In light of the human tragedies of the twentieth century, any historically sensitive engagement with the notion of cosmopolitanism today must to some extent begin ex negativo. It is not just the case that international institutions such as the League of Nations were “lights” of Enlightenment that failed to provide lasting peace.1 Cosmopolitan ideals had themselves become instruments of inhuman practice. Leading thinkers of each generation used cosmopolitan ideas of humanity to formulate rival conceptions of cultural hegemony, serving the aims of the Axis powers and the Allies, the states behind the Iron Curtain and those in front of it, and non-governmental organizations like the YMCA or the Carnegie foundations. To complicate matters further, in the twentieth century, the very terms “cosmopolitanism” and “cosmopolite” were instrumentalized in Nazi and Soviet propaganda, where they were embedded in anti-Semitic discourse.2

Nonetheless, despite this complicated history, I believe that a return to the history of twentieth-century internationalism through the lens of cosmopolitan ideals is needed in order to clarify the entangled relationship between nationalism, internationalism, and transnational agency in a way that transcends the optic of the Cold War. In this paper, then, I use a series of case studies to explore how institutions and practices of cultural internationalism in the first half of the twentieth century adapted cosmopolitan ideals to a variety of goals: national propaganda, and communist and liberal internationalism, among others. I am also interested in retracing cosmopolitan thought through another sense of the “negative”: as photographic counter-image to the reality we want to see in print. Some of the activities of intellectuals who were using ideas to further the war efforts of particular governments or non-governmental associations, and the existence of permanently exceptional institutions such as the prisoner of war camp, also unintentionally led to cosmopolitanization. This is particularly true in the use of world literature as a tool for re-educating the enemy, which will be the subject of the second half of this essay.

Prior to the twentieth century, intellectuals had begun to play an increasing role in forming new social identities that transcended the elite republic of letters, as well as imperial or national boundaries. New, interimperial cultural affinities were forged from political journalism in response to particular historical moments, which divided European publics along ethnic or confessional lines in place of national or imperial forms of patriotism. This allowed intellectuals to phrase the reporting of atrocities committed by and against states in terms that called for international solidarity and humanitarian intervention. Instances of this include the American Civil War; the Ottoman imperial authorities’ actions against the Bulgarians in 1873; anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia in the 1900s; the German atrocities in Belgium during the First World War; the famines in Russia; or the crisis after the bombing of Guernica in 1937. These events, many decades before the Holocaust, called on intellectuals across Europe and in the transatlantic world to unite in their assessment of forms

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