Palimpsests of romanticism in Austria and Poland

 Abstract

The relevance of the romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries for the concurrently unfolding rise of nationalism – itself tied closely to industrialization and the great transformation wrought by widening commodification and its ‘disembedding’ effects (Polanyi 2001 [1944]) – has been long established (e.g. Gellner 1998). More narrowly, romanticism is commonly thought of as a ‘counter-Enlightenment’, anti-rationalist philosophy manifest in artistic writings and political positions critical of the social changes of modernity, and romanticism has also been tied to the racial ‘logic’ and divisions that have continued to haunt Western modernity (e.g. Malik 1996: 73-75). In this paper, we argue that just as the romantic movement was a necessary though certainly not single-handedly sufficient condition for the nationalist movements of the 19th century, an understanding of the workings of contemporary neo-nationalisms, “new” racisms and, in part, the growing tide of EU-scepticism benefits from an appreciation of the romantics’ continuing legacy. Put differently, if romanticism was a reaction against some of industrial modernity’s defining features, we here argue that current reactions against post-industrial liquid modernity (Bauman 2000) also display some prominent, and other not so prominent features of (neo-) romanticism. We thus call for more philosophical longue durée in the study of contemporary (European) politics, and in particular for a theoretical sensitivity to how some of the defining assumptions, claims and sentiments of the earlier romantics recur in, and inform, contemporary protest politics on the (far) right. Empirically, we make this argument through select ‘snapshots’, mainly – though not exclusively – of contemporary Polish and Austrian politics. Conceptually, we suggest that in order to illuminate both continuities and important discontinuities and contemporary re-appropriations of romanticism, a new theoretical terminology is needed: we find this in what we describe and analyze as palimpsests of romanticism to capture how contemporary neo-nationalism selectively re- and over-writes older, romantic assumptions to do with ontology, politics and history.
 
 
Marek Kaźmierczak received his Ph.D. from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (2006) and habilitation from University of Warsaw (2013). He works as Associate Professor in the Faculty of European Culture of AMU in Gniezno, where he is also Deputy Director. His fields of interest include semiology of culture, contemporary philosophy, media studies, and the representations of the Holocaust in digital media and popular culture. His most recent books (in Polish) are Literature in the Network of Texts (2008) and Auschwitz in the Internet. The Representations of the Holocaust in Popular Culture (2012).
 
Christian Karner is Associate Professor in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham. His work and publications centre on memory studies, ethnicity and nationalism (particularly through his long-standing research on Austria) and on urban sociology (in a joint project with David Parker). Christian's books include Writing History, Constructing Religion (2005, co-edited with James Crossley), Ethnicity and Everyday Life (2007), Negotiating National Identities (2011), and The Use and Abuse of Memory (2013, co-edited with Bram Mertens).