English title: Dimitrie Gusti and his representations of Germany. A biographical and intellectual approach
https://doi.org/10.47743/RRISXX.2024-2-3
Issue: 2/2024
Pages: 43-71
Language: Romanian
Author: Ovidiu-Ștefan Buruiană
Abstract: Supported by autobiographical sources and the correspondence of contemporary personages, the present research aims to reconstruct Dimitrie Gusti’s representations of Germany. Having spent almost ten years studying at the universities of Berlin and Leipzig, the German cultural environment was a formative factor for him, and became the obligatory point of reference for his scientific work. In addition, it was the place where, thanks to a group of friends who were also studying in Germany, he decided on the meaning of his public endeavours for social change. By following Gusti’s public career, I aim to understand the dynamics of this affective and intellectual connection, which can be seen as part of a broader pattern of the dilution of German academic influence after the Great War.
Dimitrie Gusti was drawn by the prestige that the German state and German culture carried at the end of the 19th century. After 1918, in a public climate dominated by the demonization of Germany and the Germans due to the horrors of the conflict that had just ended, he renounced his links with the space that helped form his intellect and identity. In the 1930s, he was reluctant to embrace the new Germany, “Hitler’s Germany” as he later called it in his memoirs, despite the attempts of the German academic establishment to lure him onto a platform of collaboration, attempts which concealed a plan to impose on and influence societies in Central and South-Eastern Europe. Although proclaimed Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Leipzig (February 1935), Gusti was aware of the decline of the great German university system. And yet, even in the years of communism, he never renounced the traditional Germany of his youth, Goethe’s homeland and the country that had helped build European civilization.
Keywords: cultural representations, German university, public intellectual, cultural diplomacy