Kulturkritik und Utopie. Giuseppe Antonio Borgeses Europa – vom Liberalnationalismus zum Liberalhumanismus

The fact that many ideas of Europe emerge from the spirit of critique and crisis even before the interwar period is shown in this essay, which deals with Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Thomas Mann's son-in-law. The cultural critique of Borgese's early journalistic writings, which were still liberal-nationalist in character and written in Berlin on the eve of the First World War, is initially followed in the early 1920s by a sober diagnosis of the times, expressed in Borgese's first novel Roman Rubè, about interventionism and budding fascism in Italy. Borgese's critical view of Europe then intensified in later years in American exile, culminating in the anti-fascist, liberal-humanist utopia of a World Foundation, which he drafted together with other exiled intellectuals immediately after the Second World War.