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‘To Moscow, to Moscow!’ This is what the Three Sisters wanted in Chekhov’s play of that name. Moscow was the place where one could find a livelihood, entertainment and men, a good life, in short. If the three sisters had been stranded not in some Russian province or other but in a German province, Lübeck, for example, their yearnings would undoubtedly have been directed at cities such as Rome, Venice or Florence. For entertainment, handsome men and beautiful women are to be found, so we imagine, in the south. The good life there is sweet because in contrast to Moscow, the sun always shines in the south. ‘That is where the compass needle of happiness is pointing,’ according to cultural historian Dieter Richter. ‘We live in the west and dream of the south.’
A ‘History of a Cardinal Point of the Compass’ as cultural history? In the event, Richter uses no compass to measure parts of the globe, but instead argues that cardinal directions are always also ‘imaginative constructs of space, pointers to the compass rose of civilization, coordinates of a mental geography’. Thus in The South, as in his earlier studies of Naples (2005) or Vesuvius (2007), he strolls through space by ambling through time. He collects items from mythology, religion, literature, art and philosophy, describes them succinctly and interprets them sensitively.
Thus the individual chapters discuss the south in antiquity or Christianity, the Age of Discovery, exoticism and decadence, the South Sea and the South Pole. Of ancient Rome, for example, we learn that all southern creatures are distinguished by their extraordinary sexual activity, an activity evident in all species so that even the flora are far more luxuriant than elsewhere. ‘Hence the saying universally known in Greece: There’s always something new from Africa’, according to Pliny’s Natural History.
Chekhov’s three sisters want to go to Moscow – and never reach the goal of their dreams. We westerners want to journey to the south – and we cross the Alps in droves. Richter discusses the masses of our day, who are drawn to Italy, Dalmatia and the Balearics or Canaries. And he shows that the educational tourism of the eighteenth century can be regarded as the precursors of this modern travel movement.
Moreover, of the countless travellers who people this book, one man of the eighteenth century stands out: the Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755). Montesquieu knew England, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy at first hand and it is he who is recognized by the history books as the inventor of the division of powers in the governments of western democracies.
In Dieter Richter’s book, Montesquieu makes his appearance as the inventor of climate theory. For the entire political philosophy of this champion of the Enlightenment from the south-west of France is predicated on the conviction that ‘the rule of the climate takes precedence over all other forms of rule.’ In the middle of his chief work, The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu investigates the influence of the different temperatures in the north and the south on the minds and character of human beings.
‘The cold air,’ he writes, ‘draws the ends of the outer fibres of our body together; this increases their vigour and favours the return of blood from the outer limbs to the heart…. Therefore we have more strength in colder climes. This increased strength must produce many effects, for example, greater self-confidence, that is to say, greater courage; greater awareness of superiority, that is to say, less vindictiveness; greater faith in one’s security, that is to say, more candidness, less suspicion, cunning and slyness.’
How much truth is there in all this? Enough, at any rate, to ensure an unending series of successors eager to follow in Montesquieu’s footsteps. Montesquieu’s southern man was mentally indolent and lazy – a view that still has its adherents today. But even among Montesquieu’s own contemporaries, there were those who turned such ideas on their head. For Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), for example, the great archaeologist, the beauty of southerners was exemplary, albeit there were gradations: ‘Neapolitans are more subtle and sly than Romans, and Sicilians more so than either.’ The German-language libraries of the nineteenth century are bursting with books expressing their love of Italy – and also their hatred. The south was deeply religious – and extravagantly libertarian.
Every detail in Richter’s cultural mosaic is scrupulously documented. In that sense, it is all accurate. However, the more you gaze at the mosaic, the more the image of the south begins to blur. It is amazing to see how the western Enlightenment can make use of scientific tools to prove that the same people as both lazy and exemplary! Richter makes the historical and the simultaneous parade before our eyes - and in so doing entertains us while conveying a message that is typical of the cultural history of the present: in short, he puts the south into perspective. There turn out to be two, three or even four different souths.
Anyone who bears in mind that the ‘free’ west, the ‘rational’ north and the ‘barbaric’ east are therefore only relatively free, rational and barbaric, must perforce agree with a question that Dieter Richter poses towards the end of his book. After a brief digression about the consequences of climate change, he asks: ‘Might it not be the case that north, south, east and west will one day acquire characteristics quite different from those we have associated with them ever since the end of the last Ice Age?’
René Aguigah
April 2010
[Translated by
Rodney Livingstone]
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