Post WW2 'abendland.' AI

Perplexity

Post WW2 "abendland"

In post‑WWII discourse, Abendland became a key ideological and symbolic term in (West) German and broader Christian Democratic thinking about “the West,” Europe, and anti‑communism.

Meaning of “Abendland”

Abendland literally means “evening land,” but in modern German usage it denotes the “Occident,” the Christian West, or Latin Western Europe. ​

It was opposed to Morgenland (“morning land”), a biblical term for the Orient and Eastern Christianity, so the pair marked a cultural‑religious, not just geographic, divide. ​

Interwar roots and Spengler

Oswald Spengler’s title Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) popularized the word as a grand civilizational category and linked it to a pessimistic philosophy of Western decline.

Catholic intellectuals reacted by constructing a specifically Catholic Abendland idea: a Christian West that rejected both secular Enlightenment liberalism and Spengler’s anti‑Christian cultural pessimism. ​

Post‑1945 Christian Democracy

After 1945, Christian Democrats in Germany, Italy, and France used Abendland as a symbol for a revived, Christian, unified Europe contrasted with both Soviet communism and American “materialism.”

The CDU in early postwar campaigns used slogans like “Rettet die abendländische Kultur” (“Save Occidental culture”), presenting the party as defender of Christian European civilization. ​

For figures like Konrad Adenauer, Abendland implied that Europe’s reconstruction must be spiritual and cultural as well as economic, and that European integration should rest on shared Christian‑Latin heritage rather than mere national sovereignty.

Relation to sovereignty, nationalism, and integration

In this discourse, Abendland was explicitly anti‑nationalist: it criticized both fascist/Nazi nationalism and the modern doctrine of the fully sovereign nation‑state as a kind of theological “heresy.” ​

Christian Democratic theorists framed Abendland as a supranational Christian community transcending individual states, which fed ideologically into early European integration (e.g., Schuman’s language about Europe and heresy of the nation‑state).

This Abendland narrative helped legitimize Westbindung (binding West Germany to Western Europe and the Atlantic world) in the early Federal Republic, against both nationalism and neutralist “third way” positions.

Later transformations and right‑wing reuse

By the late 1960s the classic Christian‑democratic Abendland discourse waned, but the term never disappeared entirely from European political language.

In the 21st century, it has been repurposed on the radical and nationalist right (e.g., AfD, PEGIDA, Austrian FPÖ) as part of “Christian Europe against Islam” rhetoric, with slogans like “Abendland in Christenhand” and the PEGIDA acronym (“Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamicisation of the Abendland”).

In short, post‑WWII Abendland names a contested vision of “the West”: first a Catholic‑Christian, anti‑nationalist, pro‑integration idea shaping Christian Democracy and early European integration, and later a culturalist, defensive slogan on the nationalist right.