ZNavid Kermani is initially skeptical: “How did you come to me of all people on this topic?” A cautious reaction to the request for a conversation about what “sophistication” means today. The honest, but coaxing-sounding answer would be that he, the author who has received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and habilitated orientalist, is considered an extremely cultivated person. Someone who cultivates his audience with books, reports, commentaries and speeches, who makes himself heard in a loud world with soft tones.
He stands out at a time when, as he himself noted a few years ago in “Between the Koran and Kafka”, educational arrogance has turned into its opposite: “pride in one’s own ignorance”. During this time, manners are often confused with mannerisms, vulgarity and transgression become currency; just think of social media, reality TV or Trump. Sophistication is under suspicion: as elitist and condescending, as fake and artificial.
On the other hand, the fact that at least parts of the audience miss witty tones is not only suggested by the wistful, enthusiastic comments that accumulate on YouTube under interviews with Roger Willemsen or Anne-Sophie Mutter. When a broader public first became acquainted with Robert Habeck, an intellectually grounded sophistication was possibly part of the appeal of this writer, studied philosophers and philologists, who received his doctorate with a thesis “on the generic theoretical justification of literary aesthetics” – albeit a sophistication that Three-day beard and the habitus of the “authentic” could be considered relaxed and therefore also permissible today. Or you just listen when certain friends talk about their latest discoveries in the market hall or at the wine shop: if there is no desire behind it “through practice, training, treatment or similar. to be well-groomed, refined” – as the dictionary defines “cultivated”. Perhaps the notion of sophistication just needs an update.
Bourgeois and aristocratic standards are passé
Culture has never been measured by how many operas or books a person knows (although education is very helpful in self-cultivation) or by picking up the right fork when it comes to cutlery. Being cultivated is not something that can be measured. But as soon as it is attested to someone, it has something judgmental about it; if it is not granted to someone, and only implicitly, it acquires something presumptuous, exclusive. This presumably also explains why, especially in Germany, where equality is a central value, there is a marked foreignness, at least in relation to a traditionally shaped sophistication: because many find that it has long been used by certain milieus, the supposedly “better people”, to to distinguish oneself from others as supposedly superior, and exhaust oneself anyway in an empty form.