5

The Argument about Farce

THE FARCICAL AGE

But now we hear another exclamation: “Oh, if only we were less skeptical and could believe that there are world questions and that they are not a mirage!”1

—FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY (1877)

A Fraudulent Age

What the “crisis” had been to the eighteenth century, the “question” became to the nineteenth: the melodramatic yelp of publicists and politicians in search of an audience.² The smartest observers saw that a game was afoot. In 1864, Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, a German Catholic theologian and Bishop of Mainz, also known as the workers’ bishop, wrote a seminal text on the worker question. He declared that the so-called political questions of the day were creations of the “working class of the pen, for that part of it that talks and writes the most and as a result rules both podium and press,” in its own interest and for personal gain.³

For a long time critics like Ketteler were ignored by the frenzied querists, but eventually even they had to address the charge of insincerity, and then it was only a matter of time before the vacuity of “question”-mania became common knowledge. In the end, the age of questions did not go out with a national flourish, a progressive blast, a federative crescendo, or even a Nazi bang, but with an academic whimper.

The Birth of Questions Revisited

The first matter that should tip off the historian-detective to the possibility that the age of questions was steeped in fraud is the shadowy nature of their origins, and how the expectations of those who have sought their origins affected what they found. Consider Jacob Toury, for example, whose search for the origins of the Jewish question seem to have been undertaken in good faith. In contrast to many earlier commentators on the Jewish question who traced its origins as far back as the very origins of Judaism, Toury’s careful research brought him to the (correct) conclusion that the question was very much of nineteenth-century vintage.4 He also correctly observed that the matter of Jewish emancipation was discussed in several contexts—most notably, the French Revolution—long before a “Jewish question” ever emerged as such.⁵ His search was nonetheless colored by the Final Solution as the presumed telos of the Jewish question.

Ultimately he dated the slogan back to 1838, with two long essays published in German titled “The Jewish Question.”⁶ The anonymous author of the essays had argued that, on the basis of their essentially alien characteristics, Jews should not be given political equality in Prussia (as was being debated at the time).⁷ Toury concluded that the question itself was “an anti-Jewish battle-cry.” A small flurry of publications in 1842 in Germany used the term Judenfrage, all to argue against full and immediate equality, and thus, Toury added, “the slogan Judenfrage … initiated a new phase in the development of anti-Jewish bias. Its ideological connotations foreshadowed the development of those forms of antisemitism that became rampant in Western Europe at the end of the nineteenth century.”8 “Jews,” he declared, “could not concede the existence of a ‘Jewish question,’ ” which was already loaded with prejudice against them.

Toury’s work is interesting, but also misguided. Firstly, Germany, and specifically Prussia, was almost certainly not the birthplace of the Jewish question. In fact, it was rather a latecomer. A much earlier reference to the Jewish question appeared in 1830 in the London Times. It mentions a number of letters addressed to the Times, written to influence public opinion in advance of parliamentary debates on legislation calling for the removal of Jewish disabilities. “We must decline the insertion of any of the numerous letters on the Jewish question, about to be decided by Parliament,” we read in a brief notice “To Correspondents” from April 23 of that year.⁹ We do not know what these letters contained, but we do know that the matter to be decided in Parliament was inspired by the successful “solution” to the Catholic question through the repeal of Catholic disabilities a year earlier.¹⁰ As a successor to the Catholic question, the Jewish question appears in a wholly different light.

Yet because Toury was guided by a search for the origins of the Endlösung, he hit upon not only the wrong place (Prussia) but also the wrong time. His mistake was very likely an honest one. But of other querists who misdated the origin of a question, we cannot be so sure. Misdating was not incidental to the age but an essential feature of it from the very beginning. Indeed, the scholar who wishes to approach the age of questions by searching for its origins is immediately struck by a peculiar phenomenon: at the very instant they were born, questions were often endowed with a history that backdated them by decades, sometimes centuries, before their actual emergence.

Whereas querists have often dated the Polish question to the first partition of Poland in 1772,¹¹ it was only formulated as such around the 1810s,¹² in the run-up to the Congress of Vienna, and only commonly discussed as such in the early 1830s, during the Polish November Uprising in tsarist Russia.13 Furthermore, my own attempts to trace the origins of the phrase “Eastern question” and its first usages had to contend with several layers of misleading assumptions and presumptions. The phrase did appear in a 1777 British publication, but the reference is not to the “Eastern question” as it was later known but rather to British India (“So much for the present Eastern question—a question of more importance than is generally imagined and which points at more than meets the vulgar eye.”).¹⁴ Although the appearance of the Eastern question in state correspondence and published sources dates back to the 1820s and 1830s,¹⁵ most querists have traced its origins back at least to the emergence of tsarist Russia as a factor in shaping the future of the Ottoman Empire with the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–1774 and the subsequent treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774.¹⁶ A number of querists and historians have gone back farther still, to the seventeenth century, or to the Ottoman expansion into southeastern Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and beyond.¹⁷

“The ‘Eastern question,’ ” wrote the Croat nationalist politician Eugen Kvaternik in 1868, “[i]s so old that it reaches into the history of Rome.”¹⁸ “From time immemorial,” wrote the historian J. A. R. Marriott in his 1917 book on the Eastern question, “Europe has been confronted with an ‘Eastern Question.’ ”¹⁹ The Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire traces the origin of the phrase back to the Congress of Vienna, but the sources cited in the piece do not bear out the assertion.²⁰ Historian Alexander Bitis wrote that “[n]o one knows for sure when the term ‘the Eastern Question’ first entered the vocabulary of European diplomacy,” yet took issue with The Encyclopedia Britannica’s dating it to the Congress of Verona (1822), claiming that “the term was commonplace during the Napoleonic Wars,” though he cited no source for this assertion.²¹

In fact, I have only encountered one commentator on any of the questions I have analyzed who has come close to correctly dating a question’s true origin, and that was Otto von Bismarck, who—in a speech to the lower house of the Prussian parliament in 1886—said that “the Warsaw rising of 1830” marked the “emergence of a Polish question, in a European sense, in which other nations were involved and which has never since then wholly disappeared.”22

Bad Faith

It is clear that establishing a chronology of the Eastern question was bound to the act of defining it: if the “Eastern question” was about Ottoman decline, then the date it emerged was fashioned to correspond to the author’s conception of when decline set in.²³ Furthermore, if dating the origins of a question was a way of defining it and—as Marx and others claimed—to formulate a question was to solve it, then questions were often little more than excuses for putting forth particular solutions. In 1863, a pseudonymous Jean Ouvrier declared the “worker question” to be the invention of those who wanted there to be a “worker’s movement”: “One needed a workers movement, so one created a worker question.”²⁴ Or recall Spengler’s observation that a “question is merely a thinly veiled desire to receive a particular answer that is already implied in the question itself.”²⁵

The fullest manifestation of the bad faith of the age of questions can be found in a nearly imperceptible yet remarkable shift in the way interventions on questions were titled. Whereas early texts (such as William Duane’s 1803 writings on the Mississippi question and Davies Giddy’s and Thomas Robert Malthus’s 1811 writings on the bullion question) had the question in the title and nowhere else in the text, later ones (including Theodor Herzl’s 1896 The Jewish State and Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s 1923 Pan-Europe) featured the solution in the title with the question discussed throughout.²⁶ The 1921 Catechism of the Social Question captured in its very format the reverse engineering that typified the age.²⁷ Authors merely used questions as rhetorical launchpads for advancing their vision of how things should be.

A few period commentators—among them the Russian novelist Ivan Goncharov in his 1869 novel The Precipice (Обрыв)—were conscious of how the word “question” was losing its interrogative aspect.

“You mentioned the ‘Eastern question,’ and in the newspapers the Eastern question is also mentioned. What is this Eastern question?”

“[I]n fact …” he said thoughtfully, “It’s not a question at all!”

“Now all ‘questions’ have disappeared!”28

And in their place came pompous declarations and shrill manifestos. “Master, what do you make of the Eastern question?” wrote the popular German author Karl May (a.k.a. Kara ben Nemsi) in his 1882 travel memoir From Baghdad to Stambul. “I think they should mark it not with a question mark but with an exclamation point.”²⁹

Tolstoy, among others, was wise to the age’s prolific hubris and penchant for hyperbole. In 1893, he wrote with undisguised exasperation of all the pamphlets and books he received in which the authors offered fail-safe solutions to this or that question:

I think that the time and labour, not only of all these writers, but even of many others have not only been wasted, but have also been harmful … because in the preparation of these writings … all these authors, instead of feeling their guilt toward society, as they would if they played cards or blind man’s bluff, continue with a calm conscience to do their useless work.³⁰

The questions of the nineteenth century resemble large, clownlike shoes,³¹ absurd attempts to span an abyss between what was and what the querists wished for. With the emergence of questions, it is as if many of the inhabitants of that century donned such shoes and stumbled ramstam into the twentieth century. Gaze in wonder at the outlandish tragicomedy that ensued.

Little Beasties

Already at their backdated birth, questions were remarkably exclamatory. A passion mandate seemed to accompany them wherever they appeared, and period observers were quick to note it. In 1805, a pamphlet by the Irish-Catholic writer Theobald MacKenna decried the “clumsy invectives, the hyperbolical conjectures, the fictitious apprehension” that had hitherto attended discussion of the Catholic question.32 An 1831 pamphlet by “An Englishman,” noted the “affectionate anxiety” the Polish question evoked from “all classes” of British society.³³ The apathy of the French and British public “with regard to the Eastern question,” wrote a British editor in 1836, “proceeded from an ignorance of facts, in the midst of a confusion of words and phrases.”³⁴

The fervent appeals and hyperbolic prose that encircled questions were heavily criticized by Friedrich Engels, who in 1848 wrote that “[w]henever the Polish question is debated, almost the entire Left indulges, as usual, in declamation or even in extravagant rhapsody, without discussing the facts and the actual content of the question.”³⁵ And in February of 1854, in a letter to the former French prime minister Léon Faucher, Alexis de Tocqueville compared engagement with the Eastern question to “banging one’s head against the wall” (se faire casser la petite fiole sur la tête).³⁶ Meanwhile, the Kansas question was one “under which the country already shakes from side to side,” US congressman Charles Sumner told the senate in 1856.³⁷

If there was a queristic genre, it was irritative. In a September 1876 entry of his Diary of a Writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky called the Eastern question a “piccola bestia” (little beast) that had produced a “condition of general madness.”³⁸ The spider-troublemaker was also the theme of a series of reflections on the Eastern question in a book on Spiders and Spider Life from 1919, by the German naturalist Kurt Floericke, who noted that the spider was a holy animal in Islam because one supposedly saved the prophet Mohammed as he was hiding in a cave. “How different the world would look if there had not been a spider on hand back then! There probably would be no Eastern question and the newspapers wouldn’t bore one with the Bulgarian conundrum [Wirren].”39

In addition to madness, common words used to describe the effect of questions included confusion, anxiety, despair, and unease. “The nationality question,” wrote Slovak-Hungarian statesman and publicist Leopold Thull in 1867, “has kept Hungary and indeed the whole of Austria in a state of bated breath for decades.”⁴⁰ The Czech philosopher and statesman Tomáš Masaryk wrote in 1898 that the “social question” means the “unease (Unruhe) and dissatisfaction, yearning and fearing, hoping and despairing, suffering and frustrated fury (Ingrimm) of thousands. Millions.”⁴¹ And in a 1918 pamphlet on the Ukrainian question, the author dedicated the first section to describing the “lack of clarity” and “chaos” surrounding the question.⁴²

Several commentators observed a mood of general agitation bordering on the pathological around questions. An anecdote about Benjamin Disraeli during the period of his premiership related an encounter at a dinner party, when a woman seated next to the statesman pressed him for swift government action on the Eastern question. “I cannot imagine what you are waiting for!” she told him. “At this moment, Madam,” came his calm reply, “for the potatoes.”⁴³

In 1879, the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke wrote of how “Anti-Semitic societies are formed, the ‘Jewish question’ is discussed in noisy meetings, a flood of anti-Semitic pamphlets appears on the market. There is only too much of dirt and brutality in these doings.”⁴⁴ Three years later, the Russian-Jewish physician Leon Pinsker wrote, “The age-old problem of the Jewish Question is causing emotions to run high today, as it has over the ages. Like the quadrature of the circle, it is an unsolved problem, but unlike it, it remains the burning question of the day.”⁴⁵ “When did the ‘Jewish question’ leap on my back?” wrote the Russian dramatist Leonid Andreyev during the Great War, “I don’t know. I was born with it and under it. From the very moment I assumed a conscious attitude towards life until this very day I have lived in its noisome atmosphere, breathed in the poisoned air which surrounds all these ‘problems,’ all these dark, harrowing alogisms, unbearable to the intellect.”46

It was not merely that questions were irritating, they were also ubiquitous. There is a joke—with many variations—that goes something like this: At an international essay competition where the theme was elephants “the Englishman wrote ‘Elephants I Have Shot’; the American wrote ‘Bigger and Better Elephants’; the Frenchman wrote ‘L’Elephante es Ses Amours’; the Pole wrote ‘The Elephant and the Polish Question.’ ”⁴⁷ The phrase “Słoń a sprawa polska” (The elephant and the Polish question) is even an entry in Polish Wikipedia and was the tongue-in-cheek name given to a 2007/2008 Polish-Italian cultural festival in Sicily.⁴⁸

Nor is the aura of obsessive preoccupation unique to the Polish and Eastern questions. As Richard Bernstein wrote of the Jewish question, “I vividly recall that when I was a teenager growing up in Brooklyn (during World War II), there were many local jokes about ‘the Jewish question.’ ‘The Jewish question and—’ was a formula where one could simply, imaginatively fill in the blank … for example, ‘The Jewish question and the Brooklyn Dodgers.’ ”⁴⁹ There are works on “the Jewish question in Poland,” on “Freud’s Jewish Question,” and on the relationship between the “Jewish question” and the “woman question.”⁵⁰ It seems everyone, from Marx to Freud to Dostoevsky to Goebbels to Sartre, had something to say about it. More recently, the American writer and broadcaster Howard Jacobson wrote a best-selling novel titled The Finkler Question, a spoofed slant reference to the Jewish question through a fictional character named Sam Finkler.⁵¹

The markings and violence done to written sources on the “Polish question” offer proof enough that the phrase touched many a nerve: whole chapters torn with apparent fury out of books, and a goodly supply of shrill marginalia (“Hypocrisy!” “Not for the Poles!”).⁵² And in a copy of an 1881 Hungarian pamphlet on the Jewish question, a heated argument rages between two readers in the margins.53 Similar examples abound.⁵⁴ In fact, the very frenzied and dogged passion that questions have evoked has contributed to their relegation to the trash bin of history, if not of historical inquiry. Yet even this ennui has a long historical pedigree. One author writing in an evening newspaper in 1881 longed for the “termination” of “this tedious Eastern Question,”⁵⁵ and a poem in an 1883 issue of London’s Mayfair Magazine included a comic-pathetic line declaring that “[t]he ‘Eastern Question’ is a bore.”⁵⁶

The Reality of Questions Revisited

It was not long before questions were overlaid with seemingly intractable negativity, rather like enemies to be defeated. “Ach! How horrid this Eastern question is that sneers at us with every confusion!”⁵⁷ wrote the German poet Heinrich Heine in 1841. A commentator in the London Evening Star writing in 1881 called it “the hideous nightmare that has been the chief cause of uneasiness amongst the European Powers.”⁵⁸ To the British publicist and statesman John Morley, the Eastern question was “[t]hat shifting, intractable, and interwoven tangle of conflicting interests, rival peoples, and antagonistic faiths,”⁵⁹ while an anonymous author writing in Italian in 1854 described it as a “serious dispute that has shaken Europe for so long.”⁶⁰

In an 1877 work on The Eastern Question, Past, Present and Future, the English naval officer Captain Bedford Pim wrote what he called “a succinct account of the ‘Eastern Question’ ” for his readers. “Having done this,” he concluded, with the swaggering tone of the Arctic explorer he was, “it only remains to look the situation frankly and bravely in the face, and to grapple manfully with the evil.”⁶¹ The Turkish writer Namik Kemâl was more despairing when he wrote in 1911/1912: “The Eastern Question is the name of those calamities of politics that have, for two centuries, been feared in the manner of volcanoes that erupt with fire at the least desirable time and change the face of the earth with an earthquake of explosions [or misfortunes].”62

In the midst of the general mania around questions, it is little wonder that the more astute observers began to question their legitimacy and even their very existence. During the Crimean War, the Saxon legation to Paris wrote a report claiming that the Eastern question was really just an Anglo-French scheme to prop up Lord Palmerston and Napoleon III against domestic political enemies.⁶³ In 1858, a character in a German novel phlegmatically declared, “The Polish question still hangs around like a ghost haunting Europe. But it is a silly ghost that no one really believes in any longer.”⁶⁴ Such ideas were frequently overlaid by not a little satirical commentary on the imaginary character of questions. A German book of anecdotes from 1861 includes the following comic dialogue between two Berliners:

KRIPPENSTAPEL: We are still far behind the English….

NANTE: Yes … They invent everything a person could want. One invention after the other: steamships, gas lighting, the Eastern question, matches, national debt.⁶⁵

A few years later, in 1863, the Marquess of Salisbury penned his own laconic take on the Polish question. “There are few positions more embarrassing,” he wrote, “than that of men who hold moderate opinions in regard to questions upon which excitement is running high.”⁶⁶ In an 1887 article on “Socialism and Democracy,” Woodrow Wilson issued a comparable lament:

One wearies easily, it must be confessed, of woeful-warnings; one sighs often for a little tonic of actual thinking grounded in sane, clear-sighted perception of what is possible to be done. Sentiment is not despicable—it may be elevating and noble, it may be inspiring, and in some mental fields it is self-sufficing—but when uttered concerning great social and political questions, it needs the addition of practical initiative sense to keep it sweet and to prevent its becoming insipid.⁶⁷

In the second half of the nineteenth century, words such as moderate, sane, and sober became part of the way querists framed their own interventions as a means to set themselves apart from the image of the hysterical, maniacal querist.68

The pseudonymous Hungarian Szombatsági opened his work on the nationality question by telling his readers that it had a long history, was hard to solve, but was nonetheless of paramount importance, and that what was needed was a clear understanding and “political sobriety.”⁶⁹ The theme of sobriety, or the “sober mind,” recurs throughout the work.⁷⁰ The metaphor of drunkenness and sobriety is revealing, for drunkenness is a temporary condition of impairment. If one is drunk, the problem is not with the world but with one’s perception of it; seeing the world clearly—i.e., being sober—makes the question go away. Coming to one’s senses is tantamount to solving the problem.

The problem with questions was thus more the frenzy they produced than the reality they portended to describe. In a confidential report on the Eastern question for the British government, the Anglo-Irish major-general G. J. Wolseley wrote in 1876:

As a man awaking from heavy slumber disturbed by dreams, shakes himself into consciousness of the practical reality around him, so the English people seem now to have cleared away those clouds of sentiment in which the Eastern Question had been enveloped by unpractical enthusiasts actuated by the highest motives, by the designing Russian diplomatists with a view to national aggrandizement, and by the home politicians for party purposes…. [O]ur blood has cooled down from the fever heat to which it had been excited, to an ordinary and natural temperature, and we can now hope to reason rationally, and to divest this perplexing question of all false sentimentality.⁷¹

The passion around questions—the marquess, Wolseley, and others suggested—was part of their fraud. In 1876, Alfred Austin wrote a pamphlet titled Tory Horrors; or, The Question of the Hour: A Letter to Gladstone, a scathing critique of William Gladstone’s Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East of the same year. Austin lampooned the sensationalism of Gladstone’s pamphlet and charged him with cynical political calculation:

I would invite you, when you have retired from the tumult of public meetings to the recesses of your own conscience, to ask yourself with merciless scrutiny whether, had the name of your pamphlet been regulated either by what it contains or by the emotion which lately invaded your retirement, you would not in candour have been compelled to call it, “Tory Horrors, or the Question between Lord Beaconsfield and myself.”72

Such skepticism—nay, cynicism—cast a lingering shadow over querists’ interventions. A year later, a character in an satirical piece by a British journalist declared, “I verily believe that there is no Eastern Question at all, but that the entire thing is an invention got up and maintained by subscription among our newspapers at home, in order to increase their circulation.”⁷³

Period queristic mania caused more than a few to lose faith in questions’ reality. Since questions could be and were defined according the whims and preferences of the querists, a new group of commentators emerged who made it their task to define questions right out of existence. “There is no woman question,” Leo Tolstoy wrote in his diary in 1898. “There is a question of the freedom and equality of all human beings. The woman question is just arrogance.”⁷⁴ For an Austrian author writing during the Great War, the “so-called Ukrainian question” was the malicious construction of an MP who, for “purely personal reasons,” invented first a “Ukrainian people” and then a “Ukrainian question,” which then grew into a “question of the future of the monarchy” with a “hypnotic effect” on policy makers.⁷⁵

For many Polish Marxists, the Polish question was nonexistent, in much the same way as Marx noted for the Jewish question or Tolstoy for the woman question. “At present there is no ‘Polish question,’ ” wrote Julian Marchlewski in 1923, “there exists instead a question of the emancipation of the Polish proletariat, which should be resolved in a revolutionary manner.”76 And commentators on the social question—including the German revolutionary Karl Heinzen and the Austrian theosophist Rudolf Steiner—kept the phrase at an ironic distance by placing it in quotation marks.⁷⁷ Even the so-called “European question” was a diversion. If a question was considered the responsibility of all of Europe, then no individual state could be held to account for failing to address it.⁷⁸

Although in 1875 Lord Stratford de Redcliffe confidently declared in an article in The Times that “[t]he Eastern Question is a fact, a reality of indefinite duration,” other period commentators were not so sure.⁷⁹ In the words of a minor character, an Ottoman statesman, in Benjamin Disraeli’s 1847 novel Tancred, “For my part, it seems to me that your Eastern question is a great imbroglio that only exists in the cabinets of diplomatists. Why should there be any Eastern question? All is very well as it is.”⁸⁰ The fictional character’s outburst matches another famously uttered by the (real) Austrian diplomat Anton Prokesch: “[I]n Turkey there is no Eastern question!”⁸¹

The poem that Ambrose Bierce wrote on “The Eastern Question” (perhaps during the crisis in Macedonia in 1903) was appropriately satirical.⁸² It suggested that the frothing passions surrounding it were just that: foam with no substance that obscured a deeper, more cynical reality.

Looking across the line, the Grecian said:

“This border I will stain a Turkey red.”

The Moslem smiled serenely and replied:

“No Greek has ever for his country dyed.”

While thus each patriot guarded his frontier

The Powers stole the country in his rear.

Many were coming to believe that the geopolitical questions of the East, in particular, were but a shadow play of the Great Powers. “The business of diplomacy,” wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1877,

is now to lay hold of the Eastern Question in all repects and to assure everyone … that no question whatever has come up, that these things are nothing more than some litte excursions and maneuvers [and] not only has the Eastern Question not come up but that there never was such a thing at all, that it never existed but is only a fog that was spread a hundred years ago … and that this unexplained fog persists to this day.83

In 1886, an Ottoman Foreign Ministry official concluded that an “Eastern question” would always emerge out of British-Russian competition.⁸⁴ And Arnold Toynbee opened his classic 1922 history The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilizations with an evocative image: that the shadow that so frightened Western Europeans in the East was their own, and that the Eastern question would therefore be better understood as a “Western question.”⁸⁵ An Austrian cartoon from 1872 satirized the Polish question as a crooked mirror into which the Great Powers gazed, thinking they were engaging with a romantic and elusive Poland. A closer look revealed they were gazing at one another.⁸⁶

The seepage of questions into literature and satire (Scherr, Disraeli, Rabener, Bierce) offers a clear indication that period thinkers believed the question genre had an undeniable air of artifice about it that obscured essential truths. They had begun to suspect that the questions of the nineteenth century were naught but elaborate fictions.

The Scientization of Questions

Confronted with the possibility that they had gotten all worked up over a mirage, many querists, instead of folding, doubled down and tried to invoke the empirical certainty of science to legitimate their folly. The logic of mathematical questions (what we would now call equations, problems, or formulae) made them operable in both directions, a feature with which querists endowed nineteenth-century questions. Insofar as the Eastern, woman, and Jewish questions were construed as problems to be solved, we have seen how period thinkers often reverse engineered an understanding or definition of questions from their presumed definitive or final solutions.

FIGURE 3. “Wie der Dr. Leopold Herbst ausging, die polnische Frage zu studieren, und wie es ihm hiebei ergangen” [How Dr. Leopold Herbst went out to study the Polish question, and how that went for him], in Der Floh (Vienna), February 4, 1872, p. 23.

Although the British mathematician-philosopher George Boole wrote in 1854 that it was “premature” to “speculate … upon the question whether the methods of abstract science [specifically algebraic logic] are likely at any future day to render service in the investigation of social problems,”87 it was also in a very real sense too late. Statisticians and their predecessors had been applying these methods at least since Kant waxed enthusiastic about their potential in his 1784 Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent.⁸⁸ In fact, mathematical models for understanding society were already starting to lose their grip, and querists were quick to change tactics.

Over time, and especially toward the end of the nineteenth century, as faith in single, definitive, or “final” solutions waned, querists replaced mathematized equation- or proof-like metaphors with biological and medical ones. Questions were no longer problems that could be definitively and clearly solved so much as ills to be remedied or ameliorated.⁸⁹ Querists hypothesized that the disequilibrium or malady that characterized questions could not be “cured”; it would need to be treated over and over again (like hunger), could not be treated at all, or could only be treated with the most extreme and often violent interventions.⁹⁰

The very notion of disequilibrium drew on scientific insights, specifically in the physical sciences. Querists conceived of an intangible and yet somehow physical relationship between the geopolitics of the East and the social politics of the West. “[T]he idea of European equilibrium,” wrote the German historian Barbara Zielke in her 1931 doctoral dissertation on the The Eastern Question in the Political Thought of Europe, was “of decisive significance precisely for the Eastern question.”⁹¹ Querists borrowed from theories in fluid dynamics (or hydrodynamics) and especially of equilibrium as expressed in the work of Blaise Pascal and Jean le Rond d’Alembert to advance their claims.⁹² They also made frequent references to “dividing barriers,” “equilibrium,” and “leveling” in interventions on the social, Jewish, and woman questions.93

Certain scientized patterns repeat across multiple interventions on nineteenth- and twentieth-century questions: the need to establish first causes or premises, the aggregation of questions into question bundles (combine to solve), and the offering of a “formula” for a great omnibus solution. With these rhetorical nods to the objectivity of science, querists sought to obscure their own agendas by suggesting that the questions themselves provided both the formula and the momentum toward “the only reasonable, intelligent solution.”⁹⁴ When the precondition for the solution is given as part of the solution itself, that is a problem.

The Wages of Passion

As even those who wrote on questions began to lose faith in their reality, the role of the querist began to change: not universally and not overnight, but strikingly and irreversibly. To observe the change, it is important to understand that a nearly ubiquitous formula within the question idiom looked something like this: introductory remarks decrying the confusion of terms and ideas around previous interventions on a given question, followed by a promise to offer a correct, sober, and clear formulation of the question, which should in turn naturally point to the solution.⁹⁵

Writers regularly prefaced their positive, “sober” agenda with a passionate denunciation of the supposed misnomers, misapprehensions, or outright fabrications of preceding querists.⁹⁶ And as the argument on force noted, faith in final solutions was slipping. “For as long as I can remember,” wrote a Serbian reviewer in a Belgrade-based periodical in 1891, “and God knows I remember as far back as the Crimean War, I’ve been constantly hearing that the Eastern question will be solved—now, immediately, today, tomorrow, it’s here.”

But forty years have passed during which people have been solving the Eastern question, and there have been so many wars because of it, so many international conferences and congresses, and it’s still not solved. On the contrary. Today four million people are standing in Europe, armed to the teeth, facing each other off, ready to rush to their doom … and all this because of the Eastern question and that itty-bitty Alsace-Lorraine.97

Questions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries differed from their predecessors in that they appeared more impervious to ready solutions. Even after the Bolsheviks had taken control of a diminished Russian Empire and the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires were definitively dismantled, a Bulgarian legal scholar ended a long history of the Eastern question with the conclusion that “the Eastern question is not solved, because injustice and arbitrariness [произвола] cannot offer a lasting solution to any problem.”⁹⁸

Commentators accused the publicistic and political realms of not merely fabricating questions and prematurely declaring them solved but also of offering unrealistic panaceas and “miracle cures.” In the 1890s, one Hungarian newspaper, the social democratic daily People’s Word, noted that everyone weighing in on the worker question offered a “magical potion” [csodaszere] to solve it.⁹⁹ Writing on the woman question in 1909, the Catholic theologian Viktorin Strommer complained that feminists were too quick with their “magic potion,” such that the problem seemed to essentially solve itself.¹⁰⁰ And the same year, the Hungarian Catholic vicar Béla Mészáros saw a world full of “prophets” claiming to possess the only solution to the social question.¹⁰¹

Politics, Mihály Réz stated at the beginning of his famous 1917 essay on the nationality question, are immensely complex, yet in every time, doctrinaires look for a single cause and with it a single, elegant solution.¹⁰² This was a foolhardy mistake. By the outbreak of the Great War, querists from both the Right and Left saw false prophets, quacks, and ideologues lurking behind questions. The more the spirit of the times or the spirit of man sought solutions, the further those solutions seemed to recede, and what had once seemed a straight course now resembled ever more a “vicious circle” or a “Gordian knot,” both metaphors which began to appear frequently in the idiom of questions.103

An inexorable momentum was building behind this ever-tighter welter and spin. But instead of driving inexorably toward emancipation or war or federation, querists more commonly sought to throw the machine into neutral. Having roundly delegitimated final solutions, fewer and fewer querists even offered them, resorting instead to diagnoses of the time. In a 1933 book on The Spirit of the Time as a Question of the Philosophy of History, the right-wing Hungarian librarian-historian Tibor Joó wrote that the spirit of the time, much like Lukács’s “answering being,” was forever trying to solve something, and each era did so over and over again.¹⁰⁴ “[I]t is hopeless to seek a singular ‘solution,’ a magic potion or an incantation to remedy this situation,” wrote the Hungarian democrat István Bibó of the Jewish question in 1944. Instead, he continued, what was required was “a slowing down of the vicious circle.”¹⁰⁵

Querists’ Profile in Flux

Given the growing consensus that final solutions were not possible, both the form and the content of interventions on questions began to change. Early interventions tended to be written by members of parliament, politicians, statesmen, or publicists. During and after the revolutions of 1830–1833, and again in 1848, however, the pamphlet and newspaper venues they employed were opened to a broader range of querists, a trend which continued as press venues proliferated and literacy rates grew in many countries throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.¹⁰⁶ Already in 1840, Lord John Russell wrote to the British prime minister Lord Melbourne on the power of the press in the conduct of diplomacy around the Eastern question, suggesting that “the articles in the newspapers form part of the conduct of the negotiations.”¹⁰⁷ And in 1847, in Disraeli’s Tancred, the title character lamented that “The public opinion … has superseded the rhetorical club of our great-grandfathers.”¹⁰⁸

In an 1870 review of a book of Popular Lectures and Essays on Legal Matters, the reviewer, Dr. Karl Lemayer, noted that the phrase “popularization of science” is “known to be … a completely useless catchphrase concealing a shallow nature [Seichtigkeit], lack of understanding, or a certain asinine radicalism.”109 He nevertheless defended as “beneficial” the notion that “everyone is offered the gratifying opportunity to light his modest little lamp among the great lights of science.” He went on to criticize the book’s author for not addressing “questions of the day” (Tagesfragen): “[H]e should have addressed the aspects of his themes that most relate to questions of the day and are therefore of interest to the broader public.”

Lemayer’s critique contained an increasingly common disparagement of the quality of publicistic interventions on questions. The sole original contribution to be made by the popular pedagogical genre was in the realm of a more profound elucidation of “questions of the day”; in other words, snatching them out of the inept clutches of journalistic hacks. “It would make a lot of eyes see more clearly that there are a lot of things between heaven and earth with regard to these questions which the wisdom of our daily press has no clue about and that the decisive points and great difficulties are to be found for the most part in completely different directions than where the leading articles and club speakers seek them.”¹¹⁰

By the 1870s, questions had indeed started to reach “a lot of eyes.” This was the decade of the great attempts to bring the Eastern question, in particular, to bear on domestic political issues: to influence an election in Britain; or to bring the force of public opinion back behind a Russian imperial palace whose strength and popularity seemed to be foundering. A Russian pamphlet from 1878 noted with astonishment how rapidy the Russian public had concerned itself with a question that hitherto had been “no more than a ‘subject of information’ for the Asiatic Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”¹¹¹

By the 1890s, it was possible for a miller, a timber industrialist, or a self-declared “common man of the people” to enter the querist fold by means of self-published pamphlets.112 The Russian writer Anton Chekhov, in a satirical piece titled “The New Years Drink,” described the character Semyon Stepanich: “He, like every Russian citizen, has his own views on the Bulgarian question, and if it were up to him, he would solve it better than anyone else.”¹¹³ In The Third Staircase, an 1892 novel by the Baltic German writer Eduard von Keyserling, there is a scene in which an old shoemaker mounts a podium to give an impassioned speech on the Eastern question. “He was rather intoxicated and spoke in a confused manner; he wanted to urge the [social democratic] party to do something to solve the Eastern question; that was a duty.” Even when a fire breaks out and nearby buildings start to burn, “[a]t the podium the shoemaker was still calling for the solution to the Eastern question, for the free Balkan states.”¹¹⁴ The absurdity of the scene was meant to point to the folly both of question hysteria and the lower-class elements it had emboldened. “Just as in politics,” wrote the secretary of the Hungarian National Millers’ Association in 1894, “the ‘opinion of the street’ cannot offer us guidance.”¹¹⁵

In 1885, the Austrian-Jewish publicist Isidore Singer edited a collection of Letters of Famous Christian Contemporaries on the Jewish Question. His primary objective—as outlined in the foreword to the compilation—was to take the discussion out of the hands of the riffraff of the street (Strassenpöbel) and move it from the “smokey beer halls,” and place it instead where it belonged, namely, in the “consultation chambers of scholars and statesmen.”¹¹⁶ His compilation was intended to be just such a “consultation chamber” [Berathungssaal].

And in fact it seems high time that the discussion of such serious questions be taken out of the hands of half- and uneducated people and into those of men whose rich life experience and high position in the realm of science and literature entitles them to speak the last word on a question that cuts so deeply into the entirety of social existence.¹¹⁷

Singer solicted responses from domestic (Austrian) elites, as well as from abroad. When the Hungarian journal Twentieth Century asked prominent figures to weigh in on the Jewish question in 1916, it self-consciously borrowed the conceit from Singer’s Letters.118

There were thus two forces pulling at opposite ends of the age, one that mourned the passing of elite decision-making and decried the “confusion of concepts and tangling of relations” that accompanied the “questions being discussed in our tumultuous time,” and the concomitant proliferation of strong opinions as well as the sinking level of public discussion around questions¹¹⁹; and another that blamed the self-important megalomania of press and political figures for creating and sustaining question-fictions. Both forces drew attention to an ever more broadly held conception that the age was spinning its wheels and had become all churn and no substance.

The Academic Whimper

The very desire to gather a compendium of differing positions—as Singer and Twentieth Century did—points to a mounting unease with the propagandistic isolation of the singular pamphlet coupled with a sense that to understand, which often meant to see from a different perspective or from multiple perspectives, was tantamount to solving, and a rhetorical prioritization of “seeking the truth” over “transient tactical opportunism.”¹²⁰ Some of this is evident from the list of individuals queried for the Twentieth Century questionnaire, which included politicians from various points on the political spectrum (none of whom replied): Zionists, liberals, populists, and conservatives. The journal, in short, presumed disagreement regarding the existence, nature, and solution to the Jewish question, and sought to offer a representative array of positions. The journal’s editors did not offer their own solution. Instead, they immediately initiated another questionnaire in the same vein on the nationality question.¹²¹ A comparable compendium of positions on the colonial question in Germany was compiled by Hans Poeschel of the German Empire’s Colonial Office in 1920.122

The late nineteenth century also saw the proliferation of subject bibliographies on questions, which reinforced the value of compiling competing perspectives as an aid to “understanding” a given question. In 1885, the Australian folklorist Joseph Jacobs published a bibliography of 1,230 titles in an effort to “collect together all the literary productions emanating from either side of the so-called Jewish question under its protean aspects in Europe and America during the decade 1875–1884.” (The titles were in German, English, French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Romanian, Italian, Russian, Dutch, Spanish, Polish, and Danish, which Jacobs then divided them categories including A = Anti-Semitic, P = Pro-Semitic, and C = Conversionist).¹²³ Several other bibliographies of various questions, ranging from the social to the Balkan questions, also appeared in the last third of the nineteenth century and thereafter.¹²⁴

In their selection, bibliographies provided their own oblique but often quite clear definition of the question. It is worth noting that many works cited in these publications do not explicitly refer to a particular question, and thus we can see the range of issues and concerns that a given editor selectively gathered under a particular question umbrella and how a question was presumed to exist independently of its formulation as such. The implications: that you might well be discussing a question without invoking its name, that you know a question when you see it, and that others will accept a definition you have chosen as self-evident, while often acknowledging in the same form (namely, the variety of the works cited) that there is little agreement on the matter of essence.

Little wonder that with the widespread loss of faith in solutions and the proliferation of compendia highlighting the arbitrariness of definitions came the mounting suspicion that it was not even worth trying to engage with questions. In 1865, Miloš Popovic offered a “Serb perspective” on the nationality question in Hungary, in which he also made mention of the Eastern question:

In Europe we’ve already become so accustomed to the “Eastern question” that it seems as though it will remain forever insoluble, as though it were a thing incapable of further development in accordance with the laws of continuity and progress, and that under its influence we have become as carefree as in some contagious disease after the first flash of fear, and now with shuddering tranquility we look on as it wreaks havoc; with mute desperation we give ourselves over to it.125

Robert Musil went one further in an article from 1912. Politics in Austria had been reduced, he wrote, to a one-sided sense of “the difficulty of the nationality question.” But it was a difficulty that had “long since become a comfort,” and an “unacknowledged evasion and lingering,” betraying an “emptiness of the inner life, like the void in an alcoholic’s stomach.”¹²⁶

In light of the intense rhetoric of conviction surrounding questions, Toynbee’s assertion that only the peoples of the East believed that “Western politics turn upon the Eastern Question, and that the Englishman or Frenchman looks abroad on the world with eyes inflamed by a passionate love or hatred, as the case may be, for the Greek or the Turkish nation,” seems incongruous.¹²⁷ What Toynbee was likely responding to, however, was what he perceived as a real disjuncture between the passion with which questions were discussed in pamphlets and parliamentary speeches, and the indifference with which most people most of the time approached them.

Tolstoy’s intervention on the Eastern question through the character of Levin in the last segment of Anna Karenina unfolded in a similar key: the Russian people generally did not share the passion of commentators on the Eastern question, and the frenzy surrounding it was mostly the work of a handful of ne’er-do-wells and sensationalist journalists. “Of course the newspapers are unanimous,” the old Prince Alexander Shtcherbatsky tells an enthusiastic pontificator on the Eastern question. “That is easily explained. War will double their circulation.”¹²⁸

Epilogue

Long after many period commentators of the age of questions stopped believing in the reality of questions and, indeed, questioned the motives of querists, academics in various disciplines continued to treat them as real and assign them histories. It is a querist’s intention and folly to insist that questions are real and clearly defined problems. Historians have proven no better in this respect than the querists themselves. They have long read querists’ books, articles, and pamphlets on a subject such as the Eastern or the nationality question and proceded to make assumptions of their own about what the “real” question is or was and dropped in their own definitions, chronologies, and histories of the question, sometimes at the same time that questions were a regular feature in newspapers, pamphlets, and parliamentary proceedings. Yet if questions were understood as problems, it was because querists actively sought to make them problems for an audience they hoped to excite and influence, oftentimes with very concrete policy agendas in mind.

Perhaps the fraud of the age is beginning to dawn even on historians, however. By now Ottomanists know the Eastern question: they know it well enough to be suspicious of it as a formulation, to enclose it in quotation marks or precede it with a “so-called.”129 They know it well enough to steer clear of it if they hope to say something sensible about Ottoman history; it was for too long the dominant frame for approaches to Ottoman history in the West. Selim Deringil refers to an “ ‘Eastern Question’ paradigm” and “the ‘Eastern Question school’ ” that continues to haunt the historiography of the Ottoman Empire.¹³⁰ And even as early as 1922, when Arnold Toynbee published his classic history The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, there were clear signs of a weariness with the old “Eastern question” formulation that obscured far more than it revealed.¹³¹

Ottomanists also know that historians and statesmen have traditionally used the phrase “Eastern question” to talk about many things—the balance of power in Europe, Russian expansion, and Jewish emancipation, for example—except the Ottoman Empire.132 And they have sought to correct for the absence of the Ottoman Empire’s policies and protagonists from works on the Eastern question by writing about nineteenth-century European international relations from an Ottoman perspective.¹³³ “If we do not wish for history to repeat itself and for our national territory to once again be shared among the Western Powers as booty,” wrote the diplomatic historian and former diplomat Hüner Tuncer, “then I think we must understand very well what the Western states meant by the ‘Eastern question’ of the past and avoid the misconceptions and mistakes of history.” ¹³⁴

Nor has the Eastern question been unique in this respect. In 1946, the Polish writer Edmund Jan Osmańczyk resisted his publisher’s suggestion to title his book “New Polish Questions.” Osmańczyk considered the title “too emotional” and opted instead for The Republic of Poles.¹³⁵ More recently, in his history of Poland, God’s Playground: 1795 to the Present, the historian Norman Davies wrote that “of all the animals to be found in the diplomatic garden of modern Europe The Polish Question is indeed the elephant, if not the dodo.” For that reason, historians of Poland must view it as “a singularly barren subject.”¹³⁶

In modern Greek, “You’ve made an Eastern question (out of it)” (Aνατολικό ζήτημα το έκανες) is a common idiom meaning “You’ve made a mountain out of a molehill.” That about says it all.