The Exotic Alibi: How Europe Still Uses Brazil to Forget Itself

When German theorists Max Bense and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht wrote about Brazil in the second half of the twentieth century, they claimed to admire its modernity. But read closely, their admiration feels like déjà vu: Europe once again dreaming itself through someone else’s skin.

In Bense’s Brasilianische Intelligenz (1965), Brasília isn’t a city—it’s a laboratory. A tropical test site where European history supposedly dissolves into pure design. The philosopher, shaking in turbulence over the Amazon, describes losing the “perception of walls,” as if the heat itself could erase the burden of history. What he’s really saying is simpler: Brazil helps him imagine Europe without guilt.

Two decades later, Gumbrecht makes the same pilgrimage. In After 1945, he finds in João Cabral de Melo Neto’s poetry a way to “forget the past”—meaning, to momentarily silence the echo of fascism. Brazil becomes his therapy, its beaches his confessional. “For an entire month,” he writes, “I forgot about the past.” Convenient, if the past in question is the Holocaust.

Both men turned Brazil into a screen for projection—a “constructed outside” where European trauma could dissolve into sensual light. The intellectual move is subtle but deadly: what looks like fascination with Brazilian culture is often a desire to flee Europe’s own reflection.

That’s cultural racism at its most elegant. Not the slur or the caricature, but the gentle erasure hidden inside praise. When Bense calls Brasília a triumph of “Cartesian design over history,” he recycles the old colonial script: the tropics as eternal present, the South as futureless form. Gumbrecht, hearing Milton Nascimento’s voice, calls it “soft, sensual, free from guilt.” His Brazil is Catholic and carnal, naïve and timeless—the old fantasy of a land where pleasure redeems Europe’s sins.

Meanwhile, the real Brazil of those years was burning under dictatorship. Poets were jailed, students disappeared, Indigenous lands invaded. None of that disturbed the philosophers’ reverie. Their tropical other was too precious to risk with facts.

This is how cultural racism works in the academy: through metaphors of light, presence, and “post-hermeneutic experience.” The trick is to strip meaning from the colonized and keep the feeling. To turn political poetry into “pure rhythm,” to transform hunger into “material presence,” to mistake poverty for aesthetics.

Oswald de Andrade warned of this in his Anthropophagic Manifesto back in 1928: the only way to confront the colonizer is to eat him. Not to imitate, not to please—but to devour and transform. Bense and Gumbrecht did the opposite: they consumed Brazil without digestion, reproducing the taste of empire while calling it philosophy.

What makes their writing still relevant is how familiar it feels. The same tone haunts biennales, music festivals, even NGO reports: Europe praising “vibrant Brazilian creativity,” while exporting austerity and buying carbon offsets. The same gaze travels from colonial diaries to design fairs in São Paulo.

So, maybe the question isn’t why Europeans exoticize Brazil—it’s why the habit remains so seductive. Because in every tropical metaphor lies a confession: Europe needs the South to imagine its innocence.

Cultural racism survives precisely because it sounds like admiration. Because it hides in compliments, not insults. Because it still feels good to say “we envy your warmth” while freezing others out of history.

Brazil, after history? No. Europe, after amnesia.