This chapter reads George Steiner’s “hermeneutic motion” allegorically as a representation of the colonial and postcolonial history of Europe from the Napoleonic Wars to the present. In particular, the history of European colonial conquest and annexation through World War II is represented in the second and third moves of Steiner’s hermeneutic motion—Aggression/Invasion (move two) and Incorporation/Assimilation (move three)—and the history of “international development” from the end of World War II to the present is represented in Steiner’s fourth move, Restitution. A close reading of Steiner’s four moves is followed by an analysis of Steiner’s main inspiration for the model, Martin Heidegger’s theory of “ontological interpretation,” the hermeneutic violence required to liberate Dasein from the Covering Beast that is das Man. Steiner universalizes/depoliticizes that violence to include not just the kind of “purgative” violence that Heidegger called for but all hermeneutics, all interpretation; Steiner smuggles that universalized violence back into the three-step German Romantic sequences (especially from Novalis and Goethe) from which he draws. After discussing Paul Bandia’s Afrocentric reframing of restitution and reparations as something that the former Western colonial powers seem uninclined to undertake and so must be launched by Africans, the chapter examines the socioaffective/ideological appeal of Heidegger’s thought in “Occidentalism,” which runs through disaffection: “dissatisfaction with the prevailing order is the most valuable clue to an alternative, authentic communal existence.” This appeal was channeled to Occidentalist groups worldwide by Heideggerian ideologues like Ali Shariati, Ahmad Fardid, and Reza Davari Ardakani in Iran and Aleksandr Dugin in post-Soviet Russia.