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By a strange coincidence, this book was accepted for publication on
March 21, 2003, at the very moment that the United States unleashed
"shock and awe" within the Iraqi regime. Picking up where his father
left off, President George W. Bush launched what some might view as
tradition that extends back into the Middle Ages.This time it was dif-
of the Willing" allied to defeat Saddam Hussein could not hide the
fact that the United States and Britain entered the war without the
support of the United Nations and against the express will of some of
This recent diplomatic rift reminds us that "the West" does not
exist today as a single, monolithic block, and, indeed, it has rarely done
so in the past. By the same token, the Orientalism that Edward Said
the East must also be understood in a more nuanced way that allows
for historical and national differences. This book is about the pecu-
ever, German Orientalisms takes seriously the need to revisit the "core"
tural theory, and contemporary politics. The book explores the ideo-
dation and the National Endowment of the Humanities for their sup-
port during the 2001-2 academic year.Thanks also to the Council for
Robert Tobin, and Lynne Tatlock are among the many individuals
Special thanks are due to Lisa Lowe, John A. McCarthy, and Jeffrey
never have gotten the grants that enabled me to complete the project.
Preface vii
Friedrichsmeyer and David Luft, who both read the entire manuscript
my thanks more directly. Sadly, Susanne Zantop did not live to see the
supported with letters and advice. I dedicate the book to her memory
and to my family, who helped me in many ways to write the book but
Herder's Historicism 64
of Romanticism 133
Notes 245
Index 305
Introduction: The Location
of German Literature
ture. I focus on the canon, that is, on authors and texts that have been
ture. Much has been said about the role of history in narratives of
past.' "Who are we?" prompts the question "Who were we?" and, in
are we?" "How did we get here?" "How do we define our position
one thing to say that Germany lies in central Europe and another
when Thomas Mann says that Germany is "das Land der Mitte" (the
land of the center) that must find a balance between Western ratio-
tures from the Middle East to India.2 In fact, the deciphering of East-
cal antiquity during the early modern period.3 The Orientalism that
arose in the late eighteenth century was not entirely innocent, how-
ever, for attempts to understand the East arose together with Euro-
ity over the Orient" (3), that is, as a form of knowledge that is
and French Orientalists, as those two nations also had direct colonial
subject of lyrics, fantasies, and even novels, but it was never actual,
the way Egypt and Syria were actual for Chateaubriand, Lane,
not only had no official colonial policy until 1884, but "Germany"
itself did not exist as a unified nation-state until 1871.4 If, however,
speak of a German national interest in the East. In fact, the very lack
against the Orient and allying themselves with selected parts of the
expansion that culminated in the Griff nach der Weltmacht (grasp for
world power) in the First World War, and the quest for more
did not begin ex nihilo on April 24, 1884, the so-called birthday of
against Muslim "infidels" that began in 1o95; in the later Middle Ages
Ottoman Turks.
with the imperial ambitions of other European nations, but they did
man readers and catered to their taste for exotic adventures of the sort
ars set out to organize the profusion of plants and animals in the
[On the natural differences in the human race] (1775) that distin-
guishes on the basis of skin color and skull shape between five differ-
ent racial types; his colleague Christoph Meiners divided people into
Kant, for his part, opted for four different races: white European,
beautiful. In his view, dark-skinned peoples are not only ugly, but
also stupid and vicious.8 Hence he excuses even the harshest treat-
ter men exercise it against the less noble. For, unfortunately, there are
[sondern gezwungen seyn wollen]."9 Isaac Iselin, for his part, writes that
the peoples of Asia had grown so used to despotism that the Euro-
peans actually did them a favor by taking control: "It was a genuine
devoured."'
led from the distant past to the present. Increasingly, writers broke
human civilization, looking beyond the ancient Holy Lands and far-
ther to the East: to the Caucasus and even India. In his Essai sur les
ture owes everything to the Orient, the "cradle of all the arts,"'2 and
(1766) that "the Indians toward the Ganges are, perhaps, the men
Introduction 5
who were the most anciently united into a body of people."'3 Ger-
mans quickly joined the debate. Isaac Iselin, Johann Christoph Gat-
terer, and Christian Ernst Wiinsch agreed that human beings arose
all human beings are descended from Adam and Eve, philosophers
to what they assumed was their position of racial and cultural superi-
development that had made them not only different from the rest of
plunging one's sword into the sand of an island one claims for Britain
or Spain (or into the body of an unfortunate "native" who gets in the
also part of an effort to control and exploit natural resources and for-
write Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, for instance, "not to link
Spirit and his universal history leading from lesser peoples to its sum-
mit in Europe together with the very real violence of European con-
Hegel notes that the Germans did not participate in the beginnings of
European imperialism: "while the rest of the world set out for the
inance over lands that circle the earth,"22 the Germans, led by Luther,
ground for the liberation of the spirit" (563). The German capacity
to all human beings or-in the view of its bearers-should be" (5).
their own societies," as Elias puts it, "they see themselves as bearers
identity have for centuries been so fully established that they have
where.25
force- but one cannot turn "natives" into Germans. Or can one?
culture of the Middle East.26 From this perspective, the Germans had
no need to conquer and colonize eastern lands, for they were already
ing selected portions of the Middle East and Central Asia into a pan-
German Kultur.
from this perspective, the Germans are doubly damned: in the first
entalism and look forward to the day when they, too, can claim their
place in the sun; the second lays the groundwork for a theory of Ger-
manic racial superiority that led to Hitler and the Holocaust. In other
European, "in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently
Said,29 the Germans were more equal than others, it would seem, and
Such arguments gain force because they lack nuance. Daniel Gold-
sweeping argument that claimed that all, or almost all, "ordinary Ger-
mans" hated Jews to the point that they were willing and even eager
remembering the "good Germans" does not necessarily play into the
Jews from the Nazis in Berlin actually highlights the guilt of those
past. Without ever losing sight of the suffering and injustice perpe-
Berman has argued that the German intellectual tradition also con-
Heine, and Keller. One of the most interesting aspects of her work,
that contrasts markedly with both the majority of his more dogmatic
the foreign and critical distance toward their own German back-
through contacts with the East during the Crusades, while particular
with the "Nearest East" of eastern Europe, a theme that recurs from
Introduction 11
brief look at novels by Emine Sevgi Ozdamar and Michael Roes that
wealth between Europe and its neighbors to the south and east has
Europe" finds itself besieged by global pressures from both East and
have come under pressure to provide tactical and military support for
ism," that is, a hatred of modern Western society that has spawned a
ing of the Berlin Wall on the evening of November 9, 1989, not only
spelled the end of a repressive regime in the East, but also recalled
Orientalism in the Aryanism of the Third Reich also casts its shadow
with the Holy Lands of the Crusades, the Ottoman Empire of the
early modern period, India for the Romantics, and even eastern
an actual place.
encounters often take the form of love affairs between European men
lover into slavery to finance his journey back home.4 On the surface,
many others like it) contains a subliminal message about the white
family values and inspire German men to rise up and stand firm
against the foreign floods. Such appeals to manly German virtue recur
will proudly proclaim that he is not the sort of man who would
engage in duels over women, and perhaps not a man at all-at least
Roes's Leeres Viertel, finally, gradually distances himself from his het-
I focus on fictional texts that make use of the Orient in their effort
set in the West that make reference to the East than nonfictional trav-
deemed central to the German national literature. But how and when
were certain authors and texts selected to represent their national cul-
state of the discipline today, the history of the discipline in the past,
and the place of literature in both, or, as they say in the real estate
Birth of a Nation
OF EUROPE
Before modern European nations came into being, Europe itself had
boundaries between itself and the rest of the world. Christian Euro-
and Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries came from a soci-
ety that was already a colonizing society. Europe, the initiator of one
15
16 German Orientalisms
tion of Europe" in the High Middle Ages.2 Despite his claims to the
she gives birth to the piebald heathen Feirefiz who eventually con-
verts to Christianity; and the Provengal Kyot gets his tale from a cer-
into a faithful husband, a knight of the Round Table, and the king of
the Holy Grail. The story is thus Christian to the core, but one that
been in contact with the Middle East for hundreds of years. In 777
ruled over much of the Middle East and northern Africa.5 In the cen-
relations with the Orient entered into a dramatic new phase when
just war against infidels, waged in the service of the true religion.
Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 17
army, and those who died in battle could expect their crown in
heaven.7 As time passed and contacts with the East increased, how-
with the Islamic world extended beyond the Crusader states as well,
most notably into Sicily and Spain. Many of the advances in science,
bic translations, and Islamic culture itself was in many ways more
sense, the period around 1200 does seem open to at least some under-
standing and cultural exchange between East and West in a way that
contrasts with both earlier ignorance and the growing racism of the
lous realm of untold riches and erotic adventures. The hero of Pfaffe
diles who ate his men in India, ferocious elephants, battles with
the heads of birds; he seems particularly impressed with the hot and
tute for the true religion, however, and authors of the period adopted
theology.
tianity at war with heathendom. The story goes back to an actual bat-
18 German Orientalisms
France. The historical event became the stuff of legend over the next
mately 1170 the German Konrad der Pfaffe (Conrad the Priest) com-
posed his own version of the tale, which he claims to have translated
from French into Latin, and then from Latin to German.'2 The plot
is much the same as in the original French, although the German ver-
sion is more than double the length. While the anonymous French
author plunges into the story in medias res, Konrad stresses the reli-
gious significance of the battle throughout his tale.'3 The lines are
religious purpose. His heroes receive absolution for their sins before
battle and will become martyrs if they die. If they win, their God
wins too, and the defeated heathens have only two choices: accept
Oswald (ca. 1170) begins with the unmarried English King Oswald in
Oswald does manage to abduct his bride and bring her back to En-
along the way. As it turns out, the heathen Pamige already believes in
they are back in England, recommending that when they feel the
urge they should plunge themselves into buckets of ice water kept
Orendel (ca. 1180-1200) follows a similar pattern: the hero sets out
from his native Trier to win a heathen bride who is also already
are baptized or slain by the thousands, and in the end Orendel gets his
bride. He, too, is forbidden by an angel to sleep with his wife, but all
turns out for the best-from the perspective of the faithful, at least
as they soon die and go to heaven. As noted earlier, these tales have
Orendel shed no tears for the infidels who get slaughtered along the
way. The heathen brides are not really heathen at all: they cannot
wait to marry a Christian and become baptized. In the end, both tales
are clearly more about salvation than sex: the hero wins his bride for
Christianity and forgoes the pleasures of the bedroom for his eternal
reward.
inal version of Das Ezzolied actually predates the First Crusade; it was
to the Fall and the promise of Christ's return. Along the way the
Das Ezzolied first narrates the story of the Passover and then com-
sacrifice in the New. His death frees us from the grasp of hell and
Land. The journey will not be easy, for "our old enemy" blocks our
20 German Orientalisms
path, but our leader is strong and "with his help we will repossess the
land" [mit im besizze wir diu lant] (593). Figuratively speaking, the
author writes of the Christian's spiritual journey, yet the same passage
Holy Lands. For the medieval imagination, the two in fact go hand
in hand: the events that take place in this world are partial revelations
of eternal truths. "Thus the figures are not only tentative; they are
also the tentative form of something eternal and timeless; they point
not only to the concrete future, but also to something that always has
been and always will be; they point to something which is in need of
his literary works, while modifying them in accordance with his own
the epic tells of the defeat of Willehalm's Christian army on the bat-
allies, and the eventual Christian triumph over the Islamic forces.2I
poet and repeatedly praises Christianity as the one true religion. Yet
reminds her fellow Christians that all men were originally heathens,
and that not all heathens will be damned. As Christ was merciful to
his enemies, so we, too, should be merciful to our foes. Hence Wol-
"Was it a sin to slaughter them like cattle? I deem it a great sin, for
from a tacit acknowledgment that the enemy forces share much com-
himself was once held captive among the Arabs, where he learned to
once had an affair with the Christian queen. While Konrad portrays
narrator, and the allied Muslim forces threaten not just southern
tianity over its foes no longer seems certain. His decision to compose
romance, Parzival begins in a real place (Anjou) and with a real prob-
inherits everything when his father dies.24 Eager to test his prowess in
battle, Gahmuret seeks service under the most powerful man in the
not his decision would have bothered the Christian audience of Wol-
that Wolfram's hero should do the same is thus not implausible from
Christian soldiers of the Song of Roland fight primarily for their God,
knights of the Round Table, and as knights of the Holy Grail. The
chivalric code cuts across religious borders. On the other hand, Gah-
muret needs the money: he fights as a mercenary for the man in the
two hostile armies are besieging the city of Patelamunt. The black
tion spring up, and by the time Gahmuret sallies forth into battle he
has become a Minneritter who fights in the service of his lady love.
After Gahmuret wins the day Belakane marries the conquering hero
and declares him king of all her lands. The romance that began with
its feet solidly on the ground of historical reality has turned into a
that she is both black and heathen. In this regard Wolfram's romance
coast recalls the plot of the Aeneid, and scholars have noted that Wol-
not play a major role in the classical epic, however, whereas they do
Oswald and Orendel are both crusaders and proselytizers, while Gah-
muret fights for the heathen Baruch, has Saracens in his retinue, and
does not hesitate to help the heathen queen. He even falls in love
with Belakane and marries her without once asking her to convert to
Christianity.
riously obscure preface that is clear about at least one thing: black is
the color of hell, and white the color of heaven. He later refers to the
black princes of Zazamanc as being the color of hell [die nich der
out any evidence that the black heathen armies must be inferior to
white Christians, and the ship captain who helps Gahmuret escape to
Spain assumes that "those whose skins are black" (3 i [55.5]) will set
Gahmuret and that he has rewarded them richly for their support.30
Zazamanc is black, while Belakane worries that her dark skin will
offend the man she hopes will save her kingdom.3' Yet Belakane's
beauty soon wins Gahmuret's love as well as his knightly services, and
he later states emphatically that he did not leave her because of her
skin color: "Now many a misinformed man imagines that her black
complexion drove me from her, and yet I looked upon her as the
for her former suitor as "a pure baptism" [ein reiner touf] (17 [28.14])
and asking God's mercy for Razalic, "that brave and black-complex-
ioned pagan" [der kiiene swarze heiden] (25 [43-4]), even though he,
Christian and heathen, but for a brief period Gahmuret and Belakane
deserts his pregnant wife in search of further adventure. His real rea-
sons for leaving are quite clear: "Here the proud man remained until
his joy was pawned to sorrow" (31 [54.17-19]). Yet Gahmuret does
not tell his wife the truth about the reason for his departure. Instead,
he contends that he would have stayed with her forever if they had
24 German Orientalisms
shared the same religious faith. Now, Gahmuret has never worried
about Belakane's religion in the past, and when she reads the note she
says without hesitation that she would have been willing to convert.
for his lady love and wins her hand in marriage and her kingdom as
Instead, the story continues to the point where the same spirit of
adventure that enabled Gahmuret to win his bride makes him want
leave, he also loves his wife and misses her when he is gone. She
heathen as invalid. In the end a judge has to resolve the delicate legal
at least one tournament a month. Before long he dies for the Baruch
the military prowess that wins him wives makes him unwilling to stay
Blood will out, however, and before long Parzival sets forth to
become a knight like his father before him. As a result of his mother's
hunting spear before stripping the corpse of its armor. He also makes
short period of time, however, Parzival makes up for his initial mis-
knightly conduct and combat. Like his father before him, Parzival
comes to the aid of a besieged city, marries its queen, and becomes a
Parzival's quest for the Holy Grail distinguishes him most clearly
from both his father and the other knights of the Round Table, while
the Grail with an Oriental opulence: upon his arrival, servants bring
virgins who bear the Grail, and the Grail itself rests on green silk cloth
of luxury goods to Europe from the East increased during the twelfth
The figure of Cundrie reinforces the ties between the Grail and the
making him a knight of the Round Table. At the pinnacle of his suc-
cess, however, the hideous Cundrie curses Parzival for his failure to
what should have been his scene of great triumph, cursing God for
his misfortune and vowing not to rest until he again finds the Grail.
But who is Cundrie? We later learn that she and her brother Mal-
creature come from the land of Tribalibot by the river Ganges. The
to find out about the Holy Grail, and Cundrie has since become the
Eastern land allegedly teeming with such mutants, and yet she has
speaks Arabic as well as French and Latin and is well versed in dialec-
plays a pivotal role: she sends Parzival on the quest for the Grail and
tells him about his brother Feirefiz, born to the black Queen
India. From this time on, Parzival's quest for the Holy Grail will be
direct ties to the Grail kingship, but also, on his father's side, close
book 9, where the hermit Trevrizent convinces him to trust God and
repent his sins. Trevrizent also informs Parzival about the nature of
the Grail: its function as a link between heaven and earth; its ability
Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 27
to sustain life; the chastity required of those who serve it; and the sins
of Anfortas that have left him in pain. At this critical juncture Wol-
fram introduces the mysterious Kyot as his source for the story of the
Grail. Whether or not such a writer actually existed has been one of
the role that Kyot plays in providing historical depth to the symbolic
Jewish Flegetanis first discovered the Grail and wrote about it in Ara-
bic. The Christian Kyot of Provengal then found the abandoned Ara-
read the manuscript and then sought further information about the
Grail, and then tracing its translation into Christian Europe, Wolfram
that informed the earlier Ezzolied and Annolied.37 The heathen Flege-
tanis can see the Grail, but only a baptized Christian can understand
thens already dimly perceive a light that shines more brightly for the
grasped at truths that only Christians can fully understand. The figural
they can colonize the past, transforming alien cultures into prefigura-
Feirefiz. Like his father before him, Feirefiz has married an exotic
28 German Orientalisms
and Azagouc. These two lands have been located by various scholars
often assumed that Ethiopia and India were the same place.3s Feirefiz
sion that Christian Europe stands exposed and vulnerable against a sea
Feirefiz has returned from the East "to these Western lands" [in
sentatives of opposing cultures and opposing gods. Yet they are also
brothers, and before long their mortal combat turns into a family
common identity: "Both of them were, after all, sons of one man"
(386 [740.28]). Together with their father they form a single unit:
"My father and you and I, we were all one, but this one appeared in
three parts (392 [752.8-To]). The heathen Feirefiz speaks these lines,
of the Trinity.39 Feirefiz weeps after this speech, and, as in the case of
baptism: "his heathen eyes shed tears as in honor of baptism [al niach
tion of the passage in which the common humanity of the two broth-
his born-again brother, and his own pagan self should form a Holy
will be the next Grail king. To stress the significance of this most
that Wolfram has placed the Grail into close proximity to the heathen
world from the first. While Parzival finally asks his question, Feirefiz
falls in love with Repanse de Schoye, the virgin who bears the Grail.
Unlike the heathen Flegetanis, who could at least behold the Grail if
not understand its full significance, Feirefiz cannot even see it until he
Feirefiz can see the Grail, marry Repanse, and move back to India
where his son becomes Prester John, the legendary ruler of a Chris-
then rejects him in anger. For this sin he must undergo years of lonely
difficult path back to faith in God, reunion with his wife, and the
invalid or that there is anything wrong with his second (or is it his
his stay with Trevrizent. Yet such a protracted spiritual agony could
read at the end of the Song of Roland, for instance, that oo100,000ooo defeated
France."4 Only those with the highest social status undergo more than
Orendel's wife also accepts Christianity in her heart, while those hea-
thens not slaughtered are baptized by the thousands, whether they want
they all had to become Christians" [sie deden ez gerne oder ungerne /
sie musten alle kristen werden].41 From the Christian perspective such
involuntary baptisms must have been considered valid, yet they seem to
ity might have been, his conversion nevertheless has tremendous reli-
the world throughout his text. On the one hand, Feirefiz's conver-
heathens and Jews to the salvation that awaits all believers. Flegetanis,
Cundrie, and Feirefiz play such a prominent role in the history of the
On the other hand, Wolfram allows for a reading of his text that
and the Christians are the butt of his joke? Feirefiz finds Repanse de
marry her, so be it. The Christians may think they are winning the
could be going through the motions to satisfy his very earthly desires.
for his own purposes? True, Feirefiz can see the Grail only after his
after all, that Parzival has not played by the rules in his search for the
Holy Grail. Trevrizent has told him that one must be called by the
Grail, and that it is therefore impossible to fight one's way toward it.
dom come to pass, for you have forced God by defiance to make His
the night to fight yet another battle against the irrepressible heathen
foe. "'God,' says the king, 'how weary is my life.' "45 The irony sur-
human state, and, as even the poets tell us, nobody but God himself
transcends history, and one that recognizes and accepts existing dif-
OTTOMAN EMPIRE
the adjective diutisk or tiutisk seems to have referred to both the Ger-
nated with the invention of the printing press, and a common past
the Baroque poets of the seventeenth century could not envision the
radical force that would sweep away generations of dynastic rule and
nity that was larger than their local town or province and distinct
beginning to discover that the world was much larger than they had
previously suspected.
raphy overnight. It took time before explorers realized that the West
tition to map, conquer, and exploit the natural and human resources
ries, the Germans remained largely content to play only a minor role
liest accounts of the New World and soon profiting "from the influx
In o1095 Pope Urban II had issued his call for the First Crusade to
nating in Central Asia. The Seljuks remained in power for nearly two
hundred years until they were swept aside by the Mongol invasions
their early leader Osman. This group soon became dominant within
the region, and their empire expanded rapidly within Anatolia and
into the Middle East, across the Bosporus into the Balkans, and up to
the gates of Vienna, which they besieged in 1529 and 1683. Not sur-
peans. In France "there were twice as many books about the Turks,
about America,"54 and the same was true for German cosmographers:
parties and tournaments had been popular since the early sixteenth
throughout the Middle Ages, and even survive today."57s For the
around 1500, hostility to Rome went hand in hand with fear and
concludes that the Germanic peoples must have been the original
claims that infidelity is rare and seduction is not a game for the Ger-
with women who breastfeed their own children, rather than passing
ran away from home, hitched a ride on a log raft down the Main,
and Hebrew.59 Celtis spent his life wandering around Europe, with
Along the way Celtis taught for five years at the University of Ingol-
ancient philosophy and to hone their Latin style. Only thus could
grace to be ignorant of the histories of the Greeks and Latins, and the
the rivers, the mountains, the antiquities, and the peoples of our
tion in Latin and Greek antiquity rather than Christian faith. "What
were they to think of someone who proclaimed that virtue and the
losophy and eloquence?"6' Yet he calls for both local patriotism and
are "the last survivors of the Roman Empire" (47). Thus he addresses
by fierce cruelty in exacting filthy lucre, that it would have been far
more holy and reverent for us to practise that rude and rustic life of
the paraphernalia of sensuality and greed which are never sated, and
to have adopted foreign customs" (53). On the one hand, then, Celtis
draws on Tacitus in his plea for the Germans to rediscover the rustic
virtue of a noble past so that they can defend their modern borders:
which you so often confounded and terrified the Romans, and turn
your eyes to the frontiers of Germany; collect together her torn and
Italy.
Celtis's enthusiasm for the works of Tacitus, and his literary remains
and complains that he was not included on a short list of the world's
der's own uncle claimed that in fighting the Romans he had at least
done battle with men, whereas his nephew had merely subdued
the Turks with war] (1518). Hutten wrote his exhortation to inspire
Turks. He urges the Germans to stop their petty feuds and to remem-
ber their glorious past, when they united to defeat the Romans.
38 German Orientalisms
been diluted by foreign invaders, and that the old Germanic heroes
almost never married outside their clan, "so that they would not
quered large segments of the Middle East and Africa, captured Con-
stantinople, moved into the Balkans and Hungary, and now poses a
geil, meineidig und unmenschlich]" (247). You have no idea how bar-
baric the Turks are, continues Hutten; they are willing to murder
their own family members and are now coming to rape our women
with the womanish warriors [mit dem weibischen Kriegsvolk] of the Sul-
and pillage their way into Europe. Against this Asiatic flood of her-
[ein ganzer Mann oder ganz ein Mann, oder vollkommen Mann], as if
using German taxes to support Roman decadence "so that they can
live in voluptuousness safe from the Turks and tyrannize the world
with their useless bulls and letters."6S While Hutten fears the Turks as
Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 39
devil, you can be sure of that" [Tiirke ist Tiirke, Teufel ist Teufel,
dessen kannst du sicher sein].66 Whoever takes arms against the Turk
should not doubt that he is fighting against the enemy of God and the
little better than the Turk, and thus Luther urges the Germans to take
arms against both foes: "Should we make war on the pope as well as
on the Turks, because they are both equally pious? Answer: against
the one as against the other, and in this way no injustice will be
done."69 Luther argues finally that the Germans have been so sinful
that God has sent the Turks as his "grim rod against us who have
sinned against you and deserve every misfortune."7 Luther thus adds
Luther's Turks are both utterly alien and intimately familiar: an Asian
and Islamic threat from outside Christian Europe and the evil twin of
the Catholic Church within Europe; the incarnation of the devil and
BAROQUE ORIENTALISMS:
LOHENSTEIN'S ARMINIUS
among the Humanists and Luther's break with Rome. By the time of
the second siege of Vienna in 1683 the German nation was still reel-
ing from the devastating religious conflicts of the Thirty Years' War
reform within the Catholic Church had only led to bitter sectarian
look, only vanity on earth" [Du siehst, wohin du siehst, nur Eitelkeit
we look, is fire, pestilence, and death that pierces heart and soul"
[und wo wir hin nur schaun, / Ist Feuer, Pest und Tod, der Herz und
that had been ruined by war and whose citizens, he feared, had lost
European power under Louis XIV and posed a new threat to German
what are arguably the two most important German novels of the sev-
rative that begins in medias res and ends some 3,000 double-
and heroism "to the love of the Fatherland, and to honor German
the novel's lengthy subtitle. The word Teutsch in the title to Grim-
tant and Catholic armies, embodies that of the German nation torn
and it has remained largely forgotten to all but the most intrepid
crats by pointing out that their ancestors were often "as black as if
that the forest is as unknown to him as the road to China through the
and pipe in his mouth standing on the shelf of a curio collection that
matically in the fifth book of the novel when he travels via Moscow
the king of Korea, who in turn frees him to travel to Macao via Japan.
Muslim pirates capture him in the East Indies and sell him into slav-
into Germany.
"Your life has been no life, but rather a death" (543). He thus retires
to his old life as a hermit after bidding the cruel world farewell:
and the generous sense that this world is good and the next will only
have us believe. This sixth and concluding book of the novel was
ostensible message of its conclusion, much in the way that the author
the novel, as we have seen, but the so-called Jupiter episode elabo-
god Jupiter. Jupiter predicts that a German hero will soon come to
forms the world into a place of strength, wisdom, beauty, and virtue.
tuous men, who together will rule the entire country in a single par-
liament that will end servitude and abolish taxes. Mount Parnassus
only German, and Germans will rule the world as Rome once did in
the past. Evil princes will be punished, while good ones can either
stay at home and join their former subjects in a life of royal luxury, or
Asia. The other European kings will realize that they are actually
mit themselves to the new German rule. Finally, all Christian reli-
but with two significant differences: his Asians will succumb to mili-
tered in Conrad Celtis, who together with Luther and Hutten would
dignity when he drops his pants in public to brush away fleas that he
who had suffered the random violence of war and pestilence, Jupiter
ger of Hitler and the Third Reich, as some fascist sympathizers did,83
both as a site for the hero's adventurous journeys and as the enemy of
Asian infidels reflects the ideology of the Turkish wars, and the hero
serves a brief stint in the kaiser's army battling Turks in Hungary. The
and sets out for Jerusalem. He makes it as far as Alexandria, but war
prevents him from crossing into Judea. He sails up the Nile to Cairo
curiosity until some Europeans buy his freedom. Told that he cannot
abandons his hope to visit Jerusalem and sets off on a new pilgrimage
istic dream whose even partial realization would cost more suffering
cessful. Unlike Parzival, Simplicissimus does not find the Holy Grail,
nor does he become king of a sacred order that will rule this world
self on a desert island writing his life history on palm leaves, isolated
both from the Christian community of believers and from the Ger-
fifth book of the first part of Arminius, for instance, the Armenian
Prince Zeno entertains his German listeners with tales of his journeys
through the Caucasus to Central Asia and India. Zeno visits with
Amazons, fights with Tartars against the Chinese, and listens to the
and storms, travels for weeks through deserts so dry that the men
have to drink their horses' blood, and sees wondrous silk paper,
porcelain, and white elephants. The novel thus clearly caters to the
Baroque taste for the exotic and the curiosity about the East.84 Yet a
sages, but by the eighteenth century critics began to reject his style as
to legitimate the rule of the current French king and to educate his
ancient sources, Bossuet insists that the Bible is correct. Large areas of
the world, including most of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, find no
include all peoples of the earth, even if they did not fit into a biblical
only had read widely about the Ottoman Empire but had personal
a young man.89 His first and last dramas also take place in the world
ing confident to the last that she will find peace and freedom in the
ing character ruled by his own libido and a Machiavellian adviser, the
widow and sets her free. On one level, Lohenstein's drama is pure
"Woe to me! To me, Asia, oh woe!" [Weh weh! Mir Asien / ach!
spread the news of Turkish tyranny: "So that I can tell the South,
West, and North what sort of horrible things the damned Turk has
of central Europe and not just the evil Ottoman Empire. While
early work into a raging monster. Ibrahim Sultan (1673) was first per-
threat from the Ottoman Empire, and it, too, functions as anti-Turk-
tells the city of Vienna that it is not so much water as "Lust-oil and
widow. She draws her own knife, and only the entrance of the Sul-
tan's mother prevents a bloodbath. The incident sets the tone for the
rest of this lurid drama. We learn that the Sultan, who had once been
impotent, has discovered an elixir that has turned him into a raging
Eventually the Sultan rapes the resisting girl (who later commits sui-
cide), after having imprisoned his own mother and killed some of his
silent men.
Arminius and had completed all but the final chapter at the time of his
novel, and how does the historical fiction relate to the context in
which it was written? There are actually three sorts of Germans who
Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 49
appear within Arminius: most obviously, there are the members of the
learn that both Spartacus and the first Amazon queen were Ger-
mans.99 Finally, the novel contains several subplots that seem to retell
ant confederation of the sort that existed under Herrmann with a del-
the one hand, as we have seen, the Orient features directly as the var-
ious parts of Asia visited by Zeno and others in the course of the
ish theme continues beneath the surface like the dark bass voice of
50 German Orientalisms
the entire work."'02 Thus Lohenstein does not restrict the "Orient"
entalism, I will focus in greater detail on episodes from the third and
fourth books in the first half of the novel. The first portrays the
Book 3 begins with a pause in the battle between the Germans and
IB3mene visit Erato, who had been defeated in battle while disguised
as a man. Herrmann says that women should not bear arms, but Erato
politely disagrees. Thul3nelda not only takes her side, but reveals that
it was she who had defeated Erato, and that she, too, had been wear-
ing men's armor. The two women join forces against Herrmann,
dren from the left breast and setting their bows where the right had
breast is more honorable than those "who take away weapons from
the female sex, that is, who tear their hearts out of their bodies and
that most women lack the necessary physical strength for battle, Erato
not reject all men simply because more than one "Sardanopolis" has
spent all his time lolling around on furs in the seraglio, "and actually
made himself into a woman [ja der sich selbst zum Weibe gemacht], mar-
ried a eunuch and was angry at nature and his mother because he had
been born a man who could not offer himself up for sale in a whore-
should be condemned.
makes it very clear that there is nothing masculine about the physical
Women who fight for a just cause or rule as legitimate queens do not
descent should enjoy the same rights.'05 For the most part, however,
sphere, leaving politics to men. Indeed, those women who did ven-
ture forth into the public sphere posed a threat to "natural" gender
the end of the conversation Herrmann dismisses the notion that a vir-
tuous people should have to live like savages, eating acorns and raw
nately shown "that permissible comfort can easily slide into an ugly
more people by infecting them with a taste for luxury than by sub-
duing them by force of arms, and their warm baths and lascivious
life. The conversation then segues neatly into the history of Erato and
ian politics are complex, to put it mildly, but in a nutshell the situa-
tion is as follows: the Roman Empire has designs on the ancient king-
doms of Armenia, Media, and Parthia that lay between the Black and
Armenians ally themselves with Rome against the Medes and Parthi-
ans, and at others they side with one or both of their neighbors
against Rome. The Romans impose their rule brutally upon the
We pick up the story when Erato, who had ruled Armenia justly
and has all the attendant vices: he is a lazy and immoral person who
who allows two corrupt women to take over most of his own duties
as ruler, and who has a public affair with the wife of a high-ranking
Armenians against Rome not only parallels that of the Germans, but
the two forces also become directly linked at the end of the novel:
brother Flavius.
for a time disguised as the male Artabaxes, Erato flees to the city of
Sinope. Here she enters a chariot race as a different man named Mas-
the track, they seem to experience love at first sight: "At first both
arose in each and such an impulse in their souls that they themselves
did not know how to explain" (253b). Why are they confused? Arsi-
noe/Zeno knows he is really a man, but he does not know that Mas-
ual. Erato, for her part, knows she is really a woman, but does not
would seem to be lesbian. Soon both are pining away for each other
in a way that Erato's servant says would have been obvious to explain
if only "the equality of their sex [die Gleichheit des Geschlechtes] had not
stood in the way" (255b). Slightly later Erato decides to reveal her
true identity: "With that she tore open her dress and showed the
queen (of Sinope) and Arsinoe a pair of breasts as beautiful as any eye
has ever seen or which the most perfect woman can have" (259b).
why? Erato guesses that "her alarm stems from the fact that since
lesbian desire, Erato can only assume that "Arsinoe's" passion evapo-
rates when "she" finds out that she was interested in another woman.
the doctors are puzzled when "her" heart throbs whenever Erato
approaches the bed. A lesbian passion after all? No, for both Erato
and the reader finally learn that "Arsinoe" is actually a man. The sight
desires for a man, but actually aroused his heterosexual passion for a
desires that had so puzzled the characters involved turn into what
that Zeno and Erato are actually brother and sister. Fortunately the
two would-be lovers are separated before they can consummate their
fish nor fowl, he is an effeminate man and hence a bad king, whereas
Erato remains a virtuous woman beneath her armor, and Zeno is still
a man's man even when he is wearing a dress. With the aid of hind-
impulses: the apparent same-sex desires that form the basis of their
two virtuous individuals for one another: "Thus virtue has the
stein narrates the tale of Zeno and Erato in a way that makes it as con-
fusing as possible for as long as possible, and the two characters expe-
the real "Oriental"? The line between the lascivious Tigranes and his
might at first suspect. They too experience "deviant" desires; the dif-
raised together with two sons of Caesar, Lucius and Cajus, and Lucius
because the Germans wait longer to become sexually active, they also
and leads his wards into a room decorated "with the most erotic
about to enter this den of iniquity. He warns the boy that Aristippus
"adultery, incest, and unnatural desires" (46ob) are only the least seri-
an evening with Moorish boys and girls, "against whose fiery erotic
charms the grace of white girls seemed cold as ice" (457b). While
Lucius sings the praises of black women, Flavius replies that Germans
prefer blondes. The story reaches its first climax when Sotion warns
The police break into his chambers to find the naked Aristippus
ing positions. The guards hastily tell the two boys to get dressed, but
strangled in prison and thrown into the Tiber with a rock tied to his
neck.
by Virgil), but she is attracted to Flavius and he also falls in love with
her, despite his stated preference for blondes. Lucius becomes jealous
and stabs Flavius, whereupon Dido grabs the knife and sinks it into
56 German Orientalisms
Dido mistakenly believes he has died. She leaves Rome, but a recov-
ered Lucius pursues her and forces Dido to seek refuge in a temple of
Diana. Lucius, "this horny stallion" [dieser geile Hengst] (48 ia), dies
trying to scale the walls of the temple, but by then it is too late: Dido
has not only taken vows of chastity, but has been forced to sacrifice
her virginity to a lustful priest. In the end her father has the priest torn
apart by lions and his fellow priests castrated, while Dido gives Flay-
is not to blame for her predicament, which results entirely from the
estingly, however, her race plays no part in his decision to leave her.
The story that starts out suggesting that the desire for black women is
traying the black Dido as the innocent victim of Roman lust. Lohen-
Caesar's sons as his closest companions but manages to resist its cor-
Romans, but on the other, we find that Germans have often fought
in Roman armies in the past, and that Arminius struggles against the
constant threat that some of his fellow German tribal leaders will
transfer their loyalty to the Romans. The Armenians, for their part,
during Lohenstein's life (36). Hence she argues against "the predom-
58 German Orientalisms
between Austria and France, on the one hand, and Christian Europe
moves the novel into the domain of early modern studies.os The
term Renaissance came into vogue in the late nineteenth century and
sented great nations. Early modern studies arose in the late twentieth
century and inspired new research into a much broader range of lit-
past: whether looking for heroes or hybridity, critics are liable to find
geopolitical concerns.
him a prime candidate for further study in our own era of critical
gender studies and queer theory, just as his works seemed morally
Lohenstein's work still has the capacity to shock us with its graphic
imagination.
CHAPTER TWO
The Turkish retreat from the gates of Vienna in 1683 marked the
the Orient as the site of untold wealth and sexual license. New ency-
liothdque orientale (1697) and translations of the oo1001 Nights into French
would continue to mine for centuries. A new taste for an exotic tur-
querie and chinoiserie arose in fashion, painting, and the decorative arts,
1782).'
61
62 German Orientalisms
tiger who has come to feast on stacks of bloated corpses left over from
hairs from the Kalif's beard. He falls in love and has various adven-
raphy Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and truth] Goethe claims that he
translations.7 During his Sturm und Drang years Goethe ridiculed the
older writer in the satirical drama Gotter, Helden und Wieland [Gods,
ontik poets that Richard Samuel suggested that "we can perhaps refer
fact, it was just this sense of playful eroticism that that first drew
Novalis to Wieland: "It was thus the frivolous [das Frivole] in Wieland
that first attracted him."' More than just "frivolity" links Wieland to
In the 1770s Sir William Jones and Charles Wilkins, both officials of
the East India Company, began to learn Sanskrit and to send transla-
The play, which William Jones had originally translated from Sanskrit,
the work with personal significance in a way that was typical for eigh-
ratives portrayed the Orient as the site of a fantastic and slightly risque
of the middle class. That Novalis and other Early Romantics should
HERDER'S HISTORICISM
art and the individual, while laying the foundations for modern
the artist as a man of taste who imitates nature for the instruction and
new kind of subject who is attuned to his or her feelings and wants to
defined beginning, middle, and end, turns into "the secular mode of
Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit [Ideas on the philos-
still fragmentary, work, Herder attempts nothing less than to trace the
not (yet) have colonies outside Europe, and that feels itself to be the
lization, the East was both a site of modern colonization and ancient
culture, Europe's closest and oldest Other, but also its spiritual
tion as it moves from east to west in a way that makes a virtue out of
ist aggression.
66 German Orientalisms
Herder had plans for the project that would eventually become the
Ideen since at least the time when he left Riga for France in the spring
of 1769. "For this purpose I want to gather data from the history of
all periods," he wrote in his Journal meiner Reise imJahr 1769 [Journal
recourse to a single norm: "The human race has had sufficient happi-
ness in all ages, but each in its own way." On the other hand, inves-
I want to lead everything back up to our time, and learn how to serve
order to see how Herder moved from the cryptic comments of the
Von deutscher Art und Kunst [On German character and art] (1773), a
that have long been recognized as turning points in the history of lit-
erary theory. Inspired by Rousseau and filled with disdain for the
series of binary oppositions that value the primitive over the modern,
feeling over form, the spoken over the written word, and nature over
art. With one stroke Herder jettisoned the neoclassical image of the
the romantic genius, a titantic figure who shattered the rules of polite
society in creating art that taps into the life force of nature and
expresses the passions of the soul. Within a year, Goethe was to pro-
Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 67
dered him blind to the artifice and sophistication of the works of the
man nationalism. After all, he entitled his volume "Von deutscher Art
und Kunst," in which the word deutscher has a polemical edge that
against the French and their culture as decadent, artificial, and based
crats, who have forgotten their own Art or national character and
imitate the French instead. The appeal is thus class specific as well as
before being exported to the rest of the world. Scottish, Irish, and
poets in the 176os as elegiac figures who gave voice to national tradi-
was a communal poetry, rooted in the people and their past, and
ism. The bard soon became a popular figure in English poetry as well,
68 German Orientalisms
but in a way that obscured his original political function: the English
"imagine the bard (and the minstrel after him) as an inspired, isolated,
and peripatetic figure" and thus fail to grasp the "historical and cul-
text.20
distinction between the bardic poets of the Celtic fringe and imperial
essentially German, and that English verse was thus "a repository of
Nordic poetry and language."22 The bardic poetry that in its own
power is not England but France. The crucial difference between the
have remained true to their cultural roots and thus produce first-rate
forgotten their past, adopted the foreign garb of French culture, and
lost touch with the reading public. Hence Herder accompanies his
German intellectuals that had been under way for more than a
the mid-176os and inspired others to join the new cause; and
his essay Von dem Deutschen National-Geist [On the German national
spirit] (1765). Herder's own "patriotic turn" took place in 1769 dur-
and become immersed in its culture and at times seems quite enthu-
siastic about the opportunity to become privy to the gossip with the
all those things that others are talking about!"25 Despite his professed
Not all German writers around 1770 shared the enthusiasm for this
"Nature has already provided each nation with its own Bildung, its
that could have been written by Herder (270). Like the ancient
in nature, Wieland claims that individuals who try too hard to avoid
foreign influence only attain "a kind of individuality that often bor-
words, being German is a given; one has only the choice between
foreign.
the writers of the Sturm und Drang movement, most notably the
Wieland in the early 1770s needs further clarification. Herder was not
because he was willing to break the rules and obey the laws of
Wieland was willing to mix and match the blossoms of many literary
came from the East and was preserved in the opening passages of the
(1769).3 Much in the spirit of the essays in Von deutscher Art und
poetic mythologies about the origins of the world. The Eddas of the
Celts, the theogenies and heroic songs of the Greeks, and the popu-
lar tales of the Spanish, old French, and Germanic peoples-in short,
mics have buried the texts under suffocating layers of scholarly com-
(5:30). Herder insists that these opening verses express "a certain
are poetic, popular, authentically national, and "at the same time
for ancient (Germanic) culture. Thus in spirit, if not in actual fact, the
the plot that will link the various historical moments together in a
single grand narrative. Herder took the first step in this direction in
yet another seminal essay of the early 1770s, Auch eine Philosophie der
peoples, yet he does not share Rousseau's pessimism about the course
place and time; hence any desire on the part of one culture either to
forms part of a larger historical narrative that leads from the origins of
humankind had its childhood in the Orient, its boyhood in Egypt, its
Animals and plants are born, mature, grow old, and die, but also give
birth to the next generation that will continue the cycle of life. The
beings, and from humans to God. Herder thus adapts the Enlighten-
to keep pace with this change. For humankind holds a special place
capacity for reason, and their use of language, human beings are the
with the assumption that human beings are born with certain innate
but also a people's entire way of life, including their diet, occupa-
tions, leisure activities, and the arts, "together with a host of other
action; they are all part of the climate that changes so many things"
nations: "Each nation has its own peculiar way of thinking that is
impressed upon itself all the more deeply because it has sprung from
its own way of life, is related to its sky and its earth, and is passed
down from one generation to the next" (6:298). Each nation has its
own myths that give voice to its particular character, as well as folk-
songs that express the national culture: "The songs of each nation are
the best witnesses to its feelings, desires, and way of looking at things"
(6:3 23).
ity rather than universal human rights. While such ideas would even-
tually mutate into the racist nationalism of the Third Reich, Herder's
trism and his rejection of all forms of violent conquest of one nation
by another.34 "What people of the earth does not have some cul-
that all past cultures have merely fertilized the earth with their ashes
"so that at the end of time their descendants would become happy by
other hand, roam the earth as merchants or robbers and often neglect
the world, and he dismisses the Crusades as "nothing but a mad event
Spanish treat America like the ancient Romans treated Spain: "as a
place to pillage" (6:599). Rather than plundering the world, the Cru-
tinues to harbor what from today's perspective seem some very Euro-
centric prejudices of his own. Black Africans are sensual, carefree, and
How could it be otherwise in a land where the hot sun ignites only
happy, and lusty natives, while the American climate produces only
progress early on but got stuck in their cultural adolescence and have
Herder, but that does not mean that all cultures are of equal value.
ing scale of sophistication: "She placed the Negro next to the ape,
and she allowed the great problem of humanity among all people of
most refined human being" (6:633-34). The ancient Greeks were not
only different from the Africans: they were also better. Herder's
"I accept you for who you are," he seems to say, "it is not your fault
Negro, but not despise him, for the organization of his climate could
entire natural life cycle: "they also lived through their phases so thor-
oughly and passed through the entire course of the same more com-
pletely than any other people in history" (6:567). The Jews, in con-
trast, have been cut off from their roots to survive only as "a parasitic
out little hope for the Africans, who have the misfortune to be born
time will come "when in Europe no one will ask any more who is a
Jew and who is a Christian: for the Jew will also live in accordance
(6:702).
follows: true, Jews are foreign parasites that suck the lifeblood of
have opposed the kind of logic that produced the Holocaust. For a
Nazi, the Jew remains a Jew; nothing can change fact of race rooted
German Jews in fact shared Herder's hope that they could be inte-
was Moses Mendelssohn, who served as the model for the protago-
nist of Lessing's Nathan der Weise [Nathan the Wise] (1779), the most
76 German Orientalisms
about the possibility of change within a given culture and the trans-
development or Bildung.37
the Ideen with some brief and rather disparaging remarks about the
skilled at poetry and science. Herder claims that Asian languages are
the oldest, that Asians invented both writing and the alphabet, that
they were the first to domesticate plants and animals, to cultivate the
even goes so far as to suggest that the Garden of Eden must have been
was the Ganges. Dismissing the efforts of those who seek to reconcile
ancient history with the literal truth of the Bible, Herder emphati-
cally restates his basic position: "Enough! The solid center of the
largest part of the world, the ancient mountains of Asia, supplied the
human race with its first domicile and has remained stabile through-
Like Voltaire and others before him, Herder believes that the
Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 77
human race not only began in Kashmir "but also that its culture had
the most beneficial impact on other nations from this point of origin"
and the modern Europeans, in turn, have learned from the Greeks:
art, science, the entire body of our culture and humanity, as much or
nothing for the European" (6:227). Not surprisingly, Herder has little
tians have been degenerating ever since. The fact that they attained
what they did was only due to Eastern influence, and for this reason
Herder dismisses the claim that the Egyptians came from Ethiopia,
Herder thus provides support for Martin Bernal's claim that Ger-
"Aryan myth." However, Herder does not use his faith in European
published several articles apologizing for the slave trade. The treat-
ment of the slaves on board ship is not as bad as many people think,
sure, but Africans get over emotional distress quickly; conditions may
be harsh in the West Indies, but the slaves are still better off there than
slavery causes great suffering for its victims, but points out that if it
whole justify the sufferings it causes the African people.39 Herder has
"when we will look back at our inhuman slave trade with as much
Herder's view; just because black Africans are inferior to white Euro-
peans does not give the Europeans the right to enslave them.
particularly fertile soil: "Gentle west winds fanned the crops that
wafted at least blossoms from the spirit of these people to us, so that
against their own cultural poison and eventually transform the plant
into something nobler. The image not only contradicts basic princi-
exert their influence downward to turn the trunk into a cherry tree
but also contradicts Herder's own belief in the native vitality of Ger-
manic peoples that he had stressed during his Sturm und Drang years.
ture when it came from France has a beneficial effect when it arrives
Despite his claim that each culture has its own independent valid-
earlier texts, Herder praises the virtues of the noble savage: "Natural
man is certainly a more limited, but also a healthier and more vital
man on the earth" (6:3 59). More frequently, however, he stresses the
all, "for actually we are not yet human beings, but become human
Herder does not ask which culture has become the most highly
then, did Europe attain its culture, and the rank that it is due above
freedom" leads directly "to filling and ruling the earth" (6:154). Rea-
the part of those who have developed their Humanitdt gives them the
ture out of its Eastern roots, but also considers the modern European
current state: "How happy Industan could be if human hands had not
the most innocent members of the human race with superstition and
swept down from the north, or to the greedy Europeans who have
they bring to us from that region are no substitute for the evil that
course of history: "In the meantime the chain of fate has been forged
in that direction; fate will either release them or lead them further"
tion, voicing the familiar Western critique of the suttee and of Asian
suggests that the modern Indians share some responsibility for their
fate. The Indians suffer, but in a perverse way they want to suffer, or
at least are so stupefied that they do not notice their pain: "Asiatic
that want to bear it, that is, who feel its oppressive weight less"
makes a people ripe for subjugation" (6:457). Because India has stag-
its own nor can absorb foreign influence: "How could the seed of
cannot sprout in India in the way that Indian seedlings once flour-
Time has passed India by. The culture that ancient Indians once
and as a result, they cannot even enjoy the foreign fruit of a tree that
first took root on its native soil: "how could they even take the fruit
of this tree from the dangerous hands of the Europeans, who rob
them of all that surrounds them: political security, indeed, their land
from a gentle climate that eventually lulled them into an infantile tor-
por: "In most despotically ruled lands nature clothes people almost
cal Bildung, but they can neither participate in it nor benefit from it;
tion of the East and excuses it as the unfortunate but inevitable con-
sequence of the civilizing process that they once set into motion.
Herder prefaced the fourth and final book of his fragmentary work
ble blue eyes. They attack boldly but obey orders from their superi-
peoples and their neighbors to the east, in particular the Slavs: "thus
several nations, but most of all the Germans, have sinned grievously
against them" (6:697). On the other hand, the Germans did the most
Mongols, and Turks" (6:695-96), that is, from a series of Asian inva-
Hence it was the Germans, Herder concludes, "who not only con-
quered, cultivated, and settled the largest part of Europe in their own
way, but also protected and guarded it; otherwise it would not have
been possible for that which has arisen here to arise" (6:696). During
the Dark Ages the German nation stood "as a protective wall and bas-
the protective husk "in which the remaining culture was shielded
from the stormy times; the common spirit of Europe developed and
ripened slowly and secretly toward its influence on all regions of our
earth" (6:805). During the Middle Ages the Germans protected trade,
women and the family. "The German woman did not lag behind the
man; domestic diligence, chastity, loyalty, and honor have been a dif-
given society can be measured in terms of the way the men treat their
women, and most primitive societies fail the test: "From Greenland
to the land of the Hottentots this contempt for women is the rule.
. . Even in slavery the Negro woman is far beneath the Negro man,
and the most pitiful Caribbean thinks he is a king in his own house"
82 German Orientalisms
they took love seriously, tended toward monogamy, and were only
decadence, but his account of the ancient Germans' loyal wives and
support their husbands even at the cost of their own desires, and to
and Rousseau found rooted in nature had their historical roots in the
of the ganzes Haus, men, women, children, and servants lived and
complex and demanded more labor, men from the educated middle
class began to work for local governments. The home became a pri-
tury bourgeoisie.
ernments can also alienate citizens from their families and themselves.
In contrast to Kant and Hegel, for whom the demands of the state
and the Volk: "Nature raises families; the most natural state is there-
sive expansion of the state to include those outside the national "fam-
sins against their European neighbors, but they soon protect Europe
not continue his history of the Germans beyond the late Middle
image of the Germans as the good Europeans who carry forth the
torch of human civilization that was first ignited in the Orient, while
the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, Novalis was
84 German Orientalisms
figure who dreamed of a magical blue flower that would lead him to
private cult out of his grief for a fiancee who died young. In the
flirtatious aristocrat who was not above a dalliance or two with local
words, has been to pull him out of the clouds and back down to
earth. But precisely where on earth did Novalis think he was? What
was his attitude to the German nation? How do his works respond to
over the rest of the world? "Wir sind auf einer Mission," writes
wir berufen."43 What does Novalis mean when he writes that "we
are on a mission"? In what sense does he feel that the Germans are
At first glance it might seem odd to think about Novalis in any sort
Novalis traveled very little within Germany, and not at all beyond its
Zu ihrer Redlichkeit.46
[No, friends, come, let us flee / The chains that Europe offers /
only the physical conquest of foreign places, but also the narratives of
Novalis was quite aware of the fluid boundary between the intellec-
tant, for he had transformed Kant's dictum that we can never per-
celebrated the power and freedom of the human mind to shape or,
Like Herder before him, Novalis mapped out his vision of Ger-
many's place within Europe and in relation to the East long before
wake of the events that placed France at the vanguard of a new, rev-
for the royal pair of Friedrich Wilhelm III and Queen Luise-who
rent state of the French Revolution, and urges the Prussian subjects
to venerate the royal pair "as the ancients once venerated their gods"
may think differently than we do" (2:503). The French were not
wrong to revolt; they err only in their desire to make the Revolution
Novalis does not support the monarchy at all, or at least not in any
traditional sense. The king and queen are to function as ego ideals for
power lies in the subjects who posit the royal couple as a symbol of
what they would like to become: "All humans should become fit to
able role model for the people precisely because they exemplify
Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 87
bourgeois virtue in their attitudes toward gender roles and the fam-
ily: "The court should be classical private life in large format" [Der
Luise fulfills the role that has come to be associated with today's first
ladies: she does not concern herself directly with politics, but rather
her sex), the tasteful decoration of the home, the organization of fam-
The revolutionary sentiments are similar, but the French set out to
ally bourgeois.
cal writing, and the most controversial in his lifetime,"5' "Die Chris-
full of nostalgia for the good old days, while left-leaning critics from
Heinrich Heine to Georg Lukics condemned the text for its appar-
text was already controversial the first time that Novalis read it aloud
and even open hostility. After intense debate the group turned to
way into the fourth edition of Novalis's works in 1826, just in time
as the essay would later fuel the "conservative revolution" of the early
only seems to glorify the medieval past; his main purpose is to point
future.ss
lutionary ideas beneath their reactionary dress. He begins his essay full
of seeming nostalgia for the good old days of the Middle Ages: "It
it was better that the masses should remain ignorant and faithful
seemingly idyllic world: first, Luther split the Church into warring
factions and introduced a love of the letter through his Bible transla-
fact, he makes it clear that nature moves in only one direction: "his-
(3:51 o). Given the trend initiated by the Reformation and the
try that was the most modernized and which had lain in a state of
torpor for the longest time" (3:517). In other words, there had to be
go backward, we can only ask what will happen next. "Should the
Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 89
tion: "While the other nations are preoccupied with war, [financial]
must give him a great advantage over the others in the course of
surfeit of mere reason, the Germans should enjoy their place in the
located "in the center of the globe, so warm and splendid" while sur-
rounded by cold, fog, and darkness, so, too, Germany glistens above
spiritual and poetic revolution that could bring peace and unity back
quences: "The other parts of the world are waiting for Europe's rec-
onciliation and resurrection, so that they can join in and become fel-
within Europe, but also "out to the most distant India" [bis in das
ing the way to a new global culture in which national borders will
tal: both stand as islands of poetry in a prosaic world, but both were
once part of a broader unity that included Asia and Europe in a har-
monious whole, and both point the way toward a new global culture
"Europa" essay was still fresh, but before the Napoleonic conquest of
rejects the view that the Middle Ages were a barbaric period of his-
how different they may have become, share a common "mother and
past, Schlegel notes that Germanic tribes had overthrown the Roman
the sixteenth century Europe remained united, but since that time it
lows that Germans can best lead the rest of Europe back to its former
wholeness: "if the Orient is the region from which the regeneration
ent of Europe [so ist Deutschland als der Orient Europas zu betrachten]"
ber their old cosmopolitanism and are thus best suited to reunite
Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 91
place.
chy and based on traditional family values all make his later life typify
least one prominent critic has speculated that Novalis's own career
might have followed a similar path had he lived longer.59 In the 18o6
world with the spirit of poetry, striding through all ages, social classes,
trades, sciences, and relations" (55). In what sense does Miiller think
that Novalis is out to conquer the world? For a partial answer, let us
should become the center of world civilization, not just its summit"
[Mittelpunkt der Zivilisation der Welt, nicht bloB ihr Gipfel] (27). The
shine into Europe, but only to be reflected from Europe back into
colonies exist primarily to benefit the European core, but Europe also
periphery.
the New Worlds, Miiller writes that the major events of the past have
involved the interaction between only Asia and Europe, whose civi-
nobility blended well with European culture, but during the Renais-
sance and Reformation the spirit of the Old World, meaning Greek
during the Renaissance and suggests instead that the real modern
with the freedom of the ancient world, only Germany remains pas-
sive and feminine. But what if that toward which the others strive
extent to which it is unified with that which Germany was, is, and
Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 93
will be" (44). Miiller conjures the image of frenetic male nations out
many does not need to practice active conquest, nor does Germany
Germany is the world, and Novalis is its poet: "For if ever one man
true governor of the poetic spirit on earth" [der wahre Statthalter des
ters to the southeast on the way to his mother's home, but he already
a poet. We know from Novalis's fragments and Tieck's notes that the
work: a sudden scene shift was to have placed Heinrich at the head of
Crusader who lives as a hermit near the graves of his wife, Marie von
Hohenzollern, and his two children, all of whom died soon after
account of his own life, Heinrich pages through images that depict
his immediate present in the cave, events and figures from the recent
past, and episodes from the future: "Toward the end he seemed larger
(I:265). The book within the book thus presents in condensed form
not only the major events of the novel as we have it but also the
fulfill his destiny as a poet, but not before he has completed his grand
Herder in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit: Hein-
tell him of their exploits in the Holy Lands and encourage Heinrich
heathen blood-" Wir waschen bald infrohem Muthe / Das heilige Grab
Crusade in Zulima and her child. Her family has been slaughtered,
and she has been torn from her homeland to live in German exile.
that the Christians would have been free to visit his grave without
his martial enthusiasm and resolves to help her in any way possible.
interaction with the Orient: the first captures the Crusaders' desire to
tains several passages that express an enthusiasm for war that seems at
best naive from today's perspective: "the true war is a religious war;
that spring from national hatred, belong in this category, and they are
true poetry. Here the true heroes are at home, the noblest counter-
More often than not, however, Heinrich displays the poetic sensi-
in the first model the Orient becomes that which must be conquered
ine the East as "passive, seminal, feminine, even silent and supine," to
use Edward Said's words.61 The feminized Orient simply is; Western
Heinrich and Klingsohr converse at great length about the task of the
poet and the meaning of history, Mathilde does little more than
blush, stammer a few words, and bring the men their breakfast. From
puppet.
man.63 The global trappings of the novel are merely another vocabu-
world of his father to tap into what Friedrich Kittler has described as
first stage of a journey that will lead him back to the cradle of West-
ward" [Wo gehn wir denn hin? Immer nach Hause] (I:325). Hein-
Novalis wrote that the novel was supposed to end "with a simple fam-
ily" (I:345; italics in original). The novel that grapples with weighty
life.
meanings, and you become more and more desirous to guess the
tive for the self-understanding of the reader: "The unknown spirit [of
ism: what matters is not so much the Orient an sich, but the image of
language in which the spirit is not yet divorced from the written let-
ern man. On the one hand, the inability to understand the East points
is."67 On the other hand, she will never be more than what she is
"Sie will nichts sein-Sie ist etwas"-whereas he at least has the poten-
tial for growth and can struggle with problems that she cannot per-
ceive. In fact, those who view the ancient inscriptions are ultimately
unconcerned with what they really mean, but delight instead in the
language of the earth" and that nevertheless must remain silent. "It is
renewed every spring, and its strange script is only legible to the
beloved, like the bouquet of the Orient. He will read forever, and
is a mere game (Wortspiel) that exists only for its own sake, he claims
here, but people foolishly think that words refer to things. The truly
inspired writer could enter into the play of language and babble in the
for the sake of speaking, because speaking would be its desire and its
were blurred: "No more order in space and time . . . Everything has
to be intertwined, / The one must ripen and grow through the other
[Alles muf3 in einander greifen / Eins durch das andre gedeihn und reifen]"
asserts that "man, in a certain sense, is also woman, just as the woman
is man" [der Mann ist gewissermaaBen auch Weib, so wie das Weib
their lords, but toward their fellow citizens who stood in solidarity at
more sharply drawn. Filled with the sort of "partisan spirit" that
Novalis criticizes in his "Europa" essay, the new nation could easily
1793, this new sort of "teutschen Patriotismus" had not existed in his
youth. He remembers being told of his duty to obey his parents and
the mayor of the city, but not of his patriotic duty to Germany; in
those days, the word Teutschheit had not yet been invented.73 Now
spirit Novalis praises the German gift for literary translations, which
now better than the English" (4:237). Clearly we must not read too
much into "Fritz the flatterer's"74 kind response to his friend's cur-
to view the new German cosmopolitanism as little more than the old
fleet, no state, no 'Revolution,' but they had the idea of the [Holy
geist] had become conscious of itself among them. If anyone was, the
by flirting with reactionary rhetoric that could and did become dan-
cosmopolitan.
von Kleist wrote ferocious verses about stuffing the Rhine full of
French corpses, while Theodor Korner and Ernst Moritz Arndt com-
had gone wrong and how it might be possible to rejuvenate the Ger-
the Germans are better suited to this sort of education than other
place for centuries (Stammvolk) and because the German language has
guage has evolved over time, but there has been no sudden rupture
with the past. Fichte speaks of the German language as a living power
of nature that has the ability to touch life directly and change it for
viduals who use language, but language that creates individuals and
the Volk to which they belong: "thus it is not they who form the lan-
guage, but, rather, the language that forms them" (67). Here Fichte
Fichte takes pride in the belief that the Germans are caught up in the
102 German Orientalisms
vital force of their language; those nations that have adopted abstract
terms from foreign languages are "cut off from the living root" (68)
Fichte concedes that at times the Germans have been seduced into
the French have invaded German soil, Fichte concludes, they pose
national culture.
Thus the logic of the Reden an die deutsche Nation is more complex
than one might expect at first glance. On the surface, Fichte claims
that the Germans know exactly who they are: a Stammvolk sustained
have a vital indigenous Kultur that their oppressors lack. Fichte nev-
ertheless fears that the Germans will succumb to French influence out
Napoleon's army but the seductive force of the foreign ideology that
Fichte both rallies the Germans against an external foe and warns
them not to become their own worst enemies. His proud references
satory fictions designed to mask the sense that the German nation
has been ravaged by war and another part is ruled by foreign masters
in a foreign tongue," and yet, he continues, never has the need for
only the university can reach beyond local borders and exert an
porated into the state. Professors became civil servants whose purpose
was to train the next generation of young men for careers within the
tasks, however. On the contrary, he felt that the university years were
aim for depth rather than breadth; the select handful of young men
facts, but rather allow knowledge to flow "out of the depths of the
spirit [aus der Tiefe des Geistes heraus]: For only knowledge that stems
104 German Orientalisms
from within and that can be planted into the inner being transforms
from the heart" [Wenn es euch nicht von Herzen geht], "when it
doesn't flow from your soul" [Wenn sie dir nicht aus eigner Seele
quillt] .84
tion. By this I do not mean the sort of torpor often witnessed among
best way to solve political problems was not by storming the barri-
tand], in which all of our faculties are aroused and engaged in a state
of the Napoleonic defeats. The university best fulfills its function for
the state when the state grants the university as much independence
as possible.
The young man may learn various facts at the university, but, as
that recalls the picaresque novel. From time to time, however, Wil-
helm steps back to contemplate his life, and for a moment, at least,
example, Wilhelm reads the account of his own life that has been
past: "for the first time he saw his image outside of himself-not, to
act of self-reflection.
they are in the present by looking back over the events of their past,
the history of its national literature and the development of its lan-
and the linguistic ties between modern German and its ancient Indo-
and the Orient, in turn, gave rise to the academic disciplines of Ger-
treatise Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier [On the language and
106 German Orientalisms
toward a new order of things" that arose from the confluence of Ger-
heroic songs poured over Europe with the Germanic peoples, and
when the wild strength of Gothic poetry met with an echo of the
lamented the fact that the "treasures of the Orient" were so inacces-
sible compared with those of classical antiquity and looked to the East
for a source of poetry that would revitalize the West: "We must seek
the highest form of Romanticism in the Orient [Im Orient mhssen wir
das hochste Romantische suchen], and only when we can draw from this
the West."9
impatient with his publisher, the treatise finally appeared in the spring
of 1808. Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier thus marks the culmi-
beginning of the end. Soon after the essay appeared in print Schlegel
himself from the ancient culture he had once so admired, sharply crit-
than all rational blindness and insight. "92 Despite his reservations
his admiration for the Sanskrit language, and it is through his com-
ancient Indian root that Schlegel inaugurates a new phase in the his-
ison with other languages. In Schlegel's view, there are two basic lan-
like a living seed . . . Hence the wealth, on the one hand, and the
resilience and longevity of these languages, of which one can truly say
their first roots" (8:159), where we find Sanskrit in its pristine clarity
Asia, and Schlegel even speculates that the peoples of northern India
not to pursue "this very important question for history of our father-
vinced that "Asians and Europeans [form] only one large family; Asia
did not claim special status for Germany over other European nations
in Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, he was happy to sing Ger-
many's praises in his slightly later lectures on the Geschichte der alten
Rejecting charges that the fall of the Roman Empire led only to bar-
to the Middle Ages, particularly when one compares their "so splen-
strength as the German, the first, indeed, the only people in Europe
first German chair for Sanskrit studies at the University of Bonn; the
more than pity for the victims of British colonization, despite his
maintained the focus on the past as they sought the roots of Indo-
Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 109
German thought" that culminated in the claim that the ancient Aryan
ing the 1930s were active party members, while the vast majority of
the rest did nothing in public to oppose the regime. Whether they
clues."'02 Even Friedrich Schlegel "did not get high marks from the
married a converted Jew and voiced qualified praise for the achieve-
war on two fronts: an ironic battle against the Philistines and a seri-
without talent, with little courage and less honor that with amazing
audacity is trying to sneak, press, and force its way into the state, sci-
ence, art, and society."'05 At the same time, however, many young
know what happened under Bismarck and Hitler, but until at least
1848, the question was unresolved and a matter of hot dispute. And
gists in the Nazi era can obscure the variety of positions within the
WOLFRAM GERMAN
many and the East, others turned their interest to the history of the
ple, Arnim, Brentano, Gorres, and the Brothers Grimm began to col-
lect and publish German sagas, fairy tales, and Volkslieder. At a time
when our leaders have failed us, wrote Gorres in his preface to Die
teutschen Volksbicher (1807), the nation must look within, "to that
Romantics turned above all to the Middle Ages. Now, the notion
has long since been dispelled as a myth. Major figures of the German
some attention to the Middle Ages, while the Swiss authors Bodmer
ever, the new editions did not capture the popular imagination.
and three years later Goethe left Christoph Heinrich Miiller's new
the earliest Germanic literature soon died as well."0 It was only in the
with Tieck's editorial work in the 1790s and continuing through the
and publish every scrap of medieval poetry they could find, while
enthusiasm for German medieval literature made its way into the uni-
versity as well, and in 181o Friedrich Hagen von der Hagen was
Nibelungenlied. What had begun as the work of a few poets and iso-
system.
the old Germanic hero Arminius in the struggle against the latter-day
though he had long been one of the most widely read medieval
well as the Grail legends of the Middle East. His characters in Wille-
ple, Tieck wrote that while Das Heldenbuch and Das Nibelungenlied
as "the most artful of all German poets of this time" but also noted his
tic" works of German Kultur."9 In the long run, however, this would
not do: the Germans could hardly afford to concede one of their
century Wolfram reception was to find a way to reclaim him for the
enlied that German soldiers carried with them into battle against
Napoleon's troops. Soon after the French had been defeated, how-
Lachmann should also have paved the way for a broader popular
from a simpleton to the Grail king and that Wolfram thus could not
and paved the way for Wolfram's entry into the national literature by
the high priests of the Lachmann school and medievalists who con-
San Marte (A. Schulz) and Karl Simrock, who translated Wolfram's
"were not writing for universities but for the general public." 28 One
such figure was Georg Gottfried Gervinus, who published his path-
years 1835 and 1842. A political liberal, Gervinus wrote his volume
now past, while the time for political change has come. Goethe had
once claimed that Germany did not desire the revolutions necessary
desire such changes and directions; and if the nature of the develop-
the Middle Ages, devoting the first of his five volumes to a detailed
point that he describes as "a struggle for the individual Bildung of the
West versus the collective [Bildung] of the East" (I:I63). The West
while the East remained frozen in the past as the unchanging Other
also pure, noble morals" contrast positively with the "shameless, dis-
Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 115
gusting, and windy contents of the British" and the "shallow, foolish,
stands on the cusp of a new age: "Thus Parzival depicts a youth full
Heroic Age; but from the time of his isolated education there lay in
him the seed of an entirely new world and of a completely new kind
desire for action, full of feeling for the homeland, and yet full of long-
then, Vilmar moves back the onset of modernity from the Renais-
ism in the Middle Ages. In doing so, he finds a way to defend Ger-
man literature against the charge that it is belated. True, the Age of
Goethe came after the golden ages of English, Spanish, and French
erature had its first classical period already around 1200. Thus Euro-
pean modernity begins around 12oo00; the Germans got there first, not
(1882). Wagner had become familiar with the Parzival story in 1845
nus's literary history, although he would not complete his opera until
116 German Orientalisms
simplifies Wolfram's plot: gone is the role of King Arthur's court and
heathen queen Belakane and Parzival's joyous reunion with his half
knights of the Holy Grail from their bondage to the evil heathen
and Kundry figure as embodiments of both the Oriental and the Jew.
Jews.'32
We can follow the legacy of this argument into the twentieth cen-
val's father Gahmuret. In 1937 Ernst Cucuel argued that the opening
books of Parzival were an intrinsic part of the whole and not a later
ing his own study of Das Haus Anjou und der Orient in Wolframs
"Parzival. "i3s He, too, argues that Wolfram updated Chretien's Perce-
imperialist ambitions of the East over the West). Wolfram gives voice
to the Staufer's "global politics with its drive to the south and east"
French story into a work that is German to its inner core and that
graft but rather nourished by the juices of the new German soil [von
Efforts to link the German Parzival to the Aryan myth had in fact
begun several decades earlier. In 1913 Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels pub-
lished an essay entitled "Der heilige Gral als das Mysterium der
that inspired "a heroic Aryan racial hygiene." Liebenfels published his
"Are you blond? Are you a man? Then read Ostara, the publication
of the blonds and those who fight for men's rights." 39 Although he
hardly fit the racial profile, Adolf Hitler heeded the call during his
future triumphs of a blond and blue-eyed master race but also visiting
which makes Parzival both modern and German, critics portray him
distinguish him from passive and static Orientals and as a noble Ger-
118 German Orientalisms
AND IRONY
entitled Der geheime Bericht uber den Dichter Goethe [The secret report
about the poet Goethe]. The story begins in 1890, when a German
on the island, particularly since she grew up in the Middle East and
speaks fluent Arabic. Her son soon becomes equally bilingual and the
best friend of the crown prince. Meanwhile Great Britain and Ger-
many have discovered oil in the Gulf, and the islanders realize that it
is only a matter of time before they will have to confront the Euro-
peans. The prince decides that they should get to know their future
versities. The woman's son spends his year abroad in Germany and
returns to present his secret report on Goethe. Most of the book then
that Goethe could have developed such empathy for Persian poetry
and taught in the schools. For a brief time the island becomes a cen-
ter for international understanding, but then the British destroy the
Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 119
capital city and pump out so much oil that the island sinks beneath
the waves.
presents the Germans with just the sort of kitsch they expect, thus
his next book, War Hitler Araber? [Was Hitler an Arab?] (1994), Seno-
cak takes Goethe to task for doing the same thing, citing his Noten
imperialist imagination.
the major work of his Orientalist phase, but also in the late Novelle.
West-dstlicher Divan seemed out of step with the spirit of the times.
neglected works of the Middle Ages before heading off into battle
Germans found that their most famous poet remained decidedly cool
house in Frankfurt during the Seven Years' War, and he was proud
West.146 Years later the radical journalist Ludwig Borne was still furi-
dred spirit who resisted national chauvinism. Germans should not cut
still-innocent early form of something terrible that one day will man-
Predicting disaster for Germans who set out to conquer the world by
art . . . This is the way the Germans should be, and in this I am their
image and model. Receiving the world into itself and giving back
flex their "manly" muscles in the effort to impose their will on the
had learned from his old friend and erstwhile mentor Herder. In the
writing naive poetry, and that the more spontaneous and natural the
original poetry is, the better the national literature will develop in
quered, there remains "a certain core of the nation in its character"
ticular times and places, rather than measuring them against a com-
respect them in their own context, and forget that Greeks and
Cultures may be different for both Goethe and Herder, but they are
not all equal. Unlike the Early Romantics, Goethe has nothing good
less, its influence corrupting, and images of Indian idols hideous: "Still
he means, in the first instance, certain poetic passages in the Old Tes-
tament that Herder had also praised as "the oldest documents of the
human race" and, in the second, Arabic and Persian poetry of the
myself into the first books of Moses and found myself among the scat-
the greatest society" (14:155). Goethe based his earliest known dra-
Islamic world also began early.s' A translation of the Koran into Ger-
man appeared in late 1771; Goethe studied it carefully and copied pas-
sages from it. He did not complete his drama on the theme of the
Patriarchenluft zu kosten,
[North and West and South fall to pieces / Thrones burst, king-
Chiser's well (the well of life) shall rejuvenate you amidst lov-
Vienna and Napoleon plotted his revenge on the island of Elba, the
the Divan: it is a simple land of love and war, wine and song, caravans
and seductive maidens conceal their charms behind veils. More than
power that contrasts with the political turmoil and partisan strife of
els of Jean Paul Richter-even though he has just insisted that one
times or places. Goethe singles out Jean Paul as "a man who has pen-
etrated the breadth, heights, and depths of the Orient" more than any
which would seem to make him an unlikely hero for Goethe, the
"Oriental" style, not the content of his novels: "Such a gifted spirit
ble together, but in a way that weaves through a secret ethical thread
and Schiller had enjoyed a running joke about Jean Paul as a Trage-
ity at the height of his classical period, Jean Paul's quirky novels
seemed the product of someone "who had fallen from the moon."'57
Slightly later critics noted the contrast between the two writers but
of Faust II, the Wanderjahre, and the Divan. Goethe's relatively mild
Divan: the one essential, organically rooted in the Middle East; the
ment that might provide an organic link between East and West, a
modern, rooted and uprooted, essential and virtual. One might call it
world of presence, voice, and origin, but seems at the same time
aware that the source is always already erased, deferred, bracketed, or,
jahre, and Faust II. In the meantime, however, Goethe had become
the time of Werther and the Sturm und Drang lyrics, had given voice
Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 125
what Foucault termed the "invention of man" but also already antic-
"posthuman," or both.
and Hatem in the "Buch Suleika" that begins "People and servant
rough paraphrase, Suleika says that you can play any role you like, as
long as you remain true to your self: "Alles kdnne man verlieren, /
Wenn man bliebe was man ist." To which Hatem responds that his
entire sense of self derives from her love, and that he would lose him-
self if she turned away from him toward another. Yet he could
quickly remedy the situation by shape-shifting into her new lover: "I
quickly transform myself into [slip into the body of] the beloved that
she caresses" [Ich verkdrpere mich behende / In den Holden den sie
posed to be an Islamic poet of the Middle Ages and hence need not
be identified directly with Goethe's own views: "I would be, if not a
poets], or in any case the kaiser" [Wollte, wo nicht gar ein Rabbi, /
Das will mir so recht nicht ein; / Doch Ferdusi, Motanabbi, / Allen-
falls der Kaiser seyn.] That is: I will be a chameleon for your love
The entire "Buch Suleika," which is the most fully developed seg-
ers of love and boasts that lava still bubbles beneath the snow-capped
seems sadly aware that the present moment is only a brief reenact-
[So in accordance with fate's hard lot / you slip away from me,
The sense of loss reaches agonizing levels a few years later in the
nating passion and its debilitating loss: "I have lost everything, I have
lost myself/ I, who was once the darling of the gods" [Mir ist das All,
ich bin mir selbst verloren, / Der ich noch erst den Gottern Liebling
war] (2:462).
his late poetry by splitting the self, as it were, either overcoming the
nal cycle of nature. Here he finds consolation in the sense that others
can enjoy what he once did, and, in granting others pleasure, he, too,
the esoteric doctrine that one must sacrifice oneself in order to sur-
the nights of love / that conceived you, where you conceived" [In
desire tears you upward to higher procreation" [Und dich reil3et neu
lish some of Marianne von Willemer's poetry under his own name
authorship.~164
The double aspect of the Orient as both the site of a simple soci-
ety living in harmony with nature that contrasts with the complexity
quished by love and piety than violence," as Goethe himself put it,'65
bolic landscape of the text are the two castles owned by the ruling
family: the ruined fortress on the hilltop and the modern palace out-
side the bustling town. Servants of the ruling pair have been busy
tidying up the ruins into a picturesque park, while an artist draws pic-
tures of the old castle to hang in the halls of the new palace. The
whose halls "knights once strode up and down" (8:536), has been
pair. The function of both the spruced-up ruins and the commis-
existing power relations even as they cloak the violence that supports
such power under a nostalgic haze. The prince and princess live in a
Hence the prince heads off on a royal hunt of the sort one finds por-
jects allegedly delighted "that the first lady of the land was also the
that the capital exchanges in the flourishing marketplace are still part
of a barter economy.
of the medieval world. Young Honorio has honed his fighting skills
with exercises suitable for a budding Crusader: "the youth was hand-
some, he galloped up just as the Princess had often seen him in games
with the lance and the ring. In the same way his bullet hit the Turk's
past in the arena, just as he picked up the Moor's head from the
for their part, import entertainment from the East in the form of lions,
tigers, and their exotic keepers in the village square. As the garish
posters decorating the cages make clear, the caged beasts cater to the
cratic war games. In both cases, images of the Orient raise the specter
cated for Occidental pleasure: the Turk's head is on a post, the Moor's
head lies on the ground, and the big cats are in their cages.
The threat of violence becomes real when a fire breaks out in the
marketplace and, in the ensuing confusion, the lion and tiger break
the test: he gallops to the rescue and quickly dispatches the tiger with
a bullet to its head. He then falls to his knees and begs permission to
leave town and travel the world as a reward for his heroism, ostensi-
from all over, and when they speak about a city or an important place
anywhere in the world, they always ask us if we have been there our-
the provincial dinner table. At the same time, his immediate recourse
extension, his keepers, coupled with his desire for world travel, cap-
explore and exploit the rest of world, if here in the relatively harm-
dummies has prepared him well for his role in granting legitimacy to
the local court and solidifying its sense of importance in the world.
than the "Orientals" who owned the tiger appear: a woman, clad in
haired boy with black eyes. While Honorio gloats over his success,
also loose, the prince agrees to let the mother and her son try to
clothed like the woman and child" (8:548), delivers a short speech
der will remain in place forever, but in fact it will gradually erode, fall
into the mountain stream, and be carried to sea. Nothing remains the
the lion rules: he strides beneath palm trees and through deserts, and
it seems that nothing can resist him. "But man knows how to tame
(8:5 50). As if to prove his point, the boy approaches the escaped lion
130 German Orientalisms
wild beast.
who live in close proximity to nature and thus understand and respect
confident that they are in control: "For Daniel was not afraid in the
lion's den; he remained firm and calm, and the wild roars did not
day Crusader. As in the Divan, then, Goethe not only evokes a sim-
ple yet profound Orient that contrasts with modern Western society
but also signals his awareness that this image of the Orient is a prod-
uct of the Western imagination. In the poetry of the Divan, this self-
tasies, even though they are clearly figures who would be at home in
the outbreak of fire and the ensuing release of the wild animals as a
slowly, slowly; but it has taken its course, it will come and hit us."'67
Like Novalis's "Europa" essay, Goethe's late work is not so much for
Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 131
and inevitably modern. One can neither stop the course of history
nor turn back the hands of time, but one does have a choice in the
way one decides to move forward. At the beginning of the story the
prince and his wife flirt with a reactionary nostalgia in their efforts to
establish symbolic continuity with the feudal past. At the same time,
however, they have built a new palace and revitalized the local econ-
omy, which suggests that they have adapted to modern times with-
evolution to revolution.
modern society. At a time when the pace of travel has quickened dra-
come into increasing contact with one another and become part of a
larger unity: "National literature does not mean much now; the time
for world literature has come, and everyone must work to accelerate
this epoch." Goethe does not deny that national cultures have their
that prevents them from looking beyond the confines of their own
were to follow Goethe's model, the nation could take a leading role
world literature is forming, that all nations are inclined in this direc-
tion and thus taking positive steps. The German can and should do
the most in this process; he will have a fine role to play in this great
From the beginning Goethe had demonstrated his ability to feel his
mas, Pindaric odes, and Roman elegies. Such stylistic virtuosity is also
like anyone else, was a product of a particular time and place that
inevitably colored his perceptions of the world, and Goethe was well
walls with colorful figures and bright vistas" (8:23). Yet Goethe was
but that does not mean that there was no understanding at all. What
querade. While Goethe does not shy away from images of the Orient
readers that such images stem more from the Western imagination
Der Mythus von Orient und Occident [The myth of Orient and Occi-
for only they are most deeply ruled and determined by the big
turnal idea of the past."' Given the current political situation in Ger-
that all this is once again on the agenda" (470). Baeumler's renewed
fascination with the irrational "Asiatic" world plays into the hands of
133
134 German Orientalisms
the Bachofen introduction, one critic concludes, but right in his sus-
War. As was the case with his Romantic predecessors, thinking about
politics for Thomas Mann almost always involved thinking about sex-
uality, and Mann's sexual politics, in turn, had their own complex
Joseph Gorres. In his Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker [Sym-
the new world, between "the dark murkiness of the Near Eastern
myth in the Asian world] (181o), placing the Greek triumph over the
developed out of the original humans who lived along the Ganges in
the mountains of northern India: first, the blacks sank down into cen-
tral Africa, where they remain in darkness and form "the lowest
original Kashmir. Gradually, then, humans spread out to fill the rest
peoples like dead leaves that fall to the dark earth, while "life, as if
purified by this shedding, now drove its vital stem joyously toward
(204). Gorres thus transforms his seeming nostalgia for the primal
forces that lay just beneath the surface of what Winckelmann had
described as "a noble simplicity and a quiet grandeur" [eine edle Ein-
falt, und eine stille Grd3e] in ancient Greek culture.6 The West tri-
umphs, to be sure, but the Asian enemy has grown formidable. Their
the other passive, corporeal, and static. Bachofen then turns this series
rising above the same, a breaking through of the old barriers of exis-
Baeumler's work: the one inclines toward the irrational, the "femi-
nine," while the other reacts against the feminine with what could be
and, indeed, the seductive lure of the Orient. He praises Creuzer for
its Gorres for placing "life in connection . . . to the night and the past
century, "the age of the earth and nationality" [das Zeitalter der Erde
of blood and soil must have seemed more than a little suspicious to
tory over these "tellurian" forces, yet he lingers too long and too lov-
ingly with the enemy. From his position it would take only a short
Bachofen and Baeumler is the belief that the feminine, once defeated,
and the Furies in Aeschylus's Orestia as only "the first act in the bat-
tle that Asia fights with Europe."9 History stages the same drama
again and again: "There is no final victory. To be sure, there are vic-
torious forces: again and again the mother gives birth to the son,
again and again the sun rises out of darkness, again and again the Ori-
ment of modern times. Does patriarchy hold sway today? Not at all:
"It is an open secret that paternal authority, the rule of the man is
city, men and women have forgotten their natural roles. Hence
both sexes become, the weaker, or more weakened the men become,
of socialism and democracy, a trend that Bachofen resisted with all his
first, Greece and Rome mark the first stage of the European triumph
over the East; in the second, Germany stands alone against the deca-
to harden themselves against the threat of the feminine in all its mod-
male bonding and the fear and loathing of the feminine,'2 while Ger-
culinity helped shape both the thematic concerns and the formal
from the beginnings of the First World War to Mann's speech in sup-
Der Zauberberg.
SEXUAL POLITICS
When the German army mobilized for war in August 1914, the
contrast with the German situation on the eve of the French Revo-
of Germans into contact with a wider world: "The size of the harvest
of credit markets in distant cities all touched the lives of men and
itself within the course of little more than a single generation from a
lenge its arch-rival England for control of the seas.'5 The First World
est" in the East that Edward Said had missed in earlier German acad-
immediate aims in the First World War was to conquer and colonize
south, Germany had ambitions in the Balkans, the Crimea, and Asia
Minor. The Ottoman Empire that for many centuries had been the
bane of Christian Europe was now Germany's ally.'9 Here the Ger-
mans sought not only oil and military protection against Russia, but
man empire that would stretch "as far as the Pacific and the gates of
ders of Christian Europe into India through Feirefiz and Prester John
the initial excitement at the outbreak of the First World War: "War!
the first chords of a theme that he was to sound with obsessive regu-
larity over the next four years in his Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen
Izenburg's view, the outbreak of the First World War gave Mann a
bellicose mood did not last long, however, and his strident tones of
Germany's bid to become a major world power was his at best luke-
Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 141
that the events of 1914 temporarily caused him to believe "that the
have at least hours in which this belief wavers and nearly falls" (197).
before the war, Mann's literary works and essays reveal little enthusi-
asm for Germany's desire to establish overseas colonies. One has the
sense that he agrees with the sentiments that he attributes to the old
Zivilisation] (31). Like the Germans of the late eighteenth and early
French civilization that refuses to remain within its own borders and
thus disrupts German Bildung and Kultur. Not content with imposing
its values on the rest of Europe, France, together with Great Britain,
then set out to civilize the rest of the world. In some of the more
found: "he admired with wide eyes France's mighty colonial empire,
ity, Mann contends, the British have no concern for the plight of
their "natives": "After all, they're dealing with Asia, with 'dark
the outside world, if democrats at home" (349). Mann shares the fears
142 German Orientalisms
from surgery in the United States he had briefly developed a taste for
Coca-Cola.28
out elements of racism and hypocrisy among British and French colo-
when he expressed outrage at the fact that the Belgians were guard-
ing the postwar years, Mann sought to adapt to the new situation,
while retaining his respect for the German cultural tradition he had
Republik."
his preface to the essay that his opinions had undergone no funda-
former conservative allies, while paving the way for his reconciliation
Liebe," but by the 192os almost everyone had stopped trying. Begin-
ning during the Restoration and now again during the "Conservative
the Prussian king and queen, Novalis was "most strongly influenced
One might argue that if Mann were really serious about his com-
ner in support of his cause, to which one could respond that Mann's
sure, Mann had no sympathy for the rising tide of German fascism;
the "Jewish question."37 Yet Mann was not quite ready to throw
opposed so vociferously during the war years. During the early 1920S
144 German Orientalisms
East and West," wrote Mann at the conclusion of his essay on Goethe
and Tolstoy in the summer of 1921; "Germany will not become Asi-
the right and Mann stepped cautiously toward the center, Novalis
right. Hence Mann repeatedly reassures his hostile audience that they
should not think of the Republic "as an affair for smart Jew-boys
and that his pairing of Whitman with Novalis was intended as a fur-
male society] (1917-19).41 Here Bliiher couples his argument that the
strength of the state depends on erotic bonds between men with dis-
roles and the family. They rejected what they perceived as aristocratic
lack of masculinity, they will never be able to form the strong male-
male bonds necessary to form a state, "and so they pass through world
history with the curse of being always only a race and never a Volk.
They have lost their state" (170). A society that permits women to
liberation.44
polemical intent.45 The polemicist, that is, wants to make things sim-
ple, to tell people what to do, as Mann proclaims at the end of his
talk: "Long live the Republic!"46 The dialectician, on the other hand,
coin has two sides, that every argument in support of one position
MAGIC MOUNTAIN
Holy Grail in his vision in the snow: "that is the idea of man, the
Castorp receives his vision "before he is torn from his heights down
this moment of rupture, this sudden tear in the fabric of history, that
Now that development has been interrupted; Mann looks back across
Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 147
the story takes place, or, rather, "it took place back then, long ago, in
the old days of the world before the Great War, with whose begin-
ning so many things began whose beginnings, it seems, have not yet
jamin's phrase,49 but, rather, shot through with the bullets of the First
World War. Mann and his fellow Germans of the fledgling Weimar
[das Land der Mitte].S "Positioned between East and West, it will
have to choose, will have consciously to decide, once and for all,
between the two spheres vying for its heart" (5o8 [708]). Settembrini
racy and the law of ferment, change and progress. One could call the
first the Asiatic principle, the other the European, for Europe was the
devouring us. Tartar faces in every direction you look.' And Herr
seen, the "Orient" was not a stable category, either in terms of its
148 German Orientalisms
can begin by noting that the Orient appears in a least four different
Empire, and the Far East, as well as in the ancient myths of the
Mediterranean world.
the conflicting influences of his north German father and his mother
from Brazil,5' and in keeping with this background, his early fiction
Consuelo comes "from far south on the map,"S 2 while the dissolute
(1896]), tells of the sickly and effeminate Paolo, who was born in a
northern German city after his father had married a woman from a
the border between East and West; in a more famous work, it will be
quite to the tigers,"54 but at least as far as Venice. Here beneath "the
East comes to him in the form of a beautiful Polish boy and a disease
also features as a site of sexual desire and illness that inspires intellec-
ment enchant his very core" (227 [319]). Chauchat's "'Tartar phys-
Krokowski, who lectures on the link between love and illness, speaks
one thought in his head, and it is a filthy one" (61 [92]). A number of
Mongolian set to their eyes" (306 [430]). Russia is also home to the
ual athleticism disturbs Castorp through the thin walls of his room at
the sanatorium.
Castorp comes into indirect contact with the Ottoman Empire and
the Near East primarily through his contact with Director Behrens.
his cousin has developed a sudden interest in the fine arts when Cas-
(258 [362]). Behrens grinds coffee for the cousins in a Turkish mill
that the mill and the cigarettes were given to him as a present by an
together with her Jewish lesbian lover and a castrated Moorish ser-
alcove evoke an "Orient" of the sort that might titillate the imagina-
tion of the fraternity member that Behrens once was and in some
swords above a desk in the adjoining room, and Behrens still affects
Still more exotic are the images of the Far East that make their way
to the magic mountain. During his early days at the sanatorium Cas-
form of flirtation. Much later, as it turns out, Albin will supply the
valet arrives at the sanatorium wearing a bowler and a coat with a fur
collar, but he appears in his native garb after Peeperkorn has com-
Gone with the Wind (1939), Castorp gives Chauchat a final kiss while
the Malayan watches, "rolling his brown animal eyes to one side until
passes the time waiting for trains in foreign cities by watching feature
list several such images in a passage that he worked directly into Der
Joachim take the terminally ill Karen Karstedt to the movies: "a rous-
unrolled silently before them; scene after opulent scene sped past, full
of naked bodies, despotic lust, and abject servility blind in its zeal, full
the Oriental despot has been dispatched the film takes its audience on
are essentially no different than the toy that Castorp had once found
152 German Orientalisms
in his grandfather's china cabinet when he was a boy: "a little Turk in
a bright silk costume, whose body was rigid to the touch but con-
tained a mechanism that, though it had long since fallen into disre-
pair, had once enabled him to run across the table" (20 [35S]).
Mann's novel one travels up to the mountains rather than down into
hell. In a sense, however, the direction that one travels matters less
than the fact that one leaves the flatlands behind. Hans Castorp's jour-
product of sulfur and mercury-the res bina, the bisexual prima mate-
metically sealed realm of the magic mountain, coupled with his cor-
the mother.6' The ascent into the crystalline air of the Swiss moun-
matriarchy.
Yet this is only part of the story. As Lubich himself argues, the
Instead, we can look back beyond Bachofen and Gorres to the Early
streets in Davos are full of patients and tourists from around the
nate sorts who spoke French and came from the Balkans or the Lev-
ant, a motley set of adventurers" (310 [435S]). Even the cemeteries are
full of "unsettled folk who had found their way here from all over the
world and had returned now for good and all to the horizontal form
international community are dead, and they died young, while the
ill- enjoy the artificial paradise of a tourist trap. Yet the alternative
seriously as the judge of Hades, nor can we view him without irony
from multiple angles. Like the film clips shown in the sanatorium
still more than the matriarchy in both its utopian and reactionary
conflict also finds its way onto the mountain, if in similarly displaced
apart from her husband, and entertains other men behind closed
Empire between the Caucasus mountains and the Caspian Sea. Why
together with Great Britain, was to form the Triple Entente against
Germany and Austria in the First World War. Thus Chauchat not
has ties to the masculine reaction against this threat that takes the
Castorp, for his part, comes not from the provincial city of Liibeck
watching massive "ships that had sailed to Asia and Africa" undergo-
ing repairs in the dry docks (29 [47]). Perhaps, suggests the narrator,
engineer, and we recall that he initially sets off with a copy of Ocean
Steamships to read in the train as he travels for a brief visit with his
birth, his choice of career, and his interest in the English language all
point toward the intense rivalry between Germany and Great Britain
for control of the seas during the prewar period.65 Castorp, of course,
than passionate zeal: "For he had the greatest respect for work,
although, for his part, he found that he did tire easily" (33 [52]). He
has already stopped reading Ocean Steamships before the train arrives
and the high seas take place in the displaced form of male-male rival-
ern imperial nations in the struggle to conquer and colonize the rest
done more than just paint her portrait. The scene begins with an
each man fondles his cigar and speaks lovingly of "her" temperament.
men caress and trade phallic objects that they treat as female lovers.
Castorp has received in the mail from Bremen: "They came in beau-
lions, and an exposition hall with banners flying" (248 [349]). The
biscuit tins, whiskey bottles, tea tins, and chocolate bars."67 The Ori-
drools over Chauchat's crudely painted flesh continue the double ref-
the East and to the Western imperialist efforts to tame and exploit
that realm. In a comic follow-up to this scene, Castorp later all but
admits with a wink and a nudge to Behrens that he has spent the
offering his own lewd comment about Chauchat: "Rather nice, eh?"
the most moving scene in Der Zauberberg Castorp watches his beloved
ghost during the seance suggests that this is one relationship that must
tembrini, and at the very end of the novel they share a bittersweet
potential rival for Castorp, Mynheer Peeperkorn, and for time they
that he is not about to respond to the challenge with poison and dag-
red wine stains here on the sheet" (596 [833]). Parzival had defeated
a series of adversaries when drops of blood on the snow had sent him
into a trance in memory of his absent wife, but this modern hero dis-
creetly admits to his affair and ends up drinking Bruderschaft with his
world of decadent women and male rivalries in the West can result
will eventually give up his beloved Maria Mancini for a local Swiss
Hans's rejection of Maria also marks his final divorce from any direct
With this set of oppositions in mind, let us turn to the most com-
that his father was a kosher butcher, and that he therefore associated
religion with ritual slaughter from an early age. It will also be Naphta
voluptuary in his personal life, given to fine silks and rich chocolate
upward from peasants toiling in the fields to the bed where lovers can
of sexual excess and political regression, for Naphta can articulate the
Chauchat/Hippe cannot.
truth. As Naphta is quick to observe, the West has its own tradition
speaks with pride of the cultural advances made possible by the Cru-
so ornate that despite the desk and bookcases the room did not have
Naphta, like Chauchat, also has strong ties to the West. He was
(393 [549]).
Forced to represent not only the East in both its guises as politically
J. Reed and even Thomas Mann himself argued, the "Snow" chap-
the text: "For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no
sentiments, Castorp resolves to change his life: "I will remember it. I
vestigial piety of the sort that causes him to rub his hands together
time that Castorp makes his vow to "be good" and our last glimpse
of him in the confusion of battle. Perhaps things will turn out for the
best; perhaps Castorp will survive the war and devote himself to the
poses the triumphant harmonies of the vision in the snow into a final,
val of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky
all round-will love someday rise up out of this, too?" (706 [984]).
instead was the Third Reich and Second World War. Glancing
descent into fascism. Once again he links the East to sexuality, dis-
ease, and genius: Adrian Leverkiihn contracts the syphilis that tem-
or, as Castorp might have put it, a combination of Russia with Spain.
When Joachim Ziemssen's mother comes to care for her dying son,
she mentions that she and Joachim had run into Chauchat in
Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 161
grace. "That comes from the Asiatic East and her illness" (495 [690]),
explains Castorp. The news that Chauchat has also visited Spain sets
him off on another reverie: "Spain-it lay equally as far from the
humanistic middle, not toward the soft side, but the hard. Spain was
(495 [690]).
condemn the Nazi regime that drove him into exile, and it would be
churlish not to acknowledge his efforts and their personal cost. Yet
the world did not end in 1945, and Mann continued to write for
The reclusive German writer Botho Straul3 (1944-) scored the media
against the mass media that obliterate all distinctions between public
dimwits: "What was once the dull mass is today the dull enlightened
mass [die dumpfe aufgekldrte Masse]" (267). Such disdain for the con-
temporary culture industry is not surprising for a writer who has long
charges of elitism for his comments. More provocative were the pas-
home and in the state, and to lament the hostility toward soldiers, the
cover for the worst sort of modern hate crime: "We had hoped that
1945 at the latest. In 1993 Botho Straul3 corrects us for the worse."72
For anyone who read the essay carefully, the answer would have to
other bourgeois feelings. They place the German in shock and leave
identifies as his worst, most bitter enemies. True, Straul3 cites Rene
Girard on the salutary effect that cultic sacrifices once had for ancient
rectness" in the United States during the "culture wars" of the early
1990s, on those "tenured radicals" with children and credit cards who
well in a country still shaking from the Nazi past and the aftershocks
selves as a unit,"76 Straul3 writes sadly about the loss of tradition and
seeks renewed connections to the mythic past. His essay was soon
hatred" of those on the left, the authors revived old cliches about
time for Germany to remember its old role as the "land of the cen-
ter."79 In keeping with this spirit, Straul3 lashed out against liberals
Europe and Central Asia in the wake of the Cold War: "That a peo-
ple should want to maintain its customs against others and is willing
with other German conservatives of the early 199os who rejected the
seems to have felt some remorse over the furor aroused by the publi-
cation of his essay. In Die Fehler des Kopisten [The copyist's mistakes]
(1997) he refers wryly to the "song of the goat that I once carelessly
summoned" (36) and writes of the personal price he has paid for his
Today he writes in the gazettes: hang him!" (11 8). One has the sense,
however, that Straul3 rather enjoys his own notoriety as the sacrificial
lamb of the current culture industry. Having adopted the pose of the
For those familiar with Botho Straul3's career prior to 1993, the
come as a surprise. His jeremiad against the evils of mass media in the
computer age had begun more than a decade earlier in Paare, Passan-
ten [Couples, passersby] (1981) and continue through Die Fehler des
reviewer has in fact dubbed him "the last social critic.S"82 In Paare,
centration camps, yet even he admits that his sudden stab of "home-
between incestuous desires for his daughter, hatred of his former boss,
dawn to alert the police and to have the illegal immigrants arrested.
Straul3's most ambitious novel, Der junge Mann [The young man]
in the postwar period. Here again, Straul3 seems to go out of his way
the opening pages the narrator captures the atmosphere of his con-
who spend their days drinking around the kiosk where he gets his
morning paper. Their only real friends are their dogs-German shep-
German babble, and, much older than they are, it continues its unin-
terrupted flow beneath time.'"86 Straul3 develops this idea in the sec-
tion of the novel entitled "The Forest." Here a young female bank
ment store called "The Tower of the Germans" (o50 [77]). The store
sells only voices from all social classes and from all periods of German
man: he has golden hair and kind eyes, but a nasty mouth like that of
a carp; he lives in a giant fish tank. Billing himself as "the essence of all
currently divided Germany and to all past epochs as well: "Not one of
them thinks German without me" (60 [90]). The bemused bank exec-
utive treats this pompous aquarium dweller "in all this German blus-
ter" (61 [92]) as a relic of the past, however, and proudly declares her
faith in the free self-rule of the German people before emerging from
The section begins with the death of Hitler as Balthazar of the Old
yet time stands still in the pages that follow: "And so it was, and con-
tion; and many believe that even today this strong and beautiful land
has not yet completely awakened from its Balthazar night" (123
ern optimist who embraces the positive potential of the new com-
forms and his brutal treatment of his wife.88 Like Bekker before him,
Germans unable to break free of Hitler's legacy: "In this way, the
most evil of Germans was bound to his posterity into the third and
cists" of the 1950s to the student radicals of the 1960s, and concludes
Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 167
city dwellers: "ah, you lonely hearts, unhappy city dwellers, you who
[300oo]). Taken together, then, the evidence from Straul3's prose texts
essayistic passages of Derjunge Mann, Straul3 also places his novel into
ated with the Bildungsroman abound: the opening and concluding sec-
tions of the novel focus on Leon Pracht, who, like Wilhelm Meister
who grows up, finds some sort of job, gets married, and becomes a
philistine, as Hegel once sarcastically put it, Leon Pracht never finds
his calling and drifts aimlessly from one odd job to the next. Here
Deutschstunde.
the prominent role of two female prophets in its ranks was unusual
raries in the late 1960s are revolting against paternal authority. Leon's
dramatist directing Shaw's Saint Joan, and Leon begins his own direc-
torial career with an almost religious sense of mission: "I saw myself
Phrygian towns and cities with his two prophetesses, Priscilla and
actresses, at least in the theater and in the actor's art" (17 [31i]). As a
Cologne. The origins of the group are somewhat obscure, but they
might provide useful suggestions for life in a future "society with lim-
ited labor demands" (78 [117]). At the same time, they keep the
group under tight surveillance and guard against any expansion of the
movement.
short, a name invented in jest by one of the observers who noted that
ning, progress and the dictates of tradition" (79 [120]). The Syks are
cise language that substitutes ambivalence for logic. Their politics are
equally amorphous: although they are not a lawless society, the Syks
times they wear fanciful costumes; at other times they wear drab gray
outfits; at still others the men wear elegant suits while the women
lies.
their attitude toward religion.9' The Syks believe that one spirit flows
through everything, and they seek contact with this "Great Melt-
Schelling's philosophy, they are said to believe that the human being
is not the crown of creation, "but he is certainly the first step on the
are also quite up-to-date, believing that the universal spiritual order
"in the great electronic total" [in der grol3en elektronischen Totale]
other times, however, the peaceful Syks seem much closer to the
central Europe gave rise to small groups within existing social orga-
nizations. "The situation did not change radically until the sudden
spread freely across national and state borders" (75 [114]). Within
nine" (90 [i34]). The Syks live in the same forest where the bank
still there, but the German voices have vanished: "On the inside it
was completely bleak and empty, with only a spiral wooden staircase
place for national tradition. Outside the settlement Germany has not
Germany's fascist past as both its close relative and its alien Other.
Syk society, to "go native." Part 3 of this section begins with a lament
at how German society has worn him out: "Oh, larcenous people,
brought us down" (ioi [149]). Leon's new research partner Ines does
not share his dissatisfaction, however, and busies herself with her
appointed tasks. Ines rejects both Leon's sexual advances and his offer
to bring her with him to the Syks. Still sexually frustrated, Leon then
fixes his gaze on a young Syk woman named Zinth, but she, too,
Leon obeys and soon finds himself in the grasp of overwhelming pas-
Leon ejaculates violently onto the silent woman's upturned face and
Leon dives into the tub "like a good Christian knight" ( 112 [163])
and engages in mortal combat with what has become a monster, but
certainly presents the woman in a revolting light, yet diving into fecal
matter is not exactly a task that ennobles the latter-day knight either.
As it turns out, the entire event has been arranged by the Syks from
172 German Orientalisms
the start as a way to wean Leon from his fascination with their cult.
simply a service provided for the Syks by his brother's wife. In the
end the Syks present Leon with considerable charges for all services
the bill for the Syks' successful effort to cast him from their midst.
the Middle East. When first informed of his waiting visitor, Leon is
perplexed: "my brother's wife? Who could that be? As far as I knew,
my brother, the manager of a hotel chain, had been living abroad for
East" (o107 [i56]). His suspicions are confirmed when he meets the
woman. She does not wear exotic clothing, but "her bronze skin and
the narrow, finely sculpted face left no doubt as to her Levantine ori-
ate Leon into Syk society actually sends him back to the Germany he
mighty (German) oak outside his window. On his way out of the
who presses "her lovely exotic [Oriental] face" [ihr schones, mor-
fingertips, but Ines drags him away. He feels betrayed by her report
gence and fire him. He spends the rest of the long, hot summer in a
Istanbul to attend the funeral of a Turkish actor and poet who had
been his close friend in Germany. The funeral takes place on the
Asian side of the city. Afterward the despondent German takes a ferry
back to the European shore. On the boat he fixes his downcast eyes
on the shoes of a woman standing next to him. They exit the ferry
Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 173
alone and soon discovers that he is one of several men whom the
of his own self escapes her spell and is drawn to the voice of a young
long Leon and the younger Mero are locked in a magical embrace
ful that he will petrify into a "priapic column" (167 [240]), Leon begs
the older Mero to finish what her younger self began. She obliges
him briefly but soon becomes distracted by the young Mero. The
his sexual frustration and his grief. He leaves Istanbul feeling deeply
In several ways this episode recalls Leon's affair with his brother's
wife. Again the German man has passionate sex with an unfamiliar
woman associated with the Near or Middle East. Mewro is Greek for
who steals men's souls. We later learn that Mero's widowed father
remarried when she was in her teens, at which point she developed
fatale as a result. Leon, who as a young director had been the target
ful woman.
As it turns out, Mero is not Greek or Turkish at all, but the daugh-
itor to the East: "My first impressions of the famed Golden Metrop-
olis consisted of nothing more than the shabby grayness of new hous-
and magnificent tales had first made on me" (156 [224]). The Orient
seduce men only if they have entered a fantasy realm that detaches
them from their normal waking reality: "The thin one, for example,
was caught while viewing the collection of the sultans' robes in the
cious stone had already half transported him into the realm of The
Thousand and One Nights" (163 [234]). Leon's grief and the unfamil-
Mero's wiles, and he, too, enters a fantasy world that intoxicates,
real place than as an imaginary space associated with loss of self, fem-
man identity suggests that the "Orient" is also part of Western con-
sciousness. Notably, Leon meets Mero on the ferry between Asia and
the novel that draws clear parallels between the ancient Oriental
the Federal Republic "during what is, in the final analysis, a favored
period of German history" (4 [I 1]) and the ghost who haunts a post-
war Germany that remains "burdened with the bitterest legacy of the
Time does start moving toward the end of "Die Terrasse," and
her on the mouth, and is finally able to close his eyes. Here, as when
tower at the end of the novel, Leon finds moments of liberation and
peace. Does the burial of Balthazar/Hitler that restarts the clock sug-
gest that the Germans have the chance to put the past behind them as
well, that the voices of history have been silenced? Two images seem
but the equipment is now covered with dust. After he leaves the Syks
Leon sees an entire archive of cassette tapes hanging in the oak tree
outside his window, but the tapes are shredded and hopelessly
time. "'Throw the foreigners out [Auslinder raus]' and things like
that, that's what's going on here, it's just something in the air here in
Germany, like acid rain," says one character when under hypnosis.
seemed to me, that emanating from this young creature were the
"It is too bad, just too bad about the ruined tradition [die verdorbene
sentence stands out for its simplicity, if not banality. If in the same
lament lost traditions and seek "a renewed link with 'long time,' the
read the past through a reductive lens leading always and only to the
tation of a widespread attempt in the 1980s and 199os "to slow down
ever, the time is past when we could tell tales of organic personal
grand narrative that would make sense of the world. On the one
decline. On the other hand, the present moment seems frozen "in the
both the negative totality of the simulacrum and the seductive lure of
In the fourth book of Giinter Grass's Ein weites Feld [Too far afield]
furt an der Oder. They plan to visit the site of some of "the Immor-
cludes that the current border must remain where it is: "here Ger-
tain political climate of the early 1990s, but then, pointing to the east,
to shield these far-flung areas, I mean secure them, before the hordes
real challenge. The East extends far, very far!" (419 [Soo]). Hoftaller
ers . . . Back then [in the Second World War] it was the Atlantic Wall
you hailed, but your vision can be just as convincing today if the wall
177
178 German Orientalisms
(554 [659-60]).
erasure of the border between the two Germanies had once again
Neisse boundary imposed by the Allied forces at the end of the Sec-
to have both reassured and troubled him: yes, there were indeed
many Poles who sought entry to Germany, but primarily for eco-
has no case for asylum" (45 [36]). But what of those ethnic Germans
who remained in Upper Silesia? Did they really want to become part
want no more than what any minority has a right to: their language,
their history, their costume. . . Most of all, though, they want an end
and not in the Polish border zones. In his view, Helmut Kohl was
of former exiles from the East who might have been drawn to the
regarded as a sine qua non of German unity. Kohl's high-wire act had
its Nearest East. For centuries conflicts along Germany's eastern fron-
fears a new German Drang nach Osten to bring formerly German ter-
ritories Helm ins Reich. In both cases, the "Orient" is not in the Mid-
dle East or distant India, but, rather, eastern Europe, East Germany,
however, and instead makes fun of his Western prejudices: " 'Do you
a West German woman doesn't have?' 'Like what?' 'That she's some-
dle. All the things a Westerner associates with the East. That camels
walk slower, smoke rises differently, alarm clocks go off later or not
at all, children are better behaved, women wear higher heels.' "
fashion in Ingo Schulze's Simple Storys: Ein Roman aus der ostdeutschen
German waitress. The rape occurs on July 2, 1990, the day after the
street was that the Trust was privatizing ruthlessly; it was a colonial
ing consistent with a position he had maintained since the late 1960s,
Grass argued that a unified Germany had only brought misery to the
world in the past, and that the crime of the Holocaust made any
worse than those of other nations, then the Germans could finally put
their past behind them and begin to function as a normal nation. Ernst
Nolte touched off the debate with an essay published in the Frankfurter
will" [The past that will not pass away], in which he raised the follow-
ing question: "Did the National Socialists carry out, did Hitler perhaps
carry out an 'Asiatic' deed only because they regarded themselves and
the eastern front. In the same year Andreas Hillgruber published a slim
The Nearest East 181
volume in which he, too, argues that the historian must identify with
sian hordes. As Jiirgen Habermas was quick to point out, however, the
German stance on the Eastern Front also allowed mass killings in the
erwise have been the case.8 The very title of Hillgruber's work,
Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende
the German Reich and the end of European Jewry], implicitly equates
the military defeat of Hitler's army in a way that many have found
"The German army in the East served as a protective barrier for set-
tlements that had been German for hundreds of years, for the home of
voicing support for Nazi policies requires a delicate balancing act, and
many felt that Hillgruber tilts the scales too far toward the Germans in
plight of Germans exiled from the East at the end of the Second
NAZI IDEOLOGUES
From its beginnings in the twelfth century, the German conquest and
Holy Lands, but when he learned that the Saxons were more inter-
Clairvaux, transformed the concept of the crusade from the quest for
ever: the Order of the Sword Brethren referred to their Baltic enemies
reports that the Teutonic Knights cultivated tropical plants and kept
The Teutonic Knights were the third military order to emerge out
The first headquarters of the order was set up in a tent on the beach
during the siege of Acre in 1190. For the next one hundred years the
the Latin colonies of the Near East."'4 Gradually, however, the order
shifted its focus to northern Europe: in the I220s the knights were
torn between the emperor's desire to use them for a new crusade to
the Holy Lands and the desire of a Polish duke to enlist their aid
from further fighting in the Holy Land, and when Pope Clement V
and King Philip IV began a campaign against the military orders dur-
ing the first decade of the next century, the Teutonic Knights set up
what the fighting was like.'6 The unknown author of this oldest
known history of the order chronicles the military history of the con-
what they deserve when they are killed. To be sure, the Christians do
can never really lose: either they convert or kill their foes, or they die
smashed, prisoners burned alive, and corpses left in piles on the bat-
but the conflict itself was a bloody and brutal affair fought on unfor-
peoples of Poland and the Baltic, imported German settlers were col-
onizing the newly available territory. Robert Bartlett cites "the set-
dle Ages" that "has had historical ramifications of the first importance
offering them land at low rent and freedom from enserfment or cap-
ture. Those who came to the country brought with them new farm-
after the Poles had accepted Christianity. In his novel The Teutonic
ing defeat at the hands of allied Polish and Lithuanian forces. The
184 German Orientalisms
order continued to exist into the sixteenth century, but its power was
the term. "They were Catholic Christians first and Germans sec-
(1827-39), and the Prussian civil servant Theodor von Schon spon-
land Preuf3en [The Prussian land of the Teutonic Order] (1862) intro-
duces a new belligerence into the discourse, praising the Eastern set-
inferior people.
the first German chair for the study of Eastern Europe in 1902, and
in a way that parallels the links between German Indology and the
tions between the temples of learning and those at the sharp, opera-
and again we have been able to defeat the barbarians."24 These com-
at the expense of Russia, and this meant that the new Reich must
again set itself on the march along the road of the Teutonic Knights
of old, to obtain by the German sword sod for the German plow and
support for the murderous policies of the Third Reich does not mean
that German attitudes toward Poland and Eastern Europe were uni-
straight line from the late medieval Battle of Tannenberg to its mod-
teenth century, for example, Herder stands out for his fairly generous
ism became one of the most popular liberal causes in Germany and,
to their aid.3' The German writers admired and even envied the
Poles, because they, like the British, French, and Americans, had at
least tried to throw off the yoke of tyranny, whereas the Germans had
dens the German cheek" [Noch-ach! noch haben wir kein Vater-
the Germans seek not only to praise the Poles, but also to emulate
was raised at the liberal Hambach festival in May 1832, and that Polen-
In seeking to gain sympathy for the Poles, the poets stress Poland's
ties with the West, repeatedly invoking the memory of the Polish
King John Sobieski, whose troops saved Vienna from the Turks in
Russians? It was in these terms that August Graf von Platen couched
Turks / want to oppose us? / Turn your deeds toward the East,
Asiatics!]36
Almost a decade earlier the young Heinrich Heine had written that
he also signals his awareness that the image has grown rather tired
the evening sun, / and from the night of the banyan groves / the
horse for a good image! / that I could compare with you . . . ]38
to revolutionary causes in later years. For all his antipathy toward aris-
from the unwashed proletarian masses in a way that differed from that
188 German Orientalisms
Heine's nasty bit of homophobia places him in a bad light in this par-
Poles themselves than to the volumes of heartfelt drivel that had been
popular, but also the most German of all German poets [der deutscheste
reading of his works that focused primarily on his lyric poetry and the
novella Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts [From the life of a good-for-
of his readers from the outset and has remained popular ever since;
between 185o and 1925 alone there were one hundred reprints and
Wunderhorn [The boy's magic horn] (18o6), bridged the gap between
"Kunst- und Naturpoesie" and thus struck a tone that seemed in har-
were often sung on class trips and in amateur choirs.43 Many of the
ing for adventure that no doubt moistened many a slightly beery eye.
his prewar popular appeal. As it turns out, Eichendorff was hardly the
The Nearest East 189
time of the Napoleonic Wars. The novella Das Schloj3 Dihrande [The
Castle Durande] (1836) also deals directly with the French Revolu-
tion and indirectly with the July Revolution of 1830.44 rViel Ldrmen
Catholic aristocrat from Silesia who could trace his family roots back
the privileges of their social class and for many years tried to live in a
father had to leave town to escape his creditors. Over the next several
decades the bankrupt family was forced to sell one estate after the
productive in his dual role as Romantic poet and Prussian civil ser-
change.
wart, develops from his early impulse to turn away from the world
himself in the Rhine before setting off to fight for the Fatherland. Yet
late into enthusiasm for the Prussian state. As his biographer Ginter
Schiwy puts it, "The Eichendorffs did not feel Prussian, but, rather,
claim that whatever rose up "from the native soil of Silesia" would
Prussia to the north and Austria to the south, and between the Ger-
man-speaking lands to the west and the Czech and Slavic territories
of the east,s5 much as it had been at the time of Gryphius and Lohen-
Polish as well as German, and he also lived and worked for years in
and fairy tales drawn primarily from Polish sources.5' Later in Danzig,
jects did not translate into sympathy for the Polish nation itself, how-
spleen in a fierce satire of the Hambach festival titled "Auch ich war
"I found the Germans French, the French German, and both had
become a little Polish; at least each demands the liberum veto for them-
that I'm not very familiar with either French or Polish, and I stood
there quite stunned in my old German coat."54 As fate would have it,
Held von Marienburg [The last hero of Marienburg] (1830o), had had its
Poland. Perhaps for this reason, the performance was not a success,
although according to one observer, the play suffered from poor edit-
ing and worse acting.55 Eichendorff felt strongly about his drama,
having been born too late, out of step with the spirit of the age.56
Held von Marienburg. The drama begins with the defeat of the Teu-
the forces into the castle at Marienburg and orders the surrounding
army. He wants to lead a counterattack, but his men refuse and even-
tually depose him. Plauen retires and dies just as the Poles are storm-
ing Marienburg, but his ghost appears on the ramparts of the castle
Crusades against both the Muslim infidels of the Holy Lands and the
192 German Orientalisms
wishes he were back beneath the palms in the magic gardens of the
Holy Land, Plauen reminds him that although the scenery has
changed, their crusading mission has not; the men should maintain
take arms against a sea of Poles: "Wake up! The Christian bulwark is
broken / The blind flood rushes from the East, wake up! [Von Osten
dorffs view, if they had not already defeated themselves.59 Lax disci-
pline, moral turpitude, and lack of faith have so vitiated the order that
Plauen feels it is hardly worth the effort to rally the troops. In this
revenge, for Germans have killed her father and burned his castle;
while the Poles celebrate, she realizes that there are still Germans to
Georg von Wirsberg encounters her and is both astonished and cap-
Plauen in order to win her love. The plot never gets very far: he sets
up an ambush, but Plauen foils the plot and has Wirsberg arrested as
a traitor. Rominta, for her part, has an abrupt change of heart and falls
kills her and then casts himself over the parapets to his death.
the embodiment of the Polish enemy and as a catalyst that reveals the
inner corruption of the Teutonic Order. She takes her place in a long
tive statue of Venus that comes to life in Das Mamorbild [The marble
souls: Graf Friedrich sails on the ship of life down the Danube and
looks up to the cross placed high on the cliffs above the river, until a
pretty girl in a passing ship catches his eye: "He shuddered. For it was
(2:58). At first glance the chance encounter would seem to set the
tone for a mildly erotic Romantic novel, and, indeed, the opening
sensuality sometimes looks out all too boldly from various passages of
my novel" (2:629). Yet the novel censors itself in a way that is quite
liche zieht uns hinab].6o Graf Friedrich resists all temptation and
and prudishness.
get their "natural" gender roles and usurp the masculine monopoly on
Gegenwart for her "mad genius that has blundered into the masculine"
(2:115) and much later writes a bitter diatribe against "Die deutsche
Christian soldiers should steel themselves against the Polish floods, but
arms in the understandable desire to avenge her father and stops fight-
ing as soon as she catches sight of Plauen, whereas he betrays both his
Plauen hopes briefly for an influx of young pious knights from the
West, but decides just before he dies that the order's work is already
complete: "So let the order collapse / The cross that it planted in the
194 German Orientalisms
the Rhine beneath an iron cross: "A shudder goes through the Prus-
sian people / And once again they remember the great age" (4:509).
end of Der letzte Held von Marienburg, his critique of the order serves
one might expect, Prussian patriotism stands front and center in the
the broad fields, and raised a glass in honor of the distant home-
battle against the Asiatic infidels for the liberation ofJerusalem,"64 the
blame for the partitions of the late eighteenth century. The restora-
project that has blown a fresh breeze of "of German character and
spirit" into the old halls and thus reunited in brotherhood "the Prus-
sians on the front lines with their compatriots in the West" (5:804).
At first glance it might seem odd that the author of this patriotic
tract had twice requested early retirement from the Prussian civil ser-
vice when the tract appeared in February 1844, and that he did soon
[Zopfzeit]" (the eighteenth century) in his essay. East and West Prus-
sia were finally reunited under Frederick the Great, but the castle
thwarts all genius that does not apply itself immediately to the rattling
tion between the mechanistic French state and organic German soci-
ety in his essay "Uber die Folgen der Aufhebung der Bischofe und
many small states and argues that German unity is better served
lung" essay ended his career. By this time it had become clear that
writer who not only was sure that he was right but also felt compelled
to tell everyone else that they were wrong. What continues to make
losing side of history and incorporated this awareness into his better
reactionaries who are claiming him today is shown by the fact that
ical truth of the consciousness of those who have to pay the price for
an oddly discordant note, as the isolated hero clings to his faith as the
only certainty in a world in which the old social order has been irrev-
ocably destroyed, and in which the future holds only vague threats of
Plauen closes his eyes in the hope of future redemption, but with the
era into moribund aristocrats and revolting masses, and ends not with
impending disaster: "But you be careful not to awaken the wild ani-
mal in your breast, so that it does not suddenly break out and tear you
tional into Eichendorff's world suspends his work between the mod-
ern and the Baroque: his heroes keep their eyes on the Cross while
condemning the world, but remain anxiously aware that they are in
POETIC REALISM
lished his first novel, Soll und Haben [Debit and credit] (i855). In
Prussian civil servant and a very late Romantic writer who looked
back to the idyllic world of his childhood, the simplicity of the folk
The Nearest East 197
from the time it was published, Soll und Haben went on to become
one of the best-selling German novels of all time.6v Freytag served his
man cause. His portrait was hung in the National Gallery in Berlin,
only learn from his works what it was like to be alive in the nine-
teenth century but would also understand "why in our days it was a
In his later years Freytag seems to have accepted his role as a rep-
ter than anyone else, he is certainly different, Freytag begins his own
"If I win the reader's sympathy, it will be precisely because the broad
owed his good fortune to the fact that he was "born a Prussian, a
Protestant, and a Silesian not far from the Polish border" (1:4). As a
could devote himself to his studies with an open mind; and "as a child
ter in opposition to foreign peoples" (1:4). Far from calling his iden-
tity into question, Freytag insists that living on the margins strength-
being a typical German from the Silesian frontier. The novel is one
sort of novel struggles against the world at first but eventually comes
to accept it as it is: "in the end he usually gets his girl after all and
some sort ofjob, gets married, and becomes a Philistine like everyone
pages later as a full business partner in the firm who is about to marry
the owner's sister.72 Freytag portrays his hero as a pleasant but unre-
is a parable for the rise of the middle class and a celebration of its
ish territory only strengthen his sense of self: "Only when you are
country do you realize what the Fatherland is" (5:20). What Anton
(4:183). While Freytag never seriously suggests that Wohlfart has Pol-
ish ancestors, Anton's vehement reaction suggests that the Poles func-
tion not only as an external enemy to the German way of life, but
also as an internal threat to his sense of self: the Poles are both that
back to the dawn of German history.74 The novel does not set out to
history of the German people. Die Ahnen can in fact be read as a mas-
bound each to the past became longer, the greater his inheritance that
he received from ancient times, and stronger lights and shadows fell
from the deeds of his predecessors into his life" (8:400). Freytag
develops over time, but he also begins to move toward the Social
Who knows who lives within me, wonders the protagonist of the
final volume: "maybe I am a piece of the man who was once blessed
another form who camped on this mountain, long before the noble
fortress was built" (13:311). This character sees himself as part of what
Volk, whose scattered voices join together "until it will burst out irre-
(I12:35).
portrayed in Die Ahnen take the field against foes ranging from Cae-
however, lie to the East. The hero of the first volume is a Germanic
200 German Orientalisms
gen. He is also the last good thing to come from the East in this novel.
Already in A.D. 724 the Germans from Thiiringen struggle against the
but horrible arsonists" (8:213). "These dirty dwarfs are full of tricks"
(8:284) sputters one character when he discovers that the Sorbs have
Brhder vom deutschen Hause [The Teutonic Knights], the latest incar-
Lands before joining the Teutonic Knights in their battle against the
streamed into Germany from the East; "now the strength of the Ger-
man people flowed back in much smaller waves from the West to the
East" (o10:324). The Teutonic Knights set up a city on the border that
they dedicate to the memory of their origins outside Acre in the Holy
Lands, stressing the continuity of their efforts in both the Middle East
and Eastern Europe. They dig protective moats, raise walls, and build
a city, and thus "new miles of the territory were torn away from the
territories ebbs and flows over the course of the centuries, but the
into Polish territory to retrieve his firm's goods from Polish insur-
himself within a huge, dilapidated courtyard "of the sort that you
often find in the inns of Eastern Europe that lie on large trade routes,
but with hints of its former pretensions: "The castle was set up for a
wild Asiatic residence . . . for a proud lord, for numerous guests, and
for a swarm of indentured servants who were supposed to fill the halls
The Nearest East 201
ages to clean things up somewhat, Fink still finds the situation amus-
ing when he arrives unexpectedly a little while later: "Have a seat for
an hour next to me, like in the old days, Anton Wohlfart, baronial
Soll und Haben is his seemingly uncritical use of the most vicious anti-
in his novel, and that he may even have been embarrassed by these
characters in later years; the fact that there are almost no Jews in Die
intentions might have been, it is difficult to read Soll und Haben today
the Jews.76 Simply put, all Jews portrayed in Soll und Haben-with
one possible exception-are bad, although some are worse than oth-
ers, and all are associated with the East. When he first meets Veitel
Itzig, a poor Jewish boy from the provinces, the obsequious and
can look down so proudly at the creature before his feet" (4:48). In
time, the thoroughly evil Itzig outsmarts and ruins his erstwhile men-
tor before committing murder and then suicide. Itzig lives at the
ous reputation can stay without questions asked. Itzig, whose heavily
than walks, and knows more than is good for him about Itzig's
crimes, eventually slips out of town and heads for the Turkish border.
does what he can to mend his father's evil ways, and an initially skep-
also attracts Anton for much of the novel. While Bernhard converses
shyly with her, a little girl falls into a pond on the estate and threat-
ens to drown. Bernhard tries feebly to rescue the child but is unable
to swim, so Lenore strips off her dress and plunges into the water.
When she emerges with the child, her wet undergarments cling to
her body, leaving little to the imagination. Chilled by the water, yet
feverish with desire, Bernhard falls ill and spends the rest of his short
hard and the rest of the younger generation of Jews, including most
when she receives news of his impending arrest and eventual suicide.
Anton, the study of Hebrew has led him to learn other Asian lan-
reads aloud his translation of a Persian love poem. Like the good
Romantic that he is, Bernhard is sure that languages reveal "the peo-
His literary taste not only underscores his Jewish identity but also
life in modern Germany is cold and prosaic. "I have read that a few
lives there for an extended period" (4:273). The business world is not
between the colonial daughter in Brazil who picked the beans and
the young farm hand who drinks coffee at breakfast, and when I take
Malay who prepares and packs it, and on the other a little old woman
ness) (4:377) and politely but firmly rejects Bernhard's Oriental stud-
question of the relation between the provincial, the national, and the
loyal to the local Heimat, which can be quite narrowly defined. After
his parents die and he leaves his native village, Anton identifies his
new family and home as the firm ofT. O. Schroter: "I am an orphan
and now have no other home than this house and this business"
ter like a heartland, and the greatest strength is gathered here; this I
indeed, as Lynne Tatlock has argued, one's sense of being part of the
upon his return from a protracted stay in Poland: "The Rhine wine
also expects you to pay it homage after many a heavy Polish drink
establishes ties between distant peoples. Global trade has in fact cap-
firm sent his father a package full of such exotic goods as sugar and
tobacco: "It was not the pounds of sugar and Cuban tobacco, it was
that made him so happy" (4:8). Anton's first visit to the Schroter
lands of the earth, all human races had worked and gathered here to
tower up useful and valuable things before the eyes of our hero ..
safely, did not leave him from this time on" (4:68, 70). Anton's obser-
pleasure: people all over the world have toiled so that he can enjoy
While Anton sinks his roots ever more deeply into the firm and his
native soil, his friend Fink has little sense of belonging to a particular
place or nation: "I don't really know where my home is" (4:314). In
many ways Fink is the most appealing character in the novel; his
tediously good behavior and sense of moral purpose. Fink is the son
teen, Fink ran away, sailed around the world, and ended up in Val-
Fink has actually spent time around the Indian campfires and can
Schroter firm as a lark that he can leave at will, and does. Although
Anton takes pride in the fact that the company deals in "colonial
offers to join him in world travel: "My good father often told me to
with his words" (4:3 58). In contrast to this German Antaeus, Fink's
goods and capital necessary to fill the warehouse that Anton regards
The Nearest East 205
cured of his wanderlust, while Anton reaps rich rewards for his desire
begins to take his job a little more seriously, and he even adopts mid-
Ehrenthal. Together Fink and his fiancee Lenore von Rothsattel pro-
observes, "I've passed through half the world and found something to
object to everywhere, and now I'm burrowing into this hole in the
sand where I'd like to light a fire every night against the Polish
wolves" (5:295).
most definitely are not. Soll und Haben radiates a triumphant sense of
(4:375), and thus Anton takes pride in his role as a German imperial-
ist on Polish soil: "I stand here now as one of the conquerors who
have taken charge of this soil from a weaker race for free labor and
our side" (5:155). Toward the end of the novel the narrative voice
swells into an anthem of praise for Fink in his new role as a German
dark spirits of the landscape, and a crop of strong boys will spring out
and soul, will spread out across the land, a race of colonizers and con-
querors" (5:398).
Why does a novel that advocates the German conquest of Poland and
tag himself puts it, the sort of warehouse storage and distribution
and apprentice" and not the new realities of the urban proletariat.8s
fart and the Schroter firm, while either avoiding altogether the
the Jews.s8'
commerce. The good German stays at home and lets other European
ping home the goods. Only Fink has firsthand experience with the
New World in this novel, and he finds little that he likes: after return-
"with a dirty and corrupt mob of emigrants, half of whom have suc-
clearly for the first time that you are also worth something here"
(5:159). The only other character who wants to go abroad is the frail
does quit his job to attend missionary school in London before head-
ing out into the world. He hopes to end up in Africa, where he can
not only convert heathens but also work to prevent "the heathen
may well be working for European slave traders, just as Freytag never
comments that the sugar and tobacco that so delighted young Anton
were almost certainly products of slave labor in the New World. The
Poetic Realism that softens the image of German capitalism also takes
what I suspect are three interrelated reasons: first, the Poles are a
cinnamon or the Brazilian girl picking coffee come from distant and
exotic lands. Freytag portrays the Poles with the venom that arises
that he can get a rise out of Anton by suggesting that he might be half
Polish. Second, the Polish borderlands are right next door. Coloniz-
expansion, but enables them to extend the base of the local Heimat.
may reflect concern over the rising tide of German emigration dur-
for North and South America, Freytag urges his fellow Germans to
tional trade.
the German fleet, and he cosigned a call for the foundation of a Ger-
ism during the Wilhelmine era.83 Yet Freytag already takes pride in
Heimat. Hence German colonists did their best to preserve their lan-
work of its most popular author, Gustav Freytag. Soll und Haben
One might expect that the Prussian patriot Freytag would conclude
his fictional history of the German people in Die Ahnen with a cele-
should not be about political, religious, and social ideas. At all costs
denz goes hand in hand with his rejection of political revolution. The
Poles revolt, but we never learn why; hence their uprising appears
the rulers and the ruled are sick, each in their own way, and we are
are associated with the East.88 As a fellow Silesian from the German-
mornings reading The Last of the Mohicans. Freytag's hero revels in the
OF MIGRATION
He finally won the Nobel Prize for literature in the fall of 1999 after
having been on the short list ever since he published Die Blechtrommel
[The tin drum] in 1959. When Heinrich B6oll won the award in 1972,
many thought Grass would have been the more obvious pick.89 Grass
has not only been the most famous living German author for decades,
but also the one whose works focus on topics of central importance
with the early novella Katz und Maus [Cat and mouse] (1961) and the
ence the war and the early postwar years in the Federal Republic. Ein
weites Feld [Too far afield] (1995) depicts major events in more recent
210 German Orientalisms
German history: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Reunification of
literary critic tearing Grass's novel in half above the caption: "The
book burnings were all too real, Grass was deeply offended by what
not only because they found it long and dull, or because they dis-
agreed with his critical stance toward the new nation, but because
Germany's greatest living author. After all, Goethe gave his name to
an entire age; Thomas Mann spent his years in exile proclaiming that
wherever he was, there was German culture; it seemed the least Giin-
ter Grass could do would be to fulfill his role as unofficial poet laure-
tion, and the migrant is, perhaps, the central or defining figure of the
than Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses, who has been
late 1980s. Rushdie is just the sort of individual who comes to mind
lost his home, his language, and his culture, and whose works focus on
the radio, and in person to his fellow German citizens. And yet, as
Rushdie reminds us, Grass has spent most of his adult life in exile from
beings whose social behavior and code is very unlike, and sometimes
even offensive to, his own" (xi). In another sense, however, Grass
German language and society that both had to be reinvented after the
war. As he puts it, "Nazi Germany was, in some ways, another coun-
try. Grass had to unlearn that country, that way of thinking about
society, and learn a new one" (xiii). One of the things he learned, to
and one of the things he lost was "the sense of home as a safe, 'good'
Grass himself spoke of this loss when accepting the Nobel Prize: "I
ture a city both lost and destroyed, I could at least reconjure it. And
my readers... that what was lost did not need to sink into oblivion,
plicity, bound by ties of common blood to their native soil. But the
This local hybridity stems from the history of migrations that have
crossed and crisscrossed the city of Danzig over the centuries, each
212 German Orientalisms
leaving its mark. When the Russians burn down the city in the spring
of 1945, Oskar comments wryly that they are hardly the first to do so:
Russians, even Saxons, had made history by deciding every few years
names and dates of all the grand masters of the order and speaks
Thus Danzig is both local and global for Grass, the site of his own
played out for centuries. Der Butt is, among other things, a historical
novel about the city of Danzig from the Neolithic period to the pres-
ent, and Grass concedes in his Nobel speech that he is obsessed with
the city: "In a conversation dating back many years Salman Rushdie
and I concurred that my lost Danzig was for me-like his lost Bom-
bay for him-both resource and refuse pit, point of departure and
navel of the world" (298 [307]). Hence it should not have been such
should have begun to expand his gaze to global concerns in the 1970s
Vasco da Gama, setting out from Europe to explore the Indian sub-
Asian slums while trying to decide whether or not they should have
the slightly later Unkenrufe [The call of the toad] (1992). This long
and the place of Europe in relation to the rest of the world and its his-
tory. It, too, is a tale of multiple migrations set into motion by the
one week before the opening of the Berlin Wall. The man is Alexan-
gentle irony by an author who was also in his early sixties at the time.
memory of the dead, and when they meet, Alexandra is buying asters,
Naples before they die, the happy newlyweds head off to Italy and
accident.
Lithuania, and buried in Gdansk against their will. As it turns out, the
returned for the first time to visit his parents' graves in 1958, he dis-
covered that the Poles had been so angry at the Germans after the war
that they not only drove out the living but also bulldozed the Ger-
[72]). The Lithuanian project never gets started, but the German
buy their plots. Before long the aging Germans set up retirement
final years back home. At the airports walk-in coolers have to be built
to stack the frozen corpses shipped in from overseas. Then the Ger-
mans start digging up the graves of those already buried in the West
on birth clinics for the new German babies born on Polish soil.
corpses east even as living East Germans are rushing to the west. The
the Polish press views the project with suspicion. They reject what
the Germans start shipping the remains of their loved ones back to
Western provinces" (163 [163]). Before long the couple that con-
always hungry even when full. And that makes me afraid" (205
Danzig, now lives in the West, and was born in 1927; if he is not
opposes than what he supports, and this is certainly the case in Unken-
rufe. He rejects first and foremost the Nazis who corrupted his child-
hood and who were ultimately responsible for the loss of German
Reunification for at least two reasons: German war guilt and con-
which political unification has brought only evil to the world, while
Eastern Europe all over again; as Alexandra puts it, "Germans always
small fleet of seven bicycle rickshaws and a license for inner-city trans-
paints his rickshaws red and white, but his customers at first are mainly
West Germans who have returned to visit their childhood homes. Very
long we find him taking over Gdansk shipyards, idled by the transition
his bicycle rickshaw model Solidarity "went into mass production and,
passing beyond the borders of Europe, was on its way to meeting the
(136 [137]), she refuses to ride in his rickshaws and is outraged when
'to see Polish men doing coolie work'" (99 [O102]). Lumping Chat-
claims that he, too, will be driven back, "same as we Poles at gates of
large mushrooms, and one of the first things that attracts him to
bicycle rickshaws and even invests the profits of the German Polish
more than the screech of the barn owl, has given rise to superstitions.
In many German fairy tales-in Polish fairy tales too, I'm sure-the
rickshaws "with the sadly beautiful toad call" (176 [i77]). Thus while
The Call of the Toad is a correct literal translation of the title of Grass's
istan in 1947, at the time of its partition from India. He fled with his
Hindu family to Bombay, where he grew up, but he also has relatives
cities with mournful toad calls. Largely positive, because Grass does
that he is "of Bengali origin only on his father's side. Not without
chant caste of the Marwaris, that the Marwaris came from Rajastan in
the north and had immigrated into Bengal, where they soon cor-
nered the real estate market, acquired numerous jute mills in Cal-
cutta, and had not made themselves exactly popular" (136-37 [138]).
dreams of power" (137 [138]), had named his son after Subhas Chan-
and is just a good, ethical businessman like the rest of the Marwaris.
Since he tells Reschke in the same breath that the Marwaris have a
While Chatterjee may hope one day to conquer the world with his
new Asian invasion into Europe. "As long as the old European order
But it won't last. As the ancient Greeks knew, all is flux. We shall
over there. Everybody pushes everybody else; the end will be one
great push that will be impossible to stop" (36 [40]). There is no need
Europe, but will allow for the intermingling and peaceful coexistence
of the two cultures, thus revitalizing Europe "by new blood from
Asia" (46 [So]). Soon the Poles will worship the Hindu god Kali
known as Schichau, will bear the name of the Bengali national hero,
mix that both cancels out their former identity and preserves it in a
new form for a future in which even global warming has its benefits.
The Nearest East 219
blessedly slowed down, softened by the new warm and wet climate"
lar horrified him to the point that he found it difficult to express his
reaction in either words or images. Grass has been duly criticized for
based loosely on Salman Rushdie, one could argue that Grass por-
Grass's defense, one can point out that his images of India in Zunge
zeigen are not inaccurate, if also only a partial truth; one can even
sticks out her red tongue in shame not at Calcutta itself, but at the
The old Erna Brakup, however, who is part of the tiny and perse-
cuted German minority that had remained in Polish Gdansk after the
suffering caused by the Gulf War: "An Arab's a human, ain't he?
Even if he's maybe done wrong. Who in the world hasn't done
220 German Orientalisms
poverty of the so-called Third World. "The affluent north and west
Grass at the end of his Nobel Prize speech, "but the flocks of refugees
will catch up with them: no gate can withstand the crush of the hun-
Grass has again worked to expand the horizons of his fellow Ger-
mans. "I know: these days everything has to be seen globally, under-
of several speeches about the plight of the Sinti and Roma minorities
for centuries as a mobile minority that does not fit neatly into the
makes them model citizens of the new European Union. Grass links
his defense of the Roma and Sinti within Europe to a critique of the
European desire to wall itself off from African, Asian, and Russian
refugees, singling out for particular criticism both the Bavarian Min-
gan "Children, Not Indians" [Kinder statt Inder] summed up his plan
The Nearest East 221
to stem the tide of Indian nationals into the German computer indus-
agreed to campaign for the Social Democratic Party for the 2002 fall
pitable nation."'6
In early February 2002, Der Spiegel once again featured Grass on its
cover story, this time in connection with his new novella Im Krebs-
gang. Grass tells the story of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff by a
9,00ooo German refugees from the advancing Russian armies at the end
broaches a topic that had been considered taboo in both the German
ent reasons: citizens of the GDR, who had been taught to believe
that they were antifascist resistance fighters together with their Soviet
ing begun the war and for its mass murder ofJews and other "unde-
sirables." Yet Grass argues through his alter ego in the novella that
"Never, he said, should his generation have kept silent about such
merely because for years the need to accept responsibility and show
remorse took precedence, with the result that they abandoned the
effort to mourn for those who suffered and died without, however,
escape from the shadow of the past. The Wilhelm Gustloff was named
himself in to the police and confesses his crime: "I fired the shots
the Nazis quickly turn Gustloff into a martyr and saint; in the follow-
ing year his widow christens the new ship Wilhelm Gustloff in the
the war the Gustloff was used for "Strength through Joy" excursions
includes the pregnant Tulla Pokriefke, a familiar figure from Katz und
late January 1945. Tulla is one of the lucky few who escape the tor-
pedoed ship, and she gives birth to a son named Paul just as the Gust-
erected in August 1961. Here he works as a reporter, first for the con-
servative Springer Verlag, then for the left-wing newspaper die taz,
Konrad in 1980, but is soon divorced by his wife Gabriele. She moves
with her son to the small West German city of Molln. While surfing
discover that the webmaster is his own son. With horrified fascina-
furter. Eventually the virtual pair meets in reality at the site of the
has close ties to the upsurge in antiforeign violence that has plagued
the fact that he is not a "vulgar Nazi" like some of the drunken skin-
Nazi, Grass does not mean to deny that Soviet troops systematically
raped German women at the end of the Second World War. His
efforts to overcome the past. Elsewhere Grass has noted the historical
irony that the Berlin Wall should have been reopened on November
of power in 1933, the sinking of the Gustloff in 1945, and the simul-
224 German Orientalisms
taneous birth of Paul Pokriefke. His son Konrad, for his part, chooses
April 20, 1995, for his murder of "David," a date that inevitably
Pokriefke has convinced himself that his incarcerated son has finally
overcome his obsession with the Gustloff, only to discover that Kon-
"'We believe in you, we will wait for you, we will follow you' ...
And so on and so forth. It doesn't end. Never will it end" (234 [216]).
to the West. In another sense, however, Grass narrates his own ver-
sion of what Ernst Nolte termed "the past that will not pass away."
the past, Grass has continued his lifelong effort to remind his readers
clear, German designs on the East had not entirely disappeared, at least
nations of the European Union. That Grass has chosen to tell the tale
of German refugees who suffered and died in the flight from advanc-
ing Soviet troops does not in some sense make him an apologist for
the Nazi regime."o After years in which the story was repressed for a
variety of ideological reasons in both East and West, Grass has decided
but he holds out the hope, despite his gloomy conclusion, that the
"Bastard" Literature?
least, Germans seemed willing to forget that relations with the new
preceding the attack. On May 7, 2001, for instance, the New York
ure to support the World Court, and the abandonment of the Kyoto
the previous week. Such concerns seemed trivial while the images of
man solidarity with the United States began to yield to new criti-
cisms. One of the first to speak out was none other than Giinter
225
226 German Orientalisms
military strikes would only kill the innocent and trigger unpredictable
ritory. Above all, Grass resisted the simplistic division of the world
into good and evil and insisted on his right to express sympathy for
and the German media seemed to follow Grass's lead, voicing ever
mies to the East. In June 2002, Die Zeit summed up the mood in the
peans hate America, both in their own way-and yet for similar rea-
in other words, Germany found itself poised between East and West,
one hand, to be sure, the global "war on terror" takes place across
the other hand, however, the conflict has taken place within the
West itself. The terrorists scored their initial success against the
of their past, the Germans have to date avoided the public contro-
Marie Le Pen in France, but fear and loathing of the foreign certainly
the time of the Gulf War, the Turkish-German writer Zafer Senocak
each other like a vaccine and immunize us against each other so that
modern alchemists: "No one knows how the new language will taste.
realities between the Koran and the Bible, between Byzantium and
Roes (1960-) that point toward new possibilities in the long history
narrator tells of her childhood in Turkey during the 1950s and early
attempts to find work as a contractor, but the novel also gives a sense
The book ends when the protagonist, now seventeen, gets on the
novel begins. Die Brhcke vom goldenen Horn [The bridge of the golden
horn] (1998) tells of the young woman's gradual sexual and political
als in the early 1970s. The protagonist is kept in police custody and
interrogated for several days before being released, but many of her
fellow leftists are less fortunate: scores of young men are tortured, and
three prominent young socialists are hanged. In the end the protago-
nist gets back on the train to return to Berlin in 1975, although this
time she will continue to study acting rather than resume work as a
Gastarbeiterin.
Ozdamar actually did work for the East Berlin Volksbhhne in 1976
many and France. In 1991 she was the first nonnative German writer
1996 and 2001.8 As a less official but still significant indication of her
But are her novels German? They are written in German and pub-
Die Brucke vom Goldenen Horn employs considerably less stylistic inno-
novels also pursues her "theatrical mission." Yet the typical hero of
experience in the West. Consider finally the setting of the two nov-
els: Karawanserei takes place entirely in Turkey, as does more than half
her readers that the Germans had allied themselves with Turkey
under Bismarck and again during the First World War in a belated
expand fast toward the East."'2 The movement goes in the opposite
230 German Orientalisms
direction in Die Brhcke vom Goldenen Horn, for the postwar Germans
now seek Turkish labor: "Germany wants even more Turkish work-
itself in miniature within Istanbul itself, as she takes the ferry each day
from her parents' home on the Asian side of the city to study under
reads Kafka and Brecht, Lenin and Marx, her Europhile mother dyes
her hair blond and her father trims his moustache to look like Clark
ways, however: on the one hand, Ozdamar presents the mother and
them, for no matter how hard they try, they will never become that
which they emulate: "almost the same, but not quite."14 On the other
or she can only ape a preexistent ideal. The hybrid, in contrast, desta-
bilizes the ideal, by revealing that it, too, is a cultural construct mas-
querading as a natural identity. The same kind of logic can also com-
Conclusion 231
plicate notions of national identity and the identity of the national lit-
this fact.
MICHAEL ROES'S
POSTMODERN ORIENTALISM
While Karawanserei and Die Brhcke vom Goldenen Horn tell a new story
Michael Roes's novel Leeres Viertel, Rub' Al-Khali: Invention Tber das
(1996) revisits the familiar theme of the Western traveler to the exotic
is, two separate accounts of two different journeys to the East. The
first is set in 1993-94, shortly after the Gulf War at a time of civil
Sanaa, the protagonist ventures ever further into remote areas of the
country, making risky contacts with the locals and eventually becom-
ing the hostage of a tribe living on the edge of the great desert known
One by one his companions are either killed or die from natural
causes, until he, too, becomes a prisoner of a tribe living on the edge
Schnittke and the present-day narrator not only travel along paral-
lel routes and share similar experiences, but they also seem kindred
reminds himself that Europeans have their own barbaric customs such
panions' arrogance and ignorance, and finally tells them that their
the Orient that could destroy the real East."'6 The present-day narra-
tor also rejects the bunker mentality of his fellow scholars while seek-
ing closer contact with the local people and greater knowledge of
and so far from home, but I have not really escaped it," writes
stand their world, how should it [their world] ever be able to under-
ular culture. "We are not living in the imaginary Orient of Karl
ruled third world state" (199). The narrator nevertheless feels at times
as if he has wandered onto a movie set: "I really feel like I have been
situation" (352).
this case the Diwan refers not to a collection of poetry, but to a room
allowed beyond the Diwan to the interior of the home: "The wide-
the edge of the desert, and one night one of them requests that he
sing them a song from his own country. The only piece of music that
sion his song has made; the young men seem as melancholy as they
had been before the song, but then, as the narrator wryly comments,
title of his novel already suggests. The awareness that the outsider can
never fully assimilate into the foreign group leads to an interest on the
they cannot become the Other, there are at least moments in which
they can pass for the Other. Schnittke, by profession a comic actor,
finds that he can be mistaken for an Arab when he wears the appro-
self fitted in native garb, and is also occasionally confused for a local.
Both remain acutely aware, however, that they are only playing a
role: "On the other hand I understandably cannot get into the Ara-
make that which divides us all the more visible" (418). Seen from his
like transvestism, and he concedes that the strange clothing makes his
nine in this culture" (419). There is in fact nothing natural about the
imperatives may be, masculinity and femininity are social masks and
shortly after his arrival in Yemen, the East has long attracted gay
ters.s'8 "Gay Europeans are free to continue to visit their fictive Ori-
ent, but they should not try to pass off their erotic projections as
men. On one level, in fact, Leeres Viertel is a gay novel about male-
male desire, and more than once the modern narrator insists on the
a relationship between equals, who must and can define their roles
of simple dualisms . . . says more about the social concept than the social real-
ity" (italics in original) (23 I). Roes's novel is thus more queer than
the East.
As has been the case with many novels discussed in this book,
Leeres Viertel has been said to have certain affinities with the German
the theater and the desire on the part of both to learn and experience
Schnittke, long uncertain about the goal of his journey, finally learns
that his companions seek nothing less than the Ark of the Covenant
and the tablets that Moses brought down with him from Mount
val's quest for the Holy Grail: "For if we find the tablets, then the
pion and dies. Schnittke alone remains to continue the search, but
ple to view what he hopes may be the Ark of the Covenant, he is dis-
the chest, pulls out a stone tablet, and examines it closely in the
Schnittke's fragmentary text ends at this point, cut off both from
his distant homeland in Germany and from the promise of divine rev-
effort to find a continuation of his tale, but in the end Schnittke's fate
remains unclear. The same is true of the modern narrator. Unlike the
and a job and a couple of children on the way, the modern narrator
sense of apathy and resignation. He has been taken captive and is pre-
sumably being held hostage, but for how long or for what purpose is
not clear. Toward the end of the novel one of his colleagues visits
him and urges him to flee, but the narrator feels compelled by his
of the foreign culture, but his position has gradually shifted with his
novel, he finally realized that he had chosen games as the topic of his
"but rather to dissolve once again the division between game and
reflection; to experience once again that in the game our attitude and
our existence are one, as they were one in our childhood" (654).
wills his weakened body to its feet and joins with his friend Ahmad in
the gentle flowing gestures of a martial dance "that people would call
aware of the dust and the heat; his fever returns and the moment is
gone. In the morning all is forgotten. The modern nomads brush the
dust from their robes, climb back into their SUVs, "and drive in a dis-
orderly mass and without headlights out into the desert" (803).
events have made clear, the history of relations between East and
enemies, or perhaps Ozdamar and Roes point the way toward a new
intermingling of cultures of the sort that Giinter Grass has also envi-
sioned in his fiction and Zafer Senocak has described in his essays. In
CULTURAL STUDIES
late Bill Readings argued that the modern university was "in ruins"
238 German Orientalisms
because it could no longer fulfill its cultural mission for the nation in
you want and about whatever you want, but obey!"2 Bill Readings might
to: "You can think as much as you want and teach whatever 'sub-
versive' materials you want, as long as you get published and students
199os culture wars, Readings does not dwell gloomily on the decline
ten how to read and politically correct professors have hardened their
what misleading in that it suggests that the university that has fallen
but that we learn how to "dwell in the ruins" of the modern univer-
liberal arts colleges in the United States today, although here too, no
doubt, the appeal to "excellence" has reared its ugly head. Yet the
describes in Discipline and Punish, a totality that can easily slide into
a totalizing "ideology of the subject" that conflates art with politics and
the nineteenth century, for access to the university was denied to all
was thus ideological in the sense that it masked power under the
to have the capacity for Bildung; women and Orientals remain close
political utility and is in fact inseparable not just from the rhetoric of
the German nation has yielded in recent years to the new German
Studies. For the sake of the argument, we can set up a series of overly
canonical texts; German Studies might work with the same texts, but
240 German Orientalisms
while other works did not.27 German Studies might also look at cul-
nistik has its origins in organic theories of the nation that can be traced
To give it a final twist, one might say that Germanistik was originally
this disciplinary shift are recent debates about the status of "Migrant
Conclusion 241
Culture contained various articles about Turks, Poles, Jews, and Por-
cited article (1990), the debate itself obscured a larger issue: "what is
cultural labor. For instance, August Koberstein begins his Grundrif der
German stamp in both their form and their inner essence."35 Migrant
stik in den USA (1989), and The Future of Germanistik in the USA
ority and eager to shed "mehr Licht" on the dark continent of North
study during the Cold War, led to a new influx of German intellec-
tuals into the United States.3s Until at least the 1970s, American Ger-
ica, that is, people of French or Spanish descent born and raised in the
colonial region who began to identify with each other more than the
taking over as the editor for the German Quarterly. Pointing to the
should "no longer blur the lines between the kind of research and
step in the recent evolution of the discipline, but a first step only. To
tures serves little purpose, and Russell Berman has correctly warned
Some time ago Jeffrey Sammons called for the cultivation of a "dou-
Atlantic that would respect local contexts and yet inspire intellectual
turn students into native speakers, she argues, not just because such a
als and groups; the nonnative speaker simply adds another voice to
model of global culture will prevail in the age of empire: one that is
one hand, the field has never been more vital, as theoretically sophis-
ticated literary and cultural critics pose new questions and explore
neglected terrains; on the other hand, however, the field has never
from German Germanistik than they began to worry about being col-
man professors in the United States often feel like puzzled shopkeep-
ers, convinced that their product is better than ever even as potential
tional changes that have transformed the field and try to return to a
again those who are finally being heard but rather to use their voices
to reawaken the past-and not only to find those writers who were
authors and texts. We soon discover that many of the figures deemed
border zones and contested identities, and that they write about these
between Europe and Asia, between the Occident and the Orient. In
adopt a false pathos that claims marginal status for canonical texts.
Cultural power exists, and not just in the amorphous way that Fou-
cault sometimes defined it; many of the authors examined here were
silenced. More often than not, however, the literary texts themselves
INTRODUCTION
2. Said, Orientalism, 2.
the "obvious . . . fact that 'Germany' did not exist" during this period (1).
ment see Poliakov, The Aryan Myth; and Eze, Race and the Enlightenment.
Bernal (Black Athena, 189-224), Zammito (Kant, Herder, and the Birth of
geschlechte; Meiners, GrundriJ3 der Geschichte der Menschheit; Kant, "Von den
I2. Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations, 1:197.
I4. Iselin, Uber die Geschichte der Menschheit, 345; Blumenbach, Uber die
63-64; and Wiinsch, Unterhaltungen uber den Menschen, 386. Further sources
245
246 Notes to Pages 5-9
developed his theory of racial decline in his Uber die nathrlichen Verschieden-
heiten im Menschengeschlechte.
16. For example, "How did Europe become what it is?" questions
did this smallest part of the world raise itself up so far above the others
20. In Culture and Imperialism Said expands his focus from relations
between Europe and the Near East to those between the "first" world of
Europe and the United States and the "rest of the world," without, how-
pride in the absence of empire, claiming that it both led to a sense of Ger-
man moral superiority vis-a-vis other colonizing nations around 18oo and
26. Poliakov, The Aryan Myth; Bernal, Black Athena; Pollock, "Deep
Orientalism?"
27. Pollock views the German persecution of the Jews and others during
the Third Reich as a form of colonization that was directed inward, while
other European nations set out to conquer the world: "their 'othering' and
of Jews in Germany from 1743 to 1933, see Elon, The Pity of It All.
32. Schneider, "Und wenn wir nur eine Stunde gewinnen." For a subtler
35. I refer to the work of Hardt and Negri (Empire). They contend that
been the topic of extensive research. See Sedlar, India in the Mind of Ger-
many; Halbfass, India and Europe; and McGetchin, "The Sanskrit Reich."
been much explored in recent years. Said's Orientalism has come under fire
for its failure to account for the variety of ways in which gender informs
40. See the various versions of this tale in Price, Inkle and Yarico Album.
41. On interracial romance in the "contact zone" see Pratt, Imperial Eyes,
and shorter but readable survey of Der Orient in der deutschen Literatur. Other
torical periods. For instance, Tekinay focuses on the Middle Ages (Mate-
CHAPTER 1
von Orient und Okzident" (Goetz, "Der Orient der Kreuzziige," 6).
in Europa und der Orient 8oo- 9goo, ed. Hendrik Budde and Gereo Sievernich
introduction to the topic. For more detailed studies see Richard, The Cru-
The Crusades through Arab Eyes; and Southern, Western Views of Islam.
7. Wentzlaff-Eggebert, Kreuzzugsdichtung, 7.
Io. On the growing intolerance of Islam in the later Middle Ages see
221-42.
15. Scholars no longer accept the view of the German Romantics that
(Konig Rother, Herzog Ernst, St. Oswald, Orendel, and Salman und Morof)
22. Wolfram, Willehalm, 758 (section 450, lines 17-19); English transla-
tion, 253.
earlier scholarship. On the idealized world of the courtly romance see Auer-
25. Goetz, "Der Orient der Kreuzziige," II; also Noltze, Gahmurets Ori-
entfahrt, 70-71.
27. Noltze, Gahmurets Orientfahrt, 95-97. See also Green, "Der Auszug
Gahmurets."
29. Wolfram, Parzival, volume 1.92 (section 51, line 24). I include page
enthetically in the text. For the reader's convenience, I also include subse-
quent references to sections and lines parenthetically in the text. With this
ent modern editions. A cite that reads as follows: (31 [55.5]) is a cite to page
95-96, o108-9.
33. Thus Green tells only half the story when he contends that Gah-
Parzival, just as the events of the New Testament repeat and surpass those of
the Old ("Zur Frage"). See also Bumke, Wolfram von Eschenbach, 69-71I; and
Kuhn, "Parzival."
38. Kunitzsch, "Erneut," 88. Adolf argues that the Oriental sources for
the Grail, Prester John, and Feirefiz come from Abyssinia, not India ("New
Azagouc, which would provide continuity between the opening and con-
43. As Bumke puts it, "Parzival hat sozusagen einen doppelten Schlul3:
val und Feirefiz," 240. Groos also offers an excellent summary of the incon-
and Hobsbawm (Nations and Nationalism since 1780) all date modern nation-
Renaissance."
53. Hamilton, "What the New World Gave the Economy of the Old,"
875. On the German role in publishing accounts of the New World see
itus from Humanism to Hitler, see Schama, Landscape and Memory, 75-134.
62. For a useful overview in English of Hutten's life see Bernstein, Ger-
3:462-63.
65. Luther, "An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation" (1520) in Aus-
66. Luther, "Vermahnung zum Gebet wider den Tiirken" (1 541) in Aus-
70. Luther, "Vermahnung zum Gebet wider den Tiirken" (1 541) in Aus-
71. Quotations from the poems "Thrainen des Vaterlandes" and "Es ist
alles eitel."
72. On the distinction between the two major subgenres of the seven-
teenth-century novel, see Alewyn, "Der Roman des Barock." The heroic
Roman, der Heroisch-Galante Roman, der Hofische Roman, and also der Staats-
lungsroman, 61-86).
History.
Trauerspiele, xxxvii-xlvii.
91. Gryphius, Catharina von Georgien, in Dramen, 203 (act 4, line 427).
active role. Ibrahim Sultan, in her view, is more about political response to
tainly the play does concern itself with political matters that concern both
Europe and the Ottoman Empire, but at the same time it mounts an over-
tism.
1ol. Szarota argues that Lohenstein glorifies Leopold and the Holy
pleads for greater tolerance within the realm (Lohensteins Arminius als Zeitro-
man). Bergstedt takes issue with Szarota, seeing Lohenstein more as a clever
strategist who pays lip service to Austria while trying to maintain some
regional, and imperial loyalties within his dramas (The Intervention of Philol-
ogy) .
103. Lohenstein, Arminius, 199b. Cited hereafter in the text with page
number and column (a or b). All references are to the first volume of the
novel.
see Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, and Hunt, The Family Romance of
175-84).
ence both to Lohenstein's drama and sources cited in his footnotes to the
play, Newman argues that he provides "a more balanced, 'off-center' repre-
Notes to Pages 58-64 253
of Philology, 152).
the Boundaries.
101-27.
Entwicklungsroman, 41-45.
CHAPTER 2
178o0.
by Pfeiffer-Belli.
include "Schach Lolo" (1778), "Ham und Gulpenheh" (1778), and "Clelia
Rococo forms a first and decisive step toward German Classicism" (Liter-
the Schlegels were sharply critical of Wieland, his work nevertheless exerted
Rokoko, 42-45).
13. On Herder's place in the "querelle des anciens et des moderns" see
14. Wellek hails Herder as "the first who sharply breaks with the neo-
classical past" (A History of Modern Criticism, 181). Abrams's The Mirror and
17. Herder, Journal meiner Reise, in his Werke, 9.2:30. Zammito provides
tions with Kant and in the broader context of the emerging disciplinary
18. See the critical commentary to Von deutscher Art und Kunst in his
19. In distinction to the more common but imprecise terms middle class
whose ranks many of the major writers of the period emerged (German His-
tory, 132).
21. Herder was not completely unaware of the distinction between the
ancient Celts and the Germanic Angles and Saxons. He refers to the dis-
tinction for the first time in the third book of Alte Volkslieder (1774),
"Englisch und Deutsch" (3:47). See also the commentary to this passage
(3:951).
28. "But who could read Shakespeare and not forget his flaws [when
Werke, 3:275. See also Herder, "Shakespear" (1773), in Von deutscher Art und
Kunst, Werke, 2:498-521. As McCarthy has pointed out, however, the dis-
"Stiirmer und Dringer" was not as absolute as the latter liked to believe
authenticity see Burger, "Dasein heif3t eine Rolle spielen," and Habermas,
30. Herder revised and expanded the material in the 1769 essay into
The Spirit of the Laws, esp. book 14, "On the Laws in Their Relation to the
Nature of the Climate," 231-45. See also Iselin, Uber die Geschichte der
thought (Das Eigene und das Eigentliche, 184). I am less convinced that
thinker in his Vico and Herder, 145-216) and tend to agree rather with Zan-
top's assessment that Herder's works "are deeply inconsistent and contra-
37. On the tension in Herder between local cultures and a faith in uni-
versal progress see Fischer, Das Eigene und das Eigentliche, 220, 229.
zin were not individually signed, but the editors Christoph Meiners and
Ludwig Spittler write in the preface to the first edition that the magazine
tent racism of Meiner's GrundrifJ3 der Geschichte der Menschheit, I suspect that
409.
ences between the sexes were often influenced by social conventions about
and Uerlings, Friedrich von Hardenberg. O'Brien has written the best and
Novalis see Uerlings, Friedrich von Hardenberg, 15-o104; and Mahoney, The
edition are included with volume and page number parenthetically in the
text.
47. Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 17. Kant was another such individual
57).
"bad mother" see Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution,
89-123.
5 I. O'Brien, Novalis, 16 I.
rounding the initial decision not to publish Europa, see O'Brien, Novalis,
227-30.
ed topic" (9).
55. O'Brien has been most vigorous in opposition to the familiar image
deutschen Minnelieder" (1803) Tieck argues against "the belief in the bar-
barism of the so-called Middle Ages" and predicts that "the song of
Provence, the romances of the North, and the blossoms of the Indian imag-
57. Miiller, Vorlesungen uber die deutsche Wissenschaft und Literatur, 57.
(Friedrich von Hardenberg, 32-35) place Miuller on the cusp of the subsequent
59. "The talk about Novalis becoming Catholic is thus not as misguid-
not Novalis would have viewed the Catholic revival in late Romanticism
Bemerkungen, no. 1i8 (Schriften, 2:466) and also in Blhthenstaub, no. Io6
(Schriften, 2:459).
61. Said, Orientalism, 138. Achim von Arnim ascribes a similarly passive
role to the gypsy princess Isabella in his novella "Isabella von Agypten"
bringerin."
66. Heading toward home is not the same as arriving at home. Hence
75. Sombart, Die deutschen Manner und ihre Feinde: Carl Schmitt-ein
84. Goethe, Faust, lines 545 and 569. In Samtliche Werke, 7.I:39-4o.
Hence Kittler claims that (modern) German poetry begins with Faust's
"ach!" that inserts the emotion of a new humanism into the obsolete
Oppenberg provides a detailed account of the origins of the work, its struc-
ture, and its initial reception. See also Gerard, L'Orient, 84-128.
the text.
Indian linguistics either marks the end of the "mythic image" of India in
94. See summary in Foucault, The Order of Things, 282-85; also Said,
95. It is therefore difficult to agree with Foucault's claim that "from now
on, all languages have an equal value; they simply have different internal
structures" (The Order of Things, 285). As in the case of Herder's Ideen, some
ioo. See Riencourt, The Soul of India, 258-8I; Poliakov, The Aryan
come amount of detail that refutes the simplistic notion that all German
Indologists were racists and protofascists. Some were, to be sure, but others
during the Napoleonic Wars in Germany, see Elon, The Pity of It All,
99-Ioo.
Gesamtausgabe, 4:301.
I:I51.
Iio. On Klopstock's bardic poetry see Fischer, Das Eigene und das
Eigentliche, I 3 1-58.
from Tacitus into a thinly veiled work of propaganda against the French.
Eigene und das Eigentliche, 300-320; and Kontje, "Passing for German."
114. Even in the late Middle Ages Wolfram's Parzival was more widely
read than any other comparable text written around 1200, and its influence
MIittelalter, 173.
can piece together about Wolfram's career from textual evidence (Wolfram
von Eschenbach).
260 Notes to Pages 112-19
Ausgabe, 6:2o01.
84-85.
124. See the anonymous introductory blurb to the first printed edition
see Gotz, Die Entwicklung des Wolframbildes, 27-3 I; and Spaarnay, Karl
319-20.
563-64.
Literature.
graphical information see Schami, Damals dort und heute hier; on $enocak see
146. On the most obvious level, Goethe's Divan contrasts markedly with
that Weimar was a tolerant, humanist island in a sea of petty German abso-
lutisms have emerged from time to time since Borne, most recently in
149. Goethe, Sdmtliche Werke, vol. 3, bk. I, 148. Hereafter cited in the
text.
Joseph theme much later in the story "Sankt Joseph der Zweite" (1807) that
included fragments of his Belsazar drama in a letter to his sister from Leipzig
in 1767 but included a prose summary of the plot in Wilhelm Meisters thea-
Lehrjahre.
151. The best source on Goethe's lifelong interest in the Islamic world
modern subject, see Wellbery, The Specular Moment, 131-47, 156-57. Years
play of 1742 into German for the Weimar theater in 1799 (Sdmtliche Werke,
4:735-36).
153. Goethe's flight to the East at the end of the revolutionary period
mirrors his flight to Italy at its beginning. See in particular the third
"Roman Elegy," in which the poet refers to the British traveler who was
unable to escape the ubiquitous political song "Malbrough" and then boasts
that he is better hidden from contemporary events: "Nun entdeckt ihr mich
155. Jean Paul expressed his enthusiasm for India most clearly in his
130-36. More recently, Tobin has argued that Jean Paul's novel Siebenkds
156. Goethe to Schiller, June 1o, 1795: "Here's a tragelaph of the first
instance" [Hierbei ein Tragelaph von der ersten Sorte]. Briefwechsel Schiller
157. Schiller to Goethe, June 28, 1796: "I found [Jean Paul] pretty much
as I expected: as strange as someone who had fallen from the moon" [fremd
wie einer, der aus dem Mond gefallen ist] Briefwechsel Schiller Goethe, 1:217.
159. Birus, "Der 'Orientale' Jean Paul," and also Schlaffer, "Gedichtete
Theorie."
Specular Moment; on the theme of modern Bildung in his prose see Bakhtin,
"The Bildungsroman and Its Significance," and also Moretti, The Way of the
World.
163. Freud used this poem to illustrate the difference "between narcis-
order to please his beloved, although he does not read the poem in detail.
ing the dynamics of the Oedipal family as a timeless norm rather than the
8:1062.
37:443.
CHAPTER 3
Mann and Baeumler see Bruntriger, Der Ironiker und der Ideologe. Bruntriger
wrote his work under Kurzke's supervision, and he shares his mentor's
sion of Laokoon, who maintains his composure only in the face of extreme
physical suffering. Hence Baeumler's charge that he grasps only the bright
Winckelmann. Goethe, for his part, was hardly blind to the "chthonic"
least this is the way that Mann chose to portray him in Lotte in Weimar.
9. Bachofen; cited from Baeumler, Der Mythus von Orient und Occident,
149.
the First World War was to establish itself as the dominant European power
(Germany's Aims in the First World War). Fischer set out to refute the wide-
spread opinion among German historians and the German public that
Germany had been forced into a defensive war. On the contrary, Fischer
its desire to become a major world power until the very end. Needless to
say, Fischer's theses provoked controversy when they appeared in 1961. See
370-72.
see Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, esp. 66-70, 151. Moeller van den
Bruck was also convinced "that in the open spaces of the East lay
21. Wehler, The German Empire, 217. See also Fischer, Germany's Aims,
24. Essays, 1:202. As Izenberg puts it, "France was behaving disgusting-
Anstalten."
Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois, did he speak out for the rights of black
Thomas Mann, 275-316; Hamilton, The Brothers Mann; and Heilbut, Thomas
Mann, 355-98.
35. As Uerlings points out, Mann's attempt to enlist Novalis for the lib-
Mann and the "Jewish question" listed in his index, 628), and Kurzke,
tion between the two discourses about homosexuality in the early twenti-
eth century, see Tobin, "Making Way for the Third Sex," and Izenberg,
43. Bliiher, Die Rolle der Erotik, 2:204. For a detailed explication of
gy and popular racial theories of the state among fascists. Above all, Hewitt
Theweleit also argues, the extreme misogyny and male bonding among
members of the protofascist Freikorps are "actually far closer to what we call
normal [hetero]sexuality" (Male Fantasies, 2:320; see also 1:56; 2:61, 307).
The Fate of the Self 129-59. Corngold argues that Mann's assessment of
cited in the text with reference to the English translation first and the orig-
inal German second. For example, (154 [218-19]) is a cite to page 154 of
263.
Vorlesungen (18). See also Weigand, Thomas Mann's Novel "Der Zauberberg,"
in Rio de Janeiro in 1851 and moved to Germany when she was seven
53. "Der Wille zum Gliick," in Der Wille zum Gluck, 53.
Tadzio a Boy?"
the changing conceptions of the novel see Reed, Thomas Mann, esp.
225-46.
Zauberberg," 5).
3:285-94; esp. 288. Mann used the same passage again in "Deutschland und
die Deutschen" (1945), Essays, 5:263, and again to describe the fictive town
68. "Indeed, for all his subtlety Thomas Mann is simpler here than his
critics are sometimes prepared to believe. The clear-cut allegory was meant
70. Zeitblom writes, "I was never able to agree fully with our Fiihrer
and his paladins on precisely the issue of the Jews and their treatment" (io
[12]). Much later in the novel, however, he does express horror when the
responses in Gbrtz, Deutsche Literatur 1993, 255-69. All references are to this
edition.
75. Kirchhoff defended Straul3 along these lines, claiming that his essay
had exposed weaknesses on the left: "Treffer tun eben weh" ("Die
treated conservative dissidents as harshly as the Nazis once treated the Jews
(Schacht, "Stigma und Sorge," 60, 63). For a cogent critique of this highly
dubious logic see Miuller, Another Country, 199-225, and Klotz and
86. The Young Man, 2; Der junge Mann, 8. Hereafter cited in the text,
with reference to the English translation first followed by the German. For
example, (50 [77]) is a cite to page 50 of the English translation and to page
354-55.
197.
Straufi, 163-64.
94. "Er habe im Grunde noch nie eine autobiographische Zeile ver-
gasted Joachim Vogel in his response to the essay. (Vogel, "Tragodie eines
Einzelgaingers," 236-37.)
101. See similar comments in Williams, "Botho Straul3 and the Land of
CHAPTER 4
I. Grass, Too Far Afield, 417; Ein weites Feld, 499. Cited henceforth
page 554 of the English translation and to page 659 of the original German.
versions cited hereafter in the text using the same conventions described in
that describes his trip to Poland in early 1990. In Extreme Mittellage, 33-53;
289.
lished in his New Conservatism, 207-67. See also Holub, Jurgen Habermas,
162-89.
II. On the history of the Teutonic Knights see Seward, The Monks of
16. See the excellent translation and critical edition of the anonymous
Crusades, 213-17.
early twentieth century. On German Indologists and the Third Reich see
24. Fischer and von Hindenburg, Bei Tannenberg 1914 und 1410, 4; see
Knights see also Padfield, Himmler, 139, 164, 17o-71, 248 (further refer-
ences in index), and also Hohne, The Order of the Death's Head, 294-96.
Europe will be "the greatest piece of colonisation the world will ever have
seen linked with a noble and essential task, the protection of the Western
3:668.
38. Heine, from the Friedrike cycle in his Neue Gedichte, in Historisch-kri-
39. On Heine's relations with Marx, see Sammons, Heinrich Heine, esp.
260-65. As Sammons puts it, "the activist Heine was not a 'poet of the peo-
ple,' for all his allusions to the 'folk' in his writings, but a poet against the
Deutschland," 204.
270 Notes to Pages 188-94
205.
205.
Diirande und die Revolution." See also Eichendorffs essay "Der Adel und
die Revolution," which begins with the assertion that the "good old days"
of the Old Regime were "eigentlich weder gut noch alt." In his Werke,
5:391-416.
48. On the idea that the sense of a collective German national identity
218-19.
53. The story was probably written in 1832 but not published until after
Eichendorff 1 8-25-
58. Eichendorff, Werke, 4:448. Hereafter cited with volume and page
59. Faber argues that Der letzte Held von Marienburg is not so much about
Teutonic Order ("Das Kreuz um des Kreuzes willen"). To claim that the
to the closing lines of Goethe's Faust II: "Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns
5:710.
66. For a succinct overview of Freytag's life and works see Kaiser,
"Gustav Freytag."
67. For statistics on the enormous number of copies sold, see Carter,
70. Freytag, Gesammelte Werke, 1:3. Hereafter cited with volume and
Its goal becomes integration into the social status quo with the least amount
132. Other studies of Soil und Haben include Carter, "Freytag's Soil und
(1980); Berman, The Rise of the Modern German Novel (1986), 79-o104;
251.
("Evaluation," 317) and Kienzle (Der Erfolgsroman, 37) argue that Freytag
was not a biological racist of the sort that emerged in the later nineteenth
century, while Carter insists that Freytag was merely offering realistic por-
and influential novel, see Bramsted, Aristocracy, 136; Mosse, Crisis of German
Ideology, 140, 163; Craig, Germany, 1866-1945, 84; and Steinecke, "Gustav
Freytag," 146.
Germany.
78. Tatlock, "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country." In examining
272 Notes to Pages 205-15
a nationalistic bourgeois world that strives for complacency and stability and
capitalism that renders national borders obsolete and occasions the rise of
and present, see Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor. As he points out,
up to the historical present, see Tatlock, "In the Heart of the Heart of the
Country."
88. As Berman argues, Soll und Haben is really a political novel beneath
the facade of a Bildungsroman (The Rise of the Modern German Novel, o101).
93. Grass, "To Be Continued... ," 298; "Fortsetzung folgt... ," 307.
96. In "The Second Month," The Flounder, 107-68; Der Butt, 137-213.
97. The Call of the Toad, 27; Unkenrufe, 32. Hereafter cited parentheti-
cally in the text, with reference to the English translation followed by the
German original.
98. Preece also notes the proximity of Reschke to Grass: The Life and
99. "Fortsetzung folgt... ," 305-6; "To Be Continued ... ," 296-97.
ioo. See, for example, the essays "Shame and Disgrace" (1989), "Much
Notes to Pages 215-28 273
the collection Two States-One Nation? all of which criticize Helmut Kohl's
more recently, the American-led move toward global capitalism. See for
example his critique of globalization in "Fortsetzung folgt ... ," 308 ("To
102. Shafi, "Gazing at India," 40. Shafi repeats in this essay many of the
same points she made in "Giinter Grass' Zunge zeigen als postmoderner
Reisebericht."
103. "Grass appears all too willing to deal in stereotypes" (Preece, The
Life and Work of Gunter Grass, 183). Preece also suggests that Chatterjee "is
modelled loosely on Salman Rushdie" (182). Grass has hardly been immune
to such criticism in the past. Der Butt outraged many feminists in the 197os,
for instance, while he has also been accused of employing Jewish stereo-
first to the English translation and then to the German original in the text.
11o. On the debate surrounding Grass and other recent authors see
CONCLUSION
Deutschland, 89.
5. The full title of Ozdamar's work is Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei:
Hat zwei Thren, aus einer kam ich rein, aus der anderen ging ich raus.
revised version of the earlier article in Writing outside the Nation, 141-50.
16. Roes, Leeres Viertel, 284. Hereafter cited in the text. Roes employs
modern counterpart uses his own idiosyncratic style that avoids capitaliza-
17. For instance, Roes's second novel, Der Coup der Berdache (1999)
which is not the same as a woman" (323). His fictional travelogue Haut des
Queequeg and Ishmael in Melville's Moby Dick, while the futuristic novel
David Kanchelli (200oo1) portrays the relationship between a judge and his
original.
courses that draw students, see Hohendahl, "The Fate of German Studies,"
86. Several years before Readings, Schmidt had critiqued the role of"excel-
23. Readings, The University in Ruins, 24. Culler claims that he first sug-
24. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, "The Nazi Myth," 294. See also
36. Lohnes and Nollendorfs, German Studies in the United States; Benseler
Survival," 167.
Divide," 23-24.
41. Weiner, "From the Editor," vii. In a parallel move, Keel argued that
Studies," 344).
Divide," 20.
posed by the fact that many academic presses have severely curtailed the
bers of the MLA, May 28, 2002). How will younger scholars establish
themselves in the field and qualify for tenure if no one is willing to publish
their work?
47. Such was the repeated refrain in the "Colloquium on the State of the
Discipline" published in the millennial issue of the German Quarterly 73, no.
"Centering the Discipline"; and Mews, "A Modest Proposal," 30. The
Studies. See the series of testimonials to the power of the literary text in the
48. Many attempts have been made either to turn back the clock or to
bemoan the inevitable. See, for example, Ellis's bitter philippic Literature
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Celtis, Conrad. Selections. Ed. and trans. with introduction and commentary
Creuzer, Friedrich. Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker, besonders der
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1978.
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Iselin, Isaac. Uber die Geschichte der Menschheit. 2d rev. ed. Zurich: Orell et
al., 1770.
Keller, Gottfried. Sdmtliche Werke. Ed. Thomas Boning and Gerhard Kaiser.
1911-17.
The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle. Ed. Jerry C. Smith and William L. Urban.
Fischer, 1983.
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Index
25on, 275n
Homosexuality
MIutterrecht, 135
237-39
Bildungsroman [Entwicklungsroman],
305
306 Index
nativa, 4
166
Bohse-Talander, August, 61
Boucher, Francois, 61
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 6
109
Charlemagne, 16, 46
Chateaubriand, Francois-Ren6,
Vicomte de, 2
116-17
Cook, James, 84
134-35, 136
Elias, Norbert, 7
184
129
Faustbuch, Das, 42
Nation, 0I o1-2
259n
264n
59, 239
Great), 195
276n
denburg, 49
Frye, Northrop, 32
308 Index
114-15
255n
Gulliver's Travels, 3
Index 309
Geschichte, 6
Ritter," 188
Heraclitus, 72
Kunst, 66-67, 70
Herman of Thuringia, 21
Herzog Ernst, 17
Heselhaus, Clemens, 25 in
Untergang, 18o-81
Historikerstreit, I 8o-8 1
185, 222-24
274n, 275n
Jews, German
272n
Androgyny
238-39
Holocaust
258n
258-59n
National-Litteratur, 241
258n, 259n
de Cleves, 59
Weise, 75-76
56
Lukics, Georg, 87
88, 199
Macpherson, James, 67
262n
Marie Antoinette, 87
276n
254n, 259n
255n
Mendelssohn, Moses, 75
91
312 Index
atur, 91-93, 98
229-31, 238-44
252-53n
114
Occidentalism, II
Nationalism, German
228-29, 23 I1
40-41
Polenlieder, 186-88
259n
269n
172-74
of England, I16
Richardson, Samuel, 64
258n, 261n
Saladin, 17
271n, 275n
132
Schlegel, Dorothea, 87
105-8
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 87
deutsche Nationalgeftihl,"
178-79
249n
258-59n, 262n
275n
30, 32
Spartacus, 49
Spectator, The, 99
Abendlandes, 162
95
Spinoza, Baruch, 72
"Anschwellender Bocksgesang,"
124
Tatler, The, 99
163,257n
274n
184
264n
257n, 264n
Preuflens, 184
Wentzlaff-Eggebert, Friedrich-
Wilhelm, 248n
Merkur, 62
Wilkins, Charles, 63
262n
135,263n
27on
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 5 I
War
256n
Banise, 61-62
159