In his monumental study of German identity, Dieter Borchmeyer identifies two broad trends in the discourse about the nation. On the one hand, in his view, we find those who seek to delimit membership in the national community to an inner core defined by language, culture, or, most notoriously, race. On the other hand, we discover authors who insist—paradoxically—that the essence of the German nation lies in its cosmopolitanism, in its ability to embrace and absorb difference. Schiller's “Deutsche Größe” (German greatness), a fragmentary poem given its name by patriotic nineteenth-century editors, serves as one of Borchmeyer's prime examples of the cosmopolitan tradition in German thought. Probably composed sometime over the course of 1801, Schiller's poem takes as its theme the contrast between Germany's crumbling Empire and its great cultural achievements. While other European nations, in particular Britain and France, consolidated their state administrations and extended their power abroad, the Germans joined together in the realm of the spirit. Lack of political unity is not to blame for Germany's problems, Schiller's sketch suggests. Just the opposite, in fact: particularism was a liberating factor in the development of diverse German regions unconstrained by a single national capital. The imminent collapse of the Reich is a fortunate fall, for German language and culture are now poised to rise and extend their reach around the world. “Unsre Sprache wird die Welt beherrschen” (Our language will rule the world), proclaims Schiller, for the Germans’ time has come: “Jedes Volk hat seinen Tag in der Geschichte, doch der Tag der Deutschen ist die Ernte der ganzen Zeit” (Every people has its day in history, but the day of the Germans is the harvest of all time).

Although these lines may seem ominous today, Schiller insists that violent conquest is not what he has in mind. In strife-torn Europe, German culture stands above the fray and is thus poised to radiate peace and understanding to a global audience. At about the same time, Schiller's former student Novalis was writing his “Europa” essay, which begins with a nostalgic look back at the unity of Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, but concludes with a prophetic vision in which he proclaims that the Germans will lead the way to a new, pan-European harmony.

WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION of Effi Briest, Theodor Fontane's fiction is rarely included in surveys of world literature. Unlike Kafka's deceptively simple modernist prose, which seems to come from nowhere in particular and speak to everyone in general, or the current bestsellers that are “born translated,” easily sold in a dozen languages to readers around the world, Fontane's work is firmly rooted in the local milieu of late-nineteenth-century Prussia, giving it a linguistic and cultural specificity that resists easy circulation in the global marketplace or inclusion in the college curriculum. His novels are nevertheless worldly in the sense described by Edward Said: they are “enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society—in short, they are in the world, and hence worldly.” Fontane's locally situated works reflect on Prussia's place in the recently unified German nation and on Imperial Germany's involvement in global politics. In this essay I focus on three interrelated themes in Die Poggenpuhls (The Poggenpuhl Family, 1896): the ossification and decline of the Prussian aristocracy as exemplified by the Poggenpuhl family, the rise of global capitalism and its association with international Jewry, and the relations between the modern metropolis of Berlin and Germany's new colonies in Africa.

For many years Die Poggenpuhls was relegated to the second tier of Fontane's literary production. Fontane began writing the novel in the early 1890s, but it was not published in book form until 1896, just after Effi Briest (1895) and shortly before Der Stechlin (1898), his last completed work. Running only 121 pages in the standard edition of Fontane's works, Die Poggenpuhls seems slight in comparison with the more substantial novels that proceeded and followed it; a few minor inconsistencies in dating the events in the novel suggest that Fontane sent a carelessly edited work out into the world. The narrative form oscillates between third-person narration and a series of letters, which also raised eyebrows among some readers. Most unusual, however, is the fact that nothing much happens. Unlike Effi Briest, whose plot-driven narrative of the protagonist's marriage, seduction, banishment, and death invites comparisons with Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, Die Poggenpuhls lacks a dominant character and a single, compelling plot.

Introduction

Literary history offers a guide to the canon of great books. It matters little whether one picks up a history of literature from the nineteenth century or a modern one; they all tend to more or less salvage a small collection of books from the ocean of those published. For the year 1809, for example, any given history of German literature will highlight Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), as if no other work of literature had been published that year. This is the case regardless of whether one consults Hermann Hettner's literary history from 1870 or R. H. Stephenson's essay on the novel in Weimar classicism from 2005. A brief perusal of a book catalogue from around 1809, however, suggests an alternative to this canonical picture of literary history. Approximately one hundred German novels were published in 1809. Among the widely read novels included in this list are, for example, the third volume of August Lafontaine's Die beiden Bräute (The Two Brides) and August Kotzebue's Philbert oder die Verhältnisse (Philbert or the Circumstances). The canon is one story; the cultural history of read books is another. For those who believe that literary history should be more than the history of great books, a corpus-based approach offers one way of dealing with the thousands of books that actually circulated. And we are not using “thousands” metaphorically in speaking of the literary history of the nineteenth century, even when we limit ourselves to the German-speaking countries.

In a frequently cited article published in 2000, Franco Moretti envisions a future literary history that will step back from close readings of individual texts to gain a distant perspective on the system of literature in its entirety. “The United States is the country of close reading,” Moretti concedes, “so I don't expect this idea to be particularly popular.” He nevertheless proposes a new type of literary analysis whose innovative boldness will be “directly proportional to the distance from the text: the more ambitious the project, the greater must the distance be.”

Over the past decade Moretti has begun to realize his millennial vision, enlisting cadres of graduate students and his own formidable intelligence to produce literary histories that look very different from what has been done in the past—and I stress the visual difference of his work. In the place of prose narratives that describe major literary movements and towering individual geniuses, we find graphs, maps, and diagrams that one might expect to find in the work of statistically driven social scientists. And although Moretti may relish his role as a maverick among the herds of more traditional literary critics, his appeal for a more distant approach to literary systems has not gone unheeded. Stephan Best and Sharon Marcus have identified a recent movement toward “surface reading” in the work of critics who eschew the search for hidden meanings buried deep within the text in favor of a more neutral description of what lies in plain view. Heather Love has followed Bruno Latour around the “descriptive turn” to find a land beyond depth hermeneutics, where readings are close but not deep and the emotional landscape is flat and cold rather than rich and warm.

This chapter looks at how Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) developed and applied his particular kind of orientalist thinking and writing within the German geographical, linguistic, and cultural context of the early nineteenth century. Schlegel's orientalism developed in Paris (1802–4) in the context of the Pan-European clamor against French cultural (later political) hegemony and against modernity, capitalism, urban life, and individualism. his reflections on the orient, particularly the topos of “India,” became part of a process whereby Germany was reimagined as no longer being part of Western Europe but rather as the “true” oriental self of Europe.

Much has been written on the romantics generally and their influence on early German nationalism, and many scholars have come to similar conclusions. None, arguably, has been able to reveal through a close reading of “Reise nach Frankreich” and Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier Schlegel's use of Indian language and culture in contesting French cultural hegemony. This contribution seeks to compensate for this deficiency by bringing to bear the study of early nineteenth-century nationalism on the study of Schlegel's engagement with India.

Friedrich Schlegel in Paris

Schlegel's interest in Sanskrit studies spans a period of nearly forty years, during which an enthusiasm for India took hold of many German intellectuals. The period begins in 1791 with Georg Forster's (1754–94) translation of Kalidasa's Shakuntala and ends in 1827 with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's (1770–1831) dismissive verdict on India.

Received Orientalisms and New Departures

Over the last three decades the term “orientalism” has become a commonplace and often pejorative term within cultural studies. In Edward Said's seminal Orientalism (1978) the term was first defined critically as a mode of thought and writing by which Western discourses exercise a form of ideological power over the peoples and cultures of the East, reducing them to Europe's consummate other: exotic, degenerate, passive, fanatical, mysterious, civilized, and uncivilized by degree. The term has, though, come to be used so liberally that it seems to imply the existence of a real, unified historical school of thought, an ideological movement of like-minded people or at least a recognized set of writings, attitudes, and beliefs that carried that name within the Europe of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was not the case. Naturally, the terms “Orient” and “orientalism” permeate this volume. Here, though, they are treated within a context of critical awareness, as a contemporary tool for critically tracing patterns and tendencies within historical European discourses. The scope of what can be termed “orientalism,” of where and in what forms we might seek it, of the range of differing functions it fulfills in differing contexts, and of where, quite simply, the so-called Orient was thought to be in a geographical sense, must be considered as open to a process of redefinition.

This volume is the first publication to be generated by the International Occident-Orient Research Network, which was established in 2008 by Anil Bhatti and James Hodkinson. The network arose out of a collaborative arrangement between Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and Warwick University, UK, and it originally had a solely German Studies focus. The project expanded rapidly to include Delhi University and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW), Vienna, as its other key locations. The group has subsequently attracted scholars from Europe, Asia, and North America, who have also brought a wide range of expertise to the project: these include literary scholars of all persuasions, historians, social scientists, as well, of course, as specialists in the field known problematically as “oriental studies.”

The resulting text is an edited volume of chapters that has been developed by members of the network, working in close collaboration. Thus far the project has spanned a period of four years from January 2010 to the date of publication, and has been driven forward by three symposia, held in Delhi, Vienna, and Birmingham, UK. The editors would like to thank a great many institutions and people who have assisted the production of this volume and the research group underlying it since late 2009. These are too numerous to list in their entirety here, though others should not go without mention.