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.

This chapter focuses on three events in the period 1840 to 1857/58 and discusses how orientalist ideas were used in each of them to construct three different figurations of the oriental: the Jew, the Turk, and the Indian. The first event is the Damascus affair (1840), in which Damascan Jews were forced to confess under torture to the ritual murder of a Christian priest. The incident was widely covered in the leading European and German dailies in general and the emerging Jewish press. The second event is the Crimean War (1853–56)—a war that is central to the oriental question as it is known in German—in which conflicting European interests in regard to the declining ottoman Empire coalesced with larger inner-European power conflicts. The war is seen as the first to become a media event. The third event is the Revolt of 1857 in India, which also became a media event though it took place in distant India and did not directly involve the states of the European continent. All three events drew an extraordinary amount of attention in the European press in general and also in the German press, while the latter two also became the stuff of popular novels. In fact these events took place at a time when “print capitalism,” as Benedict Anderson calls it, had begun to provide the basis for imagining the nation, though it is equally a time of expanding colonial interests.

There are no two words in contemporary discourse more current, or more elastic and therefore potentially more misunderstood, than “difference” and “otherness.” Both terms are constantly present in discussions of intercultural communication and therefore of the practice of orientalism, which is our theme. This chapter will interrogate this discourse in light of contemporary debates about communication between cultures and the linguistic thought of the German Enlightenment, especially the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the reprise of some key Humboldtian themes in the most recent work of Jürgen Habermas on intercultural dialogue.

Von Humboldt and a New Paradigm for Orientalism

In her seminal book Der andere Orientalismus (2005), Andrea Polaschegg shows that our constant concern to deconstruct false ideas of the other can make sameness and difference the controlling and even exclusive categories of intercultural study, so preventing us from understanding what might be really other no less than what is really part of ourselves. In other words, a concern to overcome one kind of use of orientalism—the Eurocentric construction of an artificial oriental other—can sometimes license a different kind of instrumentalism in oriental studies. Our concern to deconstruct a false other might prevent us from communicating with real others: those actual other people with whom we must speak if any true intercultural dialogue is to begin.

This chapter charts the varied and changing uses of orientalist material and strategies in Hungarian culture over four distinct periods, two in the nineteenth century (1800–1850, 1850–1900) and two roughly corresponding to the two halves of the twentieth century. In the romantic period in Hungarian letters, the Orient was used for the systematic mobilization of the relevant “cultural artifacts” to highlight the “specificity” of Hungary, its differences from other European nations, and the alleged mission of the Hungarian nation in Europe. Hungary had been a part of the Habsburg monarchy from the eighteenth century, and the Habsburg monarchy provided a special framework for the collaboration of the Hungarian aristocracy in the court and in the administration. In spite of this association, the emphasis within much of the writing considered here was on features that distinguished Hungarian from Austrian and German culture, stressing the specificity of Hungarian language and folklore. The Orient that was demarcated in Hungarian letters and learning was a fluctuating concept and its shifting geographical location and parameters adapted to the political, social, and historical concerns of the day. Several tropes and formulations from earlier periods continued in orientalist discourse in these two centuries of Hungarian engagement with the Orient. In the initial two phases the link to Hungarian nationalism is the most significant feature. Traces of this are still visible in contemporary, nonacademic, populist engagement with Hungarian prehistory (before Hungarians occupied the territory of the Carpathian Basin, present-day Hungary, in AD 986) and its relationship to the Orient.

German Speaking Travelers and the Maghreb around 1840

Contemporary and historical writing about the region of coastal North Africa known today as the Maghreb has, for the obvious reason of its long and complex colonial history, usually been a focus for scholars of French literature and history. The most recognizable literary text in German is Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's less-than-well-known Karl V. Angriff auf Algiers, a historical-fictional account of the camaraderie of sixteenth-century German and Spanish soldiers in the service of Emperor Charles V during his military campaigns against Barbary corsairs, published in 1845. The advent of modern French colonial expansion into Algeria from 1836 involved the familiar patterns of military and political deployment. Also familiar, though, was the economic migration and religious missionary travel to the region by people from a range of non-French European backgrounds. The 1840s saw a renewed flowering of writing on the region in the German language, and there exists a wealth of largely neglected travel writing on the Maghreb produced during this period by German speakers of different backgrounds and affiliations. This chapter deals with two contrasting examples of such writing, produced by travelers from the German-speaking world who journeyed to French Algiers during the 1830s and 1840s.

In Orientalism, Edward Said fiercely criticized what he saw as the complicity of academic oriental studies with the colonial projects of the British, French, and American Empires. However, a few years before Said, certain Western historians of the Russian Empire had already begun to scrutinize the complex relationship between the Russian center and the residents of its Asian colonies. One important example was the anthology Russia and Asia, edited by the American historian Wayne Vucinich in 1972. Because of its subtitle—Essays on the Influence of Russia on the Asian Peoples—this volume seemed to describe the Russian-Asian colonial encounter as a one-way street toward the peripheries, in which the mutual influence between the colonizers and the colonized played only a subordinate role. But this first impression was deceptive, because the articles explained the profound Asian influences on the Russian side as well. A couple of years before the first publication of Orientalism these authors had observed the Russian scholarly gaze on the oriental other in a Saidian way, and gone even further than Said by exploring the mutual interplay between the colonizers and the colonized.

In spite of the manifold criticism of Orientalism, Said's work inspired many historians of the Russian Empire in the next decades. Thus numerous books—mostly in English—on the Russian-Asian encounter were published. Their authors not only discussed the concept of “orientalism” critically, but also extended the perspective by examining the reciprocity of the Russian-oriental relationship.

This chapter seeks to explore some of the ways in which discourses about oriental sexuality were deployed in European travelogues. The concept of deployment, taken here to refer to the way models of the Orient and oriental culture were used in European writing, aims at a more thorough understanding of the familiar notion of the stereotypically sensual Orient with its concomitant figures of the lascivious oriental and odalisques, and its central role in constructions of the Orient. In particular, this chapter will ask which function these images had for European travelers, by giving special attention to their respective gender, class, and social position, which usually, but not always, play a decisive role in this respect. Thus this chapter will look at “how asymmetries in the production of the discourse of desire differed by gender and class, [and] at how effectively these distinctions affirmed a shared notion of European bourgeois culture and its prescriptions for white normality,” as Ann Laura Stoler suggested in her seminal study. This requires sensitivity to the differing functions that a common trope or metaphor take on in the writing of different travelers; even though the stereotype of the sexualized oriental is to be found in almost all texts dealing with the Orient, it can fulfill different purposes and functions and be assigned various meanings, which will be charted here.

Among the German-speaking exiles who made India their “exile homeland” (1933–45) to escape persecution from the Nazi regime in Europe was Willy Haas (1891–1973), a Prague-born Germanophone of Jewish origin, and writer, critic, and publisher of the most widely read Weimar literary journal Die literarische Welt. Haas scripted some of the most successful films of the 1940s for the Bhavnani Studios in Bombay, published an anthology entitled Germans beyond Germany and a series of essays on Indian culture and mythology that were published in India and in Germany.

While locating Haas's writings within twentieth-century German discourses on India, this chapter attempts to show how the comparative frameworks of the narrative in his texts, the influences of German Indology and his specific location of exile in the Orient, merge to circumscribe the hegemonic position of the Occident vis-à-vis the Orient. The virtual nonreception of Haas's Indian texts, within his literary corpus and the genre of German exile literature more generally, needs to be brought to light, as this indicates the need for a closer discussion of non-occidental sites of exile in German exile studies. This becomes all the more relevant since exile texts produced by Willy Haas in India tend to transcend the dominant orientalist tropes. Thus, the discussion will engage with the typologies, demarcations, and perceptions of the Orient and the Occident within Haas's work, on the basis of a microstudy of his exile in India during the rule of the National Socialists in Germany.

I. Introduction

When in 1927 the Czech Egyptologist Ludmila Matiegková (1889–1960) set out with fellow travel companions for Egypt to marvel at its ancient culture, she was confronted with her role as a tourist, a European, a woman, a scholar, and a Czech. Even though her published travelogue did not explicitly discuss her national identity or what it meant to be a Czech in Cairo, it still produced an implicit and ambivalent picture of Czech identity in a colonial setting: while Ludmila Matiegková painted a picture of the “magic of the Orient” that seems to reproduce general orientalist topoi, she distanced herself at the same time from those with whom she shared these figures of thought, namely, European colonial society in Egypt.

This ambivalent position, present in Czech travelogues from across the so-called Orient, will be at the center of this chapter as it discusses a form of orientalism that is not based on direct or explicit colonial interests or overseas possessions. It argues, rather, for a “noncolonial orientalism”: by concentrating on Czech travelers and their travelogues on the Orient in the five decades surrounding the end of the First World War and the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918, the chapter reconstructs a specific mode of “orientalizing” the Orient, which occurred outside of any direct colonial power relations.

In For Space, Doreen Massey challenges what she terms “an essentialist, billiard-ball view of place” that imagines cross-cultural contact as a series of collisions between self-contained units that may ricochet in unpredictable angles across the surface of the global pool table, but which never change their basic identities as solids or stripes, cue ball or eight ball. Instead, Massey argues that we should understand “place as the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality; as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; as the sphere therefore of coexisting heterogeneity.” In her understanding of space as a social construct Massey builds on the work of Henri Lefebvre, her stress on the heterogeneity of particular societies echoes Michel Foucault's concept of the heterotopia, and her vision of a world conceived in hybridity and engaged in an ongoing process of global exchange is shared by others too numerous to list. In this view, the billiard balls are porous, not solid; when they meet, they mesh and change color and change color again, mixing and matching in unpredictable and never-ceasing ways.

Such theories not only challenge the essentialism of ethnic nationalism, but also compel us to rethink our understanding of orientalism. If cultures, societies, and nations are not “imagined as having an integral relation to bounded spaces, internally coherent and differentiated from each other by separation,” as Massey puts it, then it is also no longer adequate to conceive of the Occident and Orient as geographically fixed and ideologically rigid.

In 1786, a professor at the University of Halle, Matthias Christian Sprengel, published a history of what was, at the time, the largest and most powerful Indian kingdom, about which few of his German readers had probably ever heard. Die Geschichte der Maratten bis auf den lezten Frieden mit England den 17. Mai 1782 contained nearly 250 pages of sober, statistic-filled narrative that Sprengel had stitched together from dozens of European sources. With this book, the deskbound German surprisingly became the first European to write a comprehensive history of the Maratha Empire, despite the advantages his colonial English, French, and Portuguese contemporaries had in obtaining firsthand information about India. Sprengel's history of the Marathas and two other books that he wrote stood out among eighteenth-century European literature on India, as they were published in German rather than English or French. Sprengel's nonpartisan tone and interest in contemporary politics did not fit the pattern of later German orientalist literature that emerged in the nineteenth century either.

Sprengel's work defies common characterizations of orientalist scholarship. His books do not assume a binary opposition of rational West versus irrational India. He says nothing about Aryan superiority, Indo-European racial connections, or linguistic affinities, and he does not indulge in “the fantasy of a uniquely religion-obsessed India.” His writing contains no “romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences,” and he does not perceive the Orient as the subject of artistic fantasies rather than an actual place.

In contrast to Edward Said's classical model, modes of so-called orientalist thinking and writing in the Habsburg monarchy provide a more differentiated idea of the Orient. It would be inaccurate to speak of just one form of orientalist discourse in the late Habsburg Empire. This chapter will consider at least two variants, outlining and then illustrating them through quotations from influential Austro-Hungarian policymakers. One variant represents the image of the Orient as “distant” (referring to the ottoman Empire and the Turks, who were both kept at a distance in consequence of their defeat at the gates of Vienna in 1683, commemorated at the bicentennial celebrations), while the other conceives the Orient as “close to home” (Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Southern Slavic peoples); both variants were deployed, mainly for political reasons, by various protagonists. Both modes of thinking were decisively affected by two events: the occupation and later annexation of the former Ottoman provinces Bosnia and Herzegovina in the year 1878, and in 1883 the bicentennial anniversary of the siege of Vienna by the Turks (1683) and its victorious relief. This chapter seeks to reconstruct precisely this complexity and differentiation within Habsburg discourses on the Orient during the period in question.