German Orientalisms

German Orientalisms



THE UNIVERSITY Or MICHIGAN PRESS

Ann Arbor

Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2004

All rights reserved

Published in the United States of America by

The University of Michigan Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

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2007 2006 2005 2004

4 3 2 I

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or

otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kontje, Todd Curtis, 1954-

German orientalisms / Todd Kontje.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0o-472-II392-5 (cloth: alk. paper)

1. German literature-History and criticism. 2. Orientalism in

literature. 3. Orientalism-Germany. I. Title.

PTI49.A2K66 2004

830.9'325-dc22

2003024638

Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2004 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America @ P rinted on acid-iree paper 2007

2000

2005

200 4

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any torm or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

A CIP wtalog record for this book is availableJi·om the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Konge, Todd Curtis, 1954German orientalisms I Todd Kontje. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISilN 0 -472-11392- 5 (cloth: alk. paper) I. German literature-HistOly and criticism. 2. Orientalism in literature. 3. Orientalism- Germany. I. Title. PT 149.i\2K66

83o.
2004

dc22

By a strange coincidence, this book was accepted for publication on

March 21, 2003, at the very moment that the United States unleashed

the full force of a bombing campaign on Baghdad designed to inspire

"shock and awe" within the Iraqi regime. Picking up where his father

left off, President George W. Bush launched what some might view as

the latest Western "crusade" against the East, continuing a venerable

tradition that extends back into the Middle Ages.This time it was dif-

ferent, however: President Bush's repeated references to a "Coalition

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

its closest allies, including France, Russia, and Germany.

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

famously defined as a form of Western knowledge and power over

the East must also be understood in a more nuanced way that allows

for historical and national differences. This book is about the pecu-

liarities of one such national tradition. I look at various manifestations

of Orientalism in German literature from the Middle Ages to the

present, or, more precisely, I consider multiple German Orientalisms in

their distinction from one another and in their contribution to the

construction of the identity of a nation poised between western

Europe and the East.

My book grows out of recent work on colonialism and German lit-

vi Preface

erature, current interest in minority literature in Germany and other

contemporary European nations, and the transformation of Germani-

stik into German Studies as part of a broader trend toward globalizing

literary studies and rethinking the role of national cultures in a post-

national world. Rather than continuing the important work of those

who focus on the "margins" of contemporary German culture, how-

ever, German Orientalisms takes seriously the need to revisit the "core"

of the national literature-not as a nostalgic reaction to contemporary

trends but because of recent developments in literary production, cul-

tural theory, and contemporary politics. The book explores the ideo-

logical function of German literature in the shaping of a national

identity and vindicates the power of the literary imagination.

I would like to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foun-

dation and the National Endowment of the Humanities for their sup-

port during the 2001-2 academic year.Thanks also to the Council for

Research in the Humanities at the University of California, San

Diego, which supported earlier trips to Gottingen and Berlin. I was

privileged to present portions of my work in progress at the Univer-

sity of California, Irvine; Weissenfels, Germany; Oberlin College;Yale

University; and the University of California, Berkeley. My thanks to

these institutions and also to Neil Donahue, Jens Rieckman, Hans-

Peter Soeder, Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Steven Huff, and W. Daniel

Wilson for their work in arranging these visits.Arthur Groos, Douglas

McGetchin, William Arctander O'Brien, Laurel Plapp, John Smith,

Robert Tobin, and Lynne Tatlock are among the many individuals

who provided support and encouragement in various ways; my

thanks to them and my apologies to those I have momentarily for-

gotten. An earlier version of the section on Botho Straul3 in chapter

3 was published as "Botho StrauB"Der junge Mann': Cultural Mem-

ory, National Identity, and the East," in Signaturen der Gegenwartsliter-

atur: Festschrift fir Walter Hinderer, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer, 141-53

(Wiirzburg: Konigshausen und Neumann, 1999). I am grateful for

permission to reprint portions of this article here.

Special thanks are due to Lisa Lowe, John A. McCarthy, and Jeffrey

Sammons for their unflagging support; without their help I would

never have gotten the grants that enabled me to complete the project.

Preface vii

I am grateful to Christopher J. Collins for his willingness to pursue

the project for the University of Michigan Press, as well as to Sara

Friedrichsmeyer and David Luft, who both read the entire manuscript

and offered invaluable suggestions for improvement. I also very much

appreciate the warm support of an anonymous reader who recom-

mended publication of my work and regret only that I cannot express

my thanks more directly. Sadly, Susanne Zantop did not live to see the

completion of the project she both helped to inspire and so graciously

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

who continually remind me that other things are more important.



Contents

Introduction: The Location of German Literature

I

1. Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation

15

Wolfram's Parzival and the Making of Europe

15

Early Modern Nationalism and the Ottoman Empire

32

Baroque Orientalisms: Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus

and Lohenstein's Arminius

39

2. Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire

61

Herder's Historicism

64

Novalis: A Provincial Cosmopolitan

83

The Bildung of the German Nation

o101

Linguistic Nationalism and the East

105

Inventing Germanistik and Making Wolfram German

III

Goethe's Orientalism: Between Essence and Irony

118

3. Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents

133

Mann, Baeumler, and Bachofen: The Dark Side

of Romanticism

133

Tiptoeing toward Democracy: Mann's Sexual Politics 138

Symbolic Geographies on the Magic Mountain

146

Botho Strau3: Apocalypse Now

162

x Contents

4. The Nearest East

Germany's Eastern Frontier

177

177

Teutonic Knights, Prussian Patriots, Nazi Ideologues 18 I

Eichendorff's Christian Soldiers

188

At Home on the Border: Heimat, Nation, and

Empire in Freytag's Poetic Realism

196

Giinter Grass and the Literature of Migration

209

Conclusion: Toward a "Bastard" Literature?

225

Ozdamar's Hybrid Heroines

228

Michael Roes's Postmodern Orientalism

23 I

Coda: Literature in an Age of Cultural Studies

237

Notes

245

Works Cited

277

Primary Literature

277

Secondary Literature

283

Index

305

Introduction: The Location

of German Literature

This book is about the role of symbolic geography in German litera-

ture. I focus on the canon, that is, on authors and texts that have been

considered typically, representatively, quintessentially "German."

German Orientalisms is therefore a book about German national iden-

tity as reflected in and constructed by major works of German litera-

ture. Much has been said about the role of history in narratives of

national identity, about the need on the part of "imagined commu-

nities" to "invent traditions" that forge bonds between present and

past.' "Who are we?" prompts the question "Who were we?" and, in

turn, "How did we become what we are today?" Equally important

to a sense of national identity, however, is the understanding of geo-

graphical location that arises in response to such questions as "Where

are we?" "How did we get here?" "How do we define our position

with regard to our immediate neighbors?" "How do we relate to the

rest of the world?" Such questions can of course be answered factu-

ally, with references to maps and borders, latitude and longitude.

Geographic locations also have symbolic connotations, however. It is

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-

nalism and Eastern mysticism. Geography, at least as it is convention-

ally understood, dwells in the realm of facts; symbolic geography, in

contrast, is the province of the literary imagination.

My primary focus is on the role of the East in the symbolic land-

2 German Orientalisms

scape of German literature. As such, my work contributes to the

study of European Orientalism, but with a concentration on the

peculiarities of one national tradition. Edward Said defines Oriental-

ism in its most specific sense as an academic discipline devoted to cul-

tures from the Middle East to India.2 In fact, the deciphering of East-

ern languages and literatures by a handful of scholars in the late

eighteenth century had such a profound impact on the European

imagination that Raymond Schwab has written of an "Oriental

Renaissance" that rivaled the significance of the rediscovery of classi-

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-

pean imperialism and colonialism. Hence Said describes Orientalism

"as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having author-

ity over the Orient" (3), that is, as a form of knowledge that is

directly linked to the exercise of power.

Not surprisingly, therefore, Said concentrates primarily on British

and French Orientalists, as those two nations also had direct colonial

interests in the East. Germany was different: "there was nothing in

Germany to correspond to the Anglo-French presence in India, the

Levant, North Africa. Moreover, the German Orient was almost

exclusively a scholarly, or at least a classical, Orient: it was made the

subject of lyrics, fantasies, and even novels, but it was never actual,

the way Egypt and Syria were actual for Chateaubriand, Lane,

Lamartine, Burton, Disraeli, or Nerval." Hence Said concludes that

"at no time in German scholarship during the first two-thirds of the

nineteenth century could a close partnership

have developed

between Orientalists and a protracted, sustained national interest in

the Orient" (19). If by national interest Said means a direct material

stake in foreign colonies in the East, he is certainly correct: Germany

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,

we define national interest more broadly as an intellectual effort to

locate and preserve a sense of communal identity, then we can indeed

speak of a German national interest in the East. In fact, the very lack

of a unified nation-state and the absence of empire contributed to the

development of a peculiarly German Orientalism. German writers

Introduction 3

oscillated between identifying their country with the rest of Europe

against the Orient and allying themselves with selected parts of the

East against the West.

In the first case, Germans were motivated by an urgent desire to

overcome their proverbial belatedness and to join ranks with other

European nations as they set out to conquer the world. Scarcely a

decade after Bismarck had united Germany through three quick

wars, the new nation embarked on an aggressive policy of colonial

expansion that culminated in the Griff nach der Weltmacht (grasp for

world power) in the First World War, and the quest for more

Lebensraum in the Second.5 Yet German aggression toward the East

did not begin ex nihilo on April 24, 1884, the so-called birthday of

German colonialism. Germans had participated in the first Crusade

against Muslim "infidels" that began in 1o95; in the later Middle Ages

the Teutonic Knights turned their attention toward the heathen

"Saracens" of eastern Europe; and German soldiers and writers from

Luther to Lohenstein waged a series of campaigns against the

Ottoman Turks.

Not all German encounters with the world beyond western

Europe took place on the battlefield. During the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries, for instance, the Germans could not compete

with the imperial ambitions of other European nations, but they did

participate individually in the exploration of the world, and collec-

tively in the resulting expanded intellectual horizons. Travelogues

from Adam Olearius's Moskowitische und Persische Reise [Journey to

Moscow and Persia] (1633-39) to Georg Forster's Reise um die Welt

[Journey around the world] (1778-80) piqued the curiosity of Ger-

man readers and catered to their taste for exotic adventures of the sort

depicted in Robinson Crusoe (1718), Gulliver's Travels (1726), Die Insel

Felsenburg (1731 -43), and Candide (1759). Eighteenth-century schol-

ars set out to organize the profusion of plants and animals in the

newly discovered lands into scientific categories, cartographers pro-

duced increasingly precise maps, and ethnographers described the

appearance and customs of the various peoples they encountered.

As European scholars became increasingly aware of human diver-

sity, they also became preoccupied with questions of racial differ-

ence.6 Here, too, German intellectuals contributed actively to the

4 German Orientalisms

scholarly discourse. In Gottingen, for instance, Johann Friedrich Blu-

menbach wrote a treatise entitled De generis humani varietate nativa

[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

only two broad categories, Caucasian and Mongolian. Immanuel

Kant, for his part, opted for four different races: white European,

black African, yellow Asian, and copper-red American Indian.7 Such

categories were hardly neutral. Christoph Meiners, to take a particu-

larly crass example, declared that only whites could be considered

beautiful. In his view, dark-skinned peoples are not only ugly, but

also stupid and vicious.8 Hence he excuses even the harshest treat-

ment of such peoples by their colonial masters as a necessary evil:

"Unlimited violence is often necessary and also beneficial when bet-

ter men exercise it against the less noble. For, unfortunately, there are

not only individuals, but entire peoples who cannot be moved of

their own accord toward virtue, but who need/want to be forced

[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

good fortune for these nations to be conquered, oppressed, and

devoured."'°

In the course of the eighteenth century the Enlightenment effort

to classify nature and human beings on a static grid yielded to a

dynamic model of organic development, a process that Foucault

described as "the mutation of Order into History."" While ethnog-

raphers and anthropologists produced synchronic accounts of existing

world cultures, universal historians wrote diachronic narratives that

led from the distant past to the present. Increasingly, writers broke

with biblical authority in their effort to locate the beginnings of

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

moeurs et l'esprit des nations [Essay on the manners and customs of

nations] (1756), for instance, Voltaire maintained that Western cul-

ture owes everything to the Orient, the "cradle of all the arts,"'2 and

he speculated in his Philosophie de l'histoire [Philosophy of history]

(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

somewhere in Asia, while Johann Friedrich Blumenbach located the

point of origin more precisely in the Caucasus.14

Race played a central role in such narratives of universal history. If

all human beings are descended from Adam and Eve, philosophers

wondered, how can one account for current differences between

peoples? Were there in fact multiple ancestors of different races from

which modern peoples descended, a polygenetic theory to which

Voltaire subscribed, or did certain branches of the originally white

human race degenerate into inferior blacks and Mongols, as Blumen-

bach contended?'5 Others wondered how Europeans had ascended

to what they assumed was their position of racial and cultural superi-

ority. Hence ethnography soon combined with universal history, and

Germans joined other Europeans in the effort to trace the cultural

development that had made them not only different from the rest of

the world, but also-as most believed-better.'6

By participating in the intellectual project of Orientalism, Germans

sought to overcome their sense of cultural and political subordination

to other European powers, suggesting that although they had neither

nation nor empire, they nevertheless belonged to modern European

civilization. On one level there is an obvious difference between

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

way), and dipping one's quill into an inkpot in Gottingen or Weimar

to begin writing an anthropological treatise or a work of universal

history. On another level, however, the two are not completely

unrelated: as Mary Louise Pratt has argued, the seemingly neutral

effort of Europeans to organize their understanding of the world was

also part of an effort to control and exploit natural resources and for-

eign peoples. Hence she distinguishes between violent conquest and

what she terms anticonquest: "the strategies of representation whereby

European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the

same moment as they assert European hegemony."'7 Categorizing

individuals and peoples as racial inferiors obviously makes things eas-

ier for the consciences of those who seek to conquer or colonize

6 German Orientalisms

them, as do narratives of universal history that culminate in the tri-

umph of European civilization. "It is impossible, in other words,"

write Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, for instance, "not to link

both Hegel's philosophical recuperation of the Other within absolute

Spirit and his universal history leading from lesser peoples to its sum-

mit in Europe together with the very real violence of European con-

quest and colonialism."'8 Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it more suc-

cinctly: "Historicism enabled European domination of the world in

the nineteenth century."'9

Thus, to a certain extent, Germany's intellectual participation in

European Orientalism compensated for its inability to be a real player

on the international scene. The German intellectuals succeeded so

well, in fact, that postcolonial theorists routinely employ German

thinkers such as Hegel as spokesmen for a monolithic European

imperialism.20 Yet the history of European imperialism is also a his-

tory of intra-European conflict writ large.2' If we look more closely

at Hegel's Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Geschichte [Lectures on

the philosophy of history] (1821-31; 1837), for instance, we find that

in his mind, at least, there is a clear distinction between Germany and

other European nations. In considering the early modern period,

Hegel notes that the Germans did not participate in the beginnings of

European imperialism: "while the rest of the world set out for the

East Indies, America--set out to win riches, to establish world dom-

inance over lands that circle the earth,"22 the Germans, led by Luther,

liberated themselves from the authority of the Catholic Church by

basing faith on the individual's relationship to God. Luther thereby

granted the individual unprecedented autonomy in a way that was

particularly suited to the German national character: "The pure

inwardness [reine Innigkeit] of the German nation was the proper

ground for the liberation of the spirit" (563). The German capacity

for spiritual freedom more than compensates for Germany's failure to

join the rest of Europe seeking world domination. In a logic we will

encounter frequently among German writers of the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, the absence of empire becomes a source of

moral strength and national pride.23

In an effort to distinguish more precisely between the German

intellectual tradition and those of Britain and France, it is useful to

Introduction 7

recall Norbert Elias's discussion of "the difference between Kultur

and Zivilisation in German usage."24 Today the concepts are often

taken to be roughly synonymous, with culture and civilization stand-

ing together against primitivism and barbarism, but the terms

emerged in quite different social contexts in the eighteenth century.

British and French civilization developed in the court societies of

centralized nation-states, whereas the German concept of Kultur

arose among politically disenfranchised middle-class intellectuals scat-

tered throughout the German-speaking provinces. In

France,

upwardly mobile individuals could penetrate the circles of the ruling

elite, whereas in Germany, class distinctions remained rigid. Isolated

bourgeois intellectuals focused instead on their inner personal devel-

opment or Bildung. Most important, civilization was made for export,

while Kultur was an indigenous product for local consumption only.

"To a certain extent, the concept of civilization plays down the

national differences between peoples; it emphasizes what is common

to all human beings or-in the view of its bearers-should be" (5).

The process of civilization sends a democratizing message to the rest

of the world: anyone can become a member of civilized society if he

or she is willing to accept certain universal values. At the same time,

of course, such serene self-confidence in one's own higher civiliza-

tion could be used to legitimate French and British imperialism.

Once "nations consider the process of civilization as completed within

their own societies," as Elias puts it, "they see themselves as bearers

of an existing or finished civilization to others, as standard-bearers of

expanding civilization" (4i). While civilization thus "expresses the

self-assurance of peoples whose national boundaries and national

identity have for centuries been so fully established that they have

ceased to be the subject of any particular discussion," Elias continues,

"the German concept of Kultur places special stress on national dif-

ference and the particular identity of groups." Civilization expands;

"Kultur delimits" (5). German notions of national identity became

based on exclusionary concepts of ethnicity and historical ties to the

homeland rather than abstract ideas potentially open to anyone, any-

where.25

From a German perspective around 18oo, therefore, the notion of

an imperialist Kultur would seem to be a contradiction in terms: Kul-

8 German Orientalisms

tur is by nature delimiting, exclusionary, and thus implicitly anti-

imperial and anticolonial. One can bring the benefits of civilization

to non-European peoples-or impose civilization on them by

force- but one cannot turn "natives" into Germans. Or can one?

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, German ethnographers,

historians, and linguists began to view themselves as the direct

descendants of an "Aryan" culture originating in the Caucasus or in

the mountains of northern India, as distinguished from the Semitic

culture of the Middle East.26 From this perspective, the Germans had

no need to conquer and colonize eastern lands, for they were already

part of a greater Indo-European whole. The politically fragmented

Germans could thus adopt a high moral ground in condemning the

violent conquests of other colonizing nations, while quietly absorb-

ing selected portions of the Middle East and Central Asia into a pan-

German Kultur.

German Orientalism thus oscillates between a compensatory Euro-

centrism and an anti-Western, anti-Semitic Indo-Germanicism. Seen

from this perspective, the Germans are doubly damned: in the first

instance they turn belatedness into an excuse for self-righteousness

even as they participate in the intellectual project of European Ori-

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

words, German Orientalism was directed both outward and inward,

motivated by a desire to conquer as much of Europe and the rest of

the world as possible and to eliminate racial "inferiors" within the

homeland.27 Informed by an Aryan model of ancient history that was

"conceived in sin," as Martin Bernal puts it,28 in a world where every

European, "in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently

a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric," to quote

Said,29 the Germans were more equal than others, it would seem, and

the biggest sinners of them all.

Such arguments gain force because they lack nuance. Daniel Gold-

hagen won international notoriety in the 1990s with a similarly

sweeping argument that claimed that all, or almost all, "ordinary Ger-

mans" hated Jews to the point that they were willing and even eager

to contribute to their complete elimination.30 In a world in which

Introduction 9

neo-Nazi extremists continue to deny the existence of the Holocaust

and younger generations grow up with little sense of history, it is vital

that the story of twentieth-century German barbarism be told and

retold, and in this regard Goldhagen's book served a useful purpose.

Yet blanket denunciations of an entire people inadvertently exoner-

ate the individuals who perpetrated particular crimes, while ignoring

those, however few, who resisted.3' As Peter Schneider has argued,

remembering the "good Germans" does not necessarily play into the

hands of apologists who would turn ordinary Germans into Hitler's

victims; in fact, he claims, remembering those who chose to hide

Jews from the Nazis in Berlin actually highlights the guilt of those

who did not.32 Recent studies of nineteenth-century German colo-

nialism have similarly advocated a more variegated approach to the

past. Without ever losing sight of the suffering and injustice perpe-

trated by European imperialists on the rest of the world, Russell

Berman has argued that the German intellectual tradition also con-

tains moments of genuine openness to foreign cultures and significant

cross-cultural exchange.33 Susanne Zantop also warned against read-

ing history as a reductive teleology.34 While concentrating for the

most part on the negative consequences of German "colonial fan-

tasies," she found pockets of resistance in literary works by Kleist,

Heine, and Keller. One of the most interesting aspects of her work,

in fact, is the way in which it vindicates canonical works of German

literature even as it condemns racism, sexism, and xenophobia in

popular fiction and also in nonfictional texts.

Many of the authors I examine in this book display similar resis-

tance to ideological straitjacketing. The works of Wolfram von

Eschenbach reveal a sense of humor and tolerance toward the foreign

that contrasts markedly with both the majority of his more dogmatic

contemporaries and such nineteenth-century admirers as Richard

Wagner. Lohenstein's dramas demonize the sultans of the Ottoman

Empire, but his historical novel Arminius offers a multifaceted image

of the Orient that indirectly illuminates the complexities of local

dynastic politics and nascent nationalism in seventeenth-century

Europe. While often implicated in Eurocentric thought, Herder

appreciates cultural difference to a far greater degree than his openly

racist contemporaries. Novalis may seem a reactionary Romantic at

10 German Orientalisms

first glance, but he is actually a revolutionary republican and cos-

mopolitan visionary. Goethe sternly resists political liberalism and

bandies about Orientalist cliches but also criticizes the excesses of

German nationalism and envisions a future Weltliteratur. Thomas

Mann, recently converted from antidemocratic conservatism to sup-

port of the Weimar Republic, attempts in his works of the 1920s to

recapture elements of Romanticism that have been hijacked by the

protofascist right. Although accused at various times (and with vary-

ing degrees ofjustification) of pornography, misogyny, and Eurocen-

trism, Giinter Grass has consistently opposed German revanchist sen-

timents toward Poland and sought to rethink the place of Germany

and Europe in an era of globalization, mass migrations, and ecologi-

cal change. Michael Roes, finally, writes a postmodern travelogue

that combines the autobiographical and ethnographical reflections of

two sympathetic narrators who display a degree of openness toward

the foreign and critical distance toward their own German back-

grounds that distinguishes them from their more bigoted traveling

companions and fellow anthropologists.

While acknowledging the centrality of the "long" nineteenth cen-

tury to the study of European imperialism and German Orientalism,

my work begins earlier and extends to include several contemporary

writers. A sense of belonging to a common Christian culture began

to emerge among Europeans already during the Middle Ages, in part

through contacts with the East during the Crusades, while particular

national identities within Europe began to coalesce during the early

modern period in opposition to the Ottoman Empire as well as to

each other. Hence I begin my study not with Herder's historicism,

but, rather, with a look at cross-cultural contacts in Wolfram von

Eschenbach's Parzival and images of the East in the Baroque novels of

Grimmelshausen and Lohenstein. Subsequent chapters are arranged

in roughly chronological order, although I have at times interrupted

historical continuity for the sake of thematic coherence. Thus chap-

ter 3 views Thomas Mann's work in the context of a tradition of

German conservative thought that extends from the Heidelberg

Romantics of the early nineteenth century to the neoconservativism

of Botho Straul3. Chapter 4, in turn, focuses on German encounters

with the "Nearest East" of eastern Europe, a theme that recurs from

Introduction 11

the medieval Teutonic Knights through the nineteenth-century Pol-

ish-Prussian border tensions reflected in the work of Eichendorff and

Freytag to the most recent fiction of Giinter Grass. I conclude with a

brief look at novels by Emine Sevgi Ozdamar and Michael Roes that

engage with but also modify a long tradition of German Orientalism.

These contemporary German authors write at a time when

national identities have begun to unravel in the post-Cold War era of

"Empire."35 Borders between Germany and other members of the

European Union have grown increasingly porous, a process symbol-

ized most dramatically by the adoption of a common currency in Jan-

uary 2002. As Europe has grown increasingly united within, new

tensions have arisen on its borders. The immense discrepancy in

wealth between Europe and its neighbors to the south and east has

attracted millions of political and economic refugees, while declining

birth rates and an aging population within Europe have created a

pressing demand for foreign labor. To many observers it seems

inevitable that Europe will have to absorb unprecedented numbers of

immigrants, resulting in a new multicultural society. In response to

this perceived threat, conservative politicians across Europe have

won new support for anti-immigration policies designed to stem the

tide of undesirable aliens, breathing new life into old Orientalist

stereotypes. From a still larger perspective, however, "Fortress

Europe" finds itself besieged by global pressures from both East and

West. An American-led process of globalization threatens to swamp

European culture under a sea of fast food and Hollywood movies;

national economies have become deeply enmeshed in a web of

transnational capitalism; and the members of the European Union

have come under pressure to provide tactical and military support for

the foreign policy initiatives of the United States. While occasionally

chafing in their role as unequal partners of a Western alliance, Euro-

pean nations have found themselves the target of a new "Occidental-

ism," that is, a hatred of modern Western society that has spawned a

new Islamic fundamentalism and a campaign of global terror.36

Despite claims to the contrary, however, nations have not entirely

disappeared, and some have argued that the persistence of nationalism

is a good thing. Recalling the origins of the nation-state in eigh-

teenth-century liberalism, Gregory Jusdanis reminds us that nations

12 German Orientalisms

often served progressive causes in the past, while today's separatist

movements enlist nationalist sentiments in their effort to resist the

homogenizing forces of globalization.37 The history of German

nationalism in the twentieth century has left a rather different legacy

to the present, however. In an often noted irony of history, the open-

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

Hitler's abortive beer-hall putsch of November 9, 1922, and the

Reichspogromnacht or Kristallnacht of November 9, 1938. Hence

what might have been unmitigated joy at Reunification in 1990 was

tempered by memories of the past, memories that have repeatedly

thwarted attempts in recent decades to declare that Germany should

finally be considered a "normal" nation. The implication of German

Orientalism in the Aryanism of the Third Reich also casts its shadow

over contemporary debates about immigration and the status of for-

eigners in Germany. Are today's Turks yesterday's Jews?

Because Orientalism has more to do with Western ideology than

Eastern geography, the actual location of "the Orient" matters less

than the consistency of a certain Orientalizing discourse. Hence this

book is not another study of Germany's relations with one particular

country or region.3s At various times the Orient will be identified

with the Holy Lands of the Crusades, the Ottoman Empire of the

early modern period, India for the Romantics, and even eastern

Europe for Eichendorff, Freytag, Mann, and Grass. As the Orient

functions differently across time and within the works of individual

authors, I prefer to speak of German Orientalisms rather than a single

German Orientalism. It would be tedious to place "the Orient" in

quotations throughout the book, so I do not, but it should be under-

stood that the phrase refers more to an ideological construct than to

an actual place.

In the texts I examine, relations between Germany, Europe, and

the East are often depicted in terms of gender or sexuality.39 During

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, colonial

encounters often take the form of love affairs between European men

and non-European women. The frequently retold tale of "Inkle and

Yarico" centers on a shipwrecked British sailor who falls in love with

an Indian maiden on a desert island in the Caribbean. At the first

Introduction 13

opportunity, however, this treacherous individual sells his pregnant

lover into slavery to finance his journey back home.4° On the surface,

the sentimental narrative condemns Inkle's actions and the institution

of slavery he supports. At the same time, however, this story (and

many others like it) contains a subliminal message about the white

man's irresistible appeal that implicitly legitimates the European con-

quest.4' Heinrich von Kleist's novella Die Verlobung in Santa Domingo

[The betrothal in Santa Domingo] (1811i) offers a particularly subtle

reworking of this theme.42 These tales of interracial love during the

"Age of Empire" are variants of a much longer Orientalist tradition

in German literature that extends from the cross-cultural romances of

the so-called Spielmannsepen of the late twelfth century and Gah-

muret's adventures in the first books of Wolfram von Eschenbach's

Parzival through romantic interludes in Lohenstein's Baroque novel

Arminius to sexual encounters between German men and Middle

Eastern women in Botho Straul3's Derjunge Mann.

The homophobic counterpart to these heterosexual romances por-

trays Oriental despots as debauched hermaphrodites-Lohenstein's

lurid dramas-and eastern armies as effeminate hordes that threaten

family values and inspire German men to rise up and stand firm

against the foreign floods. Such appeals to manly German virtue recur

from Ulrich von Hutten's anti-Turkish polemics of the 1520s to the

protofascist ideology of Hans Bliiher and the members of the German

Freikorps in the aftermath of the First World War.43 A variant to this

theme portrays Germany favorably as the feminine or androgynous

alternative to the hypermasculine imperialism of western European

nations. Adam Miiller, for instance, praises Germany's feminine

receptivity to Eastern influence in contrast to the manly aggression of

its European counterparts; Thomas Mann's protagonist Hans Castorp

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

not in any traditional sense; the homosexual protagonist of Michael

Roes's Leeres Viertel, finally, gradually distances himself from his het-

erosexual companions and his European origins as he explores alter-

native performances of masculinity on the edge of the Arabian desert.

I focus on fictional texts that make use of the Orient in their effort

to define what is German. Hence I am more interested in narratives

14 German Orientalisms

set in the West that make reference to the East than nonfictional trav-

elogues or fictions set entirely in the East; more interested, for

instance, in Lohenstein's Arminius than Olearius's Moskowitische Reise,

in Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg than in his Joseph novels or Her-

mann Hesse's Siddhartha. Although I discuss a broad historical range

of texts and many different authors, I make no attempt to offer a

comprehensive survey of all references to the Orient in German lit-

erature, which would in any case be impossible.44 In an effort to focus

the discussion in a meaningful way, I have selected authors and texts

deemed central to the German national literature. But how and when

were certain authors and texts selected to represent their national cul-

ture? In addition to discussing the symbolic geography of the literary

works themselves, I will also consider the place of literature in the

nineteenth-century institution of criticism known as Germanistik and

conclude with some reflections on the location of literature in con-

temporary German Studies. I am interested, in other words, in the

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

business, location, location, location.

CHAPTER ONE

Crusaders, Infidels, and the

Birth of a Nation

WOLFRAM'S PARZIVAL AND THE MAKING

OF EUROPE

Before modern European nations came into being, Europe itself had

to be invented. Between the years 950 and 1350, as Robert Bartlett

has argued, members of local communities scattered throughout

Europe began to think of themselves as belonging to a common

Christian European culture. Examining such developments as popu-

lation growth, changes in military and agricultural technology, com-

mercial expansion, new international religious orders, and new uni-

versities, Bartlett shows how European society gained greater internal

cohesiveness while expanding outward toward more sharply drawn

boundaries between itself and the rest of the world. Christian Euro-

peans rallied to Crusades against infidels abroad and pogroms against

the Jews at home. Bartlett views the expansion of medieval Christian

culture as an early form of colonialism and finds in the later Middle

Ages the seeds of modern racism. Hence he concludes that the

"European Christians who sailed to the coasts of the Americas, Asia,

and Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries came from a soci-

ety that was already a colonizing society. Europe, the initiator of one

of the world's major processes of conquest, colonization, and cultural

transformation, was also the product of one."'

Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival (ca. I200-I210) provides a

particularly subtle commentary on the process of the "Europeaniza-

15

16 German Orientalisms

tion of Europe" in the High Middle Ages.2 Despite his claims to the

contrary, Wolfram clearly based his work on Chretien de Troyes's

Perceval (ca. I I80-90).3 In three significant ways, however, Wolfram

expands on his source: he adds a lengthy preface about Parzival's

father, Gahmuret; he concludes Chretien's fragment with a reconcil-

iation between Parzival and his half-brother Feirefiz; and he intro-

duces what is probably a fictional source for his romance composed

by "Kyot." Each of Wolfram's additions brings his romance into

closer proximity with the non-Christian world: Gahmuret marries,

impregnates, and then abandons the black heathen queen Belakane;

she gives birth to the piebald heathen Feirefiz who eventually con-

verts to Christianity; and the Provengal Kyot gets his tale from a cer-

tain Flegetanis in Jerusalem whose mother was Jewish and whose

father was heathen (presumably Muslim).4 At the center of the

romance stands Parzival himself, who develops from an ignorant fool

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

places the development of its Christian hero into world-historical

context, both geographically, as Wolfram explores the relation of

Christian Europe to its non-Christian neighbors to the south and

east, and chronologically, situating Parzival's Christianity between a

heathen past and an envisioned universal Christianity of the future.

By the time Wolfram began writing around 1200, Europeans had

been in contact with the Middle East for hundreds of years. In 777

Charlemagne received an Arabian emissary in Paderborn, and during

his reign he maintained cordial relations with Harun ar-Rashid, who

ruled over much of the Middle East and northern Africa.5 In the cen-

turies that followed, Europeans maintained some contact with the

East through trade and the occasional pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but

relations with the Orient entered into a dramatic new phase when

Pope Urban II announced the First Crusade in May o1095. Within

four years European knights had recaptured Jerusalem, marking the

beginning of a two-hundred-year period of intense interaction

between Latin Christendom and the Islamic world.6

By definition the Crusades were hardly an exercise in cross-cul-

tural understanding. Crusaders enlisted in what they believed was a

just war against infidels, waged in the service of the true religion.

Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 17

Forgiveness of sins was promised to all who joined the Christian

army, and those who died in battle could expect their crown in

heaven.7 As time passed and contacts with the East increased, how-

ever, the arrogance bred of ignorance yielded to a more nuanced

appreciation of Islamic culture. Crusaders who settled in the Latin

kingdom of Jerusalem began to "go native," adopting local customs

and learning the Arabic language.8 Saladin inspired admiration

among many Europeans for his chivalry and generosity. Contacts

with the Islamic world extended beyond the Crusader states as well,

most notably into Sicily and Spain. Many of the advances in science,

medicine, mathematics, and

philosophy associated with the

"Twelfth-Century Renaissance" came to the West from the East.9

Important works of Greek antiquity had been preserved only in Ara-

bic translations, and Islamic culture itself was in many ways more

advanced than the peasant societies of northern Europe. Although we

should be cautious to speak of religious tolerance in any modern

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

later Middle Ages.'o

In German literature of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries

we find a sustained interest in the Orient and the Crusades. As in later

centuries, the East appealed to the European imagination as a fabu-

lous realm of untold riches and erotic adventures. The hero of Pfaffe

Lamprecht's Alexanderlied (ca. 1140-50), for example, tells of croco-

diles who ate his men in India, ferocious elephants, battles with

giants, and forests full of comely maidens. The eponymous hero of

Herzog Ernst (ca. I 18o) finds the immaculate marble streets of a

Mediterranean city at least as miraculous as the people he meets with

the heads of birds; he seems particularly impressed with the hot and

cold running water in the bathrooms. Good plumbing was no substi-

tute for the true religion, however, and authors of the period adopted

various strategies to address the relations between Christian Europe

and the non-Christian world, including propaganda, romance, and

theology.

The Song of Roland is the best-known example of a militant Chris-

tianity at war with heathendom. The story goes back to an actual bat-

18 German Orientalisms

tle of 778 in which Basque forces ambushed and destroyed Charle-

magne's rearguard army as it tried to retreat over the Pyrenees into

France. The historical event became the stuff of legend over the next

several hundred years, until it was written down in French early in

the twelfth century, shortly after the First Crusade." In approxi-

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

clearly drawn between Christians and heathens, and Konrad's Kaiser

knows exactly what he wants to do: "destroy the heathens / spread

Christianity" [die haidenscaft zestoren, / di cristin gemeren].14 In

Konrad's world there is a seamless fit between military strategy and

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

baptism or die. Peaceful coexistence between the two religious cul-

tures is not an option.

Confrontation between East and West takes place primarily on the

personal level in the so-called Spielmannsepen, which often center on

a Christian hero in search of a heathen bride.'5 For example, Sanct

Oswald (ca. 1170) begins with the unmarried English King Oswald in

need of an heir. An angel tells him that he should journey abroad to

marry the heathen queen Pamige of Aron. After many adventures

Oswald does manage to abduct his bride and bring her back to En-

gland, converting Pamige's father and thousands of defeated infidels

along the way. As it turns out, the heathen Pamige already believes in

Christ and is eager to be baptized. In a second surprising turn of

events, God forbids the couple to consummate their marriage once

they are back in England, recommending that when they feel the

urge they should plunge themselves into buckets of ice water kept

conveniently close to the bed. Oswald, after all, becomes a saint,

although in preserving his chastity the author seems to forget that he

set out originally to sire an heir.

Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 19

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

Christian in her heart. Many miraculous adventures follow, heathens

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

much in common with the interracial romances that were popular in

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The medieval narratives also

demonstrate European superiority, and the authors of St. Oswald and

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.

The anonymous Ezzolied presents a theological justification for the

Crusades based on a typological understanding of history.16 The orig-

inal version of Das Ezzolied actually predates the First Crusade; it was

probably composed shortly before Gunther von Bamberg left on a

pilgrimage to Jerusalem in o1064. The second, longer version of the

poem dates from approximately 12O-3O.17 Das Ezzolied retells

Christian salvation history in condensed form, moving from Creation

to the Fall and the promise of Christ's return. Along the way the

author offers a good example of the interpretive strategy that enabled

Christians to reclaim the Old Testament as part of their own tradi-

tion: "The figural interpretation changed the Old Testament from a

book of laws and a history of the people of Israel into a series of

figures of Christ and the Redemption."I's For example, the author of

Das Ezzolied first narrates the story of the Passover and then com-

ments "That all had a spiritual meaning, / That refers to Christian

things" [Daz was allez geistlich, / daz bezeichnot christinlichiu

dinc].'9 The sacrificial lamb of the Old Testament prefigures Christ's

sacrifice in the New. His death frees us from the grasp of hell and

enables us to return to the paradise we once enjoyed in Eden, just as

the Israelites escaped Pharoah's grasp and returned to the Promised

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

could easily be used quite literally to justify a Crusade to recapture the

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

interpretation, which will indeed be fulfilled in the concrete future,

but which is at all times present, fulfilled in God's providence, which

knows no difference of time."20

Thus German medieval literature before 1200 conceives of the

non-Christian world as an enemy to be overcome, a bride to be won,

and an ancient realm of partial revelation since superseded by Chris-

tian truth. Wolfram von Eschenbach draws on all three traditions in

his literary works, while modifying them in accordance with his own

convictions. Wolfram's distance from the militant Christianity of the

Song of Roland is most evident in Willehalm, his updated version of the

chanson de geste. Composed approximately between I215 and 1225,

the epic tells of the defeat of Willehalm's Christian army on the bat-

tlefield of Alischanz in 793, the hero's journey in search of military

allies, and the eventual Christian triumph over the Islamic forces.2I

Like Konrad der Pfaffe before him, Wolfram writes as a Christian

poet and repeatedly praises Christianity as the one true religion. Yet

Wolfram does not share his predecessor's ferocious hostility toward

the Islamic world. Willehalm's wife Giburc, herself a convert,

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-

fram condemns the indiscriminate killing of the defeated Muslims:

"Was it a sin to slaughter them like cattle? I deem it a great sin, for

they are God's handiwork, all two-and-seventy languages of them

that are His."22

Wolfram's recognition of the common humanity of Christians and

non-Christians arises not from indifference to matters of faith, but

Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 21

from a tacit acknowledgment that the enemy forces share much com-

mon ground. Willehalm's wife was once married to the heathen

Tibalt and has only recently converted to Christianity. Willehalm

himself was once held captive among the Arabs, where he learned to

speak their language. He steals Tibalt's Islamic wife because Tibalt

once had an affair with the Christian queen. While Konrad portrays

the Christian victory over Islamic forces as inevitable and absolute,

Wolfram presents an image of Christianity under siege. Not twelve of

the seventy-two known languages are Christian, according to the

narrator, and the allied Muslim forces threaten not just southern

France but the entire Holy Roman Empire. While it would be

anachronistic to speak of Wolfram's tolerance of Islam, his work does

reflect a changing world in which Christians have greater knowledge

of non-Christian cultures, and where the eventual triumph of Chris-

tianity over its foes no longer seems certain. His decision to compose

a chanson de geste in the early thirteenth century was itself unusual in

an era of courtly romance.23 He writes in his introduction to the epic

that the material was introduced to him by his patron Herman of

Thuringia, suggesting that he was commissioned to write the work,

yet Willehalm also gave Wolfram the opportunity to continue

reflections on the relationship between Christian Europe and its non-

Christian neighbors that he had already developed with great subtlety

in Parzival (ca. I200-I210).

Wolfram begins his romance with the story of Parzival's father

Gahmuret. Unlike the fairy-tale world of the typical Arthurian

romance, Parzival begins in a real place (Anjou) and with a real prob-

lem: Gahmuret is a younger son, and according to the laws of pri-

mogeniture enforced in that part of France, his older brother Galoes

inherits everything when his father dies.24 Eager to test his prowess in

battle, Gahmuret seeks service under the most powerful man in the

world: the Baruch of Baghdad. That the Baruch happens to be a hea-

then does not seem to concern Gahmuret in the least. Whether or

not his decision would have bothered the Christian audience of Wol-

fram's romance is another question. Knights did in fact serve non-

Christian overlords in the Middle East at the time of the Crusades;

that Wolfram's hero should do the same is thus not implausible from

a historical perspective, but still curious within a Christian romance.25

22 German Orientalisms

Two factors seem to be at work. On the one hand, Wolfram detaches

the knightly ideal from religious conflict in Parzival. Whereas the

Christian soldiers of the Song of Roland fight primarily for their God,

Wolfram's chivalric heroes can excel in battle for the Baruch, as

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

best position to pay him what he is worth.26 Thus he simultaneously

exemplifies a certain chivalric ideal of military prowess and shows

how that ideal arises out of material need.

After establishing his fame and increasing his wealth, Gahmuret is

driven ashore by a storm to the distant kingdom of Zazamanc, where

two hostile armies are besieging the city of Patelamunt. The black

queen Belakane asks for help, and Gahmuret is happy to oblige-for

a price. Only in the course of their negotiations does a mutual attrac-

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

fairy tale.27 Gahmuret's love for Belakane is nevertheless unusual in

that she is both black and heathen. In this regard Wolfram's romance

deviates sharply from its literary precedents. The tale of a traveler

being washed up by a storm on what might be the North African

coast recalls the plot of the Aeneid, and scholars have noted that Wol-

fram models his story of Gahmuret and Belakane closely on Heinrich

von Veldecke's retelling of Virgil's epic.28 Religious differences do

not play a major role in the classical epic, however, whereas they do

in the twelfth-century Spielmannsepik, and it is against these works

that the originality of Wolfram's Parzival emerges most clearly. Sanct

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.

This is not to say that Wolfram's characters are unaware of reli-

gious or racial difference. Wolfram begins his romance with a noto-

Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 23

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

helle wairn gevar],29 and Gahmuret's fellow Christians seem to adopt

racist attitudes as a matter of course: his cousin Kaylet assumes with-

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

off in hostile pursuit, forgetting that they have sworn allegiance to

Gahmuret and that he has rewarded them richly for their support.30

Upon arrival Gahmuret also becomes uneasy because everyone in

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

sun" (5 I [91.4-6]). Wolfram also minimizes religious differences

between the heathens and the Christians, describing Belakane's tears

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,

too, has not been baptized. Thus as Wolfram transforms Gahmuret

from a wandering mercenary into a courtly knight, he introduces him

into an idealized realm in which religious and racial difference no

longer seem of crucial importance. The world around him continues

to distinguish clearly between white and black, heaven and hell,

Christian and heathen, but for a brief period Gahmuret and Belakane

forget their differences in mutual love.

Questions of race and religion reemerge only when Gahmuret

deserts his pregnant wife in search of further adventure. His real rea-

sons for leaving are quite clear: "Here the proud man remained until

he began to grieve because he found no knightly activity, and then

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 slips away deviously in the night, leaving Belakane a note in which

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.

Instead of insisting on the superiority of the Christian religion in the

manner of the Spielmannsepik, Wolfram exposes Gahmuret's personal

duplicity and the inherent contradictions of the knightly virtue he

represents. As a typical chivalric hero, Gahmuret fights in Zazamanc

for his lady love and wins her hand in marriage and her kingdom as

reward. If Wolfram ended his romance at this point, we might have

assumed that Gahmuret and Belakane lived happily ever after.

Instead, the story continues to the point where the same spirit of

adventure that enabled Gahmuret to win his bride makes him want

to leave his wife. He does so with mixed feelings, however, for

although Gahmuret feels compelled by his irrepressible wanderlust to

leave, he also loves his wife and misses her when he is gone. She

remains behind, grief-stricken.

Gahmuret's predicament as a married knight-errant reaches near-

comic levels once he arrives back in Europe. Here he is pronounced

the winner of a tournament at Kanvoleis, which requires him to

marry the host Herzeloyde. At the same time Queen Ampflise of

France, under whose tutelage Gahmuret first became a knight, insists

that she should marry Gahmuret. Gahmuret protests that he is already

married to Belakane, but Herzeloyde dismisses the marriage to the

heathen as invalid. In the end a judge has to resolve the delicate legal

question of Gahmuret's conflicting obligations to the three women.

He rules in Herzeloyde's favor, and Gahmuret reluctantly agrees to

overlook his first marriage, to reject Ampflise's demands, and to

marry Herzeloyde.32 This time, however, Gahmuret strikes a

prenuptial bargain whereby Herzeloyde recognizes his right to attend

at least one tournament a month. Before long he dies for the Baruch

in battle against the Babylonians, leaving his second pregnant wife

behind. As a warrior, Gahmuret is without reproach; as a husband,

however, he leaves much to be desired. The two are not unrelated:

the military prowess that wins him wives makes him unwilling to stay

at home with his family. Arthurian romance is a man's world, full of

valiant heroes and their trophy brides. Wolfram inverts tradition by

showing us this world from a woman's point of view in Parzival,

Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 25

which includes abandoned wives and grieving mothers (Belakane,

Herzeloyde), abused women (Jeschute, Cunneware), and women

who vent their frustration by abusing men (Obie, Orgeluse). For a

brief period Gahmuret and Belakane transcend religious and racial

difference in an idealized realm of heroism, tolerance, and love, but

Gahmuret's flight from Zazamanc soon exposes the negative conse-

quences of knightly virility and returns him to a world of racial prej-

udice and religious intolerance.33

In reaction to the suffering caused by Gahmuret's insatiable desire

for battle, the widowed Herzeloyde retreats to rural Soltane to raise

her son Parzival in complete ignorance of the codes of chivalry.

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

socially improper, if personally understandable, education of her son

to ignorance, Parzival's first steps into the world of chivalry end in

disaster. He steals a brooch and a kiss from Jeschute, only to expose

the innocent woman to savage beatings by her husband Orilus; then

he kills his blood relative Ither in a most unknightly fashion with a

hunting spear before stripping the corpse of its armor. He also makes

the otherwise silent Cunneware laugh, and although he means no

harm, she, too, endures a brutal beating as a result. Within a very

short period of time, however, Parzival makes up for his initial mis-

takes. With help from Gurnemanz he quickly learns the basics of

knightly conduct and combat. Like his father before him, Parzival

comes to the aid of a besieged city, marries its queen, and becomes a

knight of the Round Table. Unlike Gahmuret, however, Parzival

will remain faithful to his wife Condwiramurs in his years of wander-

ing in search of the Holy Grail.34

Parzival's quest for the Holy Grail distinguishes him most clearly

from both his father and the other knights of the Round Table, while

it also continues and deepens Wolfram's exploration of the links

between Christian Europe and heathendom. Soon after Parzival

leaves Condwiramurs he catches his first glimpse of the Holy Grail at

the castle of Munsalvaesche. Wolfram surrounds Munsalvaesche and

the Grail with an Oriental opulence: upon his arrival, servants bring

Parzival a cloak of expensive Arabian silk. Anfortas also wears rich

garments of Arabian cloth, as do Repanse de Schoye and the other

26 German Orientalisms

virgins who bear the Grail, and the Grail itself rests on green silk cloth

made in the East. It might be tempting to dismiss the repeated refer-

ences to Arabian silks in Munsalvaesche as a mere literary convention

or historical detail: expensive garments from the East feature promi-

nently in other Arthurian romances as a sign of wealth, and imports

of luxury goods to Europe from the East increased during the twelfth

and thirteenth centuries.35 In Wolfram's Parzival, however, the Ara-

bian textiles surrounding the Holy Grail point to deeper bonds

between the Christian symbol and its pagan roots.

The figure of Cundrie reinforces the ties between the Grail and the

East. In book 6 King Arthur recognizes Parzival's achievements by

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

ask the crucial question at Munsalvaesche. Parzival departs alone from

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

fabulously rich Queen Secondille has sent Cundrie and Malcreature

to find out about the Holy Grail, and Cundrie has since become the

messenger of Munsalvaesche. Cundrie thus bridges two worlds: she is

heathen by birth and the hideously deformed product of a distant

Eastern land allegedly teeming with such mutants, and yet she has

been chosen to speak on behalf of the Christian Holy Grail. She

speaks Arabic as well as French and Latin and is well versed in dialec-

tics, geometry, and astronomy. Within Wolfram's romance Cundrie

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

Belakane of Zazamanc and now married to Queen Secondille of

India. From this time on, Parzival's quest for the Holy Grail will be

linked to his family history, which includes on his mother's side

direct ties to the Grail kingship, but also, on his father's side, close

links to the heathen world.

Parzival makes significant progress in his quest for the Grail in

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 perennial questions of modern Wolfram scholarship; the current

consensus seems to be that he probably did not.36 My interest here is

not in locating a source outside Wolfram's text but in underscoring

the role that Kyot plays in providing historical depth to the symbolic

geography of the work. In brief outline, Wolfram's history, or rather,

historiography, of the Grail goes as follows: the half-heathen, half-

Jewish Flegetanis first discovered the Grail and wrote about it in Ara-

bic. The Christian Kyot of Provengal then found the abandoned Ara-

bic manuscript in Toledo, Spain. Kyot learned Arabic in order to

read the manuscript and then sought further information about the

current keepers of the Grail in Latin chronicles from various Euro-

pean countries. Eventually he found the story in a source from Anjou

in a genealogy that traces the lineage of the Grail from mythical

heroes down to Parzival. Finally, Wolfram claims that he translated

Kyot's Provengal version of the tale into German.

By identifying a heathen-Jewish astrologer as the discoverer of the

Grail, and then tracing its translation into Christian Europe, Wolfram

embeds the Grail in a typological understanding of history of the sort

that informed the earlier Ezzolied and Annolied.37 The heathen Flege-

tanis can see the Grail, but only a baptized Christian can understand

its full significance as the revelation of Christ on earth. The heathen

world is thus not in fundamental opposition to Christianity, for hea-

thens already dimly perceive a light that shines more brightly for the

Christians. Such a typology allows for a kind of pseudotolerance, as

Christians can condescendingly applaud the heathens for having

grasped at truths that only Christians can fully understand. The figural

interpretation of history offers Christians a powerful tool with which

they can colonize the past, transforming alien cultures into prefigura-

tions of their own.

Wolfram calls just such a complacent pseudotolerance into ques-

tion in the concluding books of his Parzival. The dramatic climax of

Parzival's development occurs when he unwittingly fights his brother

Feirefiz. Like his father before him, Feirefiz has married an exotic

28 German Orientalisms

queen, while he also rules over his father's kingdoms of Zazamanc

and Azagouc. These two lands have been located by various scholars

in northern Africa, Ethiopia, or even India, as medieval geographers

often assumed that Ethiopia and India were the same place.3s Feirefiz

commands a massive and diverse force of twenty-five armies that

anticipates the heathen armies in Willehalm and reinforces the impres-

sion that Christian Europe stands exposed and vulnerable against a sea

of potential adversaries. Feirefiz has distinguished himself in battle

and won several brides as a result-Secondille is already his third such

conquest-but unlike Gahmuret, Feirefiz moves exclusively in the

heathen world and seems untouched by remorse as he switches from

one woman to the next.

Feirefiz has returned from the East "to these Western lands" [in

disiu westerriche] (398 [767.5]) in search of his father, but encounters

Parzival instead. As in the confrontation between Charlemagne and

Marsilion in the Song of Roland, Parzival and Feirefiz fight as repre-

sentatives of opposing cultures and opposing gods. Yet they are also

brothers, and before long their mortal combat turns into a family

reunion. As sons of the same father, Wolfram argues, they share a

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,

even though the language unmistakably recalls the Christian concept

of the Trinity.39 Feirefiz weeps after this speech, and, as in the case of

his mother Belakane, heathen tears serve as a reminder of Christian

baptism: "his heathen eyes shed tears as in honor of baptism [al niach

des toufes dren]" (392 [752.24-26]). Here Wolfram seems to be making

the kind of condescending gesture noted earlier: Christianity remains

the superior religion; Wolfram is merely willing to overlook religious

differences temporarily in the name of blood relations, or, to put it

more strongly, Wolfram posits an omnivorous sort of Christianity

that can swallow up heathendom into a universal brotherhood that

effaces difference through a seemingly benevolent gesture. At the

same time, however, Wolfram allows for a more radical interpreta-

tion of the passage in which the common humanity of the two broth-

ers renders religious differences insignificant. To say that Feirefiz's

Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 29

tears seem to honor baptism, or that his nominally Christian father,

his born-again brother, and his own pagan self should form a Holy

Trinity is potentially blasphemous in that it disregards what for the

Christian must be essential questions of religious faith and dogma.

Christianity becomes only a convenient metaphor for blood relations

that cut across religious boundaries.

It is important to keep these questions in mind when considering

Feirefiz's very curious conversion to Christianity. After the recogni-

tion scene Parzival introduces Feirefiz to the other knights of the

Round Table. Cundrie returns, wearing a characteristic combination

of Arabian silk cut to French fashion, and announces that Parzival

will be the next Grail king. To stress the significance of this most

Christian event, Cundrie cites astrological evidence-in Arabic!

Then Parzival picks his heathen brother to accompany him on his

way to becoming the Grail King in Munsalvaesche, which might

seem odd-given that his brother is a nonbeliever-unless we recall

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

becomes baptized. He agrees to do so cheerfully, not because he has

had a profound change of heart in his attitude toward Christianity,

but because he wants to get married-again. Despite his rather dubi-

ous motivations for accepting Christ, the baptism seems valid:

Feirefiz can see the Grail, marry Repanse, and move back to India

where his son becomes Prester John, the legendary ruler of a Chris-

tian realm in the Far East. Queen Secondille conveniently dies.

Feirefiz's conversion provides a striking contrast to Parzival's reli-

gious experience. Parzival begins his life in ignorance of God and

then rejects him in anger. For this sin he must undergo years of lonely

wandering and hardship before he meets Trevrizent and begins his

difficult path back to faith in God, reunion with his wife, and the

fulfillment of his destiny as Grail King. Feirefiz, in contrast, gets the

rewards of baptism without having to pay the price. He converts

casually, almost flippantly, motivated by sexual desire for a bigamous

relationship, and yet there is no indication that his conversion is

30 German Orientalisms

invalid or that there is anything wrong with his second (or is it his

fourth?) marriage. Wolfram's contemporaries may have been less trou-

bled by this seeming discrepancy between the two conversion experi-

ences than today's readers. We have become familiar with narratives

that portray conversion as a dramatic, life-changing event such as Saul

experienced on the road to Damascus, or St. Augustine underwent in

his garden. From medieval mystics through eighteenth-century Pietists

to today's charismatic Christians, such narratives center on a climactic

experience that is preceded by spiritual turmoil and followed by a sense

of amazing grace, and Parzival undergoes something of the sort during

his stay with Trevrizent. Yet such a protracted spiritual agony could

hardly have been the norm in an era of forced mass conversion. We

read at the end of the Song of Roland, for instance, that oo100,000ooo defeated

heathens were baptized on the battlefield. The only exception is the

heathen queen: "Her the king would convert by love to Christ in

France."4° Only those with the highest social status undergo more than

the most superficial conversion experience. One finds a similar distinc-

tion in the Spielmannsepik: Sanct Oswald baptizes heathens for three

days in a row in a process that evokes images of an assembly line, while

only his future wife embraces Christianity out of inner conviction.

Orendel's wife also accepts Christianity in her heart, while those hea-

thens not slaughtered are baptized by the thousands, whether they want

to be baptized or not: "whether they did it willingly or unwillingly,

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

function primarily as an outward sign of military defeat rather than the

culmination of a spiritual odyssey. Feirefiz converts willingly, but with

a similar superficiality; in the light of these literary precedents, however,

his conversion may not have seemed extraordinary.

However pragmatic Feirefiz's motivations for accepting Christian-

ity might have been, his conversion nevertheless has tremendous reli-

gious significance, for it enables the marriage that will produce

Prester John, who is destined to spread Christianity to India.42 In ret-

rospect, therefore, the flippancy with which Wolfram allows Feirefiz

to convert seems all the more puzzling-after all, those converted en

masse on the battlefield assume no such world-historical significance.

Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 31

We can read this curious conclusion to Parzival in two contradictory,

yet complementary ways that correspond to Wolfram's ambivalent

portrayal of the relations between Christian Europe and the rest of

the world throughout his text. On the one hand, Feirefiz's conver-

sion brings Parzival to a resounding and triumphant conclusion. Wol-

fram envisions a Christianity that extends geographically to include

the entire known world, from Ireland to India, and chronologically

to include all of history, from the dimly understood visions of ancient

heathens and Jews to the salvation that awaits all believers. Flegetanis,

Cundrie, and Feirefiz play such a prominent role in the history of the

Grail because they demonstrate Christianity's ability to absorb and

transcend the heathen world. If there is any tolerance in this world-

view, it is the sort of temporary kindness that a cat might grant a

mouse before moving in for the kill.

On the other hand, Wolfram allows for a reading of his text that

introduces a note of irony into his Christian triumphalism.43 Let us

return once more to Feirefiz's conversion: What if he is a trickster

and the Christians are the butt of his joke? Feirefiz finds Repanse de

Schoye attractive; if he has to go through a baptismal ceremony to

marry her, so be it. The Christians may think they are winning the

most powerful king of heathendom to their heavenly cause, but he

could be going through the motions to satisfy his very earthly desires.

Who is in control? Does a hegemonic Christianity obliterate its ene-

mies, or does the heathen make blasphemous use of Christian rituals

for his own purposes? True, Feirefiz can see the Grail only after his

baptism, which would seem to confer divine sanction on his turn to

Christianity. Is it not conceivable, however, that he has also fooled

God, or at least manipulated God to suit his purposes? We know,

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.

Nevertheless, Parzival successfully defies God's will in a way that

leaves Trevrizent astonished and confused: "Greater miracle has sel-

dom come to pass, for you have forced God by defiance to make His

infinite Trinity grant your will" (416 [798.2-5]).44 Perhaps Feirefiz

also forces God to grant him Repanse de Schoye by going through a

sham baptismal ceremony.

32 German Orientalisms

I do not mean to suggest that Wolfram is a closet infidel, or that he

does not take seriously his vision of a universal Christianity. Yet

Wolfram is humble enough to recognize the distance between his

utopian vision and contemporary reality. We recall the sense of

Christianity being under siege that he creates in Willehalm, in which

Europe stands as a small and highly endangered outpost in a largely

heathen world. In this regard, Wolfram captures the spirit of the

French Song of Roland, which-unlike Konrad's version-ends not

with the triumph of Christianity over heathendom, but with an

exhausted Charlemagne being dragged from his bed in the middle of

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-

rounding Feirefiz's conversion introduces a note of real tolerance

into Wolfram's world that contrasts with the pseudotolerance of

figural interpretation. Wolfram's God is an ironic one, capable of

winking at Feirefiz's blasphemy rather than burning him at the stake.

As Northrop Frye once wrote, "Nobody wants a poet in the perfect

human state, and, as even the poets tell us, nobody but God himself

can tolerate a poltergeist in the City of God.'"46 Feirefiz is just such a

poltergeist in the city of Plimizoel. Through him Wolfram portrays a

utopian Christianity that simultaneously effaces and embraces differ-

ence; one that is at once a totalizing vision of a Christian world that

transcends history, and one that recognizes and accepts existing dif-

ferences in the world around him.

EARLY MODERN NATIONALISM AND THE

OTTOMAN EMPIRE

While the Crusades helped forge a collective Christian European

community during the High Middle Ages, specific national identities

within Europe began to coalesce during the early modern period.47

In Germany we find reference to "the most splendid city ever built

on German soil" already in Das Annolied of the late eleventh century;

the adjective diutisk or tiutisk seems to have referred to both the Ger-

man people and the German language.48 The politically fragmented

Germans began to discover that they had common enemies in Rome

Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 33

and Turkey, a common language that became more widely dissemi-

nated with the invention of the printing press, and a common past

revealed in the rediscovered works of Tacitus. To be sure, such Ger-

man patriotism differed significantly from the nationalist movements

of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: German Humanists and

the Baroque poets of the seventeenth century could not envision the

radical force that would sweep away generations of dynastic rule and

establish secular nation-states during the revolutionary era, nor could

they imagine the pseudo-scientific racism and propaganda techniques

that would lead to the nationalization of the masses in imperial and

fascist Germany. Yet they shared a sense of belonging to a commu-

nity that was larger than their local town or province and distinct

from other parts of Europe at a time when Europeans were also

beginning to discover that the world was much larger than they had

previously suspected.

The voyages of discovery in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth

centuries did not transform European understanding of world geog-

raphy overnight. It took time before explorers realized that the West

Indies were not minor obstacles on a shortcut to Asia, but outposts of

vast new continents. Columbus himself "remained firmly anchored

in the Old World . . . so much so that he was the major influence in

preventing Europeans from regarding the new Western discoveries as

anything more than an extension of the Old World."49 Within a few

decades, however, Europeans began to realize the extent of their dis-

coveries and to revise their representations of reality accordingly.

Geography became emancipated from theology, as individuals

"sought explanations in natural causes rather than in divine provi-

dence."5° Globes replaced medieval maps that had arranged three

segments of a flat world around Jerusalem, and the heliocentric

model of the solar system gradually displaced the old Ptolemaic or

geocentric universe.5' The medieval Christian Europe that had been

united in the effort to recapture Jerusalem from the infidel now

began to break up into individual nations engaged in a fierce compe-

tition to map, conquer, and exploit the natural and human resources

of the New World.

While monarchs and merchants in Portugal, Italy, Spain, France,

and England rushed to finance new expeditions to uncharted territo-

34 German Orientalisms

ries, the Germans remained largely content to play only a minor role

in the initial European effort to establish global empires. Individual

Germans did participate in voyages of exploration, and there were a

few brief attempts to establish colonial enterprises.52 For the most

part, however, Germans participated only indirectly in the age of dis-

covery and conquest, publishing a disproportionate share of the ear-

liest accounts of the New World and soon profiting "from the influx

of specie from abroad."S53 Although curious about the New World,

most Germans had more pressing concerns, including local dynastic

conflicts within the loose confederation of the Holy Roman Empire,

long-standing tensions with the Roman Catholic Church that esca-

lated dramatically during the Reformation, and the constant threat of

invasion from the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

In o1095 Pope Urban II had issued his call for the First Crusade to

recapture Jerusalem from the Seljuk Turks, a nomadic people origi-

nating in Central Asia. The Seljuks remained in power for nearly two

hundred years until they were swept aside by the Mongol invasions

of the thirteenth century. In this chaotic period a number of Turkic

peoples moved into Anatolia, including the Ottomans, named after

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-

prisingly, these Islamic invaders preoccupied early modern Euro-

peans. In France "there were twice as many books about the Turks,

who seem to have had a strong hold on the popular imagination, as

about America,"54 and the same was true for German cosmographers:

"The geographic interest of central Europeans was trans-Eurasian

rather than trans-Atlantic."55 Throughout the sixteenth and seven-

teenth centuries German knowledge of Asia grew increasingly

detailed as travelers published accounts of their experiences, and an

"Orientalizing cultural wave" [orientalisierende Kulturwelle] influ-

enced many aspects of German culture.56 By 1700 tobacco, tea, cof-

fee, and porcelain had all been introduced to the German-speaking

territories through contacts with the East, while Turkish costumes at

parties and tournaments had been popular since the early sixteenth

century. Despite widespread fascination with an exotic Orient, how-

Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 35

ever, the image of Islam remained consistent and negative. "The

main themes-first, violence; second, lasciviousness; and third,

deceit-appear again and again, in many forms and endless variety

throughout the Middle Ages, and even survive today."57s For the

Germans who were beginning to establish a sense of national identity

around 1500, hostility to Rome went hand in hand with fear and

loathing of the Turk.

German national pride received an early boost with the rediscov-

ery of Tacitus's Germania in 1450, which together with his account of

Arminius's defeat of the Roman general Varus in the Annals was to

be of lasting importance for the German self-image.58 Tacitus

describes the Germans as a fierce, warlike people living in an inhos-

pitable climate. He regards the Germanic peoples not as barbarians

but rather as noble savages, whose rough-hewn virtues contrast with

the decadence of Roman civilization. Reasoning that northern

weather is so bad that no foreigners would want to invade, Tacitus

concludes that the Germanic peoples must have been the original

inhabitants of the region and that they had remained uncorrupted by

foreign influence. They lead rugged lives of rustic simplicity, practic-

ing a kind of rudimentary democracy, eating simple foods, wearing

simple garments, and drinking prodigious quantities of beer. Tacitus

claims that infidelity is rare and seduction is not a game for the Ger-

mans. All but the most powerful live in monogamous relationships

with women who breastfeed their own children, rather than passing

them on to wet nurses.

Conrad Celtis (1459-1 o508) quickly adapted Tacitus's implicit cri-

tique of ancient Rome into a German critique of modern Italy. Born

Conrad Pickel to the son of a vine-grower near Wiirzburg, Celtis

ran away from home, hitched a ride on a log raft down the Main,

and began his studies in Heidelberg, where he learned Latin, Greek,

and Hebrew.59 Celtis spent his life wandering around Europe, with

stops in Italy, Krak6w, and Nuremberg-where he befriended

Albrecht Diirer-before dying, probably of syphilis, in Vienna.

Along the way Celtis taught for five years at the University of Ingol-

stadt in Bavaria, where he delivered his inaugural address in the fall

of 1492. While Columbus was sailing in uncharted waters toward

the New World, Celtis exhorted his German students to rediscover

36 German Orientalisms

ancient philosophy and to hone their Latin style. Only thus could

they hope to attain immortality, Celtis proclaimed, and only thus

could they redeem Germany's tarnished reputation: "Do away with

that old disrepute of the Germans in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew

writers, who ascribe to us drunkenness, cruelty, savagery, and every

other vice bordering on bestiality and excess. Consider it a great dis-

grace to be ignorant of the histories of the Greeks and Latins, and the

height of shame to know nothing about the topography, the climate,

the rivers, the mountains, the antiquities, and the peoples of our

region and our own country.'"60

Celtis must have shocked many in his audience by seeking salva-

tion in Latin and Greek antiquity rather than Christian faith. "What

were they to think of someone who proclaimed that virtue and the

liberal arts could make a man 'truly blessed'? Or that immortality

could only be sought at the fountain-head of this new-fangled phi-

losophy and eloquence?"6' Yet he calls for both local patriotism and

knowledge of classical antiquity because he believes that the Germans

are "the last survivors of the Roman Empire" (47). Thus he addresses

an audience of "distinguished men and well-born youths, to whom

by virtue of the courage of your ancestors and the unconquerable

strength of Germany the Italian empire has passed" (z43). It becomes

a patriotic duty of the Germans to speak eloquent Latin as proof of

the continuity of ancient culture into the present. However, modern

Germans have been corrupted by the decadent influence of modern

Italy: "To such an extent are we corrupted by Italian sensuality and

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

old, living within the bounds of self-control, than to have imported

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:

"Assume, O men of Germany, that ancient spirit of yours, with

which you so often confounded and terrified the Romans, and turn

your eyes to the frontiers of Germany; collect together her torn and

broken territories" (47). On the other hand, however, Celtis urges

the Germans to become as sophisticated as possible in their knowl-

Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 37

edge of ancient history and languages in order to prove their worth as

the heirs to the Roman Empire. The ideal German, according to

Celtis, will be neither a decadent modern sensualist nor an uncouth

savage, but an eloquent Humanist who retains his native vitality in a

modern Germania that has become the worthy successor to ancient

Rome, and the upstanding alternative to the corruption of modern

Italy.

In 1511 the young Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523) traveled to

Vienna, where he was accepted into a patriotic circle of Humanists

founded by Conrad Celtis, who had died in 1508.62 Over the

remaining dozen years of his turbulent life, Hutten was to become

the self-appointed champion of the German nation in its struggle

against Rome, hurling invective in a seemingly endless stream of cir-

cular letters (Sendschreiben), dialogues, and polemics. Hutten shared

Celtis's enthusiasm for the works of Tacitus, and his literary remains

include an unpublished dialogue entitled "Hermann oder Arminius."

In it Hermann stands before Minos, the judge of the Underworld,

and complains that he was not included on a short list of the world's

greatest military leaders. He goes on to boast at some length about his

accomplishments as the liberator of Germany from Roman tyranny.

In a sneering aside, he claims that Alexander would hardly have

defeated the Romans as easily he conquered "those effeminate

nations of Asia [jene weibischen Nationen Asiens] . . . those defenseless

peoples of India." According to Hutten's Hermann, even Alexan-

der's own uncle claimed that in fighting the Romans he had at least

done battle with men, whereas his nephew had merely subdued

Asian "women. "63

Hutten expanded these disparaging comments about Asiatic peo-

ples into a full-scale polemic in his impassioned, if somewhat repeti-

tive, "Vermahnung an die Fiirsten Teutschlands, die Tiirken mit

Krieg zu iiberziehen" [Admonition to the German princes to smite

the Turks with war] (1518). Hutten wrote his exhortation to inspire

the members of the German Reichstag to throw their support behind

a new crusade against the advancing Turkish armies, and he does

everything in his power to glorify the Germans and to vilify the

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

Echoing Tacitus, Hutten proclaims that German blood has never

been diluted by foreign invaders, and that the old Germanic heroes

almost never married outside their clan, "so that they would not

besmirch their Germanness" [um nur nicht ihre Teutschheit zu

beflecken].64 These racially pure Germans now confront a Turkish

"flood of barbarians" [Barbarenfluth] (245) that has already con-

quered large segments of the Middle East and Africa, captured Con-

stantinople, moved into the Balkans and Hungary, and now poses a

direct threat to the German territories.

As they advance, the Turks spread moral corruption together with

military destruction: "Subject to every sort of lasciviousness and dis-

gracefulness at home, [the Turk] becomes in the end coarse, wild,

cruel, lecherous, treacherous, and inhumane [roh, verwildert, grausam,

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

and strangle our children. Even though Hutten is unwilling to insult

the valiant German armies by suggesting that they can be compared

"with Asiatic effeminacy [mit der asiatischen Weichlichkeit] and also

with the womanish warriors [mit dem weibischen Kriegsvolk] of the Sul-

tan" (287), he nevertheless warns that the Turkish threat should be

taken seriously. Hutten thus presents something of a mixed message

in his appeal to the German princes: his Turks become effeminate

barbarians, girlish soldiers who spread gender confusion as they rape

and pillage their way into Europe. Against this Asiatic flood of her-

maphrodites stands a firm bulwark of German men: "For if we exam-

ine the meaning of this name, Germane, according to our under-

standing of Latin, means a whole man, or completely a man, or fully man

[ein ganzer Mann oder ganz ein Mann, oder vollkommen Mann], as if

you were to say a man who is perfect in every virtue" (295).

Hutten began to publish his anti-Roman diatribes on the eve of

the Reformation, and it is not surprising that he became one of

Luther's earliest and most fervent supporters. Luther shared Hutten's

hostility to Rome and accused the pope of-among other things

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

a military force and a threat to German manhood, Luther couches his

anti-Turkish polemic in theological terms: "Turk is Turk, devil is

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

blasphemer of Christ, "indeed, against the devil himself."67 Thus the

Christian who happens to strangle a Turk should not worry that he

might have shed innocent blood, "for certainly he throttles an enemy

of God and a blasphemer of Christ."'6 As God's enemy, the pope is

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

a psychological and theological dimension to the German hostility to

Rome and the Ottoman Empire that is lacking in Hutten's work.

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

the personification of the Germans' own sins.

BAROQUE ORIENTALISMS:

GRIMMELSHAUSEN'S SIMPLICISSIMUS AND

LOHENSTEIN'S ARMINIUS

The German anti-Turkish sentiment at the time of the first siege of

Vienna coincided with the first stirrings of national consciousness

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

(1618-48). Hope for a rebirth of the spirit of antiquity and productive

reform within the Catholic Church had only led to bitter sectarian

conflict and a pervasive sense of doom. "You see, wherever you

look, only vanity on earth" [Du siehst, wohin du siehst, nur Eitelkeit

auf Erden], proclaimed Andreas Gryphius (1616-64), "and wherever

40 German Orientalisms

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

Geist durchfihret].71 Gryphius shed his tears for a German Fatherland

that had been ruined by war and whose citizens, he feared, had lost

their faith in God. Meanwhile France had become the dominant

European power under Louis XIV and posed a new threat to German

lands, while the old menace of the Ottoman Empire remained.

During this period Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen

(1621-76) and Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein (1635-83) published

what are arguably the two most important German novels of the sev-

enteenth century: Der Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch [The

adventurous German Simplicissimus] (1669), and Groflmithiger Feld-

herr Arminius oder Herrmann [Magnanimous commander Arminius or

Herrmann] (1689/90). The works exemplify the two major subgen-

res of the Baroque novel: the Schelmenroman or picaresque novel and

the heroic or courtly novel.72 The first-person narrative of Grim-

melshausen's work depicts the hero's experiences among the lowest

social classes of war-torn Germany in an episodic plot with elements

of gritty realism, whereas Lohenstein's massive novel portrays impos-

sibly handsome and heroic aristocrats in a complex, multilayered nar-

rative that begins in medias res and ends some 3,000 double-

columned pages later with multiple marriages and the revelation of

remarkably complicated identities. Despite their generic differences,

both works foreground patriotic themes: Lohenstein retells the story

of Arminius's battles with Rome that had captured the imagination of

the German Humanists, and he dedicates his story of politics, love,

and heroism "to the love of the Fatherland, and to honor German

nobility and [inspire] praiseworthy imitation," as he puts it in part of

the novel's lengthy subtitle. The word Teutsch in the title to Grim-

melshausen's work has multiple meanings: it refers both to the style

of the work, meaning roughly "upright, honest, forthright," and to

the genre: the work is the German counterpart to the Spanish

picaresque novel and the French roman comique.73 In a broader sense,

Simplicissimus's fate, as he moves back and forth between the Protes-

tant and Catholic armies, embodies that of the German nation torn

by the religious wars of the seventeenth century.

Finally, for generations of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century

Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 41

readers, Simplicissimus was the guileless hero of the typically German

genre of the Bildungsroman who took his place in a lineage leading

from Parzival to Wilhelm Meister and beyond.74 Postwar critics have

tended to reject such a view as anachronistic, viewing Simplicissimus

as a satirical work whose hero lacks any sort of organic develop-

ment,75 yet the earlier view played an important role in establishing

the novel's position within the canon of Germany's national litera-

ture. Ironically, critics accused Lohenstein's more obviously patriotic

novel of being overly dependent on foreign influence (ube'fremdet),

and it has remained largely forgotten to all but the most intrepid

scholars of the German Baroque.76

The larger-than-life heroes of the courtly novel tend to move

within a world of correspondingly vast geographical dimensions.77

Lohenstein's Arminius contains episodes that stretch from Armenia to

India and from China to northern Africa, as well as an extended dis-

cussion of newly discovered peoples in the Americas. Simplicissimus,

in contrast, remains largely focused on the protagonist's experiences

within Germany. In many ways, however, traces of the increased

global awareness of seventeenth-century Europeans find their way

into Grimmelshausen's work. In the opening paragraph, for instance,

Simplicissimus ridicules the pretensions of recently ennobled aristo-

crats by pointing out that their ancestors were often "as black as if

they had been born and raised in Guinea."78 Simplicissimus claims

that the forest is as unknown to him as the road to China through the

frozen sea beyond Nova Zembla. He compares himself ironically to

a figurine of a Brazilian Indian with a roll of tobacco under his arm

and pipe in his mouth standing on the shelf of a curio collection that

also contains a Chinese drawing, and remarks that Switzerland seems

as foreign to him as if he were in Brazil or China. In his journey into

the magical Mummelsee Simplicissimus encounters representatives of

the entire known world displayed as if they were in a Trachten-Buch

(book with illustrations of various peoples in traditional costume)

(5o6). Simplicissimus also travels extensively in the real world, both

within Germany and to other European countries, including both

Switzerland and France. The pace of his wanderings accelerates dra-

matically in the fifth book of the novel when he travels via Moscow

to the Caspian Sea. There he is captured by Tartars who give him to

42 German Orientalisms

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-

ery in Egypt, and the Egyptians, in turn, bring him to Constantino-

ple. Here he becomes a galley slave until he is liberated by the Vene-

tians. He makes a pilgrimage to Rome before crossing the Alps back

into Germany.

Despite the increased scope and specificity of Grimmelshausen's

knowledge of the world, Simplicissimus is at heart an antiworldly

book, a Baroque polemic against earthly pleasure, and an appeal to its

readers to focus on heaven's eternal delights. Simplicissimus's whirl-

wind journey across the globe brings him no lasting satisfaction:

"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:

"Adieu oh world, oh despicable, wicked world, oh stinking, miser-

able flesh" [Adjeu O Welt / O schnode arge Welt / O stinkendes

elendes Fleisch] (ss550). Despite the graphic realism of many passages

in his novel, Grimmelshausen has little in common with a nine-

teenth-century realist such as Gottfried Keller, whose "God radiates

worldliness" [Gott strahlt von Weltlichkeit],79 or with Wolfram's

delight in the chivalrous exploits of Gahmuret, Gawain, and Parzival

and the generous sense that this world is good and the next will only

get better.8s The medieval poet leaves us with Feirefiz's laughter;

Grimmelshausen's protagonist flees a world in which all is vanity and

there is nothing new under the sun.

Or at least this is what the Simplicissimus of the Continuatio would

have us believe. This sixth and concluding book of the novel was

published separately and differs from the preceding books by a greater

tendency toward allegory and overtly moralizing statements. Yet the

vibrancy of the world portrayed in the original five books of the

novel betrays an interest in empirical reality that strains against the

ostensible message of its conclusion, much in the way that the author

of the sixteenth-century Faustbuch struggles to contain Renaissance

curiosity within the bonds of a medieval morality play.s8 Rather than

neatly illustrating a Baroque conviction about the vanity of earthly

desire, we can read Simplicissimus as a transitional work in which the

certainties of religious faith no longer seem adequate to repress fasci-

nation with a physical world whose horizons have been dramatically

Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 43

expanded through nearly two centuries of European exploration.

Scattered references to the non-European world crop up throughout

the novel, as we have seen, but the so-called Jupiter episode elabo-

rates a more detailed vision of Germany's place within Europe and in

relation to the ancient world of Asia.

Near the beginning of the third book of the novel, Simplicissimus

encounters a man who claims that he is the incarnation of the Roman

god Jupiter. Jupiter predicts that a German hero will soon come to

punish evildoers and to reward the pious. Brandishing his magic

sword, this hero will supposedly have no need of an army as he trans-

forms the world into a place of strength, wisdom, beauty, and virtue.

He envisions each German city governed by two intelligent and vir-

tuous men, who together will rule the entire country in a single par-

liament that will end servitude and abolish taxes. Mount Parnassus

will be moved to Germany, Jupiter will no longer speak Greek but

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

use up their excess energy conquering the remaining kingdoms of

Asia. The other European kings will realize that they are actually

German, or at least of German descent, and will thus voluntarily sub-

mit themselves to the new German rule. Finally, all Christian reli-

gions will be united once more into a single faith.

Like Wolfram, Grimmelshausen envisions a global Christianity,

but with two significant differences: his Asians will succumb to mili-

tary conquest rather than religious conversion, and world leadership

will pass from Christian Europe to the German nation. In making

modern Germany the heir to Greco-Roman antiquity, Jupiter

echoes the same nationalist version of world history that we encoun-

tered in Conrad Celtis, who together with Luther and Hutten would

doubtlessly have enjoyed the image of European nations voluntarily

recognizing German hegemony and of carefree German princes sub-

duing Asian infidels. The main question, of course, is whether we are

to take Jupiter's vision seriously. Grimmelshausen gives ample evi-

dence to suggest that his prophetic figure is only a delusional fool.82

Simplicissimus humors the madman by playing Ganymede to his

Jupiter, while his companions ridicule Jupiter's utopian vision in a

44 German Orientalisms

series of sarcastic comments. Eventually this modern "god" loses all

dignity when he drops his pants in public to brush away fleas that he

believes had come looking for his divine protection.

Such actions certainly compromise the messenger, but do not nec-

essarily invalidate the message itself, which must have contained

many appealing elements for Grimmelshausen's readers: to a people

who had suffered the random violence of war and pestilence, Jupiter

offers a vision of divine justice; to a society torn by religious strife

between Protestants and Catholics, he promises the return to a single

Christian faith; to a German nation under the sway of French cultural

hegemony and the threat of a new Turkish invasion, he offers the

fantasy of European supremacy and world domination. To take this

vermin-infested prophet of German greatness seriously as the harbin-

ger of Hitler and the Third Reich, as some fascist sympathizers did,83

would be ludicrous; yet to dismiss his vision out of hand would be to

deny its considerable utopian appeal to his contemporary readers.

Grimmelshausen has updated the chiliastic vision of medieval salva-

tion history in the post-Reformation world of nascent German

nationalism, but in a way that emphasizes the distance between his

utopian dream and empirical reality.

Thus Grimmelshausen introduces the Orient into Simplicissimus

both as a site for the hero's adventurous journeys and as the enemy of

Christian Europe. However quickly denied, the scope of Simplicis-

simus's travels throughout Asia signals a knowledge of the East that

far surpasses the rather vague geography of Wolfram's world and

betrays a curiosity that belies the familiar Baroque rejection of the

world's Unbestdndigkeit. Jupiter's dream of German princes subduing

Asian infidels reflects the ideology of the Turkish wars, and the hero

of Grimmelshausen's Der seltzame Springinsfeld [Strange Springinsfeld]

(1670)-one of several spin-offs of the Simplicissimus novel-actually

serves a brief stint in the kaiser's army battling Turks in Hungary. The

Orient in Simplicissimus also retains something of its medieval

significance as the birthplace of Christ and the center of the Christian

world. In the Continuatio Simplicissimus decides to become a pilgrim

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

instead, but is captured by Arab pirates who put him on display as a

Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 45

curiosity until some Europeans buy his freedom. Told that he cannot

expect a pause in the fighting in the Middle East, Simplicissimus

abandons his hope to visit Jerusalem and sets off on a new pilgrimage

to St. James de Compostella, only to be shipwrecked off the coast of

Madagascar. He spends the rest of his days on a desert island some-

where in the Indian Ocean.

We can read Simplicissimus's failure to reach Jerusalem as the

sacred counterpart to Jupiter's secular vision of Christian German

hegemony. Grimmelshausen portrays the latter's vision as an unreal-

istic dream whose even partial realization would cost more suffering

that he is willing to admit, as one of Simplicissimus's friends observes.

Yet Simplicissimus's attempt to reject Europe and return to the geo-

graphical center of Christian faith in Jerusalem proves equally unsuc-

cessful. Unlike Parzival, Simplicissimus does not find the Holy Grail,

nor does he become king of a sacred order that will rule this world

and that prefigures a perfect world to come. Instead, he sits by him-

self on a desert island writing his life history on palm leaves, isolated

both from the Christian community of believers and from the Ger-

man nation within Europe.

While Grimmelshausen spends only a few paragraphs describing

his hero's journeys to the East, Lohenstein devotes hundreds of pages

to his various characters' experiences in different parts of Asia. In the

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

wisdom of an Indian sage. Along the way he experiences earthquakes

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

modern reader expecting a straightforward adventure story might be

puzzled by certain aspects of Zeno's tale. At any moment a passing

reference to a foreign custom or experience abroad can trigger

lengthy discussions among Zeno's listeners in which each speaker

supports his or her point of view by citing a seemingly endless series

of examples drawn from works of classical antiquity. Lohenstein's

46 German Orientalisms

contemporary readers admired the erudition displayed in such pas-

sages, but by the eighteenth century critics began to reject his style as

tedious bombast or Baroque Schwulst.85 Lohenstein's decision to

alternate between exotic adventures and learned commentary may

well reflect pride in his knowledge of antiquity, but it also points

toward a changing understanding of history in the Baroque.

Throughout the seventeenth century most historians remained

committed to the biblical paradigm of salvation history.86 For exam-

ple, Jacques-Benigne Bossuet's Discours sur l'histoire universelle [Dis-

course on universal history] (168 I) leads in a straight line from Adam

to Christ to Charlemagne and his successors. Its immediate purpose is

to legitimate the rule of the current French king and to educate his

heir.87 Bossuet devotes most of his treatise to a summary of the Old

Testament, supplemented by information about ancient Greece and

Rome. If there is a contradiction between the Bible and other

ancient sources, Bossuet insists that the Bible is correct. Large areas of

the world, including most of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, find no

place in his narrative, not because he is unaware of their existence,

but because they lack world-historical significance from Bossuet's

perspective as a French Catholic at the royal court. Gradually, how-

ever, a new sort of universal history began to emerge that tried to

include all peoples of the earth, even if they did not fit into a biblical

paradigm. Although this new catholicity reflected a greater regard for

cultural and historical specificity, it by no means attempted to reduce

the past to a dry narrative that explained "wie es eigentlich gewesen."

Unlike Ranke and other nineteenth-century historians, the Baroque

writers wanted to use history as a source of moralizing fables applica-

ble to other historical periods.88 Zeno's tale and the discussions it

provokes typify this understanding of history as exemplum; Asia

serves both as an utterly alien source of wonder and as a springboard

to general reflections about the human condition.

Like Grimmelshausen, Luther, and the Humanists, Lohenstein also

portrays the Orient as the enemy of Christian Europe, although he

does so in particularly complex and fascinating ways. Lohenstein not

only had read widely about the Ottoman Empire but had personal

encounters with Turks and European travelers returning from the

Orient; he had even traveled up to the Turkish border in Hungary as

Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 47

a young man.89 His first and last dramas also take place in the world

of the Ottoman court. In Ibrahim Bassa (1653) Lohenstein reworks a

theme made famous in Gryphius's Catharina von Georgien (1647).9°

Gryphius writes a martyr drama in which the widowed Christian

queen of Georgia refuses to marry the Persian king. She stoically

endures gruesome tortures before being burned at the stake, remain-

ing confident to the last that she will find peace and freedom in the

next world: "Earth revolts us [stinks] / we are going into heaven"

[Die Erden stinckt uns an / wir gehn in Himmel ein].9' In Lohen-

stein's first drama, set in the Turkish court in Constantinople, Sultan

Soliman imprisons and eventually beheads the Christian Ibrahim, for

he lusts after Ibrahim's wife Isabella. Portrayed as a weak and vacillat-

ing character ruled by his own libido and a Machiavellian adviser, the

Sultan decides at the last minute not to execute Ibrahim's reluctant

widow and sets her free. On one level, Lohenstein's drama is pure

anti-Turkish propaganda. It opens with an allegorical figure of Asia

lamenting her former greatness and her current state of corruption:

"Woe to me! To me, Asia, oh woe!" [Weh weh! Mir Asien / ach!

weh!].92 In the end Isabella, unlike Catharina, rejects martyrdom to

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

done."93 At the same time, however, Lohenstein explores the sexual

dynamics of an absolutist court in a drama far more concerned with

politics and the psychology of power than Christian faith. On this

level Lohenstein's drama comments implicitly on the dynastic politics

of central Europe and not just the evil Ottoman Empire. While

Luther had viewed the Turk as the embodiment of Christian sin,

Lohenstein secularizes and psychologizes the image into a manifesta-

tion of human sexual desire.

Lohenstein's final drama transforms the uncertain despot of his

early work into a raging monster. Ibrahim Sultan (1673) was first per-

formed at the court of the emperor in Vienna at a time of a renewed

threat from the Ottoman Empire, and it, too, functions as anti-Turk-

ish propaganda.94 An allegorical figure representing the Bosphorus

tells the city of Vienna that it is not so much water as "Lust-oil and

the brimstone of mad desire" [Geilheits-Oel und Schwefel toller

Brunst]95 that flows around a Turkish capital reeking of murder,

48 German Orientalisms

incest, infanticide, and other horrible crimes. The Danube, in con-

trast, flows happily past a blessed land untouched by tyranny or

wrongdoing. After this paean to Leopold and Austria the action

begins as the Sultan threatens either to rape or to stab his brother's

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

volcano (Ein feuricht Etna).96 He invites spectators to admire his

amorous exploits in a seraglio decorated with lewd pictures. Inflamed

by a portrait of his mufti's fourteen-year-old daughter, the Sultan

sends his procuress on an unsuccessful mission of surrogate seduction.

Eventually the Sultan rapes the resisting girl (who later commits sui-

cide), after having imprisoned his own mother and killed some of his

own children. An angry mob throttles his servile minister in public

and throws the Sultan into a prison where he is strangled by four

silent men.

As in the case of Lohenstein's first drama, the obvious indictment

of the Oriental Other contains a subtext that touches on questions

that would have been pertinent to the sexual politics of European

states as well, as Jane Newman observes: "Lohenstein's political

analysis reveals more similarities than differences between the Turks

and the Europeans at the time, especially as concerns the mechanics

of power at the court."97 Of particular interest, from today's perspec-

tive, is Lohenstein's treatment of the question of whether or not indi-

viduals should be held personally responsible for crimes committed in

despotic regimes. When the Sultan's henchman claims that he was

"just obeying orders" when he had the girl taken by force, it is

difficult not to think of more recent instances of individual perpetra-

tors trying to escape blame for their actions.

Lohenstein devoted the final decade of his life to the novel

Arminius and had completed all but the final chapter at the time of his

death.98 He portrays noble Germans in their struggle against corrupt

Romans in a reworking of material found in Tacitus. But who

exactly who are "the Germans" within the context of Lohenstein's

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

various Germanic tribes who have united under Herrmann's leader-

ship in the struggle against Rome. In addition, Lohenstein argues

rather implausibly that Germans either participated in most of the

major events of ancient history, or that ancient peoples were actually

of German descent; the modern reader will no doubt be surprised to

learn that both Spartacus and the first Amazon queen were Ger-

mans.99 Finally, the novel contains several subplots that seem to retell

the story of German resistance to imperial oppression in displaced

form, as in the case of the Armenian struggles against Rome, or the

Tartar battles with the Chinese.°°

Determining the precise relationship between the Germanic peo-

ples of the past and seventeenth-century central European politics is

more complicated. In one view, Herrmann stands for Leopold, and

Lohenstein intended his work as a glorification of the Austrian

Empire. Lohenstein dedicated the work to the Prussian Friedrich

Wilhelm of Brandenburg, however, and it seems unlikely that a Sile-

sian Lutheran would have expressed unqualified support for an Aus-

trian emperor who spearheaded the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

It therefore seems probable that we should not look for a one-to-one

correspondence between the Germans depicted within the novel and

any existing government within central Europe. Rather, Lohenstein

combines a utopian vision of a pan-German harmony under a toler-

ant confederation of the sort that existed under Herrmann with a del-

icate strategy of contemporary realpolitik that seeks a balance

between Protestant Brandenburg, Catholic Austria, and the patch-

work quilt of dynastic and religious loyalties within Silesia.'°'

Identifying the "Orientals" both within the fiction of Arminius and

in Lohenstein's contemporary society proves equally complex. On

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

novel. On the other hand, Lohenstein depicts many Romans with

the same decadent characteristics he attributed to the Turks in his

earlier dramas. These "Orientalized" Romans of antiquity, in turn,

refer in the first instance to the overly refined culture of modern

France, but also, indirectly, to the Ottoman Empire-"and the Turk-

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"

to a specific geographical location in Arminius, nor to a specific his-

torical era. To give some sense of the intricacies of Lohenstein's Ori-

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

Armenian Queen Erato and the second Herrmann's brother Flavius.

Book 3 begins with a pause in the battle between the Germans and

the Romans. Herrmann, his fiancee Thul3nelda, and his sister

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,

arguing that many noble women have performed valiantly in battle

without neglecting their feminine duties. The Amazons, for instance,

managed to combine "domesticity and virtue" by nursing their chil-

dren from the left breast and setting their bows where the right had

been. Their decision to have burned away (weggebrennet) their one

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

chop their hands from their arms.'"1o3 Against Herrmann's contention

that most women lack the necessary physical strength for battle, Erato

argues that he should not make generalizations about the entire

female sex on the basis of a few "Pulster-Tochter" (literally, cushion

daughters) who have been deformed by a "decadent upbringing or

bad habits" (2oIb). Nurture, not nature, is generally responsible for

feminine weakness. By the same token, she continues, one should

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-

house" (2oIb). There is nothing wrong with virtuous women who

fight in battle; it is rather spoiled women and effeminate men who

should be condemned.

Lohenstein thus uncouples biological sex from the performance of

gendered virtue. What matters is not whether one is a man or a

Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 51

woman, but whether one acts with manly virtue or succumbs to

effeminate vice. As if to underscore this distinction, Lohenstein

makes it very clear that there is nothing masculine about the physical

appearance of his heroines. Beneath whatever sort of clothing or

armor they may happen to be wearing, they remain voluptuous

women of ravishing beauty as well as paragons of moral virtue.

Women who fight for a just cause or rule as legitimate queens do not

lose their essential femininity. Hence we should not confuse Lohen-

stein's "feminism" with the bourgeois movement for women's

emancipation that began at the time of the French Revolution.04

Such writers as Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges, and

Theodor von Hippel attempted to extend the Enlightenment belief

in universal human rights to include women, just as the Haitian Rev-

olution raised the question of whether or not black slaves of African

descent should enjoy the same rights.'05 For the most part, however,

bourgeois revolutionaries around 1i8oo tended to believe that women

ought to fulfill their calling as wives and mothers in the domestic

sphere, leaving politics to men. Indeed, those women who did ven-

ture forth into the public sphere posed a threat to "natural" gender

distinctions and became suspect of aristocratic degeneracy. Lohen-

stein, in contrast, depicts a prebourgeois world in which a handful of

aristocratic women could exert considerable political power, either as

rulers themselves or as members of influential salons, without losing

either their femininity or their virtue.

Entire nations can be as corrupt as decadent individuals. Toward

the end of the conversation Herrmann dismisses the notion that a vir-

tuous people should have to live like savages, eating acorns and raw

meat, wearing coarse garments, and sleeping under the stars or in

oxskin tents. Nevertheless, he continues, experience has unfortu-

nately shown "that permissible comfort can easily slide into an ugly

indulgence" (2o4b). The Romans, for instance, have conquered

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

plays pose a great threat to the noble simplicity of traditional German

life. The conversation then segues neatly into the history of Erato and

the Armenians in their struggle against Rome, most of which is nar-

rated by Erato's companion Salonine. The details of ancient Armen-

52 German Orientalisms

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

Caspian Seas in what is today primarily northern Iran. At times the

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

Armenians, who periodically respond with equally brutal reprisals.'o6

We pick up the story when Erato, who had ruled Armenia justly

and well while disguised as a man, is forced to flee because the

Romans have placed her corrupt brother Tigranes on the throne.

Although Tigranes is Armenian by birth, he has been raised in Rome

and has all the attendant vices: he is a lazy and immoral person who

prefers being carried around in a sedan-chair to hunting or riding,

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

official, "all of which, to be sure, were considered virtues in Rome,

but... were unknown to the Armenians and thus considered foreign

vices" (244a). Worst of all-from the perspective of the upstanding

Armenians-Tigranes fails to act like a man, and his opponents

repeatedly refer to him as "the womanly Tigranes" [den weibischen

Tigranes] (247b), or simply "a woman" [ein Weib] (245b). Again we

see the mobility of the "Orient" in Lohenstein's novel in a way that

contrasts markedly from the sort of geographical determinism we will

encounter in Herder's work. The Western Romans become Orien-

talized, while the Armenians to their east become Occidentalized, or,

more precisely, they become German. Hence the struggle of the

Armenians against Rome not only parallels that of the Germans, but

the two forces also become directly linked at the end of the novel:

Zeno marries Herrmann's sister IB3mene, and Erato marries his

brother Flavius.

Before the Armenian siblings settle into happily heterosexual mar-

riages with their German counterparts, however, they experience

extremely confusing sexual desires. After having ruled her country

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-

sabazanes and ends up racing next to Arsinoe, a "woman" who even-

Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 53

tually turns out to be her long-lost brother Zeno. As they meet on

the track, they seem to experience love at first sight: "At first both

could not look at each other enough, indeed, a secret inclination

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-

sabazanes/Erato is a woman and cannot suspect that she is his sister.

His initial attraction to "him" would therefore seem to be homosex-

ual. Erato, for her part, knows she is really a woman, but does not

know that Arsinoe/Zeno is a man, so her attraction to "Arsinoe"

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).

Arsinoe/Zeno-still undercover as a woman-is visibly shaken, but

why? Erato guesses that "her alarm stems from the fact that since

Massabazanes has transformed himself into a woman, her [Arsinoe's]

love has therefore faded away" (259b). Precluding the possibility of

lesbian desire, Erato can only assume that "Arsinoe's" passion evapo-

rates when "she" finds out that she was interested in another woman.

"Arsinoe" is so disappointed that "she" becomes physically sick, but

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

of Erato's perfect breasts did not disappoint "her" heterosexual

desires for a man, but actually aroused his heterosexual passion for a

woman. "Arsinoe" looks deathly ill, but actually Zeno is only

lovesick. The various combinations of homosexual and lesbian

desires that had so puzzled the characters involved turn into what

seems a safely heterosexual romance-except, of course, for the fact

that Zeno and Erato are actually brother and sister. Fortunately the

two would-be lovers are separated before they can consummate their

incestuous affair, and all turns out for the best.

Why does Lohenstein condemn the womanly Tigranes and yet

54 German Orientalisms

permit his cross-dressing hero and heroine to flirt with homosexual,

lesbian, and incestuous desires with impunity? The answer, at least on

the surface, is quite simple: the morally corrupt Tigranes is neither

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-

sight it is even possible to straighten out their seemingly deviant

impulses: the apparent same-sex desires that form the basis of their

initial mutual attraction turn out to be heterosexual, and the subse-

quent threat of incest turns out to be only the natural attraction of

two virtuous individuals for one another: "Thus virtue has the

strength of a magnet that draws even the most alien individuals

toward one another" (255a). On the other hand, however, Lohen-

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-

rience their illicit desires as intensely real and hence extremely

disturbing. Perhaps we can explain "Arsinoe's" illness as heterosexual

lovesickness inflamed by the sight of Erato's breasts, but how, then,

are we to explain Zeno's initial homosexual attraction to "Mas-

sabazanes"? And why does the heterosexual desire that clears up

homosexual confusion turn out to be incestuous in nature? Who is

the real "Oriental"? The line between the lascivious Tigranes and his

virtuous brother and sister is perhaps not as clearly drawn as one

might at first suspect. They too experience "deviant" desires; the dif-

ference is that they work their way through to nonincestuous

monogamous marriages with partners of appropriate social standing,

whereas their womanly brother neglects his political duties and

debauches himself with another man's wife. The "Oriental" desires

that in Lohenstein's dramas seemed firmly rooted in the Ottoman

Empire are not only transplanted to ancient Rome-and, by impli-

cation, modern France-but also surface in otherwise exemplary

individuals of the sort one might find in Austria, Prussia, or Silesia.

Herrmann's brother Flavius provides the counterpart to Erato's

tale by describing his upbringing in Rome. The young German is

raised together with two sons of Caesar, Lucius and Cajus, and Lucius

in particular astonishes Flavius with his licentious behavior. His

"inclination toward lasciviousness" [Neigung zur Geilheit] (452a) is

Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 55

already evident at age thirteen, which prompts Flavius to observe that

because the Germans wait longer to become sexually active, they also

remain potent until late in life, whereas the sexually precocious

Romans stunt their growth and age prematurely. The lubricious

Lucius soon comes under the influence of an Epicurean teacher

named Aristippus, who pretends to be a wise leader during the day.

At night, however, Aristippus puts on lipstick, nail polish, and rouge

and leads his wards into a room decorated "with the most erotic

images" [mit denen geilesten Bildern]. "He bathed us with sweet-

smelling waters, anointed us with Syrian balsam, and squandered all

the accoutrements of opulent Asia [des uppigen Asiens]" (454b). For-

tunately Sotion, a friend of Flavius's father, arrives just as Flavius is

about to enter this den of iniquity. He warns the boy that Aristippus

has already been condemned elsewhere for various vices, of which

"adultery, incest, and unnatural desires" (46ob) are only the least seri-

ous offenses. Meanwhile Aristippus has arranged for Lucius to spend

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 authorities that Aristippus is about to debauch a hundred youths.

The police break into his chambers to find the naked Aristippus

anointing a Priapus with wine and Caesar's two sons in compromis-

ing positions. The guards hastily tell the two boys to get dressed, but

most of the rest are imprisoned, banished, or executed. Aristippus is

strangled in prison and thrown into the Tiber with a rock tied to his

neck.

The message could not be clearer, or at least so it would seem:

while Lucius embraces Asiatic voluptuousness and Moorish women,

the noble German resists temptation and dreams of pale northern

beauties. Things become more complicated, however, when the

African Prince Juba, who is married to Cleopatra, sends his sixteen-

year-old daughter Dido to Rome. Lucius immediately desires the

dark-skinned beauty (who incidentally is not the character described

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

Lucius's neck. Advised by Caesar to get out of town, Flavius, who

has recovered from his wounds, decides to go to Africa to serve under

Dido's father. Unfortunately he is shipwrecked along the way, and

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-

ius a boat that enables him to escape back to Germany.

In some ways this interracial romance recalls that of Gahmuret and

Belakane, as both works tell of a European man's love for an African

woman. However, Wolfram's hero abandons his pregnant wife

secretly, while Dido openly urges Flavius to leave. He is sad to go but

is not to blame for her predicament, which results entirely from the

sexual aggression of Lucius and the priest. Given the conventions of

the courtly novel, it would be unrealistic to expect Flavius to con-

tinue his relationship with a woman who is no longer a virgin. Inter-

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

a sign of moral turpitude among Orientalized Romans ends up por-

traying the black Dido as the innocent victim of Roman lust. Lohen-

stein thus shifts a collective allegory into individual psychology: the

undifferentiated mass of Moorish men and women imported to

debauch Roman youth yields to a tragic love story between a noble

German and an equally noble African woman.07

Lohenstein's Orientalism thus fluctuates between a harshly Euro-

centric rhetoric at a time of renewed threat from the Ottoman

Empire and a much more nuanced literary vocabulary that illumi-

nates both the psychological complexities of his protagonists and the

politics of his contemporary central Europe. In Ibrahim Sultan Lohen-

stein paints a garish portrait of an utterly depraved Turkish court

while praising the virtues of the Austrian monarchy. In Arminius,

however, he divorces the Oriental from any particular place or time,

transforming political geography into a moral topography. The Asian

Armenians become the counterparts of the virtuous Germans, while

Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 57

the Romans sink into Oriental debauchery. Matters become still

more complicated, however, for distinctions between the Germans,

Romans, and Armenians are not as sharply defined as they might

seem at first glance: the German Flavius grows up in Rome with

Caesar's sons as his closest companions but manages to resist its cor-

rupting influence. Tigranes, in contrast, succumbs completely to

Rome's evil influence, even though he is an Armenian prince by

birth with an exceptionally virtuous sister. The movement of indi-

viduals across cultural and moral borders corresponds to the shifting

alliances between different countries and dynasties. On the one hand,

we have seemingly clear-cut divisions between

Germans and

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,

are engaged in a dizzyingly complex series of shifting alliances

between the Medes, Parthians, and Romans.

In this way the political geography of Arminius corresponds to the

intricacies of central European politics in the wake of the Thirty

Years' War. From a distant perspective, Lohenstein's political land-

scape seems divided into large, competing power blocks: Prussians

and Austrians, Protestants and Catholics, Germans and French, Euro-

peans and Turks. Read retrospectively through the lens of nine-

teenth- and twentieth-century politics, it seems as though he depicts

a familiar landscape in which discrete nation-states vie for power

within Europe, although the Ottoman Empire poses more of an

external threat and confessional differences play a larger role in the

intra-European conflicts of the seventeenth century. If we look more

closely, however, we see that Lohenstein recreates in Arminius the

complexities of local politics in Breslau and Silesia, where religious

and dynastic loyalties formed a delicate web of contested power rela-

tions. From this perspective, as Jane O. Newman has argued in her

seminal study of Lohenstein's dramas, the Baroque world of central

Europe begins to look like a distant mirror of today's postmodern,

postnational world. In his plays she finds evidence of "the same

hybridity, polyphony, and mobility that characterized Silesia itself"

during Lohenstein's life (36). Hence she argues against "the predom-

58 German Orientalisms

inant image of a monolithic early modernism" that originated in the

nationalist literary histories of the nineteenth century in favor of "a

more heterogeneously conceived early modern Europe [that] can

function as a model for the borderland in the many senses in which

that term is now used to describe the hybridity and contentiousness,

yet also the richness of the postmodern world" (175, 178-79).

The simultaneous presence of the macro- and micropolitics of

location in Lohenstein's Arminius prompts further reflections on cur-

rent efforts to redraw the disciplinary boundaries of literary and cul-

tural studies. If we focus on the broad conflicts between Germans and

Romans in the novel, and thus, by implication, on the tensions

between Austria and France, on the one hand, and Christian Europe

and the Ottoman Empire, on the other, we work on terrain mapped

out by scholars of the Renaissance, whereas a concentration on

moments of local complexity, hybrid identities, and border crossings

moves the novel into the domain of early modern studies.os The

term Renaissance came into vogue in the late nineteenth century and

prompted celebrations of great works of art by great men who repre-

sented great nations. Early modern studies arose in the late twentieth

century and inspired new research into a much broader range of lit-

erary and cultural artifacts, by women as well as men, and with a

greater sensitivity toward local politics and individual difference.

Both approaches clearly reflect the preoccupations of their age, and

both could be accused of producing anachronistic readings of the

past: whether looking for heroes or hybridity, critics are liable to find

precisely what they seek. From a more generous perspective, how-

ever, the move toward early modern studies allows us to appreciate

previously neglected aspects of Lohenstein's work and thus to situate

him more accurately in the political and cultural landscape of seven-

teenth-century Silesia. What makes Lohenstein's Arminius particu-

larly interesting, in fact, is the way in which it illuminates the com-

plex relations between local politics, nascent nationalism, and larger

geopolitical concerns.

The porous geographical boundaries in Lohenstein's work pro-

duce a correspondingly mobile sense of gender roles and sexual iden-

tity. I return in conclusion therefore to questions raised by the nearly

incestuous romance between Zeno and Erato. In portraying a

Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 59

woman who rules as successfully as a man, Lohenstein continues his

long-standing interest in politically powerful women. As Newman

points out, questions surrounding the legitimacy of female rulers

were of central importance in the dynastic politics of seventeenth-

century Silesia.'°9 Unlike such morally ambiguous figures as Agrip-

pina or Cleopatra, however, the heroines in Arminius remain without

blemish. Generic convention may explain the difference: tragedies

traditionally portray flawed greatness, whereas courtly novels depict

idealized heroes and heroines. By subjecting his protagonists to a pro-

tracted period of same-sex and incestuous desires that they find

deeply disturbing, however, Lohenstein moves his novel toward the

psychological complexity of such eighteenth-century fiction as Karl

Philipp Moritz's Anton Reiser: Ein psychologischer Roman (1785-90) or,

for that matter, his contemporary Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse

de Cleves (1678). We are certainly far removed from the world of

Wolfram's Parzival, who has little psychological depth and no lan-

guage to express his feelings."0 Lohenstein's fascination with role-

playing, cross-dressing, and "deviant" sexual desires in fact makes

him a prime candidate for further study in our own era of critical

gender studies and queer theory, just as his works seemed morally

offensive to the bourgeois critics who largely ignored him in the

nineteenth century. As heirs to the Victorian age, we find that

Lohenstein's work still has the capacity to shock us with its graphic

violence and steamy sexuality. What we may perceive as violations of

middle-class taboos, however, were no doubt considerably less star-

tling to a prebourgeois age accustomed to public executions of the

sort described in excruciating detail in the opening pages of Fou-

cault's Discipline and Punish, or the slightly later sexual fantasies of

Marquis de Sade. The challenge, as always, will be to preserve a sense

of Lohenstein's historical specificity while remaining attuned to our

own changing critical concerns; the reward that Lohenstein's work

offers is a largely untapped reservoir of an exuberantly rich literary

imagination.



CHAPTER TWO

Romantic Orientalism and

the Absence of Empire

The Turkish retreat from the gates of Vienna in 1683 marked the

beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire. Although the Sick

Man of Europe continued to languish until 1918, any real danger of

a renewed Turkish advance had vanished by the mid-eighteenth

century. As a result, the figure of the bloodthirsty Turk that had

dominated the Baroque stage yielded to a less threatening image of

the Orient as the site of untold wealth and sexual license. New ency-

clopedic collections of Oriental source materials in D'Herbelot's Bib-

liothdque orientale (1697) and translations of the oo1001 Nights into French

by Antoine Galland (1704-17) and German by Bohse-Talander

(1730) introduced Europeans to a poetic treasure trove that they

would continue to mine for centuries. A new taste for an exotic tur-

querie and chinoiserie arose in fashion, painting, and the decorative arts,

followed by a new wave of popular comic operas or Singspiele with

Oriental settings (most famously Mozart's Entfuhrung aus dem Serail of

1782).'

Much of the early-eighteenth-century European fascination with

the Orient was a product of the late-Baroque aristocratic culture

known as the Rococo, whose spirit of playful eroticism is best cap-

tured in the paintings of Frangois Boucher. The movement origi-

nated at the royal court in France, but it also exerted an influence on

German art and literature.2 Already in 1689 Heinrich Anshelm von

Zigler und Kliphausen (1663-96) published Die Asiatische Banise

[Asian Banise], a novel set in distant Thailand and Burma.3 This

61

62 German Orientalisms

action-packed work of fiction, which remained popular until the late

eighteenth century, portrays the valiant and virtuous hero's ulti-

mately successful attempt to rescue his equally virtuous and beautiful

bride from a hideously vicious villain. The exotic setting allows

Zigler to send his protagonist on a series of exciting and often grue-

some adventures: in the opening sequence, for instance, our already-

wounded hero-clad only in a blood-soaked Japanese robe-seeks

shelter in a cave, only to find himself under attack from a ravenous

tiger who has come to feast on stacks of bloated corpses left over from

recent mass executions. One finds a slightly lighter touch in the

"galante Romane" of the early eighteenth century, which often por-

tray erotic adventures in Oriental settings.4 The most important rep-

resentative of German Rococo literature, however, is Christoph

Martin Wieland (1733-1813), whose wonderfully urbane and witty

verse narratives draw on an eclectic mixture of ancient, modern

European, and Oriental sources. In his mock-heroic verse epic

Oberon (1780), for instance, Wieland combines elements of Shake-

speare's Midsummer Night's Dream with the medieval motif of the

Brautfahrt. A young European knight sets off to Baghdad to pluck

hairs from the Kalif's beard. He falls in love and has various adven-

tures-amorous and otherwise-in the East, before returning with

his converted Islamic bride to Europe.5

Wieland's cosmopolitan taste marks the end of the European

Baroque, but his works continued to influence both Goethe and, to

a certain extent, the works of the Early Romantics.6 In his autobiog-

raphy Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and truth] Goethe claims that he

was completely taken in by Wieland in his youth, and that he and

other writers of his generation devoured Wieland's Shakespeare

translations.7 During his Sturm und Drang years Goethe ridiculed the

older writer in the satirical drama Gotter, Helden und Wieland [Gods,

heroes, and Wieland] (1773), but Wieland responded graciously, and

when Goethe moved to Weimar the two quickly became friends.

Perhaps more surprising in the light of their subsequent reputations is

the extent to which Wieland also influenced Friedrich von Harden-

berg (1772-1801), who is better known by his pen name Novalis.

The young Romantic published his first poem in Wieland's Der

Teutsche Merkur in 1791 and borrowed the name Ginnistan from

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 63

Wieland for one of his last works, "Klingohr's Mirchen." Novalis's

earliest poetry is in fact so influenced by Wieland and other Anakre-

ontik poets that Richard Samuel suggested that "we can perhaps refer

to the young Hardenberg as a not unoriginal poet of the Rococo."8

In the later nineteenth century Novalis was celebrated as a Romantic

messiah for a Christian-German nation, while Wieland was scorned

as "the un-German corrupter of morals" [der undeutsche Sitten-

verderber] who was slavishly dependent on French literary fashions.9

Recalling the actual proximity of Novalis to Wieland thus corrects

the distortions of nineteenth-century hagiography that transformed

Novalis from an irreverent sensualist into a disembodied mystic. In

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

Novalis, however, for the older writer introduced him to what

would become a particularly German sort of cosmopolitanism in the

wake of the French Revolution.

While Europeans were adopting a more playful attitude toward the

Orient in works of the Rococo, a few British civil servants were

beginning to sow the seeds of a new Romantic fascination with India.

In the 1770s Sir William Jones and Charles Wilkins, both officials of

the East India Company, began to learn Sanskrit and to send transla-

tions of ancient Indian texts and the manuscripts themselves back to

Europe. The discoveries touched off a wave of enthusiasm in Britain

and France that marked the beginning of the "Oriental Renais-

sance."" In Germany, Georg Forster's translation of the play Sakontala

(1i791) did much to popularize this image of a romanticized Orient.

The play, which William Jones had originally translated from Sanskrit,

featured an innocent Indian maiden who becomes bound to the king

in eternal love by the power of a magic ring. Novalis soon invested

the work with personal significance in a way that was typical for eigh-

teenth-century readers, whose experience of reality was often medi-

ated by literary texts-one thinks of Werther's fondness for Homer

and Ossian, or Anton Reiser's obsession with Goethe's Werther.

Novalis, who-with a nod to Samuel Richardson-had frequently

referred to Sophie von Kiihn as "Klarisse," began to call her "Sacon-

tala" as well. In an example of life imitating art, Novalis gave Sophie

64 German Orientalisms

an engraved ring as a symbol of their fidelity. If Wieland's verse nar-

ratives portrayed the Orient as the site of a fantastic and slightly risque

eroticism that appealed to Friedrich von Hardenberg's aristocratic

taste, Forster's Sakontala inspired an emotional intensity more typical

of the middle class. That Novalis and other Early Romantics should

have been susceptible to both images of the Orient is only surprising

if one expects individual desires to conform neatly to sociological cat-

egories. As we shall see, the Romantic poets' fascination with the

"mythical image" of India captured in Sakontala eventually gave birth

to the academic disciplines of comparative grammar and Indology at

the nineteenth-century German university.'2 The seemingly pristine

world of ancient India provided an antidote to the complexity and

corruption of modern civilization and an answer to the Romantic

quest for origins. Sanskrit displaced Hebrew as the original language,

and poets and philosophers became convinced that human civilization

had begun in India.

HERDER'S HISTORICISM

The work of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) had a decisive

impact on the development of German Orientalism and the history

of European Romanticism. Herder revolutionized attitudes toward

art and the individual, while laying the foundations for modern

nationalism and historicism. He broke with the neoclassical reverence

for antiquity as a timeless norm and celebrated the vitality of various

national cultures, both past and present.13 Against the conception of

the artist as a man of taste who imitates nature for the instruction and

delight of his audience, Herder championed the impassioned genius

as a Promethean figure who rivals God in the creation of autono-

mous art.14 His expressive theory of poetry emerged together with a

new kind of subject who is attuned to his or her feelings and wants to

communicate those feelings in language. Such individuals are

engaged in a dynamic process of organic growth or Bildung, deter-

mined by an unpredictable combination of internal predispositions

and external influences.'5 Christian salvation history, with its clearly

defined beginning, middle, and end, turns into "the secular mode of

the Bildungsgeschichte," in which individuals progress toward an

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 65

uncertain future.16 The literary genre that corresponds to this trans-

formation is the Entwicklungs- or Bildungsroman, but Herder applied

the same model of dynamic growth to the history of individual peo-

ples or nations, and to the history of the world as a whole.

Herder's philosophy of history finds its fullest development in his

Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit [Ideas on the philos-

ophy of the history of humankind] (1784-91). In his huge, although

still fragmentary, work, Herder attempts nothing less than to trace the

history of humankind from its beginnings to the present, to survey

every culture in every corner of the globe, and to situate history on

the planet Earth in the context of God's entire creation. Arminius

already reflects increased interest in the non-European world, yet

Lohenstein relies more on ancient than modern sources and uses

world history as the Baroque equivalent of a data bank from which he

draws timeless moral exempla. Herder, in contrast, sets history into

motion as part of an all-encompassing organic development. Of par-

ticular interest is the way in which Herder negotiates a path between

Eurocentrism and an emerging German nationalism. As one might

expect, Herder often suggests that modern European civilization is

superior to that of other world cultures. At the same time, however,

Herder remains sharply critical of imperialist aggression in an era of

accelerating European exploration and colonization. Germans are at

once part of Europe, as the heirs to Greco-Roman civilization, but

also separate from Europe, as a politically fragmented nation that does

not (yet) have colonies outside Europe, and that feels itself to be the

victim of French cultural imperialism within Europe.

The Orient plays a crucial role in Herder's efforts to define

national identity in the context of universal history. While Georg

Forster's tales of the South Pacific fueled the German imagination

with images of pristine sites previously untouched by Western civi-

lization, the East was both a site of modern colonization and ancient

culture, Europe's closest and oldest Other, but also its spiritual

mother. In the Ideen Herder retraces the history of European civiliza-

tion as it moves from east to west in a way that makes a virtue out of

necessity, condoning Germany for its advanced state of European

civilization, even as he condemns the rest of Europe for its imperial-

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

of my journey in the year 1769]: "each shall provide me with the

image of its own customs, habits, virtues, vices, and happiness."'7

The passage already gives a sense of the encyclopedic scope of the

envisioned work and of the teleological thrust of the argument.

Herder's goal is both historicist and hermeneutic. On the one hand,

he wants to understand each culture on its own terms without

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-

tigation of the past helps us better to understand the present: "and so

I want to lead everything back up to our time, and learn how to serve

it properly" (30). Herder's efforts to inscribe unique historical events

within a narrative of human progress will become one of the central

challenges of the Ideen: how can individual cultures specific to one

place and time form part of a larger teleological development? In

order to see how Herder moved from the cryptic comments of the

Journal to the expansive vision of the Ideen, it is useful to look briefly

at several works written during Herder's remarkably productive years

in the early 1770s.

Herder is perhaps best known today as the contributing editor of

Von deutscher Art und Kunst [On German character and art] (1773), a

collection of five essays that became the manifesto of the German

Sturm und Drang movement and marked the beginnings of Euro-

pean Romanticism. Herder wrote essays on Ossian and Shakespeare

that have long been recognized as turning points in the history of lit-

erary theory. Inspired by Rousseau and filled with disdain for the

decadence of modern times, Herder based his new aesthetic on a

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

poet as a skillful rhetorician or a cultivated wit and replaced it with

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

duce the quintessential romantic hero in Die Leiden desjungen Werther

[The sufferings of young Werther] (1774), the novel that electrified

Europe and made Rococo preciosity and enlightened cynicism seem

like the fashions of a bygone time.

That Herder should have chosen James Macpherson's modern

forgery of the Ossian material as an example of the primitive vitality

of an ancient people has a certain irony, of course, just as Herder's

eagerness to embrace Shakespeare as a primal force of nature ren-

dered him blind to the artifice and sophistication of the works of the

Elizabethan dramatist. Herder's enthusiasm leaves little room for

ironic detachment. He styles himself as a prophet, rhapsodically

preaching the good news of a popular vitality that he finds in the

songs of Celts, Lapps, Peruvians, and North American Indians. Yet

Herder's global primitivism also stands in the service of a new Ger-

man nationalism. After all, he entitled his volume "Von deutscher Art

und Kunst," in which the word deutscher has a polemical edge that

links it to the vitality of the Volk and hence makes it opposed to

everything French.'8 Herder in fact conducts a double polemic:

against the French and their culture as decadent, artificial, and based

on a sterile imitation of the ancients, and against the German aristo-

crats, who have forgotten their own Art or national character and

imitate the French instead. The appeal is thus class specific as well as

nationalist, as a member of Germany's new group of "non-noble

elites" argues against the French abroad and a German aristocracy

under French influence at home.'9

Herder thus views Germany as a cultural colony of France, and this

sense of being subject to an imperial power within Europe places a

distinct stamp on the "bardic nationalism" of Von deutscher Art und

Kunst. Katie Trumpener has argued that the cultural dynamics of

European imperialism were first developed within the Continent

before being exported to the rest of the world. Scottish, Irish, and

Welsh poets on the Celtic fringe of Great Britain turned to bardic

poets in the 176os as elegiac figures who gave voice to national tradi-

tions that were being destroyed by British imperialism. Bardic poetry

was a communal poetry, rooted in the people and their past, and

pressed into service for the cause of an anti-imperial Celtic national-

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-

tural significance" of bardic poetry in its original communal con-

text.20

In transporting bardic poetry still further from the British Isles to

Germany, Herder seems unconcerned about the originally crucial

distinction between the bardic poets of the Celtic fringe and imperial

Britain.2' For Herder, both Ossian and Shakespeare are equally

British, or, more precisely, equally Germanic. In a short essay of 1777

entitled "Von der Ahnlichkeit der mittlern englischen und deutschen

Dichtkunst" [On the similarity of medieval English and German

poetry] Herder argued that England, having been conquered succes-

sively by the Germanic Anglo-Saxons, Danes, and Normans, was

essentially German, and that English verse was thus "a repository of

Nordic poetry and language."22 The bardic poetry that in its own

context was inspired by anti-English imperialism becomes part of a

larger pan-German nationalism for Herder, for whom the colonizing

power is not England but France. The crucial difference between the

English and the Germans, according to Herder, is that the English

have remained true to their cultural roots and thus produce first-rate

literature that reaches a wide audience, whereas the Germans have

forgotten their past, adopted the foreign garb of French culture, and

lost touch with the reading public. Hence Herder accompanies his

celebration of Anglo-Germanic culture with an appeal to his con-

temporary Germans to rediscover their own traditions, and he urges

them to make the effort to read recently discovered troves of

medieval verse. Another essay of 1776 implores the Germans to read

the works of Ulrich von Hutten, a "man for the fatherland."23

Herder also began collecting German Volkslieder at this time as part of

a cultural mission to preserve the voice of the people. These individ-

ual projects contribute to the effort to create a sense of "imagined

community" in Germany based on traditions either recovered or

invented from the past.

Herder's nationalism forms part of a broader movement among

German intellectuals that had been under way for more than a

decade: in his seventeenth Literaturbrief [Letter on literature] (1759)

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 69

Lessing had already called for an authentically German drama to

counter French Neoclassicism; Klopstock entered his bardic phase in

the mid-176os and inspired others to join the new cause; and

Friedrich Karl von Moser called for a new, pan-German patriotism in

his essay Von dem Deutschen National-Geist [On the German national

spirit] (1765). Herder's own "patriotic turn" took place in 1769 dur-

ing his extended stay in Nantes, France.24 Already in the Journal

meiner Reise we find disparaging comments about the French, whose

superficial brilliance cannot mask their lack of vital genius. Never-

theless, Herder feels compelled to go to France to learn its language

and become immersed in its culture and at times seems quite enthu-

siastic about the opportunity to become privy to the gossip with the

French capital: "To know anecdotes from Paris! To be familiar with

all those things that others are talking about!"25 Despite his professed

disdain for French culture, Herder was enough of an East Prussian

provincial to succumb to the lure of the European metropolis. Once

he had arrived in France, however, Herder felt increasingly alienated

from the foreign culture, and he returned to Germany in 1770 to

renew his polemics against French cultural hegemony.

Not all German writers around 1770 shared the enthusiasm for this

new "bardic nationalism." Wieland was particularly outspoken in his

opposition to modern affectations of supposedly ancient styles. Times

have changed so much since that time-"thank God!"-that a faux

primitivism only makes modern poetry look ridiculous.26 We live in

a time of the European Enlightenment and progress, he continues;

why should we wander around the forests pretending to be ancient

Germans? Interestingly, Wieland does not deny that nations exist:

"Nature has already provided each nation with its own Bildung, its

own temperament, its own merits and flaws," he states in a passage

that could have been written by Herder (270). Like the ancient

Greeks, the politically fragmented "German nation is actually not

One nation, but rather an aggregate of many nations." Nevertheless,

he continues, modern Germans-like the Spartans, Corinthians, and

Athenians in ancient Greece-have a single national character that

unites members of individual provinces. Wieland differs from his

contemporaries in the 1770s in his greater openness to foreign liter-

ary traditions. Confident that national identities remain firmly rooted

70 German Orientalisms

in nature, Wieland claims that individuals who try too hard to avoid

foreign influence only attain "a kind of individuality that often bor-

ders on caricature" (270). From Wieland's perspective, in other

words, being German is a given; one has only the choice between

being a progressive, cosmopolitan German open to international

influence or a narrow-minded nationalist who fears and loathes the

foreign.

Wieland's polemic targeted the poetry of Klopstock and Gersten-

berg directly, although in a broader sense it also included Herder and

the writers of the Sturm und Drang movement, most notably the

young Goethe.27 Yet the implicit opposition between Herder and

Wieland in the early 1770s needs further clarification. Herder was not

a nationalist in the sense that he focused myopically on an exclusively

German literary tradition. He was extremely well read and open to a

vast range of international literatures. Yet Wieland drew on highly

"civilized" ancient and modern literary traditions, while Herder

favored "primitive" works from many different indigenous cultures.

If they agreed on the greatness of an individual writer, it was often for

different reasons: Wieland praised Shakespeare despite his disregard

for traditional Aristotelian poetics, while Herder celebrated him

because he was willing to break the rules and obey the laws of

nature.28 Although there are already elements of bourgeois sentimen-

tality in Wieland, his work retains much of the aristocratic sense of

the self as a public performance in which "to exist means to play a

role, "29 whereas Herder seeks present authenticity arising out of a

continuous world-historical development. To put it another way,

Wieland was willing to mix and match the blossoms of many literary

traditions into a cosmopolitan bouquet, whereas Herder sought the

common roots of organically linked national cultures.

The most important ancient source of genuine poetry for Herder

came from the East and was preserved in the opening passages of the

Old Testament. While discovering the virtues of Ossian's bardic

poetry and Shakespeare's genius, the Lutheran minister was also

engaged in the study of what he termed "Die ersten Urkunden des

Menschlichen Geschlechts" [The first documents of the human race]

(1769).3° Much in the spirit of the essays in Von deutscher Art und

Kunst, Herder contends that ancient nations produced their own

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 7 1

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,

everything now called barbarous-"is all One collective voice, a sin-

gle sound from such poetic documents of earlier times."3' Unfortu-

nately, continues Herder, we overly civilized moderns find it difficult

to appreciate the fresh spirit of these ancient works, because acade-

mics have buried the texts under suffocating layers of scholarly com-

mentary. Herder wants to brush this commentary aside and hear

again the revelations of these ancient texts as they were once

recorded "from the mouth of the people" (5:22). A highly detailed

stroll through the opening verses of Genesis follows, in which Herder

offers not so much critical commentary as an effusive appreciation of

what he terms the "sacred, ancient, poetic documents of the Orient"

(5:30). Herder insists that these opening verses express "a certain

completely pure Oriental way of thinking" [eine gewisse durchaus

reine Orientalische Denkart] (5:25), by which he means that the texts

are poetic, popular, authentically national, and "at the same time

enchantingly romantic" (5:26)-the same virtues he discovered in

the songs of other allegedly uncorrupted peoples, in Ossian's bardic

poetry, and in Shakespeare's "Germanic" genius. By casting aside

modern scholarship to listen to the Romantic voice of ancient Ori-

ental poetry, Herder once again rejects modern (French) civilization

for ancient (Germanic) culture. Thus in spirit, if not in actual fact, the

original Oriental was a German.

Thus far we have seen in Herder an unqualified praise for works of

largely, but not exclusively, Germanic peoples of the present, and

scattered individuals and groups of the past, including Ossian, Shake-

speare, Homer, and the Oriental authors of Genesis. Missing as yet is

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

Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit: Beytrag zu vielen Beytrdgen des

Jahrhunderts [Another philosophy of the history of human develop-

ment: Contribution to many contributions of the century] (i774). As

the subtitle of Herder's essay indicates, we are to understand the Auch

of his main title as a sign of modesty, but perhaps also ironically: he is

72 German Orientalisms

writing "yet another" history of humankind. Again drawing on

Rousseau, Herder expresses nostalgia for simpler times and primitive

peoples, yet he does not share Rousseau's pessimism about the course

of human history. In Herder's view, each culture arises at a specific

place and time; hence any desire on the part of one culture either to

emulate a foreign culture, or to impose its influence on another, is

inherently misguided. Nevertheless, each self-contained cultural unit

forms part of a larger historical narrative that leads from the origins of

the world in the East up to modern Europe. Herder claims that

humankind had its childhood in the Orient, its boyhood in Egypt, its

youthful maturity in Greece, and its first manhood in Rome; now

the "new man" has been born in the north.

Herder's understanding of world history finds its fullest elaboration

in his Ideen. In a philosophy influenced by Heraclitus and Spinoza,

Herder rejects notions of a transcendent God or of a universe with-

out God altogether, to reveal instead the "path of God in nature"

[Gang Gottes in der Natur].32 Nothing stands still in Herder's world.

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

individual cycles form part of a larger plan that progresses upward

from rocks to plants, from plants to animals, from animals to human

beings, and from humans to God. Herder thus adapts the Enlighten-

ment's belief in human progress and applies it to the universe as a

whole, which he views as the unfolding of God in his creation

through time: "God is everything in his works" (6:17). The concept of

Bildung captures the ongoing process of formation and transformation

within God's world, and it becomes a moral imperative for humans

to keep pace with this change. For humankind holds a special place

in Herder's philosophy of history: with their upright posture, their

capacity for reason, and their use of language, human beings are the

crown of God's creation. They are thus obligated to pursue the

"noble Bildung toward rationality and freedom," which Herder

defines as Humanitdt (6:154). In such a world, laziness becomes a cap-

ital crime, just as it is for Goethe's Faust. Nature progresses, and we

must move forward with it or regress to a subhuman level: "should

he move backwards and become once again a stem, plant, an ele-

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 73

phant?" (6:179). If we dedicate ourselves to the task of Bildung on

earth, we can hope for eternal life after death.

Specific human cultures arise within the broad sweep of universal

history. Like several of his contemporaries, Herder stresses the

importance of climatic influence on individual cultures.33 He begins

with the assumption that human beings are born with certain innate

characteristics, what we might call a genetic blueprint. Yet they are

also influenced by external factors or Klima (climate), by which

Herder means not only the prevailing weather conditions of a place,

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

circumstances that have considerable effect through their vital inter-

action; they are all part of the climate that changes so many things"

(6:266). Just as certain climates produce certain plants and animals,

they also produce certain kinds of peoples or what Herder terms

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).

Herder's understanding of national cultures as organic outgrowths

of particular soils and climates lays the basis for nineteenth-century

histories of Germany's national literature, and it also marks the begin-

ning of a Romantic or volkisch nationalism based on common ethnic-

ity rather than universal human rights. While such ideas would even-

tually mutate into the racist nationalism of the Third Reich, Herder's

belief in climatological determinism inspires his critique of Eurocen-

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-

ture?" questions Herder rhetorically, "and how insufficient would

the plan of Providence be if that which we call culture-and which

we often should just call refined weakness-had been created for

each member of the human race?" (6:11-I2). It is both arrogant and

74 German Orientalisms

inconsistent to insist that humans around the globe should conform

to a single European standard of culture, and equally absurd to assume

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

means of European culture" (6:335). Other peoples have felt no need

to impose their will forcibly upon others. "We Europeans, on the

other hand, roam the earth as merchants or robbers and often neglect

that which is ours in the process" (6:462). Herder maintains that

Roman imperialism brought nothing but misery and destruction to

the world, and he dismisses the Crusades as "nothing but a mad event

that cost Europe a few million lives" (6:854). Modern European

imperialism is only the latest chapter in the history of injustice. The

Spanish treat America like the ancient Romans treated Spain: "as a

place to pillage" (6:599). Rather than plundering the world, the Cru-

saders, Romans, and modern Europeans should have stayed at home

and left other indigenous peoples in peace.

Despite his strident critique of European imperialism, Herder con-

tinues to harbor what from today's perspective seem some very Euro-

centric prejudices of his own. Black Africans are sensual, carefree, and

happy, Herder contends, but incapable of intellectual refinement.

How could it be otherwise in a land where the hot sun ignites only

seething passions in the human breast? Other peoples of the world

fare little better: a warm climate turns Polynesians into healthy,

happy, and lusty natives, while the American climate produces only

warlike barbarians. The Chinese and Egyptians made considerable

progress early on but got stuck in their cultural adolescence and have

since stagnated or declined. The Greeks, in contrast, produced an

ancient culture of unique quality in the history of the world. In other

words, different climates produce different cultures, according to

Herder, but that does not mean that all cultures are of equal value.

Nature has organized humanity into manifold cultures on an ascend-

ing scale of sophistication: "She placed the Negro next to the ape,

and she allowed the great problem of humanity among all people of

all times to be resolved from Negro rationality up to the brain of the

most refined human being" (6:633-34). The ancient Greeks were not

only different from the Africans: they were also better. Herder's

humanistic "tolerance" stands in close proximity to condescension:

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 75

"I accept you for who you are," he seems to say, "it is not your fault

that you come from an unfortunate climate that produces an inferior

culture." Or as Herder himself puts it: "Let us therefore pity the

Negro, but not despise him, for the organization of his climate could

offer him no more noble reward" (6:236).

What made ancient Greek culture superior, according to Herder,

is not only that it arose in a particularly favorable geographical setting,

but also that its culture or "national plant" [Nationalpflanze] (6:509)

could develop without corrupting foreign influence through its

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

plant on the stems of other nations; a race of sly negotiators practically

everywhere in the world" (6:492; again 6:702). While Herder holds

out little hope for the Africans, who have the misfortune to be born

in a bad climate, the deracinated Jews can redeem themselves by

assimilating to a common European culture. Herder predicts that a

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

with European laws and contribute to the well-being of the state"

(6:702).

The somewhat tortured logic of this passage would seem to be as

follows: true, Jews are foreign parasites that suck the lifeblood of

European nations. However, Jews have the potential to become like

other Europeans if they assimilate completely to Christian European

culture. Laws that would prohibit such assimilation are barbaric.

Thus Herder condemns persecution of the Jews and would certainly

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

in the blood. Herder's "tolerance" takes a different tack: Jews will

become acceptable when they become indistinguishable from Ger-

mans, that is, when they cease to be Jews. Many eighteenth-century

German Jews in fact shared Herder's hope that they could be inte-

grated into Christian German society.35 The most famous of these

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

eloquent plea for religious tolerance to emerge from the German

Enlightenment. As Jeffrey Grossman points out, however, Herder's

reference to Jews as "parasites" nevertheless "put into circulation a

repertoire of images to be used later by more questionable figures and

political movements."'36 How could "parasites" ever really become

part of the German "Nationalpflanze" (6:509)?

Herder's comments on Jewish assimilation raise larger questions

about the possibility of change within a given culture and the trans-

mission of ideas from one organically rooted culture to another.

Herder's universe seems to march to the beat of two different drums:

on the one hand, we have self-contained organic cycles of the birth,

maturation, and decline of individual cultures, a process best exem-

plified by the ancient Greeks, and on the other, we have a notion of

history as progress along an ascending line that leads from nature

through humans to God. Climatological determinism stands in

conflict with Herder's Enlightenment faith in the human capacity for

development or Bildung.37

The tension between organically rooted national communities and

a larger narrative of human progress becomes most evident in

Herder's treatment of the Orient. After beginning the second part of

the Ideen with some brief and rather disparaging remarks about the

Chinese and peoples of the Arctic, Herder lavishes praise on the

beautiful people of ancient Kashmir, a hidden paradise where the

inhabitants are physically beautiful, intellectually gifted, and equally

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

arts and sciences, to establish trade, and to set up governments. He

even goes so far as to suggest that the Garden of Eden must have been

located in the mountains of India and that the river surrounding it

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-

out all of earth's revolutions" (6:422-23).

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"

(6:227). Ancient Greece in particular benefited from Asian influence,

and the modern Europeans, in turn, have learned from the Greeks:

"From the realm of beautifully formed peoples we got our religion,

art, science, the entire body of our culture and humanity, as much or

as little as we have of it" (6:228). In contrast, "the Negro invented

nothing for the European" (6:227). Not surprisingly, Herder has little

good to say about the Egyptians. Overvalued in their prime, Egyp-

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,

arguing instead that they probably came from southern Asia.

Herder thus provides support for Martin Bernal's claim that Ger-

man writers tended to downplay African influence in favor of the

"Aryan myth." However, Herder does not use his faith in European

cultural supremacy to justify the slave trade, or at least not explicitly.

The same cannot be said of some of Herder's German contempo-

raries, many of whom took a lively interest in ethical issues sur-

rounding slavery. The Gottingisches historisches Magazin, for instance,

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,

one contributor wrote; splitting up families causes suffering, to be

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

they were in Africa.38 In another article the author concedes that

slavery causes great suffering for its victims, but points out that if it

did not exist, Europeans would have no coffee, sugar, or tobacco. He

therefore concludes that the benefits of slavery for humanity as a

whole justify the sufferings it causes the African people.39 Herder has

no patience for such arguments. A time will come, he predicts,

"when we will look back at our inhuman slave trade with as much

regret as that with which we regard ancient Roman slaves, or Spar-

tan helots" (6:642). Cultures should remain separate, if unequal, in

Herder's view; just because black Africans are inferior to white Euro-

peans does not give the Europeans the right to enslave them.

In certain cases, however, it is possible for one civilization to have

78 German Orientalisms

a beneficial effect on another. In seeking to explain how Asian cul-

ture migrated from Kashmir to Greece, and from ancient Greece to

modern Europe, Herder turns to organic metaphors. He describes

the Asian influence on Greece as a foreign seedling that takes root in

particularly fertile soil: "Gentle west winds fanned the crops that

were gradually transplanted from the heights of Asia and breathed

them full of life" (6:226). Modern Europeans, in contrast, receive the

benefits of Indo-Grecian culture from above: "We Northern Euro-

peans would still be barbarians if a benevolent breath of fate had not

wafted at least blossoms from the spirit of these people to us, so that

by being inoculated by the grafting of beautiful twigs onto wild stalks

we could, over time, be ennobled" (6:228). That is, the northern

European climate produces a barbaric culture; only the grafting of a

foreign "blossom" onto the native stock can inoculate Europeans

against their own cultural poison and eventually transform the plant

into something nobler. The image not only contradicts basic princi-

ples of horticulture-cherry twigs grafted onto apple trees do not

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.

The foreign influence that had proved so destructive to German cul-

ture when it came from France has a beneficial effect when it arrives

from India via Greece.

Despite his claim that each culture has its own independent valid-

ity, Herder nevertheless inscribes individual civilizations into a larger

narrative that leads him to justify "imperfect" cultures as necessary

stages in the course of human development: "Allow this to be the

stage of a still very imperfect culture; it is nevertheless necessary for

the childhood of the human race" (6:459). At times in the Ideen, as in

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

need and, indeed, the moral duty of human beings to develop

beyond the state of nature to what he terms Humauitdt. It is in fact

only through the process of Bildung that we become truly human at

all, "for actually we are not yet human beings, but become human

beings every day" (6:342). As a typical representative of his century,

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 79

Herder does not ask which culture has become the most highly

developed, but why European culture is the most advanced: "How,

then, did Europe attain its culture, and the rank that it is due above

other peoples?" (6:897). In recognizing the superiority of European

culture, however, Herder also acknowledges the negative conse-

quences of this development: "Human Bildung to rationality and

freedom" leads directly "to filling and ruling the earth" (6:154). Rea-

son is thus by its very nature instrumental reason; greater rationality on

the part of those who have developed their Humanitdt gives them the

freedom to rule the earth.

Herder therefore not only traces the development of Western cul-

ture out of its Eastern roots, but also considers the modern European

return as colonizers and conquerors to the lands in which their cul-

tures originated. He begins his discussion of India by lamenting its

current state: "How happy Industan could be if human hands had not

joined together to lay waste to the garden of nature and to torment

the most innocent members of the human race with superstition and

oppression . . . Happy lambs, why could you not graze undisturbed

and carefree on your meadows of nature?" (6:222-23). Such "lambs"

could offer little resistance to the warlike Mongolians who once

swept down from the north, or to the greedy Europeans who have

more recently brought them under their yoke. Here as elsewhere,

Herder condemns such imperialism: "All information and goods that

they bring to us from that region are no substitute for the evil that

they impose on a people that did nothing to them" (6:457-58).

Herder nevertheless follows this straightforward condemnation of

European rapacity with a more ambiguous comment about the

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"

(6:458). What is it that has "destined" the Indians to be the victims of

European aggression? Could they be partially to blame for their

unfortunate lot in life?

Although Herder laments the sufferings of the poor Indian

"lambs" of yore, he is not uncritical of contemporary Indian civiliza-

tion, voicing the familiar Western critique of the suttee and of Asian

despotism. The real "problem" with India is that it has remained

frozen in time, while the course of civilization has moved on.

80 German Orientalisms

Although Herder overtly condemns European greed, he therefore

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

despotism, this heavy burden of mankind, occurs only among nations

that want to bear it, that is, who feel its oppressive weight less"

(6:464). The injustices of the caste system condition the Indians to

submit to external force as well: "sooner or later the Brahman rule

makes a people ripe for subjugation" (6:457). Because India has stag-

nated for so long, it neither produces significant cultural products of

its own nor can absorb foreign influence: "How could the seed of

progressive science, that in Europe breaks through every stone wall,

take root in these realms?" (6:461). The seeds of European culture

cannot sprout in India in the way that Indian seedlings once flour-

ished in ancient Greece, nor can the blossoms of Indo-Grecian

influence that had such a beneficial effect on the European stock be

grafted back onto the withered root of modern Indian culture.

Time has passed India by. The culture that ancient Indians once

inspired has returned to them in the form of European aggression,

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

itself?" (6:461). Herder concludes that the Europeans progressed

because they worked hard together, whereas Asians benefited initially

from a gentle climate that eventually lulled them into an infantile tor-

por: "In most despotically ruled lands nature clothes people almost

effortlessly" (6:368). The Indians begin the process of world-histori-

cal Bildung, but they can neither participate in it nor benefit from it;

instead they remain locked in an early stage of development and are

thus susceptible to conquest by those who have progressed further.

Herder simultaneously condemns European conquest and coloniza-

tion of the East and excuses it as the unfortunate but inevitable con-

sequence of the civilizing process that they once set into motion.

Where do the Germans fit into Herder's account of world history?

Herder prefaced the fourth and final book of his fragmentary work

with a quotation from Virgil's Aeneid: "tantae molis erat, Germanas

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 81

condere gentes" [Thus it was difficult to found the German people]

(6:673). Drawing on Tacitus's Germania, Herder characterizes the

Germans as a warlike people with strong, beautiful bodies and terri-

ble blue eyes. They attack boldly but obey orders from their superi-

ors. Such militancy has been a mixed blessing: once converted to

Christianity the Germans turned on their heathen enemies within

Europe with destructive force, attacking both unconverted Germanic

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

to defend Europe from "the mad rage of the Huns, Hungarians,

Mongols, and Turks" (6:695-96), that is, from a series of Asian inva-

sions that threatened the integrity of Christian European culture.

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-

tion of Christianity for the freedom and security of all Europe"

(6:796-97). While most of the world degenerated into "Tartar disor-

der" [tartarische Unordnung], the Germanic peoples functioned as

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,

preserved what remained of classical culture in the monasteries, and

created new works of art to be enjoyed by all Europeans.

One of the keys to German superiority lay in their attitude toward

women and the family. "The German woman did not lag behind the

man; domestic diligence, chastity, loyalty, and honor have been a dif-

ferentiating characteristic of the women in all German tribes and

peoples" (6:797). Herder believes that the level of civilization in a

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

(6:319). According to Tacitus, the ancient Germans were different:

they took love seriously, tended toward monogamy, and were only

rarely guilty of infidelity. As noted earlier, Tacitus was probably less

concerned with ethnographical accuracy in his account of the Ger-

manic peoples than with setting up a positive counterpart to Roman

decadence, but his account of the ancient Germans' loyal wives and

breast-feeding mothers dovetailed nicely with Herder's understand-

ing of the natural distinctions between men and women: "A

woman's nature is different from man's; she feels differently" (6:316).

Virtuous women want to look their best, to keep things clean, to

support their husbands even at the cost of their own desires, and to

love and care for their children.

In such passages Herder echoes beliefs about gender roles

expressed in Rousseau's Emile (1762) and many other pedagogical

treatises of the late eighteenth century. The distinctions that Herder

and Rousseau found rooted in nature had their historical roots in the

changing economic structure of European society.4° In the old model

of the ganzes Haus, men, women, children, and servants lived and

worked together in the home. As state bureaucracies grew more

complex and demanded more labor, men from the educated middle

class began to work for local governments. The home became a pri-

vate feminized realm, defined in its opposition to the masculine

working world. Here women developed close emotional ties to their

children, organized the household, and provided a refuge for their

tired husbands. The new understanding of marriage and the family

was thus specific to the emerging middle class, whose members

defined their domestic virtues in opposition to what they perceived

as aristocratic libertinage. Lohenstein portrayed his noble characters as

paragons of virtue, to be sure, but he allowed his heroines to embody

martial valor and to assume positions of public authority in ways that

seemed not only improper, but also unnatural to the eighteenth-cen-

tury bourgeoisie.

Thus Herder's reflections on gender roles and family ties lead

directly to a sharp critique of both old-fashioned Herrschaft-rule

based on the personal authority of the local lord-and the impersonal

bureaucracy of the modern state.4' By defending the family as the

basis of German society, Herder expresses class-specific nationalist

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 83

sentiments in opposition to corrupting French influence and against

the injustices of the various absolutist governments in Germany: "for

the tyranny of aristocrats is a hard tyranny" (6:371). The state gov-

ernments can also alienate citizens from their families and themselves.

In contrast to Kant and Hegel, for whom the demands of the state

take precedence over individual desires, Herder stresses the impor-

tance of personal happiness in a society organized around the family

and the Volk: "Nature raises families; the most natural state is there-

fore a single people with a single national character" (6:369). Aggres-

sive expansion of the state to include those outside the national "fam-

ily" thus makes no sense: "Hence nothing seems so foreign to the

purpose of government as an unnatural expansion of the states, the

wild mixture of different types of people and nations beneath a single

scepter" (6:369-70). Nations should remain within their natural

boundaries where an ethnically pure people can flourish in whole-

some families with a minimum of government interference.

Herder elevates the medieval Germans to just such an ideal com-

munity. Initially the bellicose Germanic tribes commit their share of

sins against their European neighbors, but they soon protect Europe

against foreign invaders and provide a positive example to other

European nations of a community based on flourishing trade, the cul-

tivation of the arts, and domestic virtue. Unfortunately, Herder does

not continue his history of the Germans beyond the late Middle

Ages; a final volume was to have focused on the Renaissance, Refor-

mation, and more recent history. As it is, Herder leaves us with an

image of the Germans as the good Europeans who carry forth the

torch of human civilization that was first ignited in the Orient, while

criticizing other modern European nations who have returned to the

East as conquerors and colonizers. The absence of a German empire

becomes a moral advantage: while others exploit the rest of the

world, the Germans cultivate themselves at home.

NOVALIS: A PROVINCIAL COSMOPOLITAN

Few writers' reputations have undergone such thoroughgoing revi-

sion as that of Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-I8oi). Throughout

the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, Novalis was

84 German Orientalisms

known as the most stereotypically Romantic of Germany's Early

Romantic writers. Artists and critics depicted him as an ethereal

figure who dreamed of a magical blue flower that would lead him to

a world of poetry and love, and as a Christian visionary who made a

private cult out of his grief for a fiancee who died young. In the

postwar years this slightly cloying image of a Romantic dreamer

gradually yielded to that of a hardworking civil servant who studied

geology and helped supervise the local salt distillation industry, a

flirtatious aristocrat who was not above a dalliance or two with local

peasant girls, and a transcendental philosopher whose relationship to

Christianity was at best unorthodox and at times bordered on the

blasphemous.42 The tendency in recent Novalis reception, in other

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

tensions within Europe, and to the growing European dominance

over the rest of the world? "Wir sind auf einer Mission," writes

Novalis in Bluthenstaub [Pollen] (1798), "Zur Bildung der Erde sind

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

called to educate and transform the world?

At first glance it might seem odd to think about Novalis in any sort

of global context. Obviously he was no Captain Cook or Georg

Forster, but even in comparison with Goethe or the Schlegels,

Novalis traveled very little within Germany, and not at all beyond its

borders.44 Among a "nation of provincials," Novalis was even more

provincial than most.45 Although he preferred to stay close to home

in reality, Hardenberg was nevertheless quite ready to voyage to dis-

tant lands in his imagination, as this early poem attests:

Nein! Freunde kommt, lal3t uns entfliehen

Den Fesseln, die Europa beut,

Zu Unverdorbnen nach Taiti ziehen

Zu ihrer Redlichkeit.46

[No, friends, come, let us flee / The chains that Europe offers /

Let us go to uncorrupted Tahiti / To its righteousness]

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 85

Like most Germans of the time, Hardenberg was an "armchair con-

quistador,"47 whose understanding of the world and its history came

primarily from his voracious reading. Yet the history of European

imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries involved not

only the physical conquest of foreign places, but also the narratives of

universal history that made such conquest conceivable and desirable.

As someone steeped in the Idealist philosophy of Kant and Fichte,

Novalis was quite aware of the fluid boundary between the intellec-

tual and physical worlds. Fichte's influence was particularly impor-

tant, for he had transformed Kant's dictum that we can never per-

ceive things as they really are into a liberating philosophy that

celebrated the power and freedom of the human mind to shape or,

indeed, to create external reality.48 For Novalis, flights of the poetic

imagination become literally revolutionary acts that can transform the

world: "Signification by means of sounds and lines is an amazing

abstraction. Four letters signify God to me-a few lines a million

things. How easy it is to manipulate the universe in this way! . . . A

single command moves armies; the word freedom, nations" (2:413).

Like Herder before him, Novalis mapped out his vision of Ger-

many's place within Europe and in relation to the East long before

the country attained political unity or significant colonial possessions.

Herder conceived his philosophy of history during the prerevolu-

tionary 1770s and 178os, however, at a time when many German

intellectuals were beginning to chafe against the cultural hegemony

of France's ancien regime. Novalis, in contrast, began to write in the

wake of the events that placed France at the vanguard of a new, rev-

olutionary movement within Europe. Together with his Early

Romantic contemporaries, Novalis wanted to continue the French

upheaval of the political realm by revolutionizing the intellectual

world.49 He dreamed of writing a new Bible as part of the Early

Romantic project of Symphilosophie that aimed to shatter any tradi-

tional boundaries between categories of thought in an uncompromis-

ingly radical intellectual program. In a century already fascinated with

the philosophy of history, the French Revolution was immediately

perceived as a turning point that inspired new attempts on the part of

Novalis and his contemporaries to rethink the course of human

events and reconsider Europe's place in relation to the rest of the

86 German Orientalisms

world. To be sure, neither Novalis nor his Early Romantic friends

actually advocated political revolution in Germany; they were revo-

lutionary thinkers exhilarated by their self-appointed mission to

romanticize the earth.

Hence it came as a shock to his friends when Novalis unveiled a

seemingly reactionary collection of aphorisms entitled "Glauben und

Liebe" [Faith and love] (1798). Ostensibly a work of effusive praise

for the royal pair of Friedrich Wilhelm III and Queen Luise-who

had ascended to the Prussian throne on November 16, 1797

"Glauben und Liebe" defends hereditary nobility, criticizes the cur-

rent state of the French Revolution, and urges the Prussian subjects

to venerate the royal pair "as the ancients once venerated their gods"

(2:493). At second glance, however, "Glauben und Liebe" proves

considerably more subversive, particularly when read together with

the "Politische Aphorismen" [Political aphorisms] that were intended

as the second part of the original publication. Novalis writes that

although democracy and monarchy seem diametrically opposed, they

are in fact both part of a natural human development: in youth we

tend toward revolutionary democracy, but in later years we prefer to

settle down in a stable monarchy. Thus we should not rush to criti-

cize the French: "One ought to be at least politically, as well as reli-

giously, tolerant-let us concede the possibility that a rational being

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

a permanent state of affairs.

If we look still more closely at "Glauben und Liebe," we find that

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

subjects who voluntarily permit them to assume this role: "Monar-

chism [depends] on the voluntary acceptance of a human ideal." The

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

be kings [thronfahig]" (2:489). Thus Novalis uses the language of

monarchy to advocate democracy, or, more precisely, he sees both as

inextricably intertwined: "no king without a republic, no republic

without a king" (2:490). The current royal couple functions as a suit-

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

Hof soll das klassische Privatleben im Grol3en sein] (2:493). Queen

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

with "the education of her sex, supervision of the youngest children,

household manners, care of the poor and sick (particularly those of

her sex), the tasteful decoration of the home, the organization of fam-

ily celebrations" (2:491). In celebrating the middle-class virtues of the

Prussian queen, Novalis presents a mirror image of the French revo-

lutionaries' condemnation of Marie Antoinette's aristocratic vice.50

The revolutionary sentiments are similar, but the French set out to

guillotine their unrepentant aristocrats, whereas Novalis envisions a

nonconfrontational world in which the royal couple becomes virtu-

ally bourgeois.

If "Glauben und Liebe" "was Hardenberg's most extensive politi-

cal writing, and the most controversial in his lifetime,"5' "Die Chris-

tenheit oder Europa" [Christianity or Europe] (1799) has had the

most influence on his subsequent reputation. Conservative nine-

teenth-century readers found in it the Novalis who fit their precon-

ceived image of the Romantic writer as antirevolutionary, pious, and

full of nostalgia for the good old days, while left-leaning critics from

Heinrich Heine to Georg Lukics condemned the text for its appar-

ent glorification of medieval Catholicism and its open hostility

toward the Reformation and the Enlightenment.52 Here, it might

seem, German Romanticism begins its fatal swerve from "progressive

Universalpoesie" toward obscurantism and political reaction. The

text was already controversial the first time that Novalis read it aloud

to his fellow Romantic writers in November 1799. Friedrich

Schlegel initially responded with great enthusiasm, but Schleier-

macher, Schelling, and Dorothea Schlegel greeted it with suspicion

and even open hostility. After intense debate the group turned to

Goethe for his opinion as to whether or not it ought to be published.

Goethe decided against publication, and as a result the essay remained

unknown to a broader reading public for decades. It finally made its

way into the fourth edition of Novalis's works in 1826, just in time

to accelerate the Christian conservative, German nationalist appro-

88 German Orientalisms

priation of Hardenberg's work. Novalis had unwittingly provided the

Restoration with the myth it needed to legitimate its existence, just

as the essay would later fuel the "conservative revolution" of the early

twentieth century.53 The interpretive tide began to turn in the late

I950s, however, and by 1983 Hermann Kurzke acknowledged that

his investigation of the ties between Early Romanticism and political

conservatism seemed hopelessly outdated and conceptually flawed:

"Romantic conservatism does not begin with Novalis."54 Novalis

only seems to glorify the medieval past; his main purpose is to point

the way toward a modern, post-Revolutionary, even post-Christian

future.ss

As in the case of "Glauben und Liebe," Novalis demands consid-

erable mental athleticism on the part of his readers to discover revo-

lutionary ideas beneath their reactionary dress. He begins his essay full

of seeming nostalgia for the good old days of the Middle Ages: "It

was a beautiful, splendid time, when Europe was a single Christian

land" (3:507). People felt safe and protected in a peaceful world.

True, the Church repressed speculation about threatening topics, but

it was better that the masses should remain ignorant and faithful

rather than begin to doubt on the basis of partial knowledge. The

Reformation and the Enlightenment dealt a double blow to this

seemingly idyllic world: first, Luther split the Church into warring

factions and introduced a love of the letter through his Bible transla-

tions that obscured the spirit of a unified Christianity; then the

Enlightenment further secularized Europe by introducing a narrow-

minded rationality that inspired hatred of God. Despite first appear-

ances, however, Novalis does not advocate a return to the past. In

fact, he makes it clear that nature moves in only one direction: "his-

tory consists of progressing, constantly expanding evolutions"

(3:51 o). Given the trend initiated by the Reformation and the

Enlightenment, it was inevitable that history would continue its for-

ward progress: "a second, more comprehensive and more thorough-

going Reformation was unavoidable, and had to occur in the coun-

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

a revolution, and it had to take place in France. Because we cannot

go backward, we can only ask what will happen next. "Should the

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 89

Revolution remain French, as the Reformation was Lutheran?"

(3:518). Novalis's answer is no: "Germany is slowly but surely taking

the lead against other European nations" (3:519).

Novalis contrasted the self-centered violence of other European

nations against Germany's intellectual, artistic, and spiritual revolu-

tion: "While the other nations are preoccupied with war, [financial]

speculation, and partisan spirit, the German diligently transforms

himself into a member of a higher cultural epoch, and this progress

must give him a great advantage over the others in the course of

time" (3:519). Instead of lamenting a world grown pale through a

surfeit of mere reason, the Germans should enjoy their place in the

sun: "Poetry stands enticingly and colorfully like an adorned India

[wie ein geschmucktes Indien] in opposition to the cold, dead mountain-

tops of that scholastic reason [jenes Stubenverstandes]." Just as India is

located "in the center of the globe, so warm and splendid" while sur-

rounded by cold, fog, and darkness, so, too, Germany glistens above

the prosaic plains of Europe (3:520).

Novalis thus envisions two alternatives to a postrevolutionary

world: France stands for a modern nationalism arising out of the

Enlightenment that is by nature bellicose, mercenary, and separatist,

dividing Europe into warring factions, while Germany represents a

spiritual and poetic revolution that could bring peace and unity back

to Europe. The state of European affairs, in turn, has global conse-

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-

low citizens of the heavenly kingdom [Mitbirger des Himmelreichs]"

(3:524). As an outgrowth of European civilization, French national-

ism tends toward imperialism, both within Europe and beyond.

Hence Novalis mentions as historically significant the new French

"approach to the Orient in recent political relations" (3:518), a

slightly veiled reference to Napoleon's Egyptian campaign. German

Kultur, in contrast, has no such imperial ambitions, but it does have

cosmopolitan ties to other parts of the world. During the Middle

Ages Germany took part in a prenational world in which there was

not only a flourishing commerce of intellectual and earthly wares

within Europe, but also "out to the most distant India" [bis in das

fernste Indien hinaus] (3:509). Now Novalis envisions Germany lead-

90 German Orientalisms

ing the way to a new global culture in which national borders will

become as meaningless as they once were in the Middle Ages. Hence

the comparison between India and Germany is not merely acciden-

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

in which non-Europeans can join with Europeans as "fellow citizens

of the heavenly kingdom."

Although it was withheld from publication for nearly three

decades, "Die Christenheit oder Europa" had an immediate impact

on the work of August Wilhelm Schlegel and Adam Miiller. Schlegel

elaborated the ideas outlined in Novalis's essay in his lectures on the

Geschichte der romantischen Literatur [History of Romantic literature]

(1802-3). The lectures were delivered when the memory of the

"Europa" essay was still fresh, but before the Napoleonic conquest of

German territories gave a more militant edge to German nationalist

sentiments. Here Schlegel, like Novalis and also Ludwig Tieck,

rejects the view that the Middle Ages were a barbaric period of his-

tory and claims instead that modern European nations, no matter

how different they may have become, share a common "mother and

root" [Mutter und Wurzel] in medieval times.56 Looking back to the

past, Schlegel notes that Germanic tribes had overthrown the Roman

Empire, thereby becoming the second great world conquerors and

the founders of a medieval culture common to all of Europe. Until

the sixteenth century Europe remained united, but since that time it

has been divided by "narrow-minded national egotism" [bornierten

nationalen Egoismus] (22). According to Schlegel, only the Germans

have remained cosmopolitan in spirit, capable of great empathy and

appreciation for the foreign, because they remember the original

medieval unity of Europe better than other modern nations. It fol-

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

of humankind originates, then we should view Germany as the Ori-

ent of Europe [so ist Deutschland als der Orient Europas zu betrachten]"

(37). Following Novalis, Schlegel argues that whereas the rest of

modern Europe has become narrowly nationalistic, Germans remem-

ber their old cosmopolitanism and are thus best suited to reunite

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 91

Europe. On the surface, Schlegel argues against modern nationalism,

and he spends some time condemning Klopstock's bardic poetry as

both philologically unsound and culturally misguided. Even as

Schlegel rejects petty nationalisms, however, he also asserts a larger

pan-European cosmopolitanism based on German leadership. Ger-

many can afford to be appreciative of other nations in modern

Europe because it is the source of all European culture in the first

place.

The paradoxical combination of nationalist pride in Germany's

cosmopolitan tradition becomes more pronounced in Adam Miiller's

Vorlesungen iTber die deutsche Wissenschaft und Literatur [Lectures on

German scholarship and literature] (18o6). In the fifth of these lec-

tures Miller praises Novalis effusively because he allegedly recog-

nized a truth that remained hidden even to Goethe: "the omnipresence

of Christianity in history and in all forms of poetry and philosophy" (italics

in original).57 In such passages one sees the beginning of the conser-

vative interpretation of Novalis that was to gain strength in the later

nineteenth century.s8 In many ways Miiller's secret conversion to

Catholicism and career as a civil servant for Metternich's Austria, his

opposition to the Stein-Hardenberg reforms in Prussia, his outspoken

anti-Semitism, and his advocacy of an organic state ruled by a monar-

chy and based on traditional family values all make his later life typify

the reactionary turn of Romantic politics in the Restoration era. At

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

lectures, however, Miiller is still close in spirit to the revolutionary

thrust of Early Romanticism. Of particular interest in the light of

both the "Europa" essay and A. W. Schlegel's lectures is Miiller's

claim that Novalis should be seen as a certain type of world con-

queror: "Novalis, molded more by Germanic poetry, natural science,

and the loneliness of his honorable trade, decided to conquer the

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

turn briefly to a closer look at his Vorlesungen.

Miiller regards Germany as "the fortunate land of the center" [das

gliickliche Mittelland], meaning that it is both "the mother of nations

92 German Orientalisms

in today's Europe" and its current cultural and geographic center

(18). As Germany is the focal point of Europe, so Europe is the focal

point of the world. It would nevertheless be wrong for Europe to

suppress the rest of the world through violent conquest: "Europe

should become the center of world civilization, not just its summit"

[Mittelpunkt der Zivilisation der Welt, nicht bloB ihr Gipfel] (27). The

riches of both Indias (the subcontinent and the Caribbean) should

shine into Europe, but only to be reflected from Europe back into

the rest of the world. Miiller envisions a benevolent, if rather conde-

scending, Eurocentrism, in other words, marked by productive

exchange between continents rather than ruthless exploitation; the

colonies exist primarily to benefit the European core, but Europe also

exerts a beneficial influence outward to those benighted lands on the

periphery.

While contemporary Europe stands poised between the Old and

the New Worlds, Miiller writes that the major events of the past have

involved the interaction between only Asia and Europe, whose civi-

lizations embody two contrasting human types. The European is

republican and Greek, whereas the Asian is Romantic, monarchic,

aristocratic, and-Germanic. In medieval times the Asian principle of

nobility blended well with European culture, but during the Renais-

sance and Reformation the spirit of the Old World, meaning Greek

republicanism, began to win out over the Germanic/Asiatic world of

the Middle Ages. In an interesting reversal, Miiller thus rejects the

common view that modernity began with the revival of antiquity

during the Renaissance and suggests instead that the real modern

period was medieval, German, and-Asian. Adding gender to the

mix, Miiller maintains that the Greco-European republicans are mas-

culine, whereas the Asian-German aristocrats are feminine. While the

rest of Europe roams the world in a manly sort of way, intoxicated

with the freedom of the ancient world, only Germany remains pas-

sive and feminine. But what if that toward which the others strive

were in the end "a German being/essence" [ein deutsches Wesen]?

(44). What if Germany is not a masculine conqueror who wants to

possess the world, but rather a "woman" who rules by serving?

"Everything that the others have is only permanently theirs to the

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

to conquer a world that is already German in its essence. Hence Ger-

many does not need to practice active conquest, nor does Germany

need to feel bad about its receptivity to external influence, because

Germany is the world, and Novalis is its poet: "For if ever one man

seemed destined to this holy duty of mediating between German and,

indeed, all knowledge . . . it was Novalis" (56). By means of a

remarkable reversal, Miiller turns German fragmentation and subor-

dination into passive strength by trumping what he views as a petty,

masculine, Greco-European imperialism with a serene, feminine,

German-Asian cosmopolitanism. Novalis, not Goethe, becomes "the

true governor of the poetic spirit on earth" [der wahre Statthalter des

poetischen Geistes auf Erden].6o

With this set of oppositions in mind, let us turn to consider the

symbolic geography of Heinrich von Ofterdingen. In its current frag-

mentary format, the novel centers on the protagonist's journey from

Eisenach to Augsburg. Heinrich travels only a few hundred kilome-

ters to the southeast on the way to his mother's home, but he already

finds a warmer and more passionate climate that is better suited to

artistic inspiration. Here he falls in love and discovers his vocation as

a poet. We know from Novalis's fragments and Tieck's notes that the

budding writer was to have traveled much further in the completed

work: a sudden scene shift was to have placed Heinrich at the head of

an army in war-torn Italy. A storm would have driven him next to

Greece, and from there he would have traveled on to Jerusalem. In

the East Heinrich would have participated in the Crusades and

become familiar with Oriental poetry. After spending time in Rome,

Heinrich was to have returned to Germany, where he would have

had conversations with the Holy Roman Emperor. Finally, Heinrich

would have returned home to enter into a magically transfigured

poetic realm where time and space would cease to exist.

Even in its fragmentary form, Heinrich von Ofterdingen gives us a

good indication of the hero's future fate. On the way to Augsburg

Heinrich encounters Graf Friedrich von Hohenzollern, a retired

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

returning from the Orient to "the rawer Occidental air" (1:263). He

94 German Orientalisms

has brought back with him from Jerusalem an illuminated manuscript

written in a foreign language that seems related to Latin and Italian

(Provengal). Although Heinrich cannot understand the words, he

discovers pictures that bear an uncanny resemblance to himself.

Increasingly convinced that he has stumbled upon a mysterious

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

and nobler. . . He saw himself at the Kaiser's court, on board ship, in

intimate embrace with a slender, darling girl, in a battle with wild-

looking men, and in friendly conversation with Saracens and Moors"

(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

uncompleted episodes of its planned continuation. Heinrich will

fulfill his destiny as a poet, but not before he has completed his grand

tour of the Mediterranean world. In broad outlines, then, Heinrich von

Ofterdingen was to have retraced the path of world history blazed by

Herder in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit: Hein-

rich would have traveled back to the source of Western civilization

in the East before returning via Italy to northern Europe.

In the existing novel, Heinrich first encounters figures from the

East during a stopover on the way to Augsburg. Here old Crusaders

tell him of their exploits in the Holy Lands and encourage Heinrich

to join them in their next campaign. For a moment Heinrich wants

to take part in their cheerful plans to bathe the Holy Sepulcher in

heathen blood-" Wir waschen bald infrohem Muthe / Das heilige Grab

mit Heydenblute" (I1:233)-but then he encounters victims of the last

Crusade in Zulima and her child. Her family has been slaughtered,

and she has been torn from her homeland to live in German exile.

She assures Heinrich that Muslims respect Christ as a prophet and

that the Christians would have been free to visit his grave without

violence. A chastened Heinrich von Ofterdingen immediately forgets

his martial enthusiasm and resolves to help her in any way possible.

This brief episode introduces two contrasting models of European

interaction with the Orient: the first captures the Crusaders' desire to

crush infidels through military conquest, whereas the second portrays

the Oriental woman as a helpless victim who needs to be rescued and

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 95

protected by the Western man. The Crusaders embody a stereotypi-

cally aggressive masculinity of the sort portrayed in the early medieval

chansons de geste, whereas Heinrich's gentler concern for Zulima

recalls the romances portrayed in the medieval Spielmannsepen and in

the intercultural romances of the eighteenth century. In keeping with

the bellicose attitude of the Crusaders, Heinrich von Ofterdingen con-

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;

it goes directly toward destruction, and human madness appears in

the fullest form," intones Klingsohr. "Many wars, particularly those

that spring from national hatred, belong in this category, and they are

true poetry. Here the true heroes are at home, the noblest counter-

part to the poets" (1:285).

More often than not, however, Heinrich displays the poetic sensi-

bility that Klingsohr defines in opposition to warlike masculinity. If

in the first model the Orient becomes that which must be conquered

by Western man, in the second it becomes a woman who inspires

male development, in keeping with the Western tendency to imag-

ine the East as "passive, seminal, feminine, even silent and supine," to

use Edward Said's words.61 The feminized Orient simply is; Western

men are in the process of becoming. Hence Novalis would write of

Sophie "Sakontala" von Kiuihn, "She doesn't want to be anything-she

is something" [Sie will nichts sein-Sie ist etwas].62 Only Heinrich

develops from an innocent adolescent to a profound poet; Zulima

and Mathilde exist primarily to further his development. While

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

here it is only a short step to E. T. A. Hoffmann's parody of this

model of femininity in his novella Der Sandmann [The sandman]

(1817), in which the hero falls desperately in love with a beautiful

puppet.

Thus to a certain extent Heinrich von Ofterdingen exemplifies the

sort of ideology often criticized in feminist studies of the Bildungsro-

man.63 The global trappings of the novel are merely another vocabu-

lary for portraying male, heterosexual development in the sort of

modern nuclear family that emerged in the late eighteenth century.

96 German Orientalisms

In becoming a poet, Heinrich leaves behind the pragmatic working

world of his father to tap into what Friedrich Kittler has described as

the "primal orality" of the Mother's voice.64 In Augsburg, Heinrich

transfers his affections from his mother to Mathilde in a love whose

latently incestuous nature becomes manifest in the Rococo world of

the Mdrchen.65 In the context of the entire planned novel, Heinrich's

narcissistic return to the realm of the mother in Augsburg is only the

first stage of a journey that will lead him back to the cradle of West-

ern civilization; the family romance of part I is mapped onto a global

narrative of world history: "Where are we going? Always home-

ward" [Wo gehn wir denn hin? Immer nach Hause] (I:325). Hein-

rich's journey to the East functions both as a response to the sense of

"transcendental homelessness" that plagues the modern Western

world and as a desire to return to the protective embrace of hearth

and home.66 Hence in the Paralipomena to Heinrich von Ofterdingen

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

metaphysical questions is also about the psychodynamics of the

nuclear family, just as the paean to the Prussian monarchy in

"Glauben und Liebe" is also a clandestine glorification of bourgeois

life.

On another level, however, Novalis uses Heinrich's encounter

with the feminized Orient to explore the hermeneutic problems

associated with modern consciousness. Zulima describes the Orient

as an ancient land that is littered with monuments inscribed with

indecipherable texts: "You think and think, you sense individual

meanings, and you become more and more desirous to guess the

deep significance of the ancient writing" (1:236-37). Paradoxically,

the very incomprehensibility of the inscriptions makes them produc-

tive for the self-understanding of the reader: "The unknown spirit [of

these inscriptions] inspires a strange thoughtfulness, and even if you

leave without the desired discovery, you nevertheless have gained a

thousand remarkable insights into yourself' (I:237). Such passages

introduce what might be termed Novalis's transcendental Oriental-

ism: what matters is not so much the Orient an sich, but the image of

the Orient in the mind of its beholder. The letters of an ancient or

foreign alphabet appeal to the imagination as ciphers of an unfallen

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 97

language in which the spirit is not yet divorced from the written let-

ter, yet their very incomprehensibility reminds the readers of their

exclusion from that world. It is tempting to view Zulima's descrip-

tion of the encounter with the incomprehensible inscriptions as

another variant of Orientalist thought in which the feminized East

appears as an inscrutable, yet infinitely enticing mystery to the West-

ern man. On the one hand, the inability to understand the East points

to a deficiency on the part of the man, as Alice Kuzniar has observed:

"short of getting a sex change, he cannot master what she already

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

insights they gain into themselves.

Before reading the passage exclusively as an implicit indictment of

male narcissism, however, it is important to stress that it is Zulima

who describes the attempt to decipher the inscriptions; thus at least

this "Oriental" woman is privy to the hermeneutic challenges sup-

posedly reserved for Western men. She describes an alternative form

of comprehension derived from the incomprehensible stones: rather

than grasping a truth that can be incorporated into an increasingly

solid sense of personal identity, she hints at a process of letting go, of

finding a source of delight in signs that frustrate rational comprehen-

sion. In the fragmentary second part of the novel Heinrich speaks in

a similarly paradoxical vein of a flower that is "the most unmediated

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

never be satisfied and discover new meanings, new more delightful

revelations of beloved nature every day" (1:329). In writing of nature

as speaking a silent language, Novalis finds another formulation for

the problem that he solves so brilliantly in his "Monolog." Language

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

freedom of its self-contained world, or, as he puts it in Die Lehrlinge

98 German Orientalisms

zu Sais [The novices of Sais] (1798), "genuine Sanskrit would speak

for the sake of speaking, because speaking would be its desire and its

essence" (I:79). As the subjunctive voice indicates, Novalis is not

talking about the actual Sanskrit manuscripts that were beginning to

be deciphered in the late eighteenth century, nor does he claim to

have written "genuine Sanskrit" in his own poetry. In O'Brien's

words, "the Ursprache figures a theoretical possibility in the present

or, more exactly, a kind of 'presence'-that is never historically real-

izable."68 He can only gesture indirectly toward such language by

means of the self-undermining rhetoric that produces the Romantic

irony of the "Monolog."69

As the image of the Orient shifts from infidel warrior to victimized

woman to a site of suggestively mysterious signs in Heinrich von Ofter-

dingen, the Western man undergoes a corresponding transformation

from militant Crusader to protective lover to a figure who becomes

increasingly passive, receptive to external influence, and open to

metamorphosis in a process that Alice Kuzniar has described as the

feminine or androgynous antithesis to the solidification of the self

characteristic of male Bildung.7° Underscoring the "passive nature of

the protagonist" (I:34o), Novalis envisioned a continuation in which

Heinrich "becomes a flower, animal, stone, star" (1:341). He was

eventually to have entered a magical world in which all distinctions

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]"

(I:318-19). Images of androgyny abound in Novalis's works, most

famously in the concluding verses of the poem "Sehnsucht nach dem

Tode" [Longing for death] where he writes ofJesus as a bride and of

sinking down into "the father's womb" [des Vaters School3]

(I:157).7' In the fragment collection Das allgemeine Brouillon Novalis

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

Mann] (3:262). The shifting notions of masculinity in Heinrich von

Ofterdingen correspond to the political categories sketched in "Chris-

tenheit oder Europa" and developed more fully in Adam Miiller's

Vorlesungen: if Heinrich's occasional accesses of aggressive masculinity

recall the nationalist partisanship of France and other European

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 99

nations, his "effeminate" or androgynous desire to efface difference

in the name of a higher unity recalls Novalis's vision of a gentler Ger-

man cosmopolitanism that will reawaken the prenational spirit of

European unity and reconnect Europe to the East.

Novalis formulated his cosmopolitan ideas in the broader context

of the shift among German intellectuals from prerevolutionary patri-

otism to postrevolutionary nationalism. Toward the beginning of the

eighteenth century Germans began to publish Moralische Wochen-

schriften (moral weeklies) on the model of the British Spectator and

Tatler. German journals such as Der Patriot encouraged personal

virtue and civic loyalty among a rapidly expanding middle-class read-

ing public. Such patriotism differed from later nationalism in that it

was provincial and pre-political.72 Germans were to remain obedient

subjects of their local lords, not active participants in a constitution-

ally governed nation-state. Such provincial patriots could also be cos-

mopolitan intellectuals without contradiction; hence Wieland argued

in the 1770s against the bardic nationalism inspired by Klopstock and

Herder, claiming that Germans would be foolish not to participate in

a broader European culture. The French Revolution introduced a

new model to European politics that transformed local patriotism

into modern nationalism. Subjects no longer looked up in loyalty to

their lords, but toward their fellow citizens who stood in solidarity at

their sides. In the loose confederation of the old Holy Roman

Empire, provinces retained considerable autonomy and geographic

boundaries remained porous. Individual regions within the revolu-

tionary nation of France, in contrast, became increasingly intercon-

nected and homogenous, while borders against external foes were

more sharply drawn. Filled with the sort of "partisan spirit" that

Novalis criticizes in his "Europa" essay, the new nation could easily

turn imperialist, and, indeed, the French revolutionary armies soon

set out to export their civilization to the rest of Europe.

In response to the French Revolution, the cosmopolitanism that

had been part of a compensatory provincialism became part of an

alternative program of German nationalism. The isolated German

intellectuals who once reached out from their provincial backwaters

to participate in European culture began to think of themselves as

part of a cultural nation (Kulturnation) defined in opposition to

100 German Orientalisms

French imperial civilization. As the elderly Wieland commented in

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

German cosmopolitanism became a source of national pride. In this

spirit Novalis praises the German gift for literary translations, which

he sees as "an indication of the very high, uncorrupted character of

the German people. Germanness is cosmopolitanism mixed with the

strongest individuality [Deutschheit ist Kosmopolitismus mit der krafiigsten

Individualitaet gemischt]." Like the alchemist's elixir, Schlegel's Shake-

speare translation both enriches the German language and improves

the original English: "Only for us are translations elaborations

[Erweiterungen] . .. I am convinced that the German Shakespeare is

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-

rent project, but if there is nationalistic hubris in his comment about

the superiority of the German Shakespeare, it is not based on pride in

German linguistic or racial purity, but rather in the German ability to

absorb and transform foreign influence.

Novalis's Early Romantic cosmopolitanism stands poised between

prerevolutionary patriotism and post-Napoleonic nationalism. Look-

ing back somewhat cynically to the eighteenth century, it is possible

to view the new German cosmopolitanism as little more than the old

provincialism writ large. Given the continued isolation of German

intellectuals, their lack of national unity, and the absence of empire,

they could be nothing but cosmopolitans: "The Germans had no

fleet, no state, no 'Revolution,' but they had the idea of the [Holy

Roman] Empire and the Reformation . . . the 'world-spirit' [Welt-

geist] had become conscious of itself among them. If anyone was, the

Germans were 'cosmopolitans'-and nothing but that."75 Looking

ahead to the nineteenth century, we can see the anti-imperial Ger-

man cosmopolitanism turn into a more militant nationalism, begin-

ning already in 18o6. Perhaps Novalis would have become a conser-

vative nationalist, had he lived longer; he already plays a risky game

by flirting with reactionary rhetoric that could and did become dan-

gerous in the hands of subsequent ideologues. Taken on its own

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 101

terms, however, and in his immediate historical context, Novalis's

political thought has little to do with subsequent German nationalism

and imperialism; it expresses rather the utopian vision of a provincial

cosmopolitan.

THE BILDUNG OF THE GERMAN NATION

Napoleon's decisive defeat of the Prussian armies in the fall of 18o6

gave new urgency to the German nationalist movement. Some writ-

ers urged their fellow Germans to direct military action: Heinrich

von Kleist wrote ferocious verses about stuffing the Rhine full of

French corpses, while Theodor Korner and Ernst Moritz Arndt com-

posed poetry designed to inspire German soldiers in the battle against

Napoleon's troops. Other German intellectuals, however, encour-

aged the Germans to look first within themselves to discover what

had gone wrong and how it might be possible to rejuvenate the Ger-

man people in their hour of "deepest humiliation."76 Thus in his

Reden an die deutsche Nation [Addresses to the German nation]

(1807-8) Fichte called for a complete reform of educational policies:

"Bildung of the nation itself" in a program of "German national edu-

cation" [deutsche Nationalerziehung] was his goal.77 He claims that

the Germans are better suited to this sort of education than other

European nations because they are a people who have remained in

place for centuries (Stammvolk) and because the German language has

never been corrupted by foreign influence-true, the German lan-

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

the better. Reversing common logic, he contends that it is not indi-

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

expresses what Foucault identified as a new "episteme" in which

"language becomes the locus of tradition, of the unspoken habits of

thought, of what lies hidden in a people's mind; it accumulates an

ineluctable memory which does not even know itself as memory."78

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)

and thus incapable of higher development. Elsewhere, however,

Fichte concedes that at times the Germans have been seduced into

accepting foreign influence: "The ancient Germans believed that the

only way to escape barbarism was to become Roman" (83). Later

generations have looked to the Spanish or the English, "according to

whichever happens to be in fashion at the moment" (84). Now that

the French have invaded German soil, Fichte concludes, they pose

the most immediate military and ideological threat to Germany's

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

by a living linguistic tradition that distinguishes them from and makes

them superior to other European nations, in particular the French.

From this perspective, the victory of the French armies actually

becomes a sign of weakness on their part: the very desire to export

the Revolution is symptomatic of their own deracinated civilization.

The Germans, although temporarily subject to French military force,

have a vital indigenous Kultur that their oppressors lack. Fichte nev-

ertheless fears that the Germans will succumb to French influence out

of an unjustified inferiority complex. The real enemy is not

Napoleon's army but the seductive force of the foreign ideology that

threatens to alienate Germans from their own cultural tradition. For

this reason he warns against the appeal of such foreign words as

Humanitat, Liberalitat, and Popularitat, which in a German context can

only cause "impotence and a conduct without dignity" (17). Thus

Fichte both rallies the Germans against an external foe and warns

them not to become their own worst enemies. His proud references

to the continuity and vitality of German culture function as compen-

satory fictions designed to mask the sense that the German nation

exists only as a fragile figment of the collective imagination.

In response to Fichte's call for the Bildung of the German nation,

the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III encouraged his minister of

education, Wilhelm von Humboldt, to establish a university in

Berlin. Beginning in May 1809, Humboldt responded with a series of

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 103

memoranda in enthusiastic support of the idea. He admits that it may

seem odd to work on such a project at a time "when part of Germany

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

"national education and Bildung" been greater.79 Elementary and

high schools are important for individual provinces, he argues, but

only the university can reach beyond local borders and exert an

influence "on the Bildung of the entire German-speaking nation."8s

Although conceived as an immediate response to defeat in war and

foreign occupation, Humboldt's plans for a new institution in Berlin

mark the culmination of a series of changes in the German university

in the course of the eighteenth century.8I Around 1700 the typical

German student could still expect to take courses in Latin in a cur-

riculum in which theology reigned supreme. Already in the late sev-

enteenth century, however, a few individuals-most notably Chris-

tian Thomasius-had begun to teach in German, and by 1750 German

had become the primary language for academic instruction. Professor-

ships began to be established in rhetoric, so that students could learn to

write well in their native language; philosophy displaced theology, and

aesthetics emerged as a subdiscipline of philosophy.

The place of the university within German society began to

change as well: in the seventeenth century the university had been a

community of scholars who formed an independent Gelehrtenrepublik,

but in the course of the eighteenth century universities were incor-

porated into the state. Professors became civil servants whose purpose

was to train the next generation of young men for careers within the

rapidly expanding government bureaucracies. Humboldt did not

conceive of such training in terms of practical instruction for specific

tasks, however. On the contrary, he felt that the university years were

to be devoted to acquiring a well-rounded humanistic education

defined in opposition to specialization in any particular area: "It [the

university] must only consider the harmonious development of all

capacities within its students."82 In his view, university studies should

aim for depth rather than breadth; the select handful of young men

suited for such an education should not memorize lists of disjointed

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

the character."8'3 As Goethe's Faust had explained impatiently to his

assistant Wagner, rhetoric means nothing "when it doesn't come

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

The male subject engaged in a process of development or Bildung

experiences his years at the university as a kind of suspended anima-

tion. By this I do not mean the sort of torpor often witnessed among

students in overheated lecture halls. Humboldt's student is fully alive,

intellectually and spiritually, but temporarily suspended from any

practical participation in the state. A little more than a decade earlier,

Humboldt's friend Friedrich Schiller had described just this sort of

practical impracticality in his theory of aesthetic education. Writing

in the wake of the French Revolution, Schiller maintained that the

best way to solve political problems was not by storming the barri-

cades, but by temporarily turning away from contemporary affairs to

contemplate works of timeless beauty. In such moments we experi-

ence what he terms "the aesthetic condition" [der asthetische Zus-

tand], in which all of our faculties are aroused and engaged in a state

of harmonious tension. Individuals thus entranced are in no position

to perform any particular task, but they return to reality refreshed,

ennobled, and ready to participate in "the aesthetic state" [der

isthetische Staat].ss In Schiller's admittedly somewhat utopian

scheme, German Bildung through a process of aesthetic education

functions as the peaceful, organic alternative to the French Revolu-

tion. Humboldt's university, in turn, becomes the institutional site

for the aesthetic education of Germany's intellectual elite in the wake

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 logic of Bildung proceeds through a series of homologies: the

autonomous individual matures in an institution that is granted tem-

porary autonomy from the state in a process analogous to the experi-

ence of autonomous art.86 Both the aesthetic condition and univer-

sity study provide a contemplative moment in which the subject is

temporarily relieved of the need for practical activity in everyday life.

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 105

The young man may learn various facts at the university, but, as

Humboldt suggests, what he really learns is about himself. Self-

reflection forms an integral part of individual Bildung, and introspec-

tive moments play a central role in the corresponding literary genre

of the Bildungsroman. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, for instance, moves

in a seemingly random sequence from one event to the next in a way

that recalls the picaresque novel. From time to time, however, Wil-

helm steps back to contemplate his life, and for a moment, at least,

chaotic experiences seem part of a coherent narrative.8s When, for

example, Wilhelm reads the account of his own life that has been

secretly written by the members of the Turmgesellschaft [Society of the

tower], he marvels at their ability to make sense out of his confused

past: "for the first time he saw his image outside of himself-not, to

be sure, as in a mirror, a second self-but, as in a portrait, a different

self."88' Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen has a similar experience

when he leafs through an illuminated manuscript that turns out to be

a slightly camouflaged self-portrait. In such moments the protagonist

of the Bildungsroman becomes both the perceiving subject and object

represented, or, more precisely, the subject is constituted through the

act of self-reflection.

If individuals portrayed in the Bildungsroman gain a sense of who

they are in the present by looking back over the events of their past,

then the collective German subject could do the same by studying

the history of its national literature and the development of its lan-

guage. Thus the nationalism that inspired the restructuring of the

German university led to a new interest in both medieval literature

and the linguistic ties between modern German and its ancient Indo-

European roots. The combined German interest in the Middle Ages

and the Orient, in turn, gave rise to the academic disciplines of Ger-

manistik and comparative linguistics, and both informed the effort to

make Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival a paradigmatic work of the

German national literature.

LINGUISTIC NATIONALISM AND THE EAST

Fichte's nationalist linguistics set the stage for Friedrich Schlegel's

treatise Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier [On the language and

106 German Orientalisms

wisdom of the Indians] (18o8). As a young man Schlegel had been

one of the first German participants in the "Oriental Renaissance." In

his Gesprach hber die Poesie [Conversation about poetry] (i8oo)

Schlegel celebrated "the true Middle Ages" as "a fruitful chaos

toward a new order of things" that arose from the confluence of Ger-

manic and Oriental influences: "An uncorrupted wellspring of new

heroic songs poured over Europe with the Germanic peoples, and

when the wild strength of Gothic poetry met with an echo of the

charming fairy tales of the Orient through Arabian influence, a

cheerful guild of inventors of charming songs and strange stories blos-

somed on the southern coast toward the Mediterranean."89 Schlegel

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

source will perhaps the semblance of southern passion that we now

find so attractive in Spanish poetry appear again in a limited way in

the West."9°

Schlegel began to deepen his knowledge of Oriental languages and

literature when he moved to Paris in 1802. Although he had origi-

nally intended to study medieval painting, he soon began to learn

Persian, and by 1803 he had immersed himself in the study of San-

skrit.9' Schlegel continued work on the project after returning to

Germany in 1804, and after long delays in which he grew increasingly

impatient with his publisher, the treatise finally appeared in the spring

of 1808. Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier thus marks the culmi-

nation of Friedrich Schlegel's interest in the Orient, but also the

beginning of the end. Soon after the essay appeared in print Schlegel

converted to Catholicism, and already in the text Schlegel distanced

himself from the ancient culture he had once so admired, sharply crit-

icizing the fundamental errors of Indian religion in the light of

"Christianity, which alone reveals truth and knowledge that is higher

than all rational blindness and insight. "92 Despite his reservations

about Indian pantheism and fatalism, Schlegel nevertheless maintains

his admiration for the Sanskrit language, and it is through his com-

ments on the development of modern European languages from the

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 107

ancient Indian root that Schlegel inaugurates a new phase in the his-

tory of German Orientalism.93

Schlegel subscribes to Fichte's theory of language as a dynamic, liv-

ing force of nature, but he extends the roots of Germany's linguistic

tradition back to ancient India. No longer content with the rather

vague Early Romantic references to India as the land of Poesie,

Schlegel writes an extended scholarly analysis of Sanskrit in compar-

ison with other languages. In Schlegel's view, there are two basic lan-

guage types: noninflected or agglutinative languages that move indi-

vidual atoms into different combinations, and inflected languages that

modify their roots from within.94 Although Schlegel claims rather

disingenuously that he does not mean to denigrate agglutinative lan-

guages such as Chinese, he clearly prefers the organic structure of

inflected languages such as Sanskrit or Greek, in which "every root is

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

that they arose organically, and form an organic network"

(8:157-59).95 We can trace the history of inflected languages back

thousands of years and across continents "up to the simple origins of

their first roots" (8:159), where we find Sanskrit in its pristine clarity

and unsurpassed philosophical depth. Thus modern European lan-

guages gain dignity through a genealogy that leads back to ancient

Asia, and Schlegel even speculates that the peoples of northern India

may have migrated as far north as Scandinavia, although he decides

not to pursue "this very important question for history of our father-

land" (8:293) in this context. Schlegel nevertheless remains con-

vinced that "Asians and Europeans [form] only one large family; Asia

and Europe [comprise] one indivisible whole," and that we should

therefore view "the literature of all civilized peoples as a continuous

development and as a single intimately interconnected structure, as

One large entity" (8:315).

Despite the seeming generosity of this passage, Schlegel's implicit

denigration of agglutinative languages excludes many peoples from

this world-historical development, and his theory thus marks a con-

siderable constriction of Early Romantic cosmopolitanism into a

more narrowly defined Indo-European tradition. By 1823 the Ger-

man scholar H. J. Klaproth narrowed the tradition still further by

108 German Orientalisms

renaming Indo-European as Indo-Germanic.96 Although Schlegel

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

und neuen Literatur [History of ancient and modern literature] (1812).

Rejecting charges that the fall of the Roman Empire led only to bar-

barism, Schlegel claims that Germanic peoples actually brought light

to the Middle Ages, particularly when one compares their "so splen-

didly developing national strength" with the cultural stagnation of

the Byzantine Empire.97 In no other European country has "a people

[ Volk] been imbued since time immemorial with such spiritual

strength as the German, the first, indeed, the only people in Europe

in which the power of nature resting in the depths of humanity had

so revealed and preserved itself."98

The subsequent history of German Indology is well known, at least

in its broad outlines: in 1818 August Wilhelm Schlegel received the

first German chair for Sanskrit studies at the University of Bonn; the

second such chair went to Franz Bopp, the founder of comparative

linguistics, at the University of Berlin in 1821. Despite the fact that

classes in Sanskrit studies were poorly attended, German universities

continue to endow chairs in the field; indeed, the percentage of

growth in professorships of Indian philology and the related field of

comparative linguistics "outpaced all other subjects at the three

largest universities in the area that became the German Empire."99

German leadership in the fields of comparative linguistics and Indol-

ogy was widely acknowledged throughout Europe and North Amer-

ica during the nineteenth century. German scholars often occupied

chairs at foreign universities, while French, British, and American

Indologists found that a period of study in Germany was indispens-

able for their professional development. Travel to India, in contrast,

seemed expensive, dangerous, time-consuming, and ultimately

beside the point, as scholars were more interested in ancient lan-

guages than the modern individuals who happened to be living on

the subcontinent. As we have seen, Herder already expressed little

more than pity for the victims of British colonization, despite his

effusive praise for ancient India, and nineteenth-century scholars

maintained the focus on the past as they sought the roots of Indo-

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 109

European culture. The claim for linguistic affinities between Sanskrit

and German gradually shifted to arguments about special racial bonds

between superior "Aryan" peoples, most notably in the work of

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and from here it is a short step to the

racist ideology of the Third Reich.'°°

As always, one must be cautious in tracing such a teleology from

the Romantic fascination with India to claims of Aryan supremacy in

Nazi Germany. To be sure, some German Indologists did lend their

scholarly weight in support of the fascist regime. Sheldon Pollock

recounts one particularly grotesque instance of the Munich Indolo-

gist and Nazi Party member Walter Wiist delivering a lecture to SS

officers on "continuities between ancient Indian and contemporary

German thought" that culminated in the claim that the ancient Aryan

Weltanschauung "is to be found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, a text that

thus evinces a spiritual continuum stretching from the second millen-

nium B.C. to the present."' According to Pollock's figures, approx-

imately one-third of the tenured German professors of Indology dur-

ing the 1930s were active party members, while the vast majority of

the rest did nothing in public to oppose the regime. Whether they

would have been allowed to voice such protest is another question,

of course; Pollock does mention that a handful of scholars who were

Jewish or married to Jews either fled the country or committed sui-

cide (94-95). By the same token, not all nineteenth-century German

Indologists were racists; to mention only one prominent example,

Max Miiller "thought 'Aryan' should remain only a linguistic cate-

gory because he believed there was no way of determining skin color

or other racial characteristics from the few existing linguistic

clues."'02 Even Friedrich Schlegel "did not get high marks from the

Nazis" because he was a proponent ofJewish emancipation who also

married a converted Jew and voiced qualified praise for the achieve-

ments of both Arabic and Hebraic languages.'03

Viewed in their immediate historical context, Fichte's and

Schlegel's works of the Napoleonic period do participate in the

widespread surge of German nationalist enthusiasm during the

Napoleonic years. At this point in time, however, nationalism had

positive as well as negative characteristics. Among certain intellectu-

als, to be sure, German nationalism went hand in hand with anti-

110 German Orientalisms

Semitism. Achim von Arnim's "Christlich-Deutsche Tischgesell-

schaft," founded in 18o6, excluded "Philistines," women, and Jews,

but it found room for Clemens Brentano and Adam Miiller.104 In

1811 Miiller proclaimed that he and his companions were waging

war on two fronts: an ironic battle against the Philistines and a seri-

ous struggle against the Jews, "against a breed without profession,

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

Germans expressed enthusiasm for Enlightenment ideals and hoped

to unite the country under a constitutional government that

respected human rights and civil liberties. The question, as Heine

viewed it years later, was not whether one should be a nationalist or

not, but whose nationalism would prevail. If the Germans could

complete the revolution begun by the French and, in turn, spread

freedom to the entire world, writes Heine in his preface to Deutsch-

land: Ein Wintermdrchen [Germany: A winter's tale] (1844), then there

would be no need for petty disputes about borderlands such as Alsace

and Lorraine, for all would be included in a larger unity: "all of

Europe, the entire world-the entire world will become German! I

often dream about Germany's mission and universal rule when I

wander beneath oak trees. This is my patriotism."'°6

Whose nationalism would prevail? The reactionary, anti-Semitic

monarchism of the "Heidelberg Romantics" or the revolutionary

liberalism that extended from the Early Romantics to the politically

engaged poets of the Vormirz? With the benefit of hindsight, we

know what happened under Bismarck and Hitler, but until at least

1848, the question was unresolved and a matter of hot dispute. And

whose Orientalism would prevail? Could Wieland, Goethe, and the

Early Romantics inspire a spirit of generous German cosmopoli-

tanism of the sort that still reverberates in Heine's confession of faith?

Or would the more narrowly nationalistic belief in an Indo-Ger-

manic linguistic and racial kinship predominate? Here again, our

knowledge of the outcome in the works of certain German Indolo-

gists in the Nazi era can obscure the variety of positions within the

nineteenth-century academic discipline and impoverish the wealth of

the German literary imagination.

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 111

INVENTING GERMANISTIK AND MAKING

WOLFRAM GERMAN

While Friedrich Schlegel was exploring linguistic ties between Ger-

many and the East, others turned their interest to the history of the

national literature. Renewing Herder's faith in the voice of the peo-

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

which is most its own and most worthy."'07 In seeking an indigenous

literary tradition allegedly untainted by foreign influence, the

Romantics turned above all to the Middle Ages. Now, the notion

that the Romantics single-handedly rediscovered medieval literature

has long since been dispelled as a myth. Major figures of the German

Enlightenment, including Gottsched and Lessing, devoted at least

some attention to the Middle Ages, while the Swiss authors Bodmer

and Breitinger made a systematic attempt to republish major works of

German medieval literature.'s8 Despite their best intentions, how-

ever, the new editions did not capture the popular imagination.

Goethe was typical in this regard: when he visited Zurich in 1779,

Bodmer failed to arouse his interest in a copy of Das Nibelungenlied,

and three years later Goethe left Christoph Heinrich Miiller's new

edition of the epic largely unread.'09 Already in the 176os Klopstock

had begun his patriotic phase by imitating what he believed were

pre-Carolingian bardic poets, yet the flurry of interest he sparked in

the earliest Germanic literature soon died as well."0 It was only in the

wake of the French Revolution that the Early Romantics began to

recuperate medieval literature for a broader audience. Beginning

with Tieck's editorial work in the 1790s and continuing through the

first decades of the nineteenth century, Germans scrambled to collect

and publish every scrap of medieval poetry they could find, while

writing modern literature in a medieval mode." Gradually the new

enthusiasm for German medieval literature made its way into the uni-

versity as well, and in 181o Friedrich Hagen von der Hagen was

awarded the first professorship for the study of German literature at

the University of Berlin, largely on the strength of his edition of Das

112 German Orientalisms

Nibelungenlied. What had begun as the work of a few poets and iso-

lated intellectuals soon became part of the official program of higher

education for generations of young men in the German university

system.

Given the patriotic bent of the early German medievalists, it is not

surprising that the heroes of Das Nibelungenlied took center stage in

their work, flanked by Hildebrand, Hadubrant, and the Recken of Die

deutsche Heldensage."2 Such characters could proudly join ranks with

the old Germanic hero Arminius in the struggle against the latter-day

"Romans" of France. "3 Wolfram von Eschenbach was more difficult

to enshrine in the pantheon of Germany's national heroes, even

though he had long been one of the most widely read medieval

authors.'4 In his literary works Wolfram draws on the international

traditions of Arthurian romance from England, Wales, and France, as

well as the Grail legends of the Middle East. His characters in Wille-

halmrn and Parzival seem unusually tolerant of non-Christian "hea-

thens," while paying little attention to national differences within

Europe. If Wolfram seems partial to anyone, in fact, it is to the royal

family of Anjou in western France, and not to his native Bavaria or to

the Thuringian court where he probably composed his works."5

While the Early Romantics respected Wolfram's talent, they viewed

him as part of a foreign, even Oriental, literary tradition. For exam-

ple, Tieck wrote that while Das Heldenbuch and Das Nibelungenlied

show close ties to a grandiose but also bloodthirsty and terrible

Nordic mythology, romances such as Parzival reveal "the gentle spirit

of the Orient and Persia and India.""'6 August Wilhelm Schlegel

found Parzival "extremely bizarre, but a great and rich composi-

tion.""7 Friedrich Schlegel, finally, praised Wolfram von Eschenbach

as "the most artful of all German poets of this time" but also noted his

"inclination to an almost Oriental wealth of imagination.""' While

these Early Romantic writers are uniformly appreciative, if slightly

puzzled, by Wolfram's "Oriental" exuberance, some minor nine-

teenth-century writers portrayed Wolfram critically as a Frenchified

Zivilisationsliterat whose works stand in uneasy proximity to "authen-

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

major medieval authors to the French. Thus the task of nineteenth-

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 113

century Wolfram reception was to find a way to reclaim him for the

national literature, to make Wolfram German.

The first step toward Wolfram's repatriation was to move early

Germanistik from patriotic enthusiasm to scholarly precision. As typi-

cal of the first generation of Germanisten, Friedrich Hagen von der

Hagen was not, strictly speaking, a scholar but more of a popularist

and patriot best known for producing a Feldausgabe of Das Nibelung-

enlied that German soldiers carried with them into battle against

Napoleon's troops. Soon after the French had been defeated, how-

ever, German medievalists began to demand a more scholarly

approach to their work.It20 A first turning point came in 1815 when

August Wilhelm Schlegel denounced Jacob Grimm's commentary on

a scene in Parzival as an example of"wilde Philologie" based more on

random association than compelling textual or historical evidence.I2'

In the ensuing decades Karl Lachmann developed a rigorous editorial

method intended to put an end to the reign of enthusiastic amateurs.

By basing his technique on principles established in the prestigious

field of Classical Studies, Lachmann gave new dignity to the emerg-

ing discipline of Germanistik and produced scholarly editions that set

the standard in the field.I22 Lachmann was passionately dispassionate

about his work, denouncing bumbling dilettantes as not only inept as

scholars but morally flawed. A meticulously precise editor whose idea

of a hobby was to collect misprints in newspaper articles,23 Lach-

mann turned the study of German medieval literature into a precise

science for a handful of initiates. It is therefore somewhat ironic that

Lachmann should also have paved the way for a broader popular

reception of Wolfram's Parzival. His lecture of October 1819, prob-

ably delivered at the monthly meeting of the Royal German Society

of Konigsberg, marked a turning point in the history of German

Wolfram reception.'24 Lachmann made the revolutionary claim that

Parzival was tightly organized around the protagonist's development

from a simpleton to the Grail king and that Wolfram thus could not

have written the sprawling, episodic Jiingere Titurel.125 With one

stroke Lachmann moved Parzival to the center of Wolfram-Forschung

and paved the way for Wolfram's entry into the national literature by

anachronistically turning Parzival into that most "German" subgenre

of the novel, the Entwicklungs- or Bildungsroman.I26 The modern

114 German Orientalisms

reception of Parzival coincides with the heyday of the German Bil-

dungsroman, the beginnings of academic Germanistik, and the contin-

uing history of German Orientalism.

In the course of the nineteenth century a rift developed between

the high priests of the Lachmann school and medievalists who con-

tinued to reach out to a broader audience.27 Popularizers included

San Marte (A. Schulz) and Karl Simrock, who translated Wolfram's

Parzival into modern German in 1836 and 1842, respectively, as well

as the early historians of the Germany's national literature, who

"were not writing for universities but for the general public." 28 One

such figure was Georg Gottfried Gervinus, who published his path-

breaking Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen [His-

tory of the poetic national literature of the Germans] between the

years 1835 and 1842. A political liberal, Gervinus wrote his volume

to inspire the nation to a sense of self-worth. Like many others,

Gervinus takes pride in the works of Goethe and Schiller, which he

views as the culmination of Germany's literary development, but

then moves to the surprising conclusion that the age of literature is

now past, while the time for political change has come. Goethe had

once claimed that Germany did not desire the revolutions necessary

to produce classical literature, but Gervinus disagrees: "But we do

desire such changes and directions; and if the nature of the develop-

ment should make revolutions necessary, then it is smarter to meet

them halfway rather than to avoid them."'29

In seeking the origins of the national literature, Gervinus turns to

the Middle Ages, devoting the first of his five volumes to a detailed

discussion of German medieval poetry. He claims that the Crusades

played a central role in overcoming the influence of antiquity and

allowing the national and modern character to take root, a turning

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

began its inexorable development toward modern individualism,

while the East remained frozen in the past as the unchanging Other

of the Western Orientalist imagination. Gervinus singles out Das

Nibelungenlied as the national epic, whose heroes "full of healthy

strength, full of upright if also coarse characteristics, full of rough but

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,

and immoral contents of the French romances" (I:382-83). In Wol-

fram's Parzival, however, we encounter a different sort of hero who

stands on the cusp of a new age: "Thus Parzival depicts a youth full

of the drive toward external deeds, full of the Weltsturmerei of the

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

of character" (1:434). Parzival becomes the prototypical modern Ger-

man, combining old-fashioned valor with modern introspection.

The modern German, in turn, becomes the prototypical European

subject. In his popular Vorlesungen Tuber die Geschichte der deutschen

National-Literatur [Lectures on the history of the German national lit-

erature] (1845), August Friedrich Vilmar characterizes Parzival as "a

deeply German youthful character, full of innocence and yet full of a

desire for action, full of feeling for the homeland, and yet full of long-

ing to travel."130 As a representative of the ideal of the "story of the

education and development of the inner man" [Bildungs- und

Entwicklungsgeschichte des innern Menschen] (164), Wolfram's

Parzival can only be compared to Goethe's Faust. Like Gervinus,

then, Vilmar moves back the onset of modernity from the Renais-

sance and the Reformation to the beginnings of Western individual-

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

literatures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but German lit-

erature had its first classical period already around 1200. Thus Euro-

pean modernity begins around 12oo00; the Germans got there first, not

last; and Parzival is the first modern hero.

We see the beginnings of a double movement in the work of these

nineteenth-century literary historians, as they simultaneously align

Germany with Europe in its development away from an unchanging

Orient and distance Germany from the rest of Europe by claiming

priority in the race to modern times. Both tendencies inform Richard

Wagner's influential reworking of Wolfram's Parzival into Parsifal

(1882). Wagner had become familiar with the Parzival story in 1845

through the translations by Simrock and San Marte as well as Gervi-

nus's literary history, although he would not complete his opera until

116 German Orientalisms

decades later shortly before his death.131 In the opera he drastically

simplifies Wolfram's plot: gone is the role of King Arthur's court and

Gawain's adventures; gone, too, is Gahmuret's love for the black

heathen queen Belakane and Parzival's joyous reunion with his half

brother Feirefiz. Instead, Wagner turns the work into a religious

melodrama in which the Christian Parzival rescues Anfortas and the

knights of the Holy Grail from their bondage to the evil heathen

Klingsohr. As Marc Weiner has convincingly argued, both Klingsohr

and Kundry figure as embodiments of both the Oriental and the Jew.

Wagner transforms Wolfram's tolerant cosmopolitanism into a work

of a xenophobic and anti-Semitic imagination in which chaste Ger-

manic Christians triumph over the seductive lure of Orientalized

Jews.'32

We can follow the legacy of this argument into the twentieth cen-

tury, particularly in several works that focus on the character of Parzi-

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

addition. He argues that Gahmuret is a consistent character whose

"irrepressible desire for battle" should be viewed as an expression of

a "heathen-German affirmation of life." 33 Two years later Friedrich

Panzer suggested that Wolfram had modeled Gahmuret on Richard

the Lionhearted. Writing a year before German bombs began to fall

on London, Panzer contends that the historical figure was a grandiose

example of British arrogance that Wolfram had transformed into "an

idealized and Germanified [eingedeutschter] Richard." 34 Panzer's

monograph appeared when the Dutch Willem Snelleman was writ-

ing his own study of Das Haus Anjou und der Orient in Wolframs

"Parzival. "i3s He, too, argues that Wolfram updated Chretien's Perce-

val by modeling Gahmuret on Richard the Lionhearted. Although

Snelleman concedes that Wolfram seems tolerant of certain noble

heathens, he argues that Christianity remains the superior religion.

Wolfram's Parzival becomes the leader of what he terms a European

Anti-Orientalist movement (Orientalism understood here as the

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"

[Weltpolitik mit ihrem Drang nach Siiden und Osten]-overtones of

Bismarck's ambitions in the Middle East and Hitler's designs on East-

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 117

ern Europe are unmistakable-and, in so doing, turns Chretien's

work into a "Germanic drama of the soul." 36

Not all views of the Orient were equally threatening, however.

Concurrent with efforts to turn Parzival into a Nietzschean Uber-

mensch, or even a German Christ who fought against the threat of a

new Asian invasion, came an attempt to stress the affinities between

modern German culture and the ancient Orient.137 Max Semper

argued in 1934 that Wolfram transforms a superficial but entertaining

French story into a work that is German to its inner core and that

gives the purest expression to the inherent characteristics of the Ger-

man Volk. Wolfram's reworking of the French source is not a foreign

graft but rather nourished by the juices of the new German soil [von

den Sdfien des neuen Mutterbodens durchflossen]. How then to account

for the "Oriental" elements of this Germanic work? "Because of

ancient spiritual affinities between Germans and ancient Persians."'3s

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

arisch-christlichen Rassenkultreligion" [The Holy Grail as the mys-

tery of the Aryan-Christian race-cult-religion]. He argued that the

Grail Knights represented "the original Aryan religion" in a work

that inspired "a heroic Aryan racial hygiene." Liebenfels published his

work in a series entitled Ostara, which advertised itself as follows:

"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

formative years, not only reading Liebenfels's rantings about the

future triumphs of a blond and blue-eyed master race but also visiting

him several times in his Austrian castle.'40

My overview of nineteenth-century Parizival reception is admit-

tedly selective, but it does give some sense of how a prenational

writer with an "Oriental" imagination gradually became the author

of a modern Bildungsroman whose "typically German" hero combines

martial valor, dreamy introspection, and racial purity. In defining that

which makes Parzival both modern and German, critics portray him

as a Western individual whose active nature and capacity for growth

distinguish him from passive and static Orientals and as a noble Ger-

118 German Orientalisms

man who contrasts positively with the arrogant British or the

immoral French. An alternative tradition of German criticism cele-

brates Parzival as the incarnation of an Indo-Germanic ideal, an

Aryan hero who wages war against Orientalized Jews. Nineteenth-

century Parzival reception is thus about the making of a German

hero, which is part of the larger project of building a national litera-

ture.141 In contrast, the recent transformation of Germanistik into

German Studies is about the unmaking of the national literature, as

we shall see, or, more precisely, its redefinition in a postnational era.

GOETHE'S ORIENTALISM: BETWEEN ESSENCE

AND IRONY

In 1999 the German-Syrian writer Rafik Schami published a book

entitled Der geheime Bericht uber den Dichter Goethe [The secret report

about the poet Goethe]. The story begins in 1890, when a German

woman escapes pirates with her twelve-year-old son to find refuge

on an island in the Persian Gulf. Unhappily married to a British

officer stationed in India, the woman is pleased to remain undercover

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

partners by becoming familiar with their national literatures, so he

appoints a committee and sends emissaries to study at European uni-

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

consists of the young man's summaries of Goethe's works to an

appreciative audience. They are particularly impressed by his West-

dstlicher Divan [West-eastern divan] (1819) and find it hard to believe

that Goethe could have developed such empathy for Persian poetry

without ever having traveled to the Orient. The committee enthusi-

astically recommends that Goethe's works be acquired for the library

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.

Seen generously, Rafik Schami's book serves a double purpose: it

presents an attractive portrait of Goethe to a new generation of prob-

ably skeptical German students and creates a utopian model of mutual

understanding between the Occident and the Orient at a time of

increased tensions between Germans and foreigners in the wake of

Reunification.142 The Turkish-German writer Zafer Senocak would

probably have been less than generous in his response to Schami's

book, however, for he had already sharply criticized Schami in the

early 1990s for his practice of ad-libbing fairy tales in an "authenti-

cally" Oriental manner to German audiences.143 In his view, Schami

presents the Germans with just the sort of kitsch they expect, thus

reinforcing rather than undermining old Orientalist stereotypes. In

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

und Abhandlungen zu besserem Verstandnis des West-ostlichen Divans

[Notes and treatises for a better understanding of the west-eastern

divan] (1819) as a prime example of Orientalism in its most negative

sense.144 In contrast with Schami's image of Goethe as a child-loving,

politically correct advocate of multicultural understanding, Senocak

sees him as a purveyor of destructive cliches for western Europe's

imperialist imagination.

What is interesting about the implicit dialogue between Schami and

Senocak is that it takes place in German in Germany between two

writers born in the "Orient": Schami came to Germany from Syria

when he was twenty-five, and Senocak arrived from Turkey when he

was only nine.145 At stake are questions of how to represent alterity at

a time of increasing global homogeneity, how to discuss allegedly

national characteristics in a postnational era, how to speak as an Ori-

ental in the Occidental metropolis. The debate also suggests that it is

time for a new look at Goethe's Orientalism, particularly in the Divan,

the major work of his Orientalist phase, but also in the late Novelle.

From its conception in 1814 to its completion in 1819, Goethe's

West-dstlicher Divan seemed out of step with the spirit of the times.

Nationalist enthusiasm had sent many of Goethe's contemporaries on

a quest to rediscover their Germanic roots in Volkslieder, Marchen, and

120 German Orientalisms

neglected works of the Middle Ages before heading off into battle

against the Corsican tyrant. To their dismay, many of these young

Germans found that their most famous poet remained decidedly cool

to such patriotic sentiments. While they girded themselves for war,

Goethe wrote passages in his autobiography in which he recalled

with fondness his friendship for a French officer stationed in his

house in Frankfurt during the Seven Years' War, and he was proud

that Napoleon claimed to have devoted himself to the repeated study

of Werther. His decision to embark on an imaginary journey to the

East in the summer of 1814 seemed to many an act of irresponsible

escapism or, even worse, a celebration of despotism in both East and

West.146 Years later the radical journalist Ludwig Borne was still furi-

ous at Goethe-whom he dubbed "the servile rhymester" [der

gereimte Knecht]-for what he felt was his self-importance and his

sycophantic praise of tyranny.147

Things looked considerably different from Thomas Mann's per-

spective during the Second World War. He found in Goethe a kin-

dred spirit who resisted national chauvinism. Germans should not cut

themselves off from the world, proclaims Goethe in Lotte in Weimar

(1940), but, rather, open themselves up to foreign influence so that

they, in turn, can influence others. Turning to a flag-waving local

high school teacher, Mann's Goethe offers a prophetic warning:

"Your [sort of patriotism] horrifies me, because it is the still-noble,

still-innocent early form of something terrible that one day will man-

ifest itself among the Germans in the most hideous stupidities."~48

Predicting disaster for Germans who set out to conquer the world by

force, Mann's Goethe views himself as the representative of a differ-

ent sort of German identity that combines "femininity and masculin-

ity at the same time . . . I am . . . womb and seed, the androgynous

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

gifts to the world . . . great by means of understanding and love,

through mediation [durch Mittlertum]" (298-99). As we shall see, the

Goethe of Lotte in Weimar articulates Mann's own concept of artistic

androgyny developed in opposition to the hypermasculine world of

German fascism, but Goethe's words already recall Novalis's and

Adam Miiller's critiques of those imperialist European nations who

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 121

flex their "manly" muscles in the effort to impose their will on the

rest of the world.

Despite his antipathy toward a newly militant nationalism based on

hostility toward the French, Goethe was willing to speak about

national characteristics of peoples and their poetry in terms that he

had learned from his old friend and erstwhile mentor Herder. In the

Noten und Abhandlungen Goethe claims that each nation begins by

writing naive poetry, and that the more spontaneous and natural the

original poetry is, the better the national literature will develop in

subsequent epochs. No matter how many times a country is con-

quered, there remains "a certain core of the nation in its character"

that inevitably resurfaces from time to time.'49 Poetry and religion

express the national characteristics of a people; they preserve images

of the distant past and establish a continuous tradition that leads up to

the present. Thus it makes little sense to compare poetry of one

national tradition to another, and none at all to assume the superior-

ity of ancient Greece and Rome. Again following Herder, Goethe

insists that we view national literatures as organic outgrowths of par-

ticular times and places, rather than measuring them against a com-

mon standard of classical antiquity: "compare them with themselves,

respect them in their own context, and forget that Greeks and

Romans ever existed" (3.I:20I).

Cultures may be different for both Goethe and Herder, but they are

not all equal. Unlike the Early Romantics, Goethe has nothing good

to say about Indian poetry or religion. He finds Indian religion worth-

less, its influence corrupting, and images of Indian idols hideous: "Still

today the Indian monstrosities are hateful to every pure sensibility;

how horrible they must have seemed to the image-less Muslims!"

(3.1:163). When Goethe writes approvingly about Oriental culture,

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

Islamic period. As Goethe recalls in Dichtung und Wahrheit, the Old

Testament appealed to him even as a child as a calming antidote to his

overactive imagination: "I fled gladly to those Oriental regions, I sank

myself into the first books of Moses and found myself among the scat-

tered tribes of herdsmen simultaneously in the greatest solitude and

122 German Orientalisms

the greatest society" (14:155). Goethe based his earliest known dra-

matic fragment on the story of the archetypal Oriental despot Belsazar

found in the book of Daniel, and he claimed to have written a prose

version of the Joseph story in his youth.'s° Goethe's interest in the

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

charismatic leader who becomes a destructive genius, but "Mahomets

Gesang" [Muhammad's song] (1772) remains one of the most famous

lyrics of his so-called Geniezeit [time of genius]. Mahomet takes his

place alongside Faust and Prometheus as an amoral Kraftmensch, a

powerful force of nature who sweeps up his followers like a mighty

river and carries them to the sea.'52

The sense of the Orient as a site of primal simplicity and as a refuge

from the turmoil of modern times continues to inform "Hegire"

[Hegira], the first poem of the West-dstlicher Divan:

Nord und West und Siid zersplittern,

Throne bersten, Reiche zittern,

Fliichte du, im reinen Osten

Patriarchenluft zu kosten,

Unter Lieben, Trinken, Singen

Soll dich Chisers Quell verjiingen.

[North and West and South fall to pieces / Thrones burst, king-

doms tremble / Flee to enjoy patriarchal air in the pure East /

Chiser's well (the well of life) shall rejuvenate you amidst lov-

ing, drinking, and singing] (3.1:12)

Written on December 24, 1814, as delegates met at the Congress of

Vienna and Napoleon plotted his revenge on the island of Elba, the

poem gathers together the motifs that characterize Goethe's Orient in

the Divan: it is a simple land of love and war, wine and song, caravans

and coffee. It is also a patriarchal world, where fathers are respected

and seductive maidens conceal their charms behind veils. More than

simple, it is pure-"im reinen Osten"-where the spoken, not the

written word rules, a place of profound, originary depth ("des

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 123

Ursprungs Tiefe"). Goethe conjures an ancient, indeed, timeless Ori-

ental world of spiritual presence, poetic immediacy, and seductive

power that contrasts with the political turmoil and partisan strife of

modern Western society.53

We might call this aspect of Goethe's fascination with the East an

organic or essentialist Orientalism, and it is in this context that

Edward Said makes several passing references to the Divan in his

book.54 Yet there is another, seemingly contradictory, aspect to

Goethe's Orientalism that goes unnoticed in Said's work. The chief

characteristic of the Oriental style, according to Goethe's Noten und

Abhandlungen, is its eclecticism, its disregard for any sort of hierarchy,

its mixture of stylistic levels, just as at a European market or an Ori-

ental bazaar we might find healthy vegetables next to rotting weeds,

or buried treasure next to junk. Having identified the chief charac-

teristic of the Oriental style as a willingness to combine the incom-

patible, Goethe finds it impossible to resist a comparison to the nov-

els of Jean Paul Richter-even though he has just insisted that one

should not compare the works of Oriental poets to those of other

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

other German writer (3.1:202). Like his Early Romantic contempo-

raries, Jean Paul shared an enthusiasm for a poetic image of India,

which would seem to make him an unlikely hero for Goethe, the

outspoken enemy of everything Indian.'55 As becomes clear in the

Noten und Abhandlungen, however, Goethe is interested in Jean Paul's

"Oriental" style, not the content of his novels: "Such a gifted spirit

looks around cheerfully and boldly in his world in a most peculiarly

Oriental way, creates the strangest connections, joins the incompati-

ble together, but in a way that weaves through a secret ethical thread

that guides it all to a certain unity" (3.1:202). Years earlier Goethe

and Schiller had enjoyed a running joke about Jean Paul as a Trage-

laph, literally a stag or male deer, but figuratively a Mischwesen or

Mischling (half-breed). 56 While Goethe strove for simplicity and clar-

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

reversed judgment, praising Jean Paul as the poet of modern Zerris-

124 German Orientalisms

senheit while denigrating Goethe's old-fashioned Classicism.'58 By

the time critics attacked the poet of Weimar Classicism, however,

Goethe had shifted into the eclectic, open-ended, non-organic style

of Faust II, the Wanderjahre, and the Divan. Goethe's relatively mild

comments about Jean Paul in the Noten must therefore be understood

as an indirect defense of his own Altersstil. '59

We thus have two different Orientalisms in Goethe's West-ostlicher

Divan: the one essential, organically rooted in the Middle East; the

other virtual, and transportable to Europe. Unlike his Romantic con-

temporaries, or Herder before them, Goethe seems uninterested in

tracing grand narratives of cultural evolution or linguistic develop-

ment that might provide an organic link between East and West, a

continuous, uninterrupted flow. Instead, Goethe bases his model on

a paradoxical fusion of opposites: his Orient is at once ancient and

modern, rooted and uprooted, essential and virtual. One might call it

an ironic essentialism, a transcendental Orientalism, or a postmodern

Romanticism; that is, Goethe makes easy reference to the Orient as a

world of presence, voice, and origin, but seems at the same time

aware that the source is always already erased, deferred, bracketed, or,

to put it more positively, that the Orient can always be appropriated

for an Occidental masquerade.

It is tempting to see anticipations of the postmodern pastiche in the

Oriental eclecticism of Goethe's Altersstil,16o although his fascination

with costumes and masks also harks back to an earlier, pre-Romantic

tradition of thefetes galantes and the chinoiserie of Rococo culture. As

late as 1818 Goethe included the figure of Muhammad in a Masken-

zug, a remnant of Baroque courtly culture in postrevolutionary

Weimar, while his earliest dramatic fragment Belsazar stands squarely

in the tradition of Baroque tragedy.'6' Before the revolutionary lyrics

of his Geniezeit, Goethe had experimented with the boundaries of the

Anacreontic tradition, and he remained deeply influenced by

Wieland's Rococo playfulness despite his early criticism of the older

writer. These vestiges of the Baroque and Rococo literary traditions

resurface in Goethe's late works, including the Divan, the Wander-

jahre, and Faust II. In the meantime, however, Goethe had become

perhaps the paradigmatic poet of modernity, the author who, from

the time of Werther and the Sturm und Drang lyrics, had given voice

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 125

to the impassioned genius, and whose Lehrjahre and Dichtung und

Wahrheit had become immensely influential models of the organic

development of the unique individual.162 In other words, Goethe

lived long enough that he not only witnessed and participated in

what Foucault termed the "invention of man" but also already antic-

ipated man's disappearance. It is therefore difficult to tell if we should

describe his late work as anachronistically "prehuman," presciently

"posthuman," or both.

To take only one example of the malleability of the self in the

West-ostlicher Divan, consider the famous exchange between Suleika

and Hatem in the "Buch Suleika" that begins "People and servant

and conqueror" [Volk und Knecht und Uberwinder] (3.1:84). In

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

kost]. The exchange thus simultaneously gives voice to the notion of

a deep, unchangeable self-"Highest happiness of earth's children /

Is personality alone" [Hdchstes Gliick der Erdenkinder / Sey nur die

Persdnlichkeit]-and of the self as something like a garment that can

be changed at will.'63 The poem concludes with what would seem to

be a note of gratuitous anti-Semitism, although the speaker is sup-

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

rabbi-I can't quite see to that-at least Ferdusi, Motanabbi [rival

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

(although I won't be a Jew).

The entire "Buch Suleika," which is the most fully developed seg-

ment of the Divan, is a self-conscious exercise in role-playing that

fluctuates between self-aggrandizement and self-deprecation. At

times Goethe, in his role as Hatem, marvels at the rejuvenating pow-

126 German Orientalisms

ers of love and boasts that lava still bubbles beneath the snow-capped

summit of his Aetna-like white hair. At others, however, Goethe

seems sadly aware that the present moment is only a brief reenact-

ment of youthful passion that must inevitably fade.

So, nach des Schicksals hartem Loose,

Weichst du mir Lieblichste davon,

Und wair' ich Helios der gro3e

Was niitzte mir der Wagenthron?

[So in accordance with fate's hard lot / you slip away from me,

most beloved; / and even if I were the great Helios, / what

good would my chariot throne do me?] ("Hochbild," 3.1:95).

The sense of loss reaches agonizing levels a few years later in the

"Trilologie der Leidenschaft" [Trilogy of passion] (1823), as Goethe

once again-and for the last time-records his experience of rejuve-

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).

Goethe counters the poignancy of these confessional moments in

his late poetry by splitting the self, as it were, either overcoming the

sense of loss by viewing the present moment as part of a sequence of

repetitions-what he terms "Wiederholte Spiegelungen"-or by

expanding the self through role-playing in the present. The poetry of

the Divan is in part about growing old, prompted by Goethe's return

to the Rhineland where he had grown up. A poem such as "Im

Gegenwirtigen Vergangnes" [The past in the present] struggles

toward acceptance of personal finitude in contemplation of the eter-

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,

can find happiness. "Selige Sehnsucht" [Blissful yearning] proclaims

the esoteric doctrine that one must sacrifice oneself in order to sur-

vive, which can be understood simultaneously as an admonition to

transform oneself continually through Faustian striving, to acknowl-

edge one's place in the sequence of generations-"In the cooling of

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 127

the nights of love / that conceived you, where you conceived" [In

der Liebesnichte Kiihlung, / Die dich zeugte, wo du zeugtest]-and

to reproduce oneself through acts of poetic creativity-"And new

desire tears you upward to higher procreation" [Und dich reil3et neu

Verlangen / Auf zu hoherer Begattung] (3.1:24-25). The alternative

strategy for self-preservation lies in the willingness to pretend you are

someone else, just as Hatem tells Suleika he is willing to do. Goethe's

cheerful adoption of his role as Hatem becomes a way of transform-

ing personal confession into performance, just as his decision to pub-

lish some of Marianne von Willemer's poetry under his own name

undermines the sense of personal identity connected with modern

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

of modern Western civilization and as part of the artistic vocabulary

of the Western Orientalist imagination recurs in Goethe's very late

Novelle (1828). Long considered a timeless parable intended to

demonstrate "how the untamable, invincible is often better van-

quished by love and piety than violence," as Goethe himself put it,'65

the Novelle is generally read today as an implicit commentary on the

role of the aristocracy in Restoration culture.'66 Central to the sym-

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

fortress that was once an instrument of feudal warfare and power, in

whose halls "knights once strode up and down" (8:536), has been

transformed into a series of charming, "Romantic" pictures designed

to entice viewers to explore the ruins themselves. The same images

also suggest a continuity between the modern aristocracy and the

medieval knights, hence granting an aura of legitimacy to the ruling

pair. The function of both the spruced-up ruins and the commis-

sioned drawings is thus ideological in the sense that they uphold

existing power relations even as they cloak the violence that supports

such power under a nostalgic haze. The prince and princess live in a

world of make-believe, pretending to be feudal knights of yore.

128 German Orientalisms

Hence the prince heads off on a royal hunt of the sort one finds por-

trayed in the Nibelungenlied, the princess enjoys the adulation of sub-

jects allegedly delighted "that the first lady of the land was also the

most beautiful and graceful" (8:539) and allows herself to imagine

that the capital exchanges in the flourishing marketplace are still part

of a barter economy.

In keeping with the pseudofeudal fantasies of the modern aristocrats

and their loyal subjects is a desire to reenact the geopolitical struggles

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

head on a post in the forehead right under the turban as he galloped

past in the arena, just as he picked up the Moor's head from the

ground on his naked saber as he sped by" (8:545). The townspeople,

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

locals' Orientalist imagination: "The grimly terrible tiger sprang

toward a Moor that he was just about to tear to pieces" (8:539-40).

Although the prince's uncle complains about the sensationalistic art,

the townspeople are only staging their equivalent of Honorio's aristo-

cratic war games. In both cases, images of the Orient raise the specter

of threatening, primal violence, but in a way that has been domesti-

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

loose. Honorio has an unexpected opportunity to put his training to

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-

bly because he wants to be a better dinner companion to the well-

traveled guests who frequent the palace: "Travelers stream toward us

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-

selves" (8:546). Just as Crusaders once brought back tales of foreign

Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 129

lands to medieval Europeans, modern tourists now preserve memo-

ries of their travels that can be displayed in appropriate social gather-

ings. Honorio's request thus reflects his desire to contribute to the

cultural status of the local rulers by applying a cosmopolitan veneer to

the provincial dinner table. At the same time, his immediate recourse

to violence against the foreign, as represented by the tiger and, by

extension, his keepers, coupled with his desire for world travel, cap-

ture the spirit of nineteenth-century European imperialists out to

explore and exploit the rest of world, if here in the relatively harm-

less guise of a tourist. Honorio's practice on Turkish and Moorish

dummies has prepared him well for his role in granting legitimacy to

the local court and solidifying its sense of importance in the world.

No sooner has the princess tentatively granted Honorio's request

than the "Orientals" who owned the tiger appear: a woman, clad in

"respectable, but colorful and strange clothing" (8:546) and dark-

haired boy with black eyes. While Honorio gloats over his success,

the woman grieves for the dead tiger in an impassioned stream of

words that "plunges like a stream from boulder to boulder. A natural

language, short and choppy, made a vivid and touching impression"

(8:547). Honorio's quick-witted response to the crisis has had unfore-

seen consequences, for, in the eyes of the woman, he has needlessly

murdered a member of her family. When news arrives that a lion is

also loose, the prince agrees to let the mother and her son try to

recapture the animal without force, although men are standing by

with guns if necessary. The boy plays a seemingly random sequence

of notes on his flute, while his father, "colorfully and strangely

clothed like the woman and child" (8:548), delivers a short speech

"with an expression of natural enthusiasm" (8:55I). He begins in

praise of nature's beauty, as manifested in the image of a large rocky

outcropping crowned with ancient trees. It looks as though the boul-

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

same; nature is in a state of constant flux. Within the natural world

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

him, and the most horrible of creatures reveres God's likeness"

(8:5 50). As if to prove his point, the boy approaches the escaped lion

130 German Orientalisms

and, with a combination of poetry and music, manages to tame the

wild beast.

The foreign family thus brings us back to the "essential" Orient

conjured in the poem "Hegire." They are simple, devout people

who live in close proximity to nature and thus understand and respect

its power, as embodied in the lion, while nevertheless remaining

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

interrupt his pious song" (8:55o-5i). Honorio and the townspeople,

in contrast, represent the Orient in a series of shopworn cliches: the

posters on the animals' cages inspire a tawdry sense of the sublime in

the marketplace, while Honorio has been pretending to be a latter-

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-

consciousness becomes the source of a playful irony and self-depre-

cating humor; in the Novelle, in contrast, Goethe portrays Honorio's

Orientalism in a more negative light, as it leads to unthinking vio-

lence. Ironically, Goethe employs one set of Orientalist stereotypes

to expose another: the "real" Orientals in the Novelle provide an

authentic counterpart to the modern Europeans' Orientalizing fan-

tasies, even though they are clearly figures who would be at home in

an allegory or a fairy tale.

The moral of the Novelle seems quite clear: in a world where

change is inevitable and human beings confront powerful and poten-

tially destructive forces, it is better to adapt and maintain control

calmly and judiciously rather than through immediate recourse to

violence. Given the story's contemporary setting, we can easily read

the outbreak of fire and the ensuing release of the wild animals as a

reference to the return of the repressed Revolution into Biedermeier

society or, more generally, as the disruptive force of change in the

modern world. In this context one recalls the famous prediction in

Lenardo's diary in the Wanderjahre: "The rampant machinery tor-

ments and frightens me; it surges toward us like a thunderstorm,

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

or against the Revolution or modernity, as it is post-revolutionary

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-

out alienating their subjects. The prince's willingness to allow the

Oriental family to recapture its lion without force provides further

evidence that he possesses a maturity and wisdom that certainly sur-

passes that of the well-meaning but hotheaded young Honorio. The

Novelle thus reformulates Goethe's consistent response to a world in

the constant process of "formation, transformation" [Gestaltung,

Umgestaltung]:168 he prefers Bildung to violence, Neptune to Vulcan,

evolution to revolution.

Goethe's concept of Weltliteratur also responds to developments in

modern society. At a time when the pace of travel has quickened dra-

matically, he writes, it is inevitable that national literatures should

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

own peculiar characteristics; he merely argues that many of his more

nationalistic contemporaries should avoid the "pedantic arrogance"

that prevents them from looking beyond the confines of their own

narrow world: "For this reason I like to look around at foreign

nations and I advise everyone to do the same."'69 If other Germans

were to follow Goethe's model, the nation could take a leading role

in the formation of the new Weltliteratur: "I am convinced that a

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

convergence."'70 Goethe thus voices the sort of German cosmopoli-

tanism we have previously encountered in both Wieland and

Novalis, as he rejects narrow-minded nationalism and places Ger-

many at the center of a new world order.

132 German Orientalisms

Goethe's scattered comments about Weltliteratur in the late 182os

provide a theoretical justification for his lifelong poetic practice.

From the beginning Goethe had demonstrated his ability to feel his

way into foreign literary forms; his pseudo-Persian poetry of the

Divan is only one phase of a career that included Shakespearean dra-

mas, Pindaric odes, and Roman elegies. Such stylistic virtuosity is also

evidence of a cultural generosity, what Thomas Mann hailed as the

"feminine" receptivity that characterizes Goethe's "androgynous

art." The same openness to the foreign continues to inspire Rafik

Schami's admiration of Goethe's Orientalism. But if Goethe expands

his literary horizons only to reproduce Orientalist cliches, as Zafer

Senocak contends, does he not remain firmly within the bounds of

the Eurocentric thought he supposedly escapes? Yes and no. Goethe,

like anyone else, was a product of a particular time and place that

inevitably colored his perceptions of the world, and Goethe was well

aware of the threat of solipsism; his Werther is already driven to dis-

traction by the thought "that all consolation about certain points of

reflection is merely a dreamy resignation, for we paint our prison

walls with colorful figures and bright vistas" (8:23). Yet Goethe was

not Werther, as he was always quick to remind his readers, and we

need not take Werther's sense of self-entrapment at face value;

Goethe's understanding of the foreign may not have been perfect,

but that does not mean that there was no understanding at all. What

makes Goethe's Orientalism particularly interesting, in fact, is the

balance he maintains between empathy and irony: he not only has a

highly developed "negative capability" that allows him, like Hatem,

to transform himself into another at a moment's notice, but also an

ironic awareness that he is only playing a role, adopting a new mas-

querade. While Goethe does not shy away from images of the Orient

as a site of primal vitality and uncluttered wisdom, he also reminds

readers that such images stem more from the Western imagination

than the Eastern source. It is not so much a question, then, of

Goethe's generous understanding of the East, but more of his ironic

awareness of the Western desire for Oriental origins that casts a

kinder light on his imperial imagination.

CHAPTER THREE

Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents

MANN, BAEUMLER, AND BACHOFEN:

THE DARK SIDE OF ROMANTICISM

In his autobiographical essay "Pariser Rechenschaft" [Parisian reck-

oning] (1926), Thomas Mann interrupts an account of his recent trip

to France with some pointed remarks about Alfred Baeumler's intro-

duction to an anthology of Johann Jakob Bachofen's works entitled

Der Mythus von Orient und Occident [The myth of Orient and Occi-

dent] (1926). Mann begins deceptively, praising Baeumler's "rivet-

ing" introduction to a German intellectual tradition that leads back

through Bachofen to the late Romantics of the Heidelberg school.

According to Baeumler, as Mann summarizes, writers such as Novalis

and Friedrich Schlegel were only "Romantics in quotation marks,

basically eighteenth century, infected with rationality, reprehensible.

Arndt, Gorres, Grimm, finally Bachofen are the true [Romantics],

for only they are most deeply ruled and determined by the big

'regression' [bestimmt von dem groj3en 'Zuriick'], by the maternal-noc-

turnal idea of the past."' Given the current political situation in Ger-

many, however, Mann questions whether now is the time to dredge

up "this whole Joseph Gorres-complex of earth, Volk, nature, past,

and death, a revolutionary obscurantism. . . with the tacit insinuation

that all this is once again on the agenda" (470). Baeumler's renewed

fascination with the irrational "Asiatic" world plays into the hands of

the "the crassest volkisch reaction" (472), continues Mann, at a time

when Germans need to look forward to a new humanism. From

133

134 German Orientalisms

Mann's perspective in the 1920s, in other words, the Early Romantic

"Oriental Renaissance" has transformed itself into fascist Orientalism.

Critics have been somewhat puzzled by the vehemence of Mann's

reaction to Baeumler's introduction. While Baeumler recognizes the

Heidelberg Romantics' appreciation of the dark side of the ancient

Asiatic world, he allegedly comes out clearly on the side of Western

rationality in the end. To be sure, Alfred Baeumler did join the

National Socialist Party in 1933, and he remained a loyal Nazi ideo-

logue throughout Hitler's regime, yet the 1926 essay supposedly

remains untainted by fascist thought. Mann was simply wrong about

the Bachofen introduction, one critic concludes, but right in his sus-

picions about where such thought might lead.2 In my opinion,

Mann's accusations against Baeumler's introduction were not as mis-

guided as we have been led to believe, although the urgency of

Mann's repeated denunciations may well have stemmed in part from

his need to repress aspects of his own still-recent conservatism.3

Baeumler had touched on an intellectual tradition of central impor-

tance to Mann in the 1920s, as the "un-political" writer steeped in

nineteenth-century thought struggled to come to terms with the con-

sequences of Germany's Griff nach der Weltmacht in the First World

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

symbolic geography in which the East played a prominent role.

Baeumler locates the beginning of the late Romantic tradition of

thought that leads to Bachofen in the work of Friedrich Creuzer and

Joseph Gorres. In his Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker [Sym-

bolism and mythology of ancient peoples] (1805), Creuzer locates the

origin of human religion in Asia, or, more specifically, India. In

Creuzer's view, however, the symbolism of Eastern religion must be

superseded by Western mythology. Homer stands on the threshold of

the new world, between "the dark murkiness of the Near Eastern

religious service" and the colorful pantheon of Greek gods.4 Gorres

goes further in his Mythengeschichte der asiatischen Welt [History of

myth in the Asian world] (181o), placing the Greek triumph over the

East into a sweeping narrative of universal history that culminates in

the triumph of Caucasian Europeans over other "degenerate" races.

Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 135

Echoing the racist anthropologies of Christoph Meiners and Johann

Friedrich Blumenbach, Gorres contends that three different races

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

stratification" of the human race.5 The remaining peoples then

divided themselves along an east/west axis, with the Caucasus

becoming a second focal point of ancient civilization alongside the

original Kashmir. Gradually, then, humans spread out to fill the rest

of the world. Gorres likens this development to the growth of a plant

that gradually sheds Slavic, Mongolian, Chinese, Indian, and Negroid

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

the West into higher atmospheres, so that it could unfold there in

European blossom" (53). Meanwhile Asian civilization stagnates,

leaving "the European Caucasian branch historically dominant"

(204). Gorres thus transforms his seeming nostalgia for the primal

unity of all peoples in ancient India into a self-congratulatory parable

that excludes the vast majority of humankind.

What distinguishes Creuzer and Gorres from earlier German

thinkers, according to Baeumler, was their grasp of the dark mythic

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

work anticipates the later nineteenth-century view that human rea-

son stands in a precarious position against what Schopenhauer terms

the Will, Nietzsche the Dionysian, and Freud the Unconscious. In

Baeumler's view, however, Bachofen's profound grasp of the irra-

tional forces threatening Western reason makes even Nietzsche's

thought look superficial. In Das Mutterrecht [The matriarchy] (1861)

Bachofen views human history as an epic battle between the

"chthonic," feminine forces of the Orient and Occidental rationality

and patriarchy. He bases his theory on stereotypical distinctions

between male and female: the one is active, intellectual, progressive;

the other passive, corporeal, and static. Bachofen then turns this series

of binary oppositions into an account of world history: human civi-

136 German Orientalisms

lization began in Asia in the dark, undifferentiated realm of the

mother. Gradually, however, the bright light of Hellenic patriarchy

triumphed over the gynocratic East: "There bondage to the physical,

here intellectual development . . . there submission to nature, here a

rising above the same, a breaking through of the old barriers of exis-

tence, the striving and suffering of Promethean life instead of persist-

ing stasis, peaceful pleasure, and eternal immaturity in an aging

body."7 History, according to Bachofen, records the triumph of male

over female, rationality over irrationality, light over darkness, patri-

archy over matriarchy, and Europe over Asia.

Why, then, would Thomas Mann-the recent convert to Western

democracy-find anything offensive in Baeumler's introduction to

Bachofen's thought? The answer lies in two opposing tendencies in

Baeumler's work: the one inclines toward the irrational, the "femi-

nine," while the other reacts against the feminine with what could be

termed a hypermasculinity. Regarding the first: although the West-

ern forces of reason defeat Eastern irrationalism, Baeumler devotes

long stretches of his introduction in praise of those thinkers

Creuzer, Gorres, Bachofen, and others-who recognize the power

and, indeed, the seductive lure of the Orient. He praises Creuzer for

his "Orientalization and Romanticization of Antiquity" (cvii), and cred-

its Gorres for placing "life in connection . . . to the night and the past

. earth, body, Volk, and nature" (clxxvii). History, according to

Gorres, is not a sequence of ideas and deeds, "but, rather, a living

link, a sequence of generations bound by blood" (clxxx). In his work

we see what Baeumler describes as the beginning of the nineteenth

century, "the age of the earth and nationality" [das Zeitalter der Erde

und der Nationalitdt] (clxxx). In 1926, Baeumler's enthusiastic

description of the late Romantic understanding of the nation in terms

of blood and soil must have seemed more than a little suspicious to

Mann. To be sure, Baeumler goes on to describe the Apollonian vic-

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

step to abandon oneself completely to the irrational, "to plunge back

into the elemental" [ins Elementare zuriickzutauchen], as Wendell

Kretzschmar puts it in Doktor Faustus.8

Perhaps more important than the risk of regression to the ancient

Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 137

realm of the mother is Western man's ongoing struggle against

renewed assaults of the feminine. Central to the work of both

Bachofen and Baeumler is the belief that the feminine, once defeated,

regroups and returns in new forms. Bachofen reads the victory of

Agamemnon and Apollo over the matriarchal world of Klytemnestra

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-

ent is defeated by the Occident."'o Thus Baeumler begins his intro-

duction as an excavation of ancient history, but ends with an indict-

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

broken today" (ccxcii). A single glance at the streets of London, Paris,

or Berlin reveals that the "cult of Aphrodite" has displaced the

authority of Zeus and Apollo. In the decadent world of the modern

city, men and women have forgotten their natural roles. Hence

Baeumler cites Christoph Meiners with approval: "The more vicious

both sexes become, the weaker, or more weakened the men become,

while the women become bolder and more masculine" (ccxciii).

Equally symptomatic of the decline of Western civilization is the rise

of socialism and democracy, a trend that Bachofen resisted with all his

might: "He was an aristocrat in every sense. In his autobiography we

find sentences such as: complete democracy is the end of everything

good; because I love freedom, I hate democracy" (ccv).

In these passages Baeumler recites the entire litany of an antimod-

ern philosophy that protests against urbanization and the modern

masses, emancipated women and effeminate men, democracy, social-

ism, and anarchism-all features of modern Western society. The

ancient Orient has returned in the guise of the modern Occident. In

broad outline, Baeumler reduces history to two main phases: in the

first, Greece and Rome mark the first stage of the European triumph

over the East; in the second, Germany stands alone against the deca-

dence of western European civilization. In essence, Baeumler has

inverted the pattern noted in such Early Romantic thinkers as

Novalis, August Wilhelm Schlegel, and Adam Miiller, who oppose

138 German Orientalisms

an expansive "effeminate" or hermaphroditic German cosmopoli-

tanism to the narrow nationalism and imperialism of their western

European neighbors. Now Germany braces itself in a manly way

against the incursion of effeminate Orientalized Occidentals. Hence

it is not surprising that another protofascist ideologue, Carl Schmitt,

reacted against the "feminine characteristics" [Weibermerkmale] in

Adam Miiller's thought, while strongly implying that the homosexu-

ally inclined Miiller was himself "not a real/proper man" [kein

richtiger Mann]." As Klaus Theweleit and Nicolaus Sombart have

argued, German men of the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods sought

to harden themselves against the threat of the feminine in all its mod-

ern guises by creating a kind of hypermasculinity based on intense

male bonding and the fear and loathing of the feminine,'2 while Ger-

ald Izenberg claims that a "social and psychological crisis of mas-

culinity helped shape both the thematic concerns and the formal

innovations of the early Modernist revolution in the arts" in which

Mann's work played a prominent role.13

In sum, Baeumler's introduction to Bachofen's work posed two

opposing threats to Mann's still-recent support of the Weimar

Republic: either the threat of an atavistic regression to a world of

anti-intellectual barbarism associated with the matriarchy of ancient

Asia, or an aggressive German reaction against the Orientalized world

of modern European democracies. To see how Mann arrived at this

position we need to look briefly at the development of his thought

from the beginnings of the First World War to Mann's speech in sup-

port of the German Republic in 1922, before turning to a more

detailed exploration of sexual politics and symbolic geographies in

Der Zauberberg.

TIPTOEING TOWARD DEMOCRACY: MANN'S

SEXUAL POLITICS

When the German army mobilized for war in August 1914, the

nation finally seemed poised to become a major world power. The

contrast with the German situation on the eve of the French Revo-

lution could hardly be greater. While at that time a few intellectuals

could envision a German nation comprised of a common culture and

Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 139

language, most Germans lived as subsistence farmers under absolutist

rule in one of the many German provinces. By the first Griinderzeit of

the 185os, however, things began to change. The Zollverein (tariff

union) of 1834 had begun to ease trade within Germany, while

growing international commerce brought even the most provincial

of Germans into contact with a wider world: "The size of the harvest

in the American Midwest, the price of guano in Chile, the condition

of credit markets in distant cities all touched the lives of men and

women in the far corners of the countryside."14 With a stunning

rapidity that compensated for its belatedness, Germany transformed

itself within the course of little more than a single generation from a

provincial backwater into a major industrial and military power. A

series of three quick wars enabled Bismarck to unify Germany with

"blood and iron" in 1871; his government launched an official pro-

gram of overseas expansion in 1884, and by the turn of the century

Germany had embarked on an aggressive build-up of its navy to chal-

lenge its arch-rival England for control of the seas.'5 The First World

War was to have completed Germany's rise to power by securing its

dominance within Central Europe and establishing a correspondingly

broad base of colonies throughout the world.'6

As Germany's imperial ambitions grew, the direct "national inter-

est" in the East that Edward Said had missed in earlier German acad-

emic Orientalism arrived with a vengeance. One of Germany's

immediate aims in the First World War was to conquer and colonize

parts of Poland with ethnic Germans as part of a plan to set up "a

'protective wall' of Germans from the whole of east-central

Europe."'7 German hegemony in the east was to extend further to

the Ukraine, thus realizing the dream of finding German Lebensraum

in eastern Europe that had been championed by such conservative

thinkers as Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn.'s Further to the

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

also cultural prestige. Hence beginning with the founding of the

Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft [German Orient society] in 1898, the

German government began to fund large-scale archaeological proj-

140 German Orientalisms

ects in Asia Minor.20 As part of an attempt to destabilize the Russian

and British Empires, Germans actively promoted revolution among

subjugated peoples from Ireland to India. Even as late as 1918, the

ultraconservative Fatherland Party dreamed of establishing a vast Ger-

man empire that would stretch "as far as the Pacific and the gates of

India."2 Wolfram von Eschenbach's old dream of extending the bor-

ders of Christian Europe into India through Feirefiz and Prester John

seemed on the verge of becoming a reality for the German Reich.

Like most German intellectuals, Thomas Mann was caught up in

the initial excitement at the outbreak of the First World War: "War!

It was purification, liberation that we sensed, and an immense hope"

wrote Mann in his "Gedanken im Krieg" [Thoughts in war]

(August/September 1914).22 Germany is the land of Kultur, genius,

and philosophical depth, he argues in this essay, and thus intrinsically

incompatible with and superior to the superficial world of rationality

and democracy at the heart of French civilization. Here Mann strikes

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

[Reflections of a nonpolitical man] (1919). He defends Germany as

the land of Romanticism, nationalism, and music, and as the home of

Nietzsche, Wagner, and Schopenhauer, while ridiculing the French

preference for the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as "feminine

and mendacious."23 "There is no doubt that this [French] nation

wants to be treated like a lady" [Diese Nation nimmt Damenrechte

in Anspruch] writes Mann in "Gedanken im Krieg," in full keeping

with the misogynist tradition of German conservative thought of the

Wilhelmine period.24 Misogyny slides into homophobia when Mann

mocks France for speaking in a hoarse "falsetto" [Fistelstimme].25 In

Izenburg's view, the outbreak of the First World War gave Mann a

convenient outlet for his struggle with his own homosexuality,

which he could now project against an effeminate France. Mann's

bellicose mood did not last long, however, and his strident tones of

August and September 1914 soon turned into an increasingly melan-

choly defense of a conservative tradition that he knew would not sur-

vive the war.

What distinguishes Mann most clearly from those who supported

Germany's bid to become a major world power was his at best luke-

Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 141

warm support for Germany's imperial ambitions. Nearly two hun-

dred pages into his Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, Mann admitted

that the events of 1914 temporarily caused him to believe "that the

people to whom I have the honor to belong had great claims to

power, a legitimate right to their part in ruling the earth... Today I

have at least hours in which this belief wavers and nearly falls" (197).

Mann is more outspoken in the preface to this work, where he con-

fesses his "oppositional doubt about Germany's calling to 'Grand Pol-

itics' [zur Grof3en Politik] and imperial existence" (25). He speculates

that perhaps because he came from the provincial town of Liibeck he

somehow slept through the transformation of the nineteenth-century

German Biirger into "a capitalist-imperialist bourgeois" (129). Even

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

Fontane: "The whole colonial policy is idiotic" [Die ganze Kolo-

nisierungspolitik ist ein Blodsinn].26

Mann couples his skepticism about German colonialism with a

sharp critique of the French "empire of civilization" [Imperium der

Zivilisation] (31). Like the Germans of the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries, Mann portrays Germany as the victim of a

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

interesting passages of the Betrachtungen, Mann exposes what he

believes to be the inherent hypocrisy of British and French imperial-

ism. Where was the liberals' anti-imperialist moralizing when France

flouted international law and invaded Morocco? Nowhere to be

found: "he admired with wide eyes France's mighty colonial empire,

he admired the imperialist democracy" (347). The East India Com-

pany pretends that it is a humanitarian organization even though

hunger, pestilence, and premature death are rampant in India. In real-

ity, Mann contends, the British have no concern for the plight of

their "natives": "After all, they're dealing with Asia, with 'dark

masses,' with niggers. They are 'Europeans' and aristocrats toward

the outside world, if democrats at home" (349). Mann shares the fears

142 German Orientalisms

of the early Nietzsche that the democratization of education will

result in "a complete leveling, journalistic-rhetorical dumbing-down

and vulgarization [Verdummung und Verpobelung]" (25 1), and he fore-

sees a nightmarish world in which individual national cultures will

have been flattened into "a single homogenous civilization" (234).27

In such passages Mann

not only anticipates Adorno and

Horkheimer's indictment of the "culture industry," but also today's

critics of an American-led process of globalization. Incidentally, even

Mann was not entirely immune to the lure of American "culture":

years later he reported with bemused irony that while recovering

from surgery in the United States he had briefly developed a taste for

Coca-Cola.28

In retrospect, Mann's Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen remains a

confused and often troubling work. Although he is quick to point

out elements of racism and hypocrisy among British and French colo-

nialists, Mann frequently employed racist stereotypes of his own, as

when he expressed outrage at the fact that the Belgians were guard-

ing German prisoners with "Senegal Negroes . . . an animal with lips

as thick as pillows."29 Even in the "Pariser Rechenschaft," Mann

makes a self-deprecating reference to his own crude Nege franzo-

sisch.30 His denunciation of the Enlightenment, the French Revolu-

tion, and European democracy serves at best as a benchmark against

which we can measure his eventual progress toward support of the

Weimar Republic, a public campaign against Hitler, and the socialist

leanings that eventually made him suspect in the Red-baiting climate

of American McCarthyism.3' Already in the Betrachtungen, however,

Mann formulates his conservative manifesto in an elegiac mode and

voices increasing skepticism about Germany's imperial ambitions. As

the political climate grew increasingly unsettled and disturbing dur-

ing the postwar years, Mann sought to adapt to the new situation,

while retaining his respect for the German cultural tradition he had

defended so vehemently in the Betrachtungen. The most important

milestone in this development was Mann's essay "Von deutscher

Republik."

Mann delivered "Von deutscher Republik" as a lecture in Berlin

in the fall of 1922 and retained asides to his uncertain audience of

conservative students in the printed version. The talk caused some-

Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 143

thing of a sensation, for the antidemocratic author of the Betrachtun-

£en had seemingly reversed course and was now declaring allegiance

to the Weimar Republic. Mann insisted somewhat disingenuously in

his preface to the essay that his opinions had undergone no funda-

mental change: "I have perhaps changed my thoughts,-not my

meaning" [Ich habe vielleicht meine Gedanken geindert,-nicht

meinen Sinn].32 Mann nevertheless knew that his comments would

prove controversial, and, indeed, the essay alienated some of Mann's

former conservative allies, while paving the way for his reconciliation

with his brother Heinrich and other liberals.33

Mann enlists two unlikely allies in his defense of democracy:

Novalis and Walt Whitman. Even Novalis's friends had found it

difficult to reconcile his radical thought with the seemingly reac-

tionary stance of "Die Christenheit oder Europa" and "Glauben und

Liebe," but by the 192os almost everyone had stopped trying. Begin-

ning during the Restoration and now again during the "Conservative

Revolution" of the early twentieth century, Novalis seemed per-

fectly suited to his role as a politically reactionary Christian vision-

ary.34 In a deliberately provocative strategy, Mann appropriates an

icon of the German right in support of his own nascent liberalism.35

Hence he speaks paradoxically of Novalis's political thought "as a

kind of Romantic Jacobinism," and insists that despite his praise of

the Prussian king and queen, Novalis was "most strongly influenced

by the French Revolution."36 Mann goes on to note Novalis's pro-

gressive attitude to world commerce, to praise the democratic

impulse of his Symphilosophie, and to cite his paradoxical notion of a

"democracy of kings" (148).

One might argue that if Mann were really serious about his com-

mitment to democracy, he could have chosen a less ambiguous part-

ner in support of his cause, to which one could respond that Mann's

commitment to the Republic was itself not unambiguous. To be

sure, Mann had no sympathy for the rising tide of German fascism;

already in the fall of 1921 he had made a disparaging reference to "the

Swastika nonsense" [der Hakenkreuz-Unfug] in a short article about

the "Jewish question."37 Yet Mann was not quite ready to throw

himself without reservation into the Western camp that he had

opposed so vociferously during the war years. During the early 1920S

144 German Orientalisms

he sought rather a specifically German alternative to both Western

liberalism and Russian "wildness": "As far as Germany is concerned,

it stands indecisively here as well, rich in spiritual mixtures, between

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-

atic and wild, but, rather, European."3s As Germany strode rapidly to

the right and Mann stepped cautiously toward the center, Novalis

offered him a suitably ambiguous figure with which he could signal

his increased sympathy for Western democracy while remaining

squarely within a German intellectual tradition, a tradition, more-

over, that he sought to reclaim from its appropriation by the German

right. Hence Mann repeatedly reassures his hostile audience that they

should not think of the Republic "as an affair for smart Jew-boys

[schafer Judenjungen] , "39 despite his protestations elsewhere that he

was always a philo-Semite.4°

If Mann was indeed anxious to preserve his ties to German culture

even as he gradually shifted his political allegiances, why would he

also turn to Walt Whitman, the ecstatic celebrant of American

democracy? The simple and partially correct answer would be that

Mann really had undergone a change of heart by the summer of 1922,

and that his pairing of Whitman with Novalis was intended as a fur-

ther provocation to the German right. At the same time, however,

Mann's defense of Whitman allowed him an indirect way to counter

the conservatism of another German thinker: Hans Bliiher. Bliiher

had gained considerable notoriety in German circles through his early

work on male bonding in the German youth movement and had

captured Mann's attention with his two-volume work entitled Die

Rolle der Erotik in der Mdnnlichen Gesellschaft [The role of eroticism in

male society] (1917-19).41 Here Bliiher couples his argument that the

strength of the state depends on erotic bonds between men with dis-

paraging comments about liberalism, women, and Jews. Viewed in

historical context, Bliiher's work marks an extreme version of the

sexual politics of the European bourgeoisie on the eve of the French

Revolution. As we recall, members of the revolutionary middle class

identified themselves in part through their attitude toward gender

roles and the family. They rejected what they perceived as aristocratic

libertinage in favor of a "natural" division of labor along gender lines

Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 145

in the nuclear family. The new nationalism combined homosocial

bonding between men in the public sphere with a corresponding

glorification of heterosexual domesticity.

Bliiher, in contrast, celebrates homosexual bonding between cer-

tain heroic men in the public sphere, while denigrating heterosexual

domesticity as an unpleasant necessity for the propagation of the

species: "Where families predominate in the life of the people, the

spirit stagnates; tradition rules under their regime, whereas revolution

rules in alliances of men [Mannerbhude]."42 Because Jews suffer from a

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

penetrate the ranks of its Mannerbhnde is doomed to succumb to "lib-

eralism in all its unbearableness."43 Thomas Mann, in contrast, cele-

brates erotic passion in general, and Whitman's homoerotic passion

in particular, as symptomatic of an all-embracing democratism. Given

Mann's understandable reticence to reveal his own homosexual incli-

nations, his outspoken defense of homosexuality in "Von deutscher

Republik"-so outspoken, in fact, that his English translator felt the

need to expurgate the most explicit passages-is indeed remarkable.

Perhaps more important, however, is Mann's attempt to wrest the

political discourse about homosexuality from the hands of such right-

wing ideologues as Hans Bliiher. Male bonding need not be proto-

fascist, according to Mann; it can also be a sign of sexual and political

liberation.44

Mann pursues a straightforward goal in "Von deutscher Repub-

lik": he seeks support for the Weimar Republic in an unstable soci-

ety already showing an alarming susceptibility to fascist ideology. His

argumentative strategy, however, is far more complex. Like Novalis,

Mann prefers to infiltrate the enemy position and undermine it from

within, rather than toppling it through direct frontal assault. Thus

Novalis will praise the Prussian monarchy even as he surreptitiously

defends democracy, cloaking his vision of a postrevolutionary Ger-

man cosmopolitanism under a cloud of nostalgia for the Christian

Middle Ages. Mann, for his part, reads Novalis as a revolutionary

republican at a time when many hailed him as a prophet of the Ger-

146 German Orientalisms

man Reich and enlists Whitman's democratic eroticism in the strug-

gle against Bliiher's authoritarian homosexuality. As a political writer,

Mann's dialectical method of argumentation often confuses his

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,

makes things more complicated by reminding his readers that each

coin has two sides, that every argument in support of one position

can be inverted into support of another. The same combination of a

seemingly clear "message" within an infinitely replicating series of

dialectical inversions characterizes the wonderfully rich, if madden-

ingly contradictory, world of Der Zauberberg.

SYMBOLIC GEOGRAPHIES ON THE

MAGIC MOUNTAIN

In a lecture delivered to students at Princeton University in 1939,

Thomas Mann spoke of Der Zauberberg as a German Bildungsroman in

the tradition of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, whose hero, Hans Castorp,

takes his place among such other "questers" as Wilhelm Meister,

Goethe's Faust, and even Parzival.47 Castorp goes through a process

of initiation on the mountain until he finds his own version of the

Holy Grail in his vision in the snow: "that is the idea of man, the

conception of a future humanity that has passed through deepest

knowledge of sickness and death." As Mann points out, however,

Castorp receives his vision "before he is torn from his heights down

into the European catastrophe of the First World War" (617). It is

this moment of rupture, this sudden tear in the fabric of history, that

distinguishes Der Zauberberg from the earlier works associated with

the Bildungsroman tradition. Wolfram von Eschenbach works within

a typological understanding of history in which human temporality

unfolds within the simultaneity of divine knowledge; Parzival culmi-

nates with an only slightly ironic vision of fulfilled time on earth in

which Christianity will extend from Europe to include the entire

world. By the late eighteenth century Herder and others reconceived

history as an open-ended progression toward an uncertain future.

Now that development has been interrupted; Mann looks back across

Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 147

a chasm that divides the present uncertainty from an abruptly termi-

nated period of historical continuity. As Mann writes in his preface,

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

ceased."48 The past has stopped making sense; history appears as a

fractured tradition, as discontinuity-but the present moment is not

"shot through with chips of Messianic time," to use Walter Ben-

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

Republic were left a legacy of a shattered generation of men who had

fought in the war and a seemingly endless series of crises including

widespread hunger, an influenza epidemic, inflation, the Munich

Revolution, and the beginnings of fascism.

Der Zauberberg is a book about symbolic geography, an essayistic

novel on the theme of Germany's position as "the land of the center"

[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

presents Germany's impending decision as a clear-cut choice

between diametrically opposed alternatives: "might and right,

tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge, the law of obdu-

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

continent of rebellion, critique, and transforming actions, whereas

the continent to the east embodied inertia and inactivity" (154

[218-I9]). Settembrini fears that in the hermetic world of the magic

mountain, at least, the West is fighting a losing battle: "'Asia is

devouring us. Tartar faces in every direction you look.' And Herr

Settembrini discreetly turned his head to glance over his shoulder.

'Genghis Khan,' he said, 'lone wolves on dusky steppes'" (238 [334]).

As a representative of Italian humanism and a champion of the

Enlightenment, Settembrini is hardly an impartial observer of the

hordes of "Mongolian Muscovites" (239 [336]) at the sanatorium,

and his blanket condemnation of Asiatic Russians does not do justice

to the complexity of the novel's symbolic geography. As we have

seen, the "Orient" was not a stable category, either in terms of its

148 German Orientalisms

geographical location or in terms of its symbolic significance in early

twentieth-century German thought, and the East plays an equally

complex and contradictory role in the world of Der Zauberberg. We

can begin by noting that the Orient appears in a least four different

locations in the novel, including eastern Europe, the Ottoman

Empire, and the Far East, as well as in the ancient myths of the

Mediterranean world.

Mann never tired of attributing the tension in his own character

between the respectable bourgeois and the morally suspect artist to

the conflicting influences of his north German father and his mother

from Brazil,5' and in keeping with this background, his early fiction

tends to move along a north-south axis. To mention only two of the

most famous examples, Tonio Kroger's "dark and fiery mother"

Consuelo comes "from far south on the map,"S 2 while the dissolute

Christian Buddenbrooks spends most of his adult life reminiscing

about his youthful adventures in Valparaiso, Chile. One of Mann's

earliest stories, "Der Wille zum Gliick" [The will to happiness]

(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

good family in South America. Unable to find happiness in the north,

Paolo travels extensively in southern Europe and northern Africa

before settling in Rome, "this modern metropolis in the South into

which the warm wind nevertheless blows the sultry sluggishness of

the Orient."53 As this early work already indicates, Mann's "Orien-

talized" south-whether conceived as southern Europe, northern

Africa, or South America-could easily expand to include regions

more traditionally associated with the Orient. Here Rome stands at

the border between East and West; in a more famous work, it will be

Venice. Gustav von Aschenbach finds himself wandering around

Munich disturbed and oddly excited by daydreams of tigers prowling

through tropical bamboo forests and decides to head south, "not

quite to the tigers,"54 but at least as far as Venice. Here beneath "the

sturdy splendor of the Oriental temple" of St. Mark's Cathedral, the

East comes to him in the form of a beautiful Polish boy and a disease

spawned in "the warm morasses of the Ganges delta."55 Der Tod in

Venedig links homosexual passion, illness, and genius to an Orient

that includes both southern and eastern Europe as well as Asia.56

Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 149

Given that Mann originally conceived Der Zauberberg as a comic

pendant to Der Tod in Venedig, it is not surprising that we should find

certain thematic parallels between the two works.57 Eastern Europe

also features as a site of sexual desire and illness that inspires intellec-

tual activity in Der Zauberberg, although whether Castorp's somewhat

delirious "research" should be taken as a sign of genius remains an

open question; it certainly contrasts with the stern precision of

Aschenbach's prose.58 Castorp's feverish mental activity is sparked in

the first instance by his infatuation with the Russian Clavdia

Chauchat's gray-green eyes, "whose slightly Asiatic shape and place-

ment enchant his very core" (227 [319]). Chauchat's "'Tartar phys-

iognomy,' in particular her 'lone-wolf eyes'" (284 [399]), in turn,

reawaken in Castorp the repressed memory of his adolescent homo-

sexual passion for Pfibislav Hippe, a boy whose Slavic-Wendish-

German "racial mixture" [Rassenmischung] (I 8 [1 68]), high cheek-

bones, and bluish-gray eyes seem identical to those of Chauchat.

Inspired by his combined passion for Chauchat and Hippe, Castorp

begins attending the lectures of the Polish psychologist Dr.

Krokowski, who lectures on the link between love and illness, speaks

Russian, and who, according to the prudish Settembrini, "has but

one thought in his head, and it is a filthy one" (61 [92]). A number of

minor characters round out the image of an Orientalized eastern

Europe in Der Zauberberg: the salesman Anton Karlowitsch Ferge has

traveled widely in the most distant reaches of the Russian Empire,

and Castorp thrills to tales of the adventurously exotic Russian peo-

ples, "with Asia in their blood, prominent cheekbones, and a Finno-

Mongolian set to their eyes" (306 [430]). Russia is also home to the

pretty Marusja, the unobtainable or unapproachable object of

Joachim Ziemssen's heterosexual desires. Finally, we have the Rus-

sian "barbarians"-whom Settembrini ironically calls the "Parthians

and Scythians" of the ancient Orient (220 [3 Io])-whose diurnal sex-

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.

Pouting because Joachim refuses to join the after-lunch gathering on

the veranda-thus denying him a chance to flirt with Chauchat

150 German Orientalisms

Castorp takes his revenge by finagling an invitation to view Behrens's

amateur paintings. A puzzled and embarrassed Ziemssen realizes why

his cousin has developed a sudden interest in the fine arts when Cas-

torp pauses in front of Behren's crude portrait of Madame Chauchat.

A hilarious scene ensues, as Castorp rattles on rapturously about the

marvels of the human body while ogling Chauchat's decolletage in

the painting that he half-consciously carries with him around the

room. The entire scene of doubly displaced passion-medical and

philosophical discussions about a painting rather than direct contact

with Chauchat-takes place in Behrens's smoking alcove that has

been decorated in what he imagines is a "Turkish" style with objects

whose origins are "probably more Indian or Persian than Turkish"

(258 [362]). Behrens grinds coffee for the cousins in a Turkish mill

while sitting with Joachim on an ottoman covered with silk pillows.

While he chats lecherously about subcutaneous fat deposits on the

female breast and thigh, Castorp absentmindedly picks up the coffee

mill, only to blush involuntarily when he realizes that it is covered

with obscene engravings. As Castorp helps himself to a cigarette

imprinted with a golden sphinx, Behrens remarks matter-of-factly

that the mill and the cigarettes were given to him as a present by an

Egyptian princess, who we later learn had arrived at the sanatorium

together with her Jewish lesbian lover and a castrated Moorish ser-

vant. Taken together, the various decorations in Behrens's smoking

alcove evoke an "Orient" of the sort that might titillate the imagina-

tion of the fraternity member that Behrens once was and in some

ways continues to be: a fraternity cap hangs with crossed dueling

swords above a desk in the adjoining room, and Behrens still affects

the jargon of his college days. In keeping with the masquerade,

Behrens attends the Mardi Gras costume ball wearing a fez.

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-

torp overhears Herr Albin frightening female patients by playing with

a razor-sharp knife that he bought from a blind magician in Calcutta.

Albin then half-seriously threatens to commit suicide with a pistol as

part of what Castorp regards as a disgraceful but weirdly exciting

form of flirtation. Much later, as it turns out, Albin will supply the

pistols for the duel between Settembrini and Naphta, thereby

Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 151

becoming the unwitting accomplice to Naphta's suicide. By this time

Castorp has had his adventures with the majestically incoherent

Mynheer Peeperkorn, "a colonial Dutchman, a man from Java, a cof-

fee-planter" (538 [751]). Peeperkorn, who at times resembles a hea-

then priest and at others a delirious alcoholic, regales Castorp with

tales of Indonesian love potions and exotic poisons. His Malayan

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-

mitted suicide by injecting himself with cobra venom from artificial

fangs. In a scene that anticipates the racial stereotyping in the movie

Gone with the Wind (1939), Castorp gives Chauchat a final kiss while

the Malayan watches, "rolling his brown animal eyes to one side until

the whites showed" (616 [859]).

Film actually contributes to the atmosphere of theatrical exoticism

that invades the sanatorium. In a short article written in May 1923, on

the occasion of the filming of Buddenbrooks, Mann had praised film as

"an immense democratic power." While admitting that he often

passes the time waiting for trains in foreign cities by watching feature

films, Mann claims that he is particularly fond of newsreels and doc-

umentaries that bring him pictures of exotic locales.59 He goes on to

list several such images in a passage that he worked directly into Der

Zauberberg. During Castorp's brief phase as a Good Samaritan he and

Joachim take the terminally ill Karen Karstedt to the movies: "a rous-

ing tale of love and murder in the court of an Oriental potentate

unrolled silently before them; scene after opulent scene sped past, full

of naked bodies, despotic lust, and abject servility blind in its zeal, full

of cruelty, prurience, and fatal desire . . . In short, it had been pro-

duced with a sympathetic understanding of its international audience

and catered to that civilization's secret wishes" (3 , [436-37]). Once

the Oriental despot has been dispatched the film takes its audience on

a whirlwind tour that offers glimpses of "a cockfight on Borneo,

naked savages blowing on nose flutes, the capture of wild elephants,

a ceremony at the Siamese royal court, a street of brothels in Japan

with geishas sitting caged behind wooden lattices" (311-12 [438]).

Although the medium has become technologically more sophisti-

cated, these images of an Orient produced for Western consumption

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]).

Beneath the various contemporary sites of an exotic and erotic

Orient in Der Zauberberg lies a mythic subtext, much as Leopold

Bloom retraces the voyages of Odysseus as he wanders through

Joyce's Dublin. Settembrini only half-jokingly refers to Behrens and

Krokowski as Rhadamanth and Minos, two judges of the Greek

underworld who sentence their wards to additional time in the

"Hades" of the tuberculosis ward, although in the inverted world of

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-

ney to the magic mountain resembles Faust's visit to the mysterious

"Mothers" in part two of Goethe's drama. "Descend, then!"

Mephistopheles commands his timorous partner; "I could also say:

ascend! It makes no difference" [Versinke denn! Ich konnt auch

sagen: steige! 'ist einerlei].6o In keeping with the topsy-turvy atmos-

phere, the magic mountain is also a realm of sexual inversion, cap-

tured most memorably in the slightly surreal Walpurgisnacht episode

in which Castorp finally consummates his affair with Chauchat/

Hippe after an evening of dreamlike conversation in French while

surrounded by cross-dressing party-goers. After having tasted of the

pomegranate of the underworld, to use Settembrini's phrase, Castorp

continues his forays into ancient Chaldean magic, listens to Naphta

discuss the role of the "lapis philosophorum, which is the male-female

product of sulfur and mercury-the res bina, the bisexual prima mate-

ria" (soi [699]) in medieval mysticism, and undergoes something of

his own purification, transubstantiation, and elevation (Steigerung) as

the concerns of the flatlands recede into oblivion.

Taken together, the various images of the Orient in Der Zauberbeng

present a dangerously alluring world of undifferentiated sexual desire

associated with both feverish intellectual activity and the threat of

violence or even death. Castorp's increasing absorption into the her-

metically sealed realm of the magic mountain, coupled with his cor-

responding alienation from the world of the newspapers that he no

Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 153

longer reads, would seem to be symptomatic of an irresponsible flight

from reality. In this vein Settembrini accuses Castorp of wallowing in

an Asiatic realm of squandered time and purposeless passion. Cas-

torp's protracted stay at the sanatorium becomes what Frederick

Lubich has described as a "uterine flight," a reactionary regression to

the mother.6' The ascent into the crystalline air of the Swiss moun-

tains becomes a symbolic descent into the morass of an atavistic Asian

matriarchy.

Yet this is only part of the story. As Lubich himself argues, the

matriarchal world on the mountain can also be viewed as a utopian

alternative to patriarchal society, although we need not follow him

into the realm of postmodern French feminism to support this claim.

Instead, we can look back beyond Bachofen and Gorres to the Early

Romantic tradition that envisioned an Indo-Germanic cosmopoli-

tanism as an alternative to the aggressively imperialist nationalism of

postrevolutionary Western states. There are many moments in the

novel when the enclosed world on the mountain seems to present a

miniature version of just such a cosmopolitan community. The

streets in Davos are full of patients and tourists from around the

world, as Castorp and Ziemssen repeatedly note: "They were now

walking on a city sidewalk-it was immediately apparent that this

was the main street of an international resort" (71 [10o4]). Americans,

Russians, and Dutch with a slightly Malayan appearance mix with

Germans and Swiss, "all intermixed with a sprinkling of indetermi-

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

of existence" (31 6 [443]). Of course, the permanent residents of this

international community are dead, and they died young, while the

motley crew of shoppers in Davos-many of whom are also mortally

ill- enjoy the artificial paradise of a tourist trap. Yet the alternative

image of the sanatorium as a high-altitude underworld is no less

qualified. We can neither take the multilingual Behrens completely

seriously as the judge of Hades, nor can we view him without irony

as an ambassador to an unofficial League of Nations, and yet Mann

hints at both interpretations. The magic mountain offers Mann a

154 German Orientalisms

chance to play through possibilities, to consider intellectual debates

from multiple angles. Like the film clips shown in the sanatorium

from around the world, the diverse individuals assembled on the

mountain function as a simulacrum of an international community,

an experimental form of virtual cosmopolitanism.

The hermetically sealed world of the magic mountain represents

still more than the matriarchy in both its utopian and reactionary

guises. The modern patriarchal world of empire building and world

conflict also finds its way onto the mountain, if in similarly displaced

form. To approach this aspect of the novel by means of indirection,

let us return to the figure of Clavdia Chauchat. As noted, her Asiatic

features lure Castorp into a world of sexuality associated with

Bachofen's ancient matriarchy. Yet Chauchat also exhibits character-

istics of the modern, feminized, and Orientalized Occident so feared

by conservative ideologues such as Alfred Baeumler. Chauchat

neglects her physical appearance, ignores schedules, slams doors, lives

apart from her husband, and entertains other men behind closed

doors- all symptomatic of Western decadence, modern feminism,

and revolutionary anarchy.62 Chauchat's absent husband is not Rus-

sian, but a Frenchman living in Daghestan, a part of the Russian

Empire between the Caucasus mountains and the Caspian Sea. Why

Daghestan, of all places? As Kenneth Weisinger has suggested,

Chauchat's husband is almost certainly involved in the oil industry

centered in the region.63 His presence there and his marriage to

Chauchat suggest both the European competition for natural

resources in the Caucasus and the Franco-Russian alliance, that,

together with Great Britain, was to form the Triple Entente against

Germany and Austria in the First World War. Thus Chauchat not

only represents the threat of an effeminate or feminist West but also

has ties to the masculine reaction against this threat that takes the

form of colonialism, imperialism, and militarism.

Castorp, for his part, comes not from the provincial city of Liibeck

that Mann later described as having preserved something of a

medieval ambiance,64 but from the modern metropolis and bustling

international harbor of Hamburg. Castorp grows up in this atmos-

phere of "global shopkeeping and prosperity," breathing in "the pun-

gent odors of the world's produce [Kolonialwaren] piled high" and

Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 155

watching massive "ships that had sailed to Asia and Africa" undergo-

ing repairs in the dry docks (29 [47]). Perhaps, suggests the narrator,

these influences determined Castorp's decision to become a ship's

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

cousin in Davos before he was to begin work at the firm of Tunder

and Wilms in Hamburg. As Weisinger points out, Castorp's place of

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,

plays no direct role in such international rivalries. A lethargic youth

whose inheritance does not quite make him independently wealthy,

Castorp pursues his career as a ship's engineer with something less

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

in Davos, and after a few abortive attempts to take it up again at the

sanatorium, he soon turns to more stimulating fare.

The international conflicts between world powers on the flatlands

and the high seas take place in the displaced form of male-male rival-

ries on the magic mountain. Following Eve Sedgwick and Christo-

pher Lane, Weisinger views the mountain as a site of heterosexual

conflict and homosocial bonding that enacts the dynamics of West-

ern imperial nations in the struggle to conquer and colonize the rest

of the world. The Oriental trappings of Behrens's smoking alcove not

only point to the "Asiatic" appeal of Chauchat's sexuality, but also to

the competition between Germany and Great Britain to control this

realm. Behrens offers Castorp indirect access to Chauchat, but also

stands in his way as a potential rival, as Castorp suspects that he has

done more than just paint her portrait. The scene begins with an

exchange that reads almost as a parody of Freudian symbolism, as

each man fondles his cigar and speaks lovingly of "her" temperament.

Mann ironically but effectively stages a double double entendre: the

men caress and trade phallic objects that they treat as female lovers.

The exchange thus simultaneously portrays a moment of homosocial

bonding between heterosexual men over Chauchat, while hinting at

a homosexual pederastic relationship between the young man and his

156 German Orientalisms

doctor.66 Mann further links this moment of homosocial bonding to

the dynamics of imperialism by pausing to detail the cigar cases that

Castorp has received in the mail from Bremen: "They came in beau-

tiful enameled boxes with gilt depictions of a globe, lots of medal-

lions, and an exposition hall with banners flying" (248 [349]). The

cigar cases present the sort of triumphalist advertising that Anne

McClintock has discussed in the context of Victorian England:

"advertising took scenes of empire into every corner of the home,

stamping images of colonial conquest on soap boxes, matchboxes,

biscuit tins, whiskey bottles, tea tins, and chocolate bars."67 The Ori-

ental decorations of the smoking alcove in which Castorp practically

drools over Chauchat's crudely painted flesh continue the double ref-

erence, pointing simultaneously to a realm of unbridled sensuality in

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

night with Chauchat. He chooses a poor moment to do so, however,

for Behrens is giving Castorp one of his periodic injections and-

accidentally?-hits a nerve just as Castorp makes his confession.

"'That's a critical nerve you happened to hit there, Director

Behrens,'" exclaims Castorp; "'Oh, yes, yes, hurts like hell.'" If

Behrens did in fact jab Castorp in anger, he quickly recovers his

composure and is cavalier enough to enter into Castorp's game by

offering his own lewd comment about Chauchat: "Rather nice, eh?"

[Niedlich, was?] (347 [485]).

Later in the novel, however, Mann portrays a kinder, gentler form

of male friendship that stands as an alternative to the sort of towel-

snapping jocularity that typifies Castorp's exchanges with Behrens. In

the most moving scene in Der Zauberberg Castorp watches his beloved

cousin die, and his violent reaction to the reappearance ofJoachim's

ghost during the seance suggests that this is one relationship that must

be left in peace. Castorp also develops a genuine fondness for Set-

tembrini, and at the very end of the novel they share a bittersweet

embrace in which Settembrini not only addresses Hans by his first

name- -"Giovanni"-but even embraces him and kisses him on both

cheeks: "a Mediterranean-or perhaps a Russian-kiss" (702 [979]).

Somewhat earlier Chauchat returns to the sanatorium with another

Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 157

potential rival for Castorp, Mynheer Peeperkorn, and for time they

do eye each other suspiciously. When confronted by Settembrini and

accused of succumbing to Asiatic softness, however, Castorp declares

that he is not about to respond to the challenge with poison and dag-

gers like a passionate southern European: "in short, have me play

cock of the walk. That would be very manly of me, to be sure,

socially masculine and gallant. But I see it differently. I am not at all

manly in the sense that I regard other men as my rivals in courting

perhaps I am not masculine at all" (576 [804]). When later challenged

directly by Peeperkorn to confess that he has indeed been Chauchat's

lover, Castorp at first refuses to answer as he stares at the "bloodstains,

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

rival. A less macho encounter would be difficult to imagine, for

Peeperkorn has already confessed his impotence, and Castorp is quick

to comment "that I find it rather boastful and tasteless of me to call

myself 'the man,' although Clavdia to be sure is a woman" (599

[837]). At the moment Castorp is indeed no macho man, but

whether she is entirely a woman is another matter; at least on the

night in which he returned "son crayon" Chauchat/Hippe exuded a

distinctly hermaphroditic appeal.

Thus the Occidental patriarchy takes on its own ambivalence in

Der Zauberberg that complements the conflicting images of the Ori-

ental matriarchy. Just as the undifferentiated world of sexual desire

linked to the East is alternately associated with regression to reac-

tionary politics and progression toward utopian cosmopolitanism, the

world of decadent women and male rivalries in the West can result

either in hypermasculine militancy and imperial aggression or a

softer, more "effeminate" form of male friendship. To translate this

double dialectic within the novel back into an intellectual-historical

shorthand that Mann would have understood, the Oriental matri-

archy features both as the threateningly irrational realm conjured by

Gorres, Bachofen, and Baeumler and as the androgynous utopia of

Novalis and Adam Miiller. Occidental patriarchy, in turn, oscillates

between the protofascist male bonding of a Hans Bliiher and the

158 German Orientalisms

democratic ecstasies of a Walt Whitman. Perhaps as an indication of

his turn toward a less confrontational form of masculinity, Castorp

will eventually give up his beloved Maria Mancini for a local Swiss

cigar named "Oath of Riitli" [Riitlischwur] (698 [974]), a clear refer-

ence to the primal scene of Swiss democracy that features promi-

nently in Schiller's Wilhelm Tell-although, with characteristic irony,

Hans's rejection of Maria also marks his final divorce from any direct

engagement in the concerns of the flatlands.

With this set of oppositions in mind, let us turn to the most com-

plexly contradictory figure in the novel: Leo Naphta. As an eastern

European Jew, Naphta evokes an Oriental world of reactionary

Romanticism in its most threatening guise: he admires the work of

Gorres and Arndt, prefers medieval mysticism to enlightened ratio-

nality, and likes Gothic art over Renaissance Humanism. We learn

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

who introduces Castorp to the world of ancient Mediterranean mys-

ticism, including the "bacchanalian excess" of the Eleusian Mysteries

(503 [701]). As Settembrini warns Hans and Joachim, Naphta is a

voluptuary in his personal life, given to fine silks and rich chocolate

cakes, as well as an intellectual who dares to tell the impressionable

young lads about a medieval hierarchy of knowledge that leads

upward from peasants toiling in the fields to the bed where lovers can

retreat from the world to commune with God. Settembrini responds

to Naphta's philosophy with a burst of righteous indignation: "Ah,

no, I am a European, an Occidental. Your ladder is pure Orient. The

East despises action" (370 [517]). From Settembrini's perspective,

Naphta is a particularly threatening emissary from the Eastern realm

of sexual excess and political regression, for Naphta can articulate the

seductive lure of Eastern mysticism to Castorp in a way that

Chauchat/Hippe cannot.

As always, however, Settembrini's perspective offers only a partial

truth. As Naphta is quick to observe, the West has its own tradition

of mystical thought. Moreover, he points out that there is more than

a little hypocrisy in Settembrini's self-righteous stance. Settembrini

speaks with pride of the cultural advances made possible by the Cru-

sades, of the liberal democracy of the nation-state and the hope to

Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 159

establish a bourgeois world republic. At the same time, however, Set-

tembrini is such a fervent Italian nationalist he is ready to fight "a civ-

ilizing war" (38o [530]) against the encroaching Austrian Empire at a

moment's notice. What Settembrini presents as a desire for interna-

tional democracy and world peace becomes in Naphta's eyes merely

an excuse for international capitalism and world conquest. In con-

trast, Naphta's advocacy of a postnational revival of a Catholic-Com-

munist cosmopolitanism carries with it at least traces of the Early

Romantic alternative to the "masculine" aggression of the modern

nation-state. Symptomatic of this aspect of Naphta's character is the

"effeminate" luxury of his apartment: "the decor was first-rate, and

so ornate that despite the desk and bookcases the room did not have

much of a masculine look" (385 [538]). Such effeminacy is of course

a sign of decadence, from Settembrini's perspective, but it also has

positive associations as an alternative to the "Imperium der Zivilisa-

tion" that Settembrini represents.

Naphta, like Chauchat, also has strong ties to the West. He was

orphaned early when his father was brutally murdered in a pogrom

and raised by Jesuits, who are associated with the Counter-Reforma-

tion, international proselytizing, and an overly refined, morally

ambiguous "Jesuitical" logic. If Naphta's early experience of blood

sacrifice associates him with the "chthonic" world of the ancient

matriarchy, his commitment to revolutionary communism links him

to the return of the feminine in its modern guise as an anarchic, vio-

lent, revolutionary force in the Western world. To add yet another

layer to Naphta's crushing and contradictory symbolic burden, he

also represents the masculine reaction against modern effeminacy in

his advocacy of personal renunciation in the service of a higher cause:

"absolute authority and an ironclad bond-discipline and sacrifice,

renunciation of the ego, and coercion of the personality." Today's

youth only thinks it wants to be free, continues Naphta: "'Its deep-

est desire is to obey.' Joachim sat up straight. Hans Castorp blushed"

(393 [549]).

Forced to represent not only the East in both its guises as politically

reactionary mysticism and potentially progressive cosmopolitanism,

but also aspects of the modern, Orientalized West, it seems almost

inevitable that Naphta should commit suicide. He succumbs to the

160 German Orientalisms

internal contradictions of his character, despite Castorp's visionary

assertion that "man is the master of contradictions" (487 [679]). As T.

J. Reed and even Thomas Mann himself argued, the "Snow" chap-

ter unambiguously presents the moral of the story.68 Lest we over-

look the clear message, Mann has thoughtfully italicized it for us in

the text: "For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no

dominion over his thoughts." In pious appreciation of these profound

sentiments, Castorp resolves to change his life: "I will remember it. I

will be good" (487 [679]). Castorp's heartfelt pledge carries a hint of

vestigial piety of the sort that causes him to rub his hands together

before he eats, "perhaps because his forebears had prayed before

every meal" (13 [25]). Whether the moralizing message of Castorp's

vision in the snow does justice to the novel's conclusion is another

question, however. A good third of the novel remains between the

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

long-neglected concerns of the flatlands, but Mann has given us little

reason to be optimistic. Der Zauberberg ends with a refrain that trans-

poses the triumphant harmonies of the vision in the snow into a final,

unresolved chord in a minor key: "And out of this worldwide festi-

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]).

Probably not, or at least not in the immediate future. What rose up

instead was the Third Reich and Second World War. Glancing

ahead, Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (1947) reworks the themes of

Der Tod in Venedig and Der Zauberberg into an analysis of Germany's

descent into fascism. Once again he links the East to sexuality, dis-

ease, and genius: Adrian Leverkiihn contracts the syphilis that tem-

porarily heightens his creative powers in Hungary, which is also the

site of his homosexual affair with the violinist Rudi Schwerdtfeger.69

Mann portrays fascism as a paradoxical combination of barbaric pas-

sion with rigid order, Asiatic femininity and Occidental masculinity,

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

Munich, and that Chauchat has exhibited a disturbing lack of social

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

not a lack of form, but an excess of form, death as form, so to speak"

(495 [690]).

The combination of a hypermasculine rigidity with raw passion

recurs in the strictly choreographed ecstasy of the Nazi rallies-and in

the twelve-tone music of Adrian Leverkihn. Here again, Mann

introduces a characteristic ambivalence into his portrayal of Lev-

erkihn and his music. On the one hand, he presents Leverkihn as a

cosmopolitan intellectual who resists the patriotic excesses of his

acquaintances and whose music has nothing to do with contempo-

rary German politics. From this perspective, Mann condemns not

Leverkiihn, but those irresponsible German intellectuals of the sort

that haunt the Kridwiss circle and dabble in reactionary thought

without considering the political consequences. On the other hand,

Mann borrows a kind of totalitarian logic from Theodor Adorno that

implicates Leverkiihn's music in the fascist politics he avoids. That is,

Leverkiihn's absolute music inadvertently but inevitably reproduces

the structure of the society in which it is written. Once again, Mann's

dialectical imagination is at odds with his humanist pathos. In count-

less public appearances, radio addresses, and essays, Mann worked to

condemn the Nazi regime that drove him into exile, and it would be

churlish not to acknowledge his efforts and their personal cost. Yet

his spokesman for humanist values in the novel, Serenus Zeitblom,

seems at best ineffectual and at worst complicitous with the regime

whose technical prowess he admires and whose resolution of the

"Jewish question" arouses only mild disagreement,70 while the apo-

litical genius Leverkiihn ends up writing a demonically inspired

musical counterpart to the dynamics of German fascism. To be sure,

the world did not end in 1945, and Mann continued to write for

another decade. The self-contained world of Dr. Faustus, however,

draws to an apocalyptic close that renders the prospect of a hope

beyond hopelessness tenuous indeed.

162 German Orientalisms

BOTHO STRAUB: APOCALYPSE NOW

The reclusive German writer Botho Straul3 (1944-) scored the media

sensation of the year with the publication of his essay "Anschwellen-

der Bocksgesang" [Rising/swelling song of the goat] in Der Spiegel of

February 8, 1993.71 In this essay, whose title translates more loosely as

"rising tide of tragedy" or "impending sense of doom," Straul3 gives

voice to a cultural pessimism that recalls the mood of Oswald Spen-

gler's Untergang des Abendlandes or Thomas Mann's Betrachtungen eines

Unpolitischen. As he had done in earlier works, Straul3 lashes out

against the mass media that obliterate all distinctions between public

and private. "Infotainment" has produced a nation of half-educated

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

admired the work of Theodor Adorno, and Straul3 drew predictable

charges of elitism for his comments. More provocative were the pas-

sages in "Bocksgesang" in which Straul3 seemed to express sympathy

for nationalism, to wax nostalgic for the virtues of discipline in the

home and in the state, and to lament the hostility toward soldiers, the

Church, and tradition in the Federal Republic of Germany. Perhaps

most troubling, however, was Straul3's contention that "racism and

xenophobia" are "fallen cultic passions which originally had a sacred

meaning that created order" (263). Within a few weeks an outraged

Peter Glotz objected that Straul3, perhaps unintentionally, provided a

cover for the worst sort of modern hate crime: "We had hoped that

this mixture of moods [Stimmungsmixtur] had drowned in blood in

1945 at the latest. In 1993 Botho Straul3 corrects us for the worse."72

The left-wing newspaper die taz reduced the controversy to a

provocative question: "Is Botho Straul3 a fascist?"73

For anyone who read the essay carefully, the answer would have to

be a resounding "no." "The crimes of the Nazis are so enormous,"

writes Straul3, "that they cannot be compensated by moral shame or

other bourgeois feelings. They place the German in shock and leave

him shaking . . . a guilt that exceeds human boundaries cannot sim-

ply be 'worked off in one or two generations."74 True, Straul3 styles

himself as a conservative in opposition to what he feels is the liberal

Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 163

mainstream of German society, yet he draws a sharp distinction

between his own rightist position and the neo-Nazi thugs he

identifies as his worst, most bitter enemies. True, Straul3 cites Rene

Girard on the salutary effect that cultic sacrifices once had for ancient

communities, yet he distances this past from modern racism and

xenophobia. Straul3's primary goal is not to condemn foreigners in

contemporary Germany, but to condemn what he feels is the

hypocrisy of knee-jerk liberalism on the left. In this regard his own

conservative position parallels right-wing attacks on "political cor-

rectness" in the United States during the "culture wars" of the early

1990s, on those "tenured radicals" with children and credit cards who

cling to the moral high ground of their youth.75

Nevertheless, Botho

Straul3 is on dangerous territory in

"Anschwellender Bocksgesang." Nostalgia for blood sacrifice in the

name of the nation, however qualified, is not a sentiment that sits

well in a country still shaking from the Nazi past and the aftershocks

of neo-Nazi violence. At a time when Giinter Grass argued that the

memory of crimes committed at Auschwitz under an earlier German

regime gave his contemporary Germans "every reason to fear our-

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

reprinted as the first contribution to a large anthology that served as

the collective manifesto of Germany's new conservatism. Contribu-

tors to Die Selbstbewusste Nation [The self-conscious nation] (1994)

declared that it was finally time for Germany to become a "normal"

nation again. Deriding the "national masochism" and "German self-

hatred" of those on the left, the authors revived old cliches about

Germany as the land of "inwardness," "unworldliness," "homeland,"

and "homesickness" (Innerlichkeit, Weltferne, Heimat, Heimweh).77 In

language disturbingly reminiscent of Nazi ideology, one contributor

dared to speak of the peculiarly German experience of nature as a

"Nordically dark, tragic elemental force" [nordisch-diistere, tragische

Urgewalt] and proclaimed that it was time to revitalize the "splendid

tradition" of German Romanticism that leads from Tieck and

Eichendorff to Bachofen and Klages.78

For too long, these writers maintained, postwar liberals had

"fetishized" Germany's ties to the West. Thus a second volume of

164 German Orientalisms

essays challenged Germany's Westbindung and suggested that it was

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

who failed to understand the resurgence of nationalism in Eastern

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

to contribute blood sacrifice to the cause is something that we no

longer understand and consider false and reprehensible in our liberal-

libertarian self-absorption."so In looking to the East, Straul3 joins

with other German conservatives of the early 199os who rejected the

West as the source of capitalist greed, ecological recklessness, and a

stupefying mass media. Echoes of the once-positive belief in a Ger-

man Sonderweg began to be heard again among a new generation of

Romantic anticapitalists in a replay of "the so-called 'Conservative

Revolution' of the 192os."81

That the media-shy Straul3 should have emerged as such a promi-

nent voice in the public debate came as a surprise, however, and he

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

remarks: "Some who spit on me today used to visit me gladly .. .

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

misunderstood loner, the prophet of disaster crying in the wilderness,

he retreated to his country home to pursue his melancholy thoughts

and to dismiss the affair as a "farce" and a "bitter joke" (118).

For those familiar with Botho Straul3's career prior to 1993, the

ideas expressed in "Anschwellender Bocksgesang" should not have

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

Kopisten. Straul3 has also displayed a consistent interest in German

national identity in the wake of National Socialism, both before and

after Reunification. Evidence from the literary texts suggests that

Straul3 is anything but a flag-waving national chauvinist; a recent

Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 165

reviewer has in fact dubbed him "the last social critic.S"82 In Paare,

Passanten, for example, he writes of "German National Socialism" as

"our unique place of birth," a point of origin for postwar society

from which there can be no escape.83 As a result of this past, Germans

lack "das nationell Positive," the capacity for a healthy attitude

toward the nation.84 The protagonist of the slightly earlier novel

Rumor (1980) does experience a brief surge of national pride "despite

Hitler" during a drunken conversation in New York about the con-

centration camps, yet even he admits that his sudden stab of "home-

sickness and love" is "to a doubtlessly imaginary country.s85 Bekker

in any case hardly qualifies as a positive role model. Certainly one of

the least pleasant characters to haunt postwar German literature,

Bekker staggers through the book in an alcoholic stupor, fluctuating

between incestuous desires for his daughter, hatred of his former boss,

and delusions of grandeur. Near the end of the novel he adopts a

group of unemployed Pakistanis, promises them jobs, and accepts the

offer of a bed in their crowded apartment, only to slip out before

dawn to alert the police and to have the illegal immigrants arrested.

The entire episode is an exercise in self-aggrandizement based on a

callous disregard for the human dignity of the foreign workers.

Straul3's most ambitious novel, Der junge Mann [The young man]

(1984), also contains sustained reflections on German national identity

in the postwar period. Here again, Straul3 seems to go out of his way

to discredit nationalist sentiments and those who represent them. In

the opening pages the narrator captures the atmosphere of his con-

temporary Berlin with a sketch of unemployed men of various ages

who spend their days drinking around the kiosk where he gets his

morning paper. Their only real friends are their dogs-German shep-

herds, of course. In this passage Straul3 collapses history into an eternal

present of the German language; these men "simply speak along in a

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

executive becomes lost in a mysterious forest where she finds a depart-

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

history. The owner of the store is introduced as the all-powerful Ger-

166 German Orientalisms

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

Germans," he contends that his influence extends to both halves of the

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

his subterranean abode into the light of day.

That Germany's past cannot be shrugged off quite so easily

becomes apparent in the longest section of the novel, "The Terrace."

The section begins with the death of Hitler as Balthazar of the Old

Testament, ends with his burial, and consists primarily of conversa-

tions and stories among a group of postwar Germans on the model of

Boccaccio's Decameron or Friedrich Schlegel's Gesprach uber die Poesie

[Conversation about poetry] (18oo).87 Hitler/Balthazar dies at dawn,

yet time stands still in the pages that follow: "And so it was, and con-

tinued to be for many, many years, pervasively and without excep-

tion; and many believe that even today this strong and beautiful land

has not yet completely awakened from its Balthazar night" (123

[1 8 1]). The section contains a debate between Hans-Werner, a mod-

ern optimist who embraces the positive potential of the new com-

puter age, and the conservative ideologue Reppenfries, who laments

Germany's transformation from a nation rooted in the Volk into a

permissive modern society in need of "peace of mind and a sense of

conformity" [Fassung und Fiigung] (133 [195]). Reppenfries thus

anticipates some of the more disturbing ideas Straul3 voices in

"Anschwellender Bocksgesang," yet in the context of the novel his

character is severely compromised by his penchant for wearing uni-

forms and his brutal treatment of his wife.88 Like Bekker before him,

Reppenfries cannot be viewed uncritically as Straul3's spokesman in

the novel. The section concludes with a grotesque parade of postwar

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

fourth generation by a long chain of tyrannies" (209 [298]). A series

of bitter caricatures leads seamlessly from the "professional antifas-

cists" of the 1950s to the student radicals of the 1960s, and concludes

Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 167

with a cry of disgust at the motley crew of contemporary German

city dwellers: "ah, you lonely hearts, unhappy city dwellers, you who

can no longer be disappointed: you don't deserve to be united!" (211I

[300oo]). Taken together, then, the evidence from Straul3's prose texts

of the I980s suggests that while he is disturbed by the centrifugal

forces in modern society and the resulting loss of national tradition,

he remains acutely aware of the fascist past that makes it impossible

for Germans to celebrate the nation uncritically.

In addition to reflections on German history in allegorical and

essayistic passages of Derjunge Mann, Straul3 also places his novel into

an implicit dialogue with the literary tradition of the German Bil-

dungsroman. Parallels between Derjunge Mann and earlier texts associ-

ated with the Bildungsroman abound: the opening and concluding sec-

tions of the novel focus on Leon Pracht, who, like Wilhelm Meister

before him, sets off on a theatrical mission or Sendung. The phantas-

magoric dream sequences in the middle of this "Romantic Novel of

Reflection" [RomantischerReflexionsRoman] (7 [I5]) recall pas-

sages from Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and Straul3 in fact alludes to

Klingsohr's Mdrchen (314 [221]).89 Like Hans Castorp on the magic

mountain, Leon Pracht listens largely in silence to the ideological

debates between Reppenfries and Hans-Werner (themselves reincar-

nations of Naphta and Settembrini). Unlike the stereotypical hero

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

again, however, he is in good company, as such literary predecessors

as Anton Reiser, Heinrich Lee, and Oskar Matzerath prove equally

incapable of settling down to responsible adulthood. Finally, the

reflections on German culture and history in Der junge Mann con-

tinue a tradition that extends from Wilhelm Meister's aspirations for

a German national theater to examinations of the Third Reich in

Mann's Dr. Faustus, Grass's Blechtrommel, and Siegfried Lenz's

Deutschstunde.

As in many of these earlier works, the East plays a prominent role

in the symbolic geography of Der junge Mann. In the opening seg-

ment of the novel we learn that Leon Pracht's father is a scholar of

ancient Middle Eastern religions with a particular interest in Mon-

168 German Orientalisms

tanus, the leader of a schismatic movement in early Christianity cen-

tered in ancient Phrygia (modern Anatolia). Montanus was an apoc-

alyptic prophet of the imminent end of the world who advocated

strict morality and severe penance, and whose followers sought

moments of frenzied ecstasy and divine rapture. The charismatic

movement threatened the hierarchy of the organized Church, while

the prominent role of two female prophets in its ranks was unusual

and provocative. As a young man Leon follows in his father's foot-

steps, dutifully learning Aramaic and Coptic while his contempo-

raries in the late 1960s are revolting against paternal authority. Leon's

expertise in religious mysticism attracts the attention of a young

dramatist directing Shaw's Saint Joan, and Leon begins his own direc-

torial career with an almost religious sense of mission: "I saw myself

as the new Montanus, and just as this visionary journeyed through

Phrygian towns and cities with his two prophetesses, Priscilla and

Maximillia, proclaiming the advent of the new Jerusalem, so I was

determined to lead a movement of renewal along with my two

actresses, at least in the theater and in the actor's art" (17 [31i]). As a

young man, Leon Pracht is particularly interested in the sexual com-

ponent of the esoteric religion: "I happily immersed myself in these

secret Christian writings, which constantly made reference to femi-

nine wisdom, to 'God the Mother,' to an almighty erotic grace, as it

seemed to me then" (io [22]). Thus this "unpolitical" German's early

interest in an obscure religious sect draws him into an exotic and

eroticized maternal realm that recalls Bachofen's descriptions of the

ancient Asian matriarchy.

The postmodern counterpart to this ancient matriarchal society

appears in the section entitled "The Settlement (The Outsiders) [Die

Gesellschaftslosen]." Here an unnamed protagonist who can plausibly

be understood to represent either Leon himself or his romantic Dop-

pelginger9° is hired by authorities in Frankfurt to conduct ethno-

graphic research on an unusual community living northwest of

Cologne. The origins of the group are somewhat obscure, but they

are described as "the modern men of the third industrial revolution"

(75 [i 4]) who have undergone a transformation into a different sort

of a society, perhaps as a result of radiation emanating from nuclear

stockpiles. The community is not economically viable, yet the

Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 169

authorities support and study it as a form of social experiment that

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.

The alternative society is known as "Synkreas," or "Syks" for

short, a name invented in jest by one of the observers who noted that

they are "creative-but only as inventive synthesizers, as collectors and

recyclers" (78 [I i8]). Combination matters more than innovation for

the members of this group, who value "dreams, games, collecting,

integrating concepts . . . [over] the iron rule of abstract logic, plan-

ning, progress and the dictates of tradition" (79 [120]). The Syks are

gradually doing away with binary oppositions in a deliberately impre-

cise language that substitutes ambivalence for logic. Their politics are

equally amorphous: although they are not a lawless society, the Syks

shift their allegiance rapidly from one form of government to the

next, moving from absolutism to dictatorship to democracy within a

matter of weeks. Their clothing changes as fast as their politics: some-

times they wear fanciful costumes; at other times they wear drab gray

outfits; at still others the men wear elegant suits while the women

wear only colorful body paint. Provisional "body-heat alliances"

[Wirmeverbande] (90) have replaced traditional marriages and fami-

lies.

It is difficult to reduce the Syks to a single allegorical meaning.

Certainly they recall aspects of German Romanticism, particularly in

their attitude toward religion.9' The Syks believe that one spirit flows

through everything, and they seek contact with this "Great Melt-

River" [Grol3en Schmelzflu3] (91 [135S]). In a passage recalling

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

endless path of the universe coming to an awareness of itself [des sich

selbst zu Bewujf3tsein kommenden Universums]" (9I [136]). Yet the Syks

are also quite up-to-date, believing that the universal spiritual order

reveals itself in a modern semiconductor as well as in the intricate

maze of a termite heap. As "synthetic creators" they produce works

that evoke both Early Romantic "Symphilosophie" and the post-

modern pastiche. Elsewhere termed "Romantics of the electronic

170 German Orientalisms

revolution" (259 [369]), they express their neo-Romantic spirituality

"in the great electronic total" [in der grol3en elektronischen Totale]

(6 [14]) of the postmodern age.

Politically the Syks are equally ambivalent. To a certain extent

they exemplify some of the negative connotations of communitarian

thought.92 As their language disintegrates they become incapable of

the rational debate necessary in liberal democracies; their tight social

organization seems to answer the call for more "Fassung und

Fiigung" from the politically suspect Reppenfries; and the Syks'

longing for a muscular Messiah seems particularly questionable. At

other times, however, the peaceful Syks seem much closer to the

I96os counterculture or its New Age descendants than to the totali-

tarian culture of the Third Reich. Particularly noteworthy in this

regard is the decidedly international, or, more precisely, postnational

makeup of the community. At first mysterious climatic changes in

central Europe gave rise to small groups within existing social orga-

nizations. "The situation did not change radically until the sudden

advent of extensive migration and new patterns of colonization that

spread freely across national and state borders" (75 [114]). Within

such settlements a "new consciousness" (77 [I17]) arose that tran-

scended national borders. The Syks are a strange conglomeration of

Icelandic fishermen, French actors, Turkish tailors, and German

"psychagogues." While fascist society bonded men together in ser-

vice to a fatherland rooted in blood and soil, the Syks represent an

alternative "feminine" society: "all knowledge had become femi-

nine" (90 [i34]). The Syks live in the same forest where the bank

executive had discovered the "Tower of the Germans." The tower is

still there, but the German voices have vanished: "On the inside it

was completely bleak and empty, with only a spiral wooden staircase

rising into the heights, before reaching its bricked-up terminus

devoid of any view" (80 [121]). A postnational community has no

place for national tradition. Outside the settlement Germany has not

disappeared, however, and it is the task of Leon Pracht, or his alter

ego, to observe and comment on the Syks to the proper authorities.

He thus occupies a position analogous to that of his father in the

study of ancient religion: the rational, masculine, German ethnogra-

pher investigates an irrational, feminized, non-German society. The

Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 171

postmodern and postnational community of the Syks, in other words,

seems to reincarnate the schismatic Christian community of the

ancient Orient. Each society, in turn, stands in an uneasy relation to

Germany's fascist past as both its close relative and its alien Other.

In "Die Siedlung" Leon unsuccessfully attempts to cross over into

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,

the Germans! From whom we have descended, and who have

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,

rejects him, and he is ordered by the Syk authorities to meet his

brother's wife in a chalet just outside the borders of the settlement.

Surprised to discover that his long-forgotten brother even has a wife,

Leon obeys and soon finds himself in the grasp of overwhelming pas-

sion for the woman. In the novel's most controversial sequence,

Leon ejaculates violently onto the silent woman's upturned face and

later discovers her vomiting in a bathtub full of human excrement.

Leon dives into the tub "like a good Christian knight" ( 112 [163])

and engages in mortal combat with what has become a monster, but

then faints to awaken alone in a bed with clean white sheets.

"Brrr," commented Caroline Fetscher in her review of this scene

in the novel. "Maybe he [Botho Strau3] needed to 'work through'

[these fantasies] [Vielleicht mufite er 'da durch'], but maybe he could

have left most of this report on his 'expedition' in a drawer [unpub-

lished]."93 The scene is indeed disturbing if we read it as a fragment

of Botho's great confession, although Straul3 insists elsewhere that

none of his works is directly autobiographical.94 In the context of the

novel, in any case, the scene frequently cited as evidence of Straul3's

pornographic imagination actually leads to the humiliation and defeat

of the male protagonist. Immediately after his ejaculation Leon feels

overcome with shame and remorse. The subsequent bathtub scene

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.

What he had experienced as a uniquely passionate experience was

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

performed in the chalet; he pays without protest, ironically footing

the bill for the Syks' successful effort to cast him from their midst.

Particularly noteworthy is the fact that his brother's wife is from

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

many years in several different countries of the Near and Middle

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-

gins" (io8 [158]). This "Oriental" woman serves as a fitting repre-

sentative of the "effeminate" Syk society that stands in opposition to

modern Germany, while suggesting a link between the postnational

European cult and the mystical Middle Eastern religious sect of

antiquity. Ironically, however, the very woman who seems to initi-

ate Leon into Syk society actually sends him back to the Germany he

longs to escape. He awakens from his nightmarish adventures to see a

mighty (German) oak outside his window. On his way out of the

community he stops for a final conversation with his brother's wife,

who presses "her lovely exotic [Oriental] face" [ihr schones, mor-

genlindisches Gesicht] (II6 [169]) against a fence. Leon kisses her

fingertips, but Ines drags him away. He feels betrayed by her report

to the authorities, who show no sympathy for his "feminine" intelli-

gence and fire him. He spends the rest of the long, hot summer in a

shabby room in Frankfurt.

The Orient features prominently again in Leon's one clearly auto-

biographical narrative in Derjunge Mann. In the section entitled "Die

Terrasse" [The terrace] Leon describes how he once traveled to

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

together, and he finds himself drawn as if by a magnetic force to the

woman's apartment where they engage in frenzied sex. He awakens

alone and soon discovers that he is one of several men whom the

woman, named Mero, has seduced and enchanted. Only a fragment

of his own self escapes her spell and is drawn to the voice of a young

girl singing beyond the walls of Mero's garden. It turns out to be

none other than Mero herself, but as a sixteen-year-old girl. Before

long Leon and the younger Mero are locked in a magical embrace

interrupted by the older Mero at the height of Leon's passion. Fear-

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

two are reunited as he watches, a scene that magically removes both

his sexual frustration and his grief. He leaves Istanbul feeling deeply

rested and at peace.

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

madness or intoxication, and with her Leon experiences Dionysian

rapture.95 Once again, however, what begins as a male fantasy ends

with the woman in control, as Mero turns out to be a modern Circe

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

her seductive powers. In psychological terms, then, Mero suffers

from an unresolved Electra complex and becomes a kind of femme

fatale as a result. Leon, who as a young director had been the target

of abuse from two older actresses, again becomes subject to a power-

ful woman.

As it turns out, Mero is not Greek or Turkish at all, but the daugh-

ter of a German diplomat. The fact that Leon's "Oriental" seductress

is really German parallels the sense of disappointment he feels as a vis-

itor to the East: "My first impressions of the famed Golden Metrop-

olis consisted of nothing more than the shabby grayness of new hous-

ing developments" (154 [222]). Mero leads him to a dingy building

that Leon describes as "a somewhat more modest version of one of

those cheap and ugly concrete monstrosities that had contributed so

much to the disappointing impression the city of sultans, odalisques,

174 German Orientalisms

and magnificent tales had first made on me" (156 [224]). The Orient

is thus revealed as a Western fantasy that has little to do with life in

modern Istanbul. Correspondingly, the pseudo-Oriental Mero can

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

Topkapi Seraglio, where blinding magnificence of fabric and pre-

cious stone had already half transported him into the realm of The

Thousand and One Nights" (163 [234]). Leon's grief and the unfamil-

iar, if disappointing, surroundings also make him susceptible to

Mero's wiles, and he, too, enters a fantasy world that intoxicates,

enthralls, but eventually releases him from its spell.

As in the earlier sections of the novel, the Orient features less as a

real place than as an imaginary space associated with loss of self, fem-

ininity and sexuality, mysticism and exoticism-a space, in other

words, defined in terms of its opposition to Western rationality, indi-

viduality, and masculinity. At the same time, however, Mero's Ger-

man identity suggests that the "Orient" is also part of Western con-

sciousness. Notably, Leon meets Mero on the ferry between Asia and

Europe: both stand on the threshold, in a space that simultaneously

underscores the opposition between East and West and undermines

the distinction. Leon's story, in turn, is embedded in the section of

the novel that draws clear parallels between the ancient Oriental

despot and the modern German megalomaniac. Hitler is at once the

embodiment of evil who released irrational passions in a fascist

regime that is diametrically opposed to the functioning democracy of

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

malfeasant" (208 [296]). As if to underscore the tie between Ger-

many's Nazi past and the present Federal Republic, between

Dionysian intoxication and Socratic rationality, between Oriental

despotism and Occidental democracy, Straul3 freezes time in "Die

Terrasse" to a perpetual dawn: the rising sun of a new era remains

frozen in the East of the past.

Time does start moving toward the end of "Die Terrasse," and

Leon eventually emerges from a series of dreamlike adventures to

Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 175

find a woman's disembodied face in the forest. He picks it up, kisses

her on the mouth, and is finally able to close his eyes. Here, as when

he leaves Istanbul, when he awakens after his nightmarish struggle

with the monster in the bathtub, or when he escapes Ossia in his

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

to suggest as much: Leon emerges from the dream garden in "Die

Terrasse" to find little cabins filled with technical equipment that

recalls the projection screen beneath the "Tower of the Germans,"

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

ensnarled. In both cases the modern memory machines have become

dysfunctional. Yet despite such moments of relative calm, Leon

Pracht never achieves a sense of lasting personal or professional mas-

tery in the novel. Germany's past, it seems, might resurface at any

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.

Leon recoils in horror, rejecting a modern sociological explanation of

contemporary xenophobia for something approaching myth: "It

seemed to me, that emanating from this young creature were the

rustlings of an old malevolence, a historical curse, rather than the

anguish of youth or affluence" (135 [i v97]). The tapes from the

archive may be tangled, but the oak tree is still alive.

"It is too bad, just too bad about the ruined tradition [die verdorbene

Uberlieferung]," writes Straul3 near the end of "Anschwellender

Bocksgesang."96 In an essay notorious for its rebarbative prose, this

sentence stands out for its simplicity, if not banality. If in the same

essay Straul3 refers to the enormity of Nazi crimes, how can he

lament lost traditions and seek "a renewed link with 'long time,' the

unmoved" [Wiederanschlul3 an die lange Zeit, die unbewegte]?97 In

part, Straul3 continues his polemic against left-wing intellectuals who

read the past through a reductive lens leading always and only to the

Third Reich. As Volker Hage reported in a conversation of 1986,

176 German Orientalisms

"he [Straul3] had become allergic in the meantime to 'crude short-

circuits' of the sort that makes people immediately scream 'Heinrich

Himmler' whenever someone says 'Meister Eckhart.' That is the

continuation of barbarism with anti-fascistic means."'9 In another

sense, Straul3's interest in cultural memory can be seen as a manifes-

tation of a widespread attempt in the 1980s and 199os "to slow down

information processing, to resist the dissolution of time in the syn-

chronicity of the archive, to recover a mode of contemplation out-

side the universe of simulation and fast-speed information and cable

networks."''99 Such an appeal to memory and tradition runs the risk of

becoming a regressive, reactionary phenomenon of the sort Fredric

Jameson has derided in his comments on "nostalgia films."'00 As

Straul3 makes quite clear in the introduction to Derjunge Mann, how-

ever, the time is past when we could tell tales of organic personal

development, or when philosophy or religion could provide a single

grand narrative that would make sense of the world. On the one

hand, time for Straul3 hurtles forward in a series of transformations

that defy human efforts to order them in stories of either progress or

decline. On the other hand, the present moment seems frozen "in the

great electric totality" of the third industrial age. In an effort to avoid

both the negative totality of the simulacrum and the seductive lure of

an old-fashioned organicity, Straul3 structures his postmodern Bil-

dungsroman as a series of layers that thicken time, that provide it with

density and thus defy its inexorable onrush: "Instead of producing a

straight-line narrative, or striving for an all-encompassing develop-

ment, he will grant diversity its zones, instead of history he will

record the multistoried moment [statt Geschichte . . . den geschichteten

Augenblick], the synchronous event" (3-4 [Io]).'o' In conjuring the

past, however, Straul3 summons evil spirits as well as redemptive

solutions to cultural amnesia; as he put it, the tradition is itself verdor-

ben, contaminated by memories that continue to haunt the Federal

Republic. With his vision of Germany caught between a despised

present and a poisoned past, it is perhaps not surprising that Botho

Straul3 can only conceive of future change as catastrophe.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Nearest East

GERMANY'S EASTERN FRONTIER

In the fourth book of Giinter Grass's Ein weites Feld [Too far afield]

(i995), the protagonist Theo Wuttke and his constant companion

Ludwig Hoftaller travel to the German-Polish border town of Frank-

furt an der Oder. They plan to visit the site of some of "the Immor-

tal's" novels-a reference to Wuttke's alter ego Theodor Fontane

but also to stand at the eastern border of the newly reunified

Germany. Wuttke regrets that much of the formerly German terri-

tory portrayed in Fontane's novels has become Polish, but he con-

cludes that the current border must remain where it is: "here Ger-

many has to stop, unified or not."' Hoftaller at first ridicules the

notion that any border could be considered permanent in the uncer-

tain political climate of the early 1990s, but then, pointing to the east,

becomes more serious: "Still, it has to remain within limits. We have

to shield these far-flung areas, I mean secure them, before the hordes

descend. I'd call Poland a sort of boundary territory, or rather an out-

post, because what's coming at us from out there, Wuttke, poses a

real challenge. The East extends far, very far!" (419 [Soo]). Hoftaller

later returns to "his horrific picture of the Eastification of the West

[Verostung des Westens]" (ss554 [659]) and envisions a series of

fortifications along Germany's new eastern border: "That's the only

way we can safeguard our Germany from being overrun by foreign-

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

is erected against the East . . . Otherwise we'll be Eastified, I said"

(554 [659-60]).

Hoftaller makes these comments in June 1991, nine months after

Germany's official reunification in October of the previous year. The

erasure of the border between the two Germanies had once again

raised the question of where to draw the nation's eastern frontier.

Would the expanded Federal Republic accept the existing Oder-

Neisse boundary imposed by the Allied forces at the end of the Sec-

ond World War, or would it try to reclaim some formerly German

territories? Fears of a renewed German aggression toward the East

seemed justified in mid-November 1989, when Chancellor Helmut

Kohl visited a small town in western Poland. Here he was greeted by

a banner that proclaimed "Helmut, you're our Chancellor too!"2

Were there in fact huddled masses of ethnic Germans yearning to be

free of Polish sovereignty? The question sent novelist and essayist

Peter Schneider on a "journey through Germany's sense of national

identity" [Reise durch das deutsche Nationalgeftihl] that led him to

the tiny German minority in western Poland.3 What he found seems

to have both reassured and troubled him: yes, there were indeed

many Poles who sought entry to Germany, but primarily for eco-

nomic reasons. Ironically, Poles who had been categorized by the

Nazis as either ethnically German or "Germanizable" quickly gained

access to German citizenship, "while a compatriot whose father or

grandfather died in the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazi barbarians

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

of a new, larger Germany? Not at all, concludes Schneider: "They

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

to discrimination" (6I [so]). Revanchist sentiments existed only

among the far-right fringe within Germany, according to Schneider,

and not in the Polish border zones. In his view, Helmut Kohl was

playing a sinister game of electoral politics: by first vacillating on the

question of the Oder-Neisse boundary, Kohl catered to the demands

of former exiles from the East who might have been drawn to the

extremist Republikaner Party in local elections in the spring of 1990,

only to proclaim on the eve of the "two-plus-four talks" in July "that

The Nearest East 179

he was committed to reconciliation with the Poles." Thus Kohl

"added an international coup to his domestic one: the whole world

was relieved when he finally accepted the western border of Poland,"

even though he conceded on a point "that had previously been

regarded as a sine qua non of German unity. Kohl's high-wire act had

turned a dead issue back into a bargaining chip" (63).4

These two episodes from contemporary German literature mark a

recent chapter of Germany's engagement with what could be called

its Nearest East. For centuries conflicts along Germany's eastern fron-

tier have played an important role in the history of a specifically Ger-

man Orientalism. Hoftaller's comments raise the specter of an Asian

invasion flooding into Germany through Poland, while Schneider

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,

or even East Berlin. In the novel Eduards Heimkehr [Eduard's home-

coming] (1998), for instance, Peter Schneider plays on Orientalist

stereotypes when he allows his West German protagonist to have an

affair with a woman whom he suspects of having grown up in the

German Democratic Republic. She refuses to satisfy his curiosity,

however, and instead makes fun of his Western prejudices: " 'Do you

associate something specific with an East German woman, something

a West German woman doesn't have?' 'Like what?' 'That she's some-

how more feminine, more straightforward, less tricky, easier to han-

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.' "

Once again the Eastern woman has become exoticized, eroticized,

and made available for the Western man's pleasure.

What Schneider portrays sarcastically resurfaces in a more sinister

fashion in Ingo Schulze's Simple Storys: Ein Roman aus der ostdeutschen

Provinz [Simple stories: A novel of provincial East Germany] (1999),

in which a West German real estate speculator rapes a young East

German waitress. The rape occurs on July 2, 1990, the day after the

deutsche mark became the official currency throughout Germany,

thus making a rather heavy-handed comment on the West German

takeover of the East in an otherwise subtle novel. Giinter Grass is

180 German Orientalisms

even more relentless in his portrayal of reunification in Ein weites Feld

as the Western colonization or annexation of the East, a capitalist

Anschluf3 led by the "Handover Trust" (Treuhand): "The word on the

street was that the Trust was privatizing ruthlessly; it was a colonial

agency, subject to no parliamentary control" (512 [6io]). He even

makes the provocative suggestion that the privatization of former

state-owned businesses in the East can be compared to the forced

appropriation of Jewish property during the Third Reich. Remain-

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

move toward a renewed union morally as well as politically suspect.

Grass's controversial stance on reunification marks the prelude to an

ongoing discussion about whether or not Germany can once again be

a "normal" country, one in which it might even be possible to take

pride in some of its achievements, and here, again, questions sur-

rounding Germany's eastern frontier have played their part in the

debate. The controversy that has flared up periodically since

Reunification has its roots in the "Historians' Controversy" (Histori-

kerstreit) of the 1980s. This by now well-chronicled public debate

began when several conservative German historians began to question

"whether Nazi crimes were unique, a legacy of evil in a class by them-

selves, irreparably burdening any concept of German nationhood, or

whether they are comparable to other national atrocities, especially

Stalinist terror.'"6 If the Nazi crimes, however bad, were at least no

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

Allgemeine Zeitung in 1986 entitled "Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen

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

their kind as the potential or real victims of an 'Asiatic' deed?"7

The Orientalist presuppositions in Nolte's rhetorical question could

hardly be clearer: he implies that the threat of a barbaric "Asian inva-

sion" of Soviet troops justified the "Asiatic" atrocities of the Nazis on

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

the Germans' desperate attempt to protect themselves from the Rus-

sian hordes. As Jiirgen Habermas was quick to point out, however, the

German stance on the Eastern Front also allowed mass killings in the

concentration camps to continue for months longer than might oth-

erwise have been the case.8 The very title of Hillgruber's work,

Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende

des europaischenJudentums [Two sorts of destruction: The shattering of

the German Reich and the end of European Jewry], implicitly equates

the murder of millions of innocent men, women, and children with

the military defeat of Hitler's army in a way that many have found

offensive.9 To be sure, Hillgruber has no sympathy for Hitler's Ost-

politik, which he acknowledges led to the decimation of the Slavs and

the annihilation of the Jews. He nevertheless insists on the legitimacy

of Hitler's army in their defense of German settlements in the East:

"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

millions of Eastern Germans who lived in a heartland of the German

Reich."1o After centuries of legitimate occupation of the East, Hill-

gruber argues, it was unfortunate that these Germans should so

quickly be identified with the criminal policies of the National Social-

ists. Expressing sympathy for German suffering in the East without

voicing support for Nazi policies requires a delicate balancing act, and

many felt that Hillgruber tilts the scales too far toward the Germans in

his account. Questions surrounding the propriety of depicting the

plight of Germans exiled from the East at the end of the Second

World War continue to haunt contemporary German literature, most

notably in Giinter Grass's novella Im Krebsgang [Crabwalk] (2002), to

which we will return. In order to understand present reflections on

Germany's Nearest East, however, it is particularly important to have

at least some sense of the past.

TEUTONIC KNIGHTS, PRUSSIAN PATRIOTS,

NAZI IDEOLOGUES

From its beginnings in the twelfth century, the German conquest and

colonization of Eastern Europe had intimate ties to the crusading

182 German Orientalisms

movement." In 1146 Pope Eugenius III called for a crusade to the

Holy Lands, but when he learned that the Saxons were more inter-

ested in attacking the Slavic pagans to their immediate east, he autho-

rized the northern Europeans to make war on their own heathens. In

doing so the pope, with the ideological support of St. Bernard of

Clairvaux, transformed the concept of the crusade from the quest for

a particular place-the recapture ofJerusalem-to the spread of Chris-

tianity among heathens wherever they might be found. The Oriental

origins of the crusading movement were not entirely forgotten, how-

ever: the Order of the Sword Brethren referred to their Baltic enemies

as "Northern Saracens,"'2 for instance, and Joseph von Eichendorff

reports that the Teutonic Knights cultivated tropical plants and kept

exotic birds and even lions at their headquarters in Marienburg to

remind them of "the rich Orient" where the order began.13

The Teutonic Knights were the third military order to emerge out

of the crusading movement, following the Templars and Hospitalers.

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

order devoted itself "primarily to the defence and advancement of

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

against Prussian heathens. Acre fell in 1291, preventing the brothers

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

a new headquarters in distant Marienburg-today Malbork in north-

ern Poland-"beyond the reach of any secular ruler."'5

By definition, the Teutonic Knights were Christian soldiers,

"monks of war" dedicated to poverty, chastity, obedience, and the

spread of Christianity by any means necessary. The Livdndische Reim-

chronik [Livonian rhymed chronicle] (ca. 1290) gives a good sense of

what the fighting was like.'6 The unknown author of this oldest

known history of the order chronicles the military history of the con-

quest of Livonia in the thirteenth century. He makes no pretense of

The Nearest East 183

impartiality: good Christian knights battle evil heathens, who get

what they deserve when they are killed. To be sure, the Christians do

not always win-the author records several devastating defeats suf-

fered by the Teutonic Knights-but in another sense, the Christians

can never really lose: either they convert or kill their foes, or they die

a martyr's death in trying. What strikes the modern reader of this

chronicle is the ferocity of the encounters described: heads are

smashed, prisoners burned alive, and corpses left in piles on the bat-

tlefield. Doubtless the knights believed in the justice of their cause,

but the conflict itself was a bloody and brutal affair fought on unfor-

giving terrain with acts of savagery committed on both sides.

While the Teutonic Knights were busy conquering the native

peoples of Poland and the Baltic, imported German settlers were col-

onizing the newly available territory. Robert Bartlett cites "the set-

tlement of tens of thousands of German urban and rural immigrants

in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the so-called Ostsiedlung," as

one of the most significant "migratory movements of the High Mid-

dle Ages" that "has had historical ramifications of the first importance

down to the present."'7 The Teutonic Knights recruited settlers by

offering them land at low rent and freedom from enserfment or cap-

ture. Those who came to the country brought with them new farm-

ing tools and techniques, established dozens of new colonial towns

and hundreds of villages, and expanded trade from Germany to the

entire Baltic area.'s What nineteenth-century Germans would

describe as the spread of civilization to barbaric Eastern lands natu-

rally looked somewhat different from the Slavic perspective, particu-

larly since the Teutonic Knights continued their depredations long

after the Poles had accepted Christianity. In his novel The Teutonic

Knights (1900oo), for instance, the Polish Nobel laureate Henryk

Sienkiewicz portrays the order as a band of ruthless conquistadores

who rape and pillage the Polish countryside. Sienkiewicz is of course

no impartial observer, as he wrote his book at a time of increasingly

harsh Prussian rule, but his novel culminates in a historically accurate

account of the Battle of Tannenberg (known in Poland as the Battle

of Grunwald) in 1410o, in which the Teutonic Order suffered a crush-

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

broken and the crusading movement essentially ended.

Although the medieval Order of the Teutonic Knights was largely

German, it was not a nationalist organization in the modern sense of

the term. "They were Catholic Christians first and Germans sec-

ond," 9 and the "original purpose was to use Germans to extend

Christendom, not to expand Germany."20 Subsequent generations,

however, gradually appropriated the Teutonic Order into Germany's

national history. The Humanists began the trend by celebrating the

Ordensstaat as Nova Germania, stressing the national identity of the

monks over their religious mission.2' While intellectuals of the

Enlightenment tended to condemn the order and its barbaric cru-

sades, nineteenth-century Prussian patriots viewed it more sympa-

thetically. Johannes Voigt laid the foundation for a positive assess-

ment of the order in his Geschichte Preufi3ens [History of Prussia]

(1827-39), and the Prussian civil servant Theodor von Schon spon-

sored a campaign to rebuild the Marienburg castle as a monument to

Prussian nationalism. Heinrich von Treitschke's Das deutsche Ordens-

land Preuf3en [The Prussian land of the Teutonic Order] (1862) intro-

duces a new belligerence into the discourse, praising the Eastern set-

tlements as a bulwark extending "from the German shore into the

wild sea of the Eastern peoples."22 He celebrates the Germanic con-

quest of the Slavs, whom he denounces as a culturally and racially

inferior people.

Treitschke was to have a lasting impact on German academic Ost-

forschung in the early twentieth century. One of his students occupied

the first German chair for the study of Eastern Europe in 1902, and

over the next several decades supposedly objective German acade-

mics eagerly or opportunistically combined racism with scholarship

in a way that parallels the links between German Indology and the

Third Reich. The latter scholars sought to establish the origins of

German racial superiority, the former propagated notions of Slavic

inferiority, and both were generously funded by the Nazi regime.

Hence, as Michael Burleigh summarizes, "it becomes clear that rela-

tions between the temples of learning and those at the sharp, opera-

tive, edge of the Third Reich were multiple and fluid."23

German prejudice against the "Asiatic" Slavs is already firmly in

The Nearest East 185

place in German accounts of the battle of Tannenberg of 1914, which

was viewed as the long-overdue German revenge for the humiliation

of the Teutonic Knights in 1410. "Eastern peoples, Asiatic and half-

Asiatic swarms of barbarians have plagued the 'West' repeatedly for a

millennium and devastated the land of European culture, but again

and again we have been able to defeat the barbarians."24 These com-

ments appear in a political pamphlet published in the wake of the

1914 battle, which is portrayed as the victory of "diligent German

cultural work" over "half-Asian hordes."25 From here it is a fairly

short step to Adolf Hitler's proclamation in Mein Kampf (1925) that if

"land was desired in Europe, it could be obtained by and large only

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

daily bread for the nation.'126 Heinrich Himmler envisioned the SS as

a reincarnation of the Teutonic Knights, and he oversaw the new

Germanic Lebensraum in the East. Here he pursued a double goal:

propagation of a new, "healthy," and superior Germanic race in the

simple agrarian environment and the enslavement or eradication of

Slavic and Jewish "subhumans."27

The fact that many German ideologues provided active or tacit

support for the murderous policies of the Third Reich does not mean

that German attitudes toward Poland and Eastern Europe were uni-

formly negative in the twentieth century, or that we can draw a

straight line from the late medieval Battle of Tannenberg to its mod-

ern counterpart. As in the case of German Indology, the history of

Germany's relations with the Nearest East contains countercurrents

and complexities obscured by reductive teleologies. In the late eigh-

teenth century, for example, Herder stands out for his fairly generous

assessment of the Slavs and his criticism of their mistreatment by the

Teutonic Knights.28 During the revolutionary era Kosciusko helped

inspire a new, positive image of noble, freedom-loving Poles among

German intellectuals,29 and again in the early 1830s Polish national-

ism became one of the most popular liberal causes in Germany and,

indeed, throughout Europe.

On November 29, 1830, a group of Polish conspirators attacked

Belvedere Castle in Warsaw, touching off what became known as the

186 German Orientalisms

"November uprising" (Novemberaufstand) against Russian rule.3° The

Polish patriots inspired a wave of sympathy among Germans who had

recently supported the Greeks in their war of independence against

the Turks. Dozens of largely forgotten German poets wrote Polen-

lieder in praise of Polish freedom fighters in their struggle against

tyranny and encouraged the Germans and other Europeans to come

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

not: "Still-alas! Still we have no Fatherland! / Still deep shame red-

dens the German cheek" [Noch-ach! noch haben wir kein Vater-

land! / Noch rothet tiefe Scham des Deutschen Wangen].32 Hence

the Germans seek not only to praise the Poles, but also to emulate

them: "Learn from Sarmatians to be Germans!" [Lernt von den Sar-

maten, Deutsche werden!]33 The Polenlieder were thus expressions of

liberal German nationalism directed against tyranny in general, but

also- at least implicitly-against Prussian rulers who declared their

solidarity with the Russian czars and the reactionary climate of

Restoration Europe. Hence it is not surprising that the Polish flag

was raised at the liberal Hambach festival in May 1832, and that Polen-

lieder were sung at all liberal gatherings of the period.34

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

1683: "When the wild hordes of the Turks devastated Christianity, /

Sobieski's heroic sword liberated Vienna, the emperor's city."35 If

Poland once saved Christendom from Turkish infidels, should the

West not rally to the defense of a Poland now threatened by Asiatic

Russians? It was in these terms that August Graf von Platen couched

his "Aufruf an die Deutschen" [Appeal to the Germans] of Decem-

ber II, 1830.

Aus Europa muB hinaus

Jeder absolute Graus!

Moskowiten oder Tiirken

Wollen uns entgegenwirken?

Kehrt nach Osten eure Thaten, Asiaten!

The Nearest East 187

[Each absolute horror / must leave Europe! / Muscovites or

Turks / want to oppose us? / Turn your deeds toward the East,

Asiatics!]36

Almost a decade earlier the young Heinrich Heine had written that

Poland had been subjected to both Eastern "barbarism" from Russia

and overly refined Western civilization from France, resulting in

"those strange mixtures of culture and barbarism in the character and

family life of the Poles."37 While Heine criticizes many aspects of

Polish society, he shares the Polish aristocrats' enthusiasm for liberal

Western ideas and commends their patriotism, and hence he strikes

chords that would be echoed more forcefully in the Polenlieder. How-

ever, Heine's praise of Polish women as flowers on the banks of the

Ganges should be understood less as a serious comment about the

"Asiatic" nature of the Poles than as a self-conscious use of what had

become a Romantic cliche. On several occasions in his early work

Heine makes shorthand reference to India as the land of poetry, but

he also signals his awareness that the image has grown rather tired

since the days of Novalis.

Der Ganges rauscht, der grol3e Ganges schwillt,

Der Himalaja strahlt im Abendscheine,

Und aus der Nacht der Banianenhaine

Die Elefantenherde stiirzt und briillt -

Ein Bild! Ein Bild! Mein Pferd flirn gutes Bild!

Womit ich dich vergleiche ...

[The Ganges rushes, the Ganges swells, / the Himalayas glow in

the evening sun, / and from the night of the banyan groves / the

herd of elephants falls and trumpets- / An image! An image! My

horse for a good image! / that I could compare with you . . . ]38

Just as Heine was unwilling to recycle worn imagery without irony

in his youth, he was also reluctant to commit himself unambiguously

to revolutionary causes in later years. For all his antipathy toward aris-

tocratic abuses of power, Heine preferred to maintain his distance

from the unwashed proletarian masses in a way that differed from that

188 German Orientalisms

of his friend Karl Marx.39 A similar negativity informs his viciously

satirical reprise on the Polenlieder in the poem "Zwei Ritter" [Two

knights] (originally "Zwei Polen" [Two Poles]) included in the late

Romauzero (i85i). Here Heine portrays two "Poles from Polockia"

[Polen aus der Polackei] as dirty, drunk, and probably homosexual.

Heine's nasty bit of homophobia places him in a bad light in this par-

ticular case, although he may well be responding less to the exiled

Poles themselves than to the volumes of heartfelt drivel that had been

penned in their name.

EICHENDORFF'S CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

In his preface to the critical edition of Eichendorff's works published

in 1921, Wilhelm Kosch proclaimed Eichendorff "not only the most

popular, but also the most German of all German poets [der deutscheste

aller deutschen Dichter]."4° The widespread belief in Eichendorff's sta-

tus as a "typically German" writer was based on a highly selective

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-

nothing] (1826). Eichendorff's happy-go-lucky picaro won the hearts

of his readers from the outset and has remained popular ever since;

between 185o and 1925 alone there were one hundred reprints and

new editions of the work. The Taugenicht's heartfelt piety, unaf-

fected simplicity, and cheerful willingness to proclaim "alles, alles

gut!" seemed to many, including Thomas Mann, "exemplarisch

deutsch."4"1 Eichendorff's poetry, which was inspired in form and

tone by the Volkslieder collected in Arnim and Brentano's Des Knaben

Wunderhorn [The boy's magic horn] (18o6), bridged the gap between

"Kunst- und Naturpoesie" and thus struck a tone that seemed in har-

mony with the vibrations of the German soul.42 Composers such as

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Robert Schumann increased

Eichendorff's popularity by setting his poems to music, and the songs

were often sung on class trips and in amateur choirs.43 Many of the

poems evoke moods of melancholy loneliness and sentimental yearn-

ing for adventure that no doubt moistened many a slightly beery eye.

Eichendorff's postwar critical reception differs dramatically from

his prewar popular appeal. As it turns out, Eichendorff was hardly the

The Nearest East 189

sort of sentimental simpleton he portrays in his most popular novella.

His first novel, Ahnung und Gegenwart [Presentiment and presence]

(i815), for example, begins in a stereotypically "Romantic" world,

but becomes increasingly involved with contemporary events at the

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

um Nichts [Much ado about nothing] (1832) ridicules the contempo-

rary literary scene, while other prose works comment dyspeptically

on liberal political movements. In addition to his prose fiction and

poetry, Eichendorff wrote political essays, literary histories, and the-

ological tracts. Obviously, then, Eichendorff was a multifaceted,

politically engaged writer. But was he "typically German"? Who did

Eichendorff think he was?

Joseph Karl Benedikt Freiherr von Eichendorff (1788-1857) was a

Catholic aristocrat from Silesia who could trace his family roots back

to the eleventh century.45 He and his brother grew up surrounded by

the privileges of their social class and for many years tried to live in a

style befitting their social rank. Unfortunately, however, Eichen-

dorffs family experienced such serious financial difficulties that his

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

next. As a result, Eichendorff had to work for a living in the Prussian

bureaucracy. Confounding the Romantic cliche of the creative

writer imprisoned in a dreary office, Eichendorffmanaged to be quite

productive in his dual role as Romantic poet and Prussian civil ser-

vant, a symbiosis that was actually encouraged by his superiors.46

Increasingly, however, Eichendorffs conservative political philoso-

phy was at odds with the centralized bureaucracy of the Prussian

state. As a Catholic member of the landed Silesian nobility working

in a government dominated by Prussian Protestants, Eichendorff was

a fish out of water, a walking contradiction in terms, and he finally

sought early retirement to begin a second career as an antimodern

Catholic polemicist in an era of secular humanism and revolutionary

change.

But was Eichendorff German? Or, in what sense would he have

understood the term? The immediate answer would be yes, of

190 German Orientalisms

course: Eichendorff enlisted in the legendary Liltzowischer Freikorps

at considerable personal and professional cost, and the "Wars of Lib-

eration" against Napoleon remained of decisive importance in deter-

mining his worldview. GrafFriedrich, the hero of Ahnung und Gegen-

wart, develops from his early impulse to turn away from the world

and devote himself to poetry to become a young patriot who anoints

himself in the Rhine before setting off to fight for the Fatherland. Yet

Eichendorff s loyalty to the German nation did not necessarily trans-

late into enthusiasm for the Prussian state. As his biographer Ginter

Schiwy puts it, "The Eichendorffs did not feel Prussian, but, rather,

Silesian and also Austro-German."47 Eichendorff's deep Silesian roots

actually strengthened the impression among later readers that he was

"typically German" in a nation composed of multiple provincial

identities.48 Hence in 1930 Herbert Cysarz would hail Eichendorff's

combination of "loyalty to the homeland and impulse to all of Ger-

many" [Heimattreue und Drang zum ganzen Deutschland] and pro-

claim that whatever rose up "from the native soil of Silesia" would

serve as a genuine testimony to the entire German spirit.49

Despite Cysarz's volkisch confidence in the Germanic purity of the

soil, Silesia was actually more of a multilingual border zone between

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-

stein. Like many residents of the area, Eichendorff grew up speaking

Polish as well as German, and he also lived and worked for years in

the bilingual city of Danzig. Eichendorffs German patriotism does

not seem to have been based on linguistic chauvinism. Inspired by

Gorres's and Arnim's efforts to renew Germany's sense of national

identity from its popular roots, Eichendorff collected Silesian myths

and fairy tales drawn primarily from Polish sources.5' Later in Danzig,

Eichendorff insisted that the Prussian government should not be

overly concerned about Polish-speaking residents in its territory,

arguing that they could be just as patriotic as the Germans.52

Eichendorff's linguistic tolerance for Polish-speaking Prussian sub-

jects did not translate into sympathy for the Polish nation itself, how-

ever, and in this he stands in deliberate opposition to his liberal con-

temporaries, who responded warmly to both the July Revolution in

The Nearest East 19 1

Paris and the Polish uprising in Warsaw. Eichendorff vented his

spleen in a fierce satire of the Hambach festival titled "Auch ich war

in Arkadien" [I, too, was in Arcadia].53 Eichendorff sends an alter ego

off to the festival, who seems puzzled by much of what he observes:

"I found the Germans French, the French German, and both had

become a little Polish; at least each demands the liberum veto for them-

selves and wants to set up a big Polish parliament in Europe. I admit

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,

Eichendorff's historical drama about the Teutonic Knights, Der letzte

Held von Marienburg [The last hero of Marienburg] (1830o), had had its

premiere in Konigsberg in February 183 1, just three months after the

Warsaw uprising and at the height of liberal German enthusiasm for

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,

however, and sent a copy to Goethe in hopes of receiving at least his

approval. Unfortunately for Eichendorff, the book was discovered

years later still sealed among the toys of Goethe's grandchild.

Whether Goethe avoided the drama because he suspected its nation-

alist tendencies or whether he simply could not be bothered with yet

another unsolicited contribution to his library is difficult to know,

but the rejection must have contributed to Eichendorff's sense of

having been born too late, out of step with the spirit of the age.56

Eichendorff's antimodern tendencies emerge clearly in Der letzte

Held von Marienburg. The drama begins with the defeat of the Teu-

tonic Knights at Tannenberg. Heinrich von Plauen leads a retreat of

the forces into the castle at Marienburg and orders the surrounding

town to be burned to prevent it from providing shelter for the Polish

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

and drives back the astonished Poles. On the surface, Eichendorff's

drama is a piece of anti-Polish Prussian propaganda.57 While German

liberals celebrated the Poles as the defenders of Western civilization

against the Turks, Eichendorff stresses the continuity of the European

Crusades against both the Muslim infidels of the Holy Lands and the

192 German Orientalisms

heathen Poles of Eastern Europe. Hence when one of Plauen's men

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

discipline "as if we were still on the battlefield among Saracens."S8

The Poles appear as a faceless horde, a raging flood of northern

infidels who must be defeated at any cost. Despite Plauen's efforts,

however, the defensive shield breaks down, forcing the knights to

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

braust die blinde Flut, wach't auf!]" (4:417).

The order would never have succumbed to the Poles, in Eichen-

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

context we can consider the role of Rominta, a woman who first

appears in the garb of a Polish knight on the battlefield. She seeks

revenge, for Germans have killed her father and burned his castle;

while the Poles celebrate, she realizes that there are still Germans to

fight and seeks final victory in Marienburg. The Teutonic Knight

Georg von Wirsberg encounters her and is both astonished and cap-

tivated by the disguised woman. He later sneaks behind enemy lines

in a Polish overcoat and agrees to her demand that he overthrow

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

in love with Plauen. She successfully warns him of Wirsberg's

renewed plans for an assassination, but a deeply disturbed Wirsberg

kills her and then casts himself over the parapets to his death.

Rominta fulfills a double function in Eichendorff's drama both as

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

line of female characters in Eichendorffs work who tempt men to

forget their Christian virtue, perhaps most memorably in the seduc-

tive statue of Venus that comes to life in Das Mamorbild [The marble

image] (1819). Ahnung und Gegenwart begins with an episode that

begs to be read as an allegory of the conflicting forces that beset men's

The Nearest East 193

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

as if her glances suddenly revealed a new world of blossoming, mirac-

ulous splendor, ancient memories, and unknown desires in his heart"

(2:58). At first glance the chance encounter would seem to set the

tone for a mildly erotic Romantic novel, and, indeed, the opening

chapters of Ahnung und Gegenwart are full of strikingly handsome

heroes and extraordinarily beautiful heroines who always seem to be

falling out of their loose-fitting clothing as they exchange passionate

kisses. In retrospect, even Eichendorff agreed with the charge "that

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

different in spirit from the cheerful, life-affirming eroticism in works

by Wieland, Goethe, and Novalis. For Eichendorff, as Egon Schwarz

puts it, "the eternal feminine draws us downward" [Das Ewig-Weib-

liche zieht uns hinab].6o Graf Friedrich resists all temptation and

sternly rebukes those less abstemious than himself. As a result, Ahnung

und Gegenwart exudes an uncomfortable combination of prurience

and prudishness.

Worst of all, from Eichendorff's perspective, are women who for-

get their "natural" gender roles and usurp the masculine monopoly on

genius. Hence he condemns the figure of Romane in Ahnung und

Gegenwart for her "mad genius that has blundered into the masculine"

(2:115) and much later writes a bitter diatribe against "Die deutsche

Salon-Poesie der Frauen" [The German salon-poetry of women]

(1847).61 The cross-dressing warrior Rominta in Der letzte Held von

Marienburg links the threat of gender confusion to the hordes of

infidels pouring into German lands from the East. Eichendorffs

Christian soldiers should steel themselves against the Polish floods, but

Wirsberg succumbs instead to the lure of the feminine. She takes up

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

calling as a celibate monk and his service to the German cause.

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

North will remain standing" (4:5o8). Plauen envisions himself at the

head of an army of resurrected Teutonic Knights marching toward

the Rhine beneath an iron cross: "A shudder goes through the Prus-

sian people / And once again they remember the great age" (4:509).

Although Plauen's contemporaries have failed, their predecessors tri-

umphed in bringing Christianity to the region, and Eichendorff calls

on the memory of this accomplishment to inspire his contemporary

Prussians to reclaim their former greatness and resist further threats

from the East.

Despite Eichendorff's patriotic appeal to the Prussian people at the

end of Der letzte Held von Marienburg, his critique of the order serves

as an implicit critique of modern Prussian society as well. The tension

between Eichendorff's appointed task as a Prussian propagandist and

his personal convictions as a conservative Catholic also emerges

between the lines of his essay on "Die Wiederherstellung des

Schlosses der deutschen Ordensritter zu Marienburg" [The restora-

tion of the castle of the Teutonic Knights in Marienburg] (1844).62 As

one might expect, Prussian patriotism stands front and center in the

commissioned essay. Eichendorff begins with an idealized image of

the Teutonic Knights as men of the noblest families throughout Ger-

many and imagines a poignant moment in which one of these knights

sat "alone on a stone bench at a window, looking to the west across

the broad fields, and raised a glass in honor of the distant home-

land."63 Having fought what Eichendorff elsewhere terms "an ideal

battle against the Asiatic infidels for the liberation ofJerusalem,"64 the

Teutonic Knights conquer new lands for Germany in eastern Europe.

The order eventually succumbs to the devious machinations of the

Polish King Jagiello and his "hordes drunk

with victory"

[siegestrunkenen Horden] (5:721), but the Poles prove incapable of

maintaining the land they have conquered, and their "Polish

(mis)management" [polnische Wirtschaft] (5:726) soon brings the

region to complete anarchy. Hence the Poles have only themselves to

blame for the partitions of the late eighteenth century. The restora-

tion project promises to bring Prussian order back to a building and a

region ruined by Polish slovenliness, and to rekindle Prussian great-

ness by cultivating the past: "People recognized that there can be no

progress that is not rooted in the past" (5:759). Eichendorff concludes

The Nearest East 195

his essay in praise of King Wilhelm IV of Prussia for sponsoring the

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

retire effective July I of the same year. We find traces of Eichen-

dorff's dissatisfaction with the current Prussian regime displaced into

his critique of what he derisively terms "the age of powdered wigs

[Zopfzeit]" (the eighteenth century) in his essay. East and West Prus-

sia were finally reunited under Frederick the Great, but the castle

itself suffered in "a thoroughly prosaic and miserable . . . time of drab

utility" (5:755). In criticizing "that Philistine system of utility . . . that

thwarts all genius that does not apply itself immediately to the rattling

cogs of the state's machinery" (5:750), Eichendorff echoes his distinc-

tion between the mechanistic French state and organic German soci-

ety in his essay "Uber die Folgen der Aufhebung der Bischofe und

Kloster" [On the consequences of the dissolution of the bishoprics

and cloisters] (i819). Here Eichendorff regrets the loss of Germany's

many small states and argues that German unity is better served

through a loose federation of semiautonomous regions under moder-

ate aristocrats than through the constitutional "tyranny" of a central-

ized government. As Eichendorff puts it, "monotony" [Einerleiheit]

is not "unity" [Einheit] (5:488).

Eichendorff's essay "Uber die Folgen" functioned as his entrance

examination to the Prussian bureaucracy, while the "Wiederherstel-

lung" essay ended his career. By this time it had become clear that

Prussia was becoming just the sort of centralized bureaucratic state

that Eichendorff detested, and he devoted his retirement years to a

series of often bitter indictments of a godless age. If certain aspects of

his work seem unappealing today, it is not so much because of his

conservative convictions, but because of his self-righteous finger-

wagging and lack of generosity. Eichendorff was an often humorless

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

Eichendorff interesting today is the fact that he knew he was on the

196 German Orientalisms

losing side of history and incorporated this awareness into his better

literary works. As Adorno put it, Eichendorff's "superiority to all the

reactionaries who are claiming him today is shown by the fact that

like the great philosophy of his time he understood the necessity of

the revolution he was terrified of: he embodies something of the crit-

ical truth of the consciousness of those who have to pay the price for

the advance of the Weltgeist."65 Ahnung und Gegenwart moves from a

Romantic idyll to social satire and political engagement, but ends on

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

the coming apocalypse: "everything points as if with a bloody finger

in warning of a great, inevitable catastrophe" (2:38 I). Heinrich von

Plauen closes his eyes in the hope of future redemption, but with the

certainty that the current Teutonic Order is thoroughly corrupt. Das

Schloj3 Diirande, finally, divides French society of the revolutionary

era into moribund aristocrats and revolting masses, and ends not with

a promise of better times to come but with a renewed warning of

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

to pieces" (3:465). The constant threat of the irruption of the irra-

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

the grasp of forces beyond their control.

AT HOME ON THE BORDER: HEIMAT,

NATION, AND EMPIRE IN FREYTAG'S

POETIC REALISM

Two years before Eichendorff's death Gustav Freytag (1816-95) pub-

lished his first novel, Soll und Haben [Debit and credit] (i855). In

some ways, it would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast

between two writers. Eichendorff spent his career as a reluctant

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

song, and an idealized image of the Christian Middle Ages. Although

he was only a generation younger, Freytag seems to come from an

entirely different world. He directed his energies toward the future,

with boundless faith in the rising middle class, an enthusiastic devo-

tion to the German nation under Prussian leadership, and a convic-

tion that it was Germany's manifest destiny to extend its powers in

Europe and throughout the world.66 Despite these obvious differ-

ences, both Freytag and Eichendorff were extremely popular writers

in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Freytag, no less

than Eichendorff, was considered "typically German." A success

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

country as a professor, politician, and writer, and he received official

recognition as well as popular acclaim for his dedication to the Ger-

man cause. His portrait was hung in the National Gallery in Berlin,

and the Friedrich Wilhelm University also awarded him an honorary

doctorate.68 On that occasion Freytag's old friend Heinrich von

Treitschke proclaimed that future generations of Germans would not

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

joy and a matter of pride to be a German professor."''69

In his later years Freytag seems to have accepted his role as a rep-

resentative German. Unlike Rousseau, who begins the tradition of

modern autobiography by proclaiming that while he may not be bet-

ter than anyone else, he is certainly different, Freytag begins his own

Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben [Memories of my life] (1887) by admit-

ting that although he may not be interesting, he is certainly typical:

"If I win the reader's sympathy, it will be precisely because the broad

outlines of my life and education look very similar to those of thou-

sands of my contemporaries."7' Freytag goes on to claim that he

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

Prussian, Freytag claims that he learned to subordinate his personal

desires to the fatherland as if by second nature; as a Protestant, he

could devote himself to his studies with an open mind; and "as a child

of the border I learned from an early age to love my German charac-

198 German Orientalisms

ter in opposition to foreign peoples" (1:4). Far from calling his iden-

tity into question, Freytag insists that living on the margins strength-

ened his sense of being German to the core.

The protagonist of Soll und Haben reflects Freytag's own sense of

being a typical German from the Silesian frontier. The novel is one

of the few nineteenth-century German works that actually fits into

the paradigm of the Bildungsroman as it is commonly understood. In

Hegel's frequently cited words, the young man introduced in this

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

else."7' What Hegel describes sarcastically takes place without a hint

of irony in Freytag's novel: we first encounter Anton Wohlfart as a

nearly penniless orphan on his way to begin work as a lowly scribe in

a large storage and shipping company; we leave him hundreds of

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-

markable young man whose Horatio Alger tale of individual success

is a parable for the rise of the middle class and a celebration of its

devotion to work, the family, and the German nation.73

Like Freytag, Wohlfart grows up on the Polish-German frontier

before coming to work in Breslau, and subsequent journeys into Pol-

ish territory only strengthen his sense of self: "Only when you are

abroad do you learn to enjoy your local dialect; only in a foreign

country do you realize what the Fatherland is" (5:20). What Anton

describes as utterly foreign is in fact a border zone, where German

settlements alternate with Polish estates. Yet the German colonists

make no effort to assimilate aspects of Polish culture; in fact, they

anxiously seek to preserve the purity of their national traditions while

"abroad." Hence Anton is overjoyed to encounter one of these Ger-

man families on Polish soil: "Hurray! Here is a housewife, here is the

Fatherland, here are Germans" (5:25). As Wohlfart's friend Fink slyly

suggests, however, Anton may not so much be discovering his ethnic

purity as he is repressing his sense of cultural hybridity. Hence Fink

teases Anton about his origins when he introduces him to an aristo-

crat in Breslau: "My friend, proud lady, is half Slavic . . . although he

protests passionately when people doubt his German heritage"

The Nearest East 199

(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

which he is not and that which he fears he might become.

The sense of representative individuality that informs both Frey-

tag's autobiography and Soll und Haben recurs in monumental form in

Die Ahnen [The ancestors] (1872-80). This six-volume historical

novel follows successive generations of an extended German family

from the Roman occupation of the fourth century to the Revolution

of 1848. Although Freytag admitted that the final volume contained

autobiographical elements, he emphatically denied that he had

invented a flattering family history that extended his personal roots

back to the dawn of German history.74 The novel does not set out to

glorify a particular individual, but to subordinate the individual to the

history of the German people. Die Ahnen can in fact be read as a mas-

sive Bildungsroman whose subject is the entire German Volk as it

develops over more than a millennium: "The chain of ancestors that

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

echoes Herder's concept of the nation as an organic community that

develops over time, but he also begins to move toward the Social

Darwinism and biological racism of the later nineteenth century.

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

at this very spot by the Reformer [Luther], and maybe it was I in

another form who camped on this mountain, long before the noble

fortress was built" (13:311). This character sees himself as part of what

a later generation will call the "racial community" of the German

Volk, whose scattered voices join together "until it will burst out irre-

sistibly after centuries as the battle hymn of a victorious nation"

(I12:35).

In order to win victories, a nation needs enemies, and the Germans

portrayed in Die Ahnen take the field against foes ranging from Cae-

sar to Napoleon. The most consistent opponents of the Germans,

however, lie to the East. The hero of the first volume is a Germanic

200 German Orientalisms

Vandal who heads West into Germany as part of the Volkerwanderun-

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

Wends or Sorbs, described as "a mighty people of the East [Ostvolk],

but horrible arsonists" (8:213). "These dirty dwarfs are full of tricks"

(8:284) sputters one character when he discovers that the Sorbs have

cheated in a drinking contest. In the third novel of the series, Die

Brhder vom deutschen Hause [The Teutonic Knights], the latest incar-

nation of German manhood participates in a Crusade to the Holy

Lands before joining the Teutonic Knights in their battle against the

infidels of Eastern Europe. Once Vandals and Burgundians had

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

heathens and settled by Germans" (o10:327). The fate of the German

territories ebbs and flows over the course of the centuries, but the

Germans are consistently described as a bulwark of upright settlers

against an encroaching flood of Slavic disorder and treachery.

The centuries-old conflict between Germans and Slavs recurs in

contemporary form in Soll und Haben, where Freytag presents the

Poles as an "Oriental" presence within Europe. When Anton crosses

into Polish territory to retrieve his firm's goods from Polish insur-

gents, it is as though he has crossed the border into Asia. He finds

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,

and which-like the caravansaries of the Orient-are to give neces-

sary protection to large wagon transports and a quickly gathering

crowd of people" (4:412-I13). Anton later agrees to oversee the man-

agement of a Polish estate purchased by the German aristocrat Baron

von Rothsattel. He arrives to find it in pitiably decrepit condition,

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

and antechambers" (5:I2). Instead he finds chipped paint, shattered

glass, leaking roofs, and overgrown gardens. Although Anton man-

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

bursar in a Slavic Sahara. Listen, you are in such a bizarre situation

that my hair is still standing on end in astonishment" (5:I60).

More ominous than Freytag's persistent denigration of the Poles in

Soll und Haben is his seemingly uncritical use of the most vicious anti-

Semitic stereotypes. Critics sympathetic to Freytag have argued that

he was not an anti-Semite, that he did not intend to denigrate Jews

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

Ahnen may point in this direction.75 Whatever Freytag's beliefs or

intentions might have been, it is difficult to read Soll und Haben today

as anything but an anti-Semitic novel, and its immense popularity in

the prewar years almost certainly reinforced popular prejudice against

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

unscrupulous Jewish businessman Hirsch Ehrenthal regards him with

disdain: "he was all majesty, vanity, despotism; no Asiatic emperor

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

"Caravanserei" (4:1 16) of Loebel Pinkus, an inn where Jews of dubi-

ous reputation can stay without questions asked. Itzig, whose heavily

accented German has a "hint of the East" [ein ostlicher Hauch]

(4:118), soon discovers that Pinkus has an illegal business smuggling

defective goods "to the East. . . up to the Russian empire, up to the

border of Asia" (4:I20). Schmeie Tinkeles, an Eastern European Jew

who speaks barely comprehensible German, creeps (schleicht) rather

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.

In a cast of Jews that ranges from the devious to the criminal,

Hirsch Ehrenthal's son Bernhard stands out as merely pathetic. He

202 German Orientalisms

does what he can to mend his father's evil ways, and an initially skep-

tical Anton befriends him, if in a rather condescending manner.

Bernhard is a sickly bookworm who spends most of his time in his

room. On one occasion, however, he accompanies his father to the

Rothsattel estate. Here he meets Lenore, the aristocratic beauty who

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

life fantasizing about Lenore's half-revealed charms. While Freytag

allows his Christian German protagonists to pair off happily with

fiancees from appropriate social classes, he denies marriage to Bern-

hard and the rest of the younger generation of Jews, including most

cruelly Ehrenthal's daughter Rosalie, who is about to marry Itzig

when she receives news of his impending arrest and eventual suicide.

Before his fateful encounter with Lenore, Bernhard spends most of

his time reading Oriental literature in his room. As he explains to

Anton, the study of Hebrew has led him to learn other Asian lan-

guages. He proudly shows Anton one of his Arabic manuscripts and

reads aloud his translation of a Persian love poem. Like the good

Romantic that he is, Bernhard is sure that languages reveal "the peo-

ple's souls" [die Seelen der Volker] (4:282) and-with an implicit

nod toward Goethe's Divan-claims that his favorite poet is Firdusi.

His literary taste not only underscores his Jewish identity but also

points to the widespread enthusiasm for Oriental literature and fash-

ions during the Biedermeier period.77 Hence Anton's polite critique

of Bernhard's taste functions as a realist manifesto within the novel.

Anton disagrees vigorously with Bernhard's contention that everyday

life in modern Germany is cold and prosaic. "I have read that a few

times already in books, but I cannot understand why, and I don't

believe it at all. I think that if someone is dissatisfied with our life, he

will be even more dissatisfied with life in Teheran or Calcutta if he

lives there for an extended period" (4:273). The business world is not

at all dull, he continues: "the businessman experiences just as much

The Nearest East 203

grandeur, sensations, and action here as any horseman among the

Arabs or Indians" (4:274-75). Daily contact with the goods of inter-

national commerce provides Anton with a vicarious exoticism that he

finds every bit as satisfying as travel to distant parts of the globe:

"When I set a sack of coffee on the scales, I tie an invisible thread

between the colonial daughter in Brazil who picked the beans and

the young farm hand who drinks coffee at breakfast, and when I take

a stick of cinnamon in my hand, I see on the one side the crouching

Malay who prepares and packs it, and on the other a little old woman

in our suburbs who crumbles it over her cream of rice" (4:274).

Hence Anton thrills to the "Poesie des Geschiftes" (poetry of busi-

ness) (4:377) and politely but firmly rejects Bernhard's Oriental stud-

ies as Romantic escapism.

The exchange between Anton and Bernhard opens the broader

question of the relation between the provincial, the national, and the

international in Freytag's work. In the first instance, characters are

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"

(4:358). In Die Ahnen characters such as Hermann von Salza express a

similar loyalty to the province of Thiiringen: "For it lies in the cen-

ter like a heartland, and the greatest strength is gathered here; this I

can certainly say in praise of my homeland" (10:137). Local patriotism

does not preclude loyalty to the greater German nation, however;

indeed, as Lynne Tatlock has argued, one's sense of being part of the

German Heimat emerges directly out of one's regional identity in Die

Ahnen.78 Hence Hermann von Salza proudly proclaims that he stands

"as a Thuringian, and as the master of a brotherhood that calls itself

'from the German house' [Teutonic Knights]" (10:137). Anton

Wohlfart also feels part of a larger German nation, as captured nicely

when Schroter welcomes him with a glass of the national beverage

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

... Welcome to the Heimat!" (4:492).

The relationship in Soll und Haben between national identity,

global commerce, and Germany's imperial ambitions proves more

204 German Orientalisms

complicated. As the conversation with Bernhard reveals, Anton takes

a vicarious delight in the way in which international commerce

establishes ties between distant peoples. Global trade has in fact cap-

tured his imagination since childhood. Each Christmas the Schroter

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

the poetry of this cozy connection to a completely foreign human life

that made him so happy" (4:8). Anton's first visit to the Schroter

warehouse rekindles this sense of childhood wonder: "Almost all

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 ..

This delight in the foreign world, into which he had entered so

safely, did not leave him from this time on" (4:68, 70). Anton's obser-

vation of these products of empire grants him risk-free narcissistic

pleasure: people all over the world have toiled so that he can enjoy

looking at their products in the safety of the Schroter warehouse.

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

irreverence and exuberance provide a welcome contrast to Anton's

tediously good behavior and sense of moral purpose. Fink is the son

of the co-owner of a large international firm based in Hamburg. Sent

by his father to a millonaire uncle in New York when he was four-

teen, Fink ran away, sailed around the world, and ended up in Val-

paraiso, Chile. While the polymath Bernhard has somewhat implau-

sibly mastered several Native American languages in his bedroom,

Fink has actually spent time around the Indian campfires and can

mimic their songs. Fink views his temporary apprenticeship at the

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

goods" [Colonialwaaren] (4:74), he firmly rejects Fink's repeated

offers to join him in world travel: "My good father often told me to

stay home and support yourself honestly. I will live in accordance

with his words" (4:3 58). In contrast to this German Antaeus, Fink's

peripatetic globetrotting resembles the circulation of international

goods and capital necessary to fill the warehouse that Anton regards

The Nearest East 205

with such excitement.79 Curiously, however, it is Fink who must be

cured of his wanderlust, while Anton reaps rich rewards for his desire

to remain at home. Under Anton's positive influence, Fink gradually

begins to take his job a little more seriously, and he even adopts mid-

dle-class morality when he reluctantly and with great resentment

agrees to Anton's demand that he break off an affair with Rosalie

Ehrenthal. Together Fink and his fiancee Lenore von Rothsattel pro-

vide a positive example of a younger generation of aristocrats capable

of adapting to modern times in a way that Lenore's parents cannot.

Most important, the man without a Heimat eventually settles down to

defend his German estate on Polish soil. As Fink sarcastically

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).

If Fink and Anton are capable of positive development, the Poles

most definitely are not. Soll und Haben radiates a triumphant sense of

German superiority over Slavic peoples. Only German industry can

tidy up the mess of their "Polack slovenliness" [Polakenwirtschaft]

(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

human culture. We and the Slays-it is an old struggle. And with

pride we feel that education, diligence, and [financial] credit are on

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

colonist: "His life will be an incessant victorious struggle against the

dark spirits of the landscape, and a crop of strong boys will spring out

of the Slavic womb; a new German race, full of endurance in body

and soul, will spread out across the land, a race of colonizers and con-

querors" (5:398).

Interestingly enough, however, Freytag's strident defense of Ger-

man imperialism within Europe does not coincide with a corre-

sponding desire to participate directly in colonial projects abroad.

Why does a novel that advocates the German conquest of Poland and

that expresses wonder and delight at the products of global commerce

encourage its protagonists to stop traveling and stay at home? The

206 German Orientalisms

answer lies in the peculiar combination of the contemporary and the

anachronistic in Soll und Haben. Although seemingly up-to-date in its

realistic portrayal of the German working world, Freytag's novel is

anachronistic to the extent that it portrays a soon-to-be outmoded

form of business rather than modern industrial production. As Frey-

tag himself puts it, the sort of warehouse storage and distribution

practiced by the Schroter company will seem as foreign to the next

generation "as we [find] a market in Timbuktu or in a Kaffir's kraal"

(4:58). The patriarchal relations between Schroter and his employees

represent "a last relic of the mediaeval family relationships of master

and apprentice" and not the new realities of the urban proletariat.8s

Thus the poetic realist Freytag seeks to portray capitalism with a

human face, idealizing the German industriousness of Anton Wohl-

fart and the Schroter firm, while either avoiding altogether the

unpleasant side effects of modern capitalism or projecting them onto

the Jews.s8'

The same desire to enjoy the benefits of capitalism without

acknowledging their human cost informs Freytag's portrayal of global

commerce. The good German stays at home and lets other European

nations do the dirty work of establishing foreign colonies and ship-

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-

ing to the New World, Fink ends up in a miserable little town in

Tennessee financed by speculation with his own money. Surrounded

"with a dirty and corrupt mob of emigrants, half of whom have suc-

cumbed to laziness and fever" (4:494), Fink finds himself holding

orphaned Irish babies (Paddykinder) (4:495) over chamber pots. He

soon returns to Europe with a new appreciation of the Old World:

"There is a powerful life there, he said, but in the turmoil I sensed

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

Herr Baumann, who goes to church every Sunday and plans to be a

missionary. Eventually this "future apostle to the heathens" (4:86)

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

slave trade" (5:357). Baumann presents slavery as an institution pecu-

The Nearest East 207

liar to certain African kings, apparently unaware that the Africans

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

the sharp edges off European colonialism.

Only in regard to Poland does Freytag take a hard-line stance, for

what I suspect are three interrelated reasons: first, the Poles are a

known and hated quantity, whereas the Malayan woman packing

cinnamon or the Brazilian girl picking coffee come from distant and

exotic lands. Freytag portrays the Poles with the venom that arises

out of the "narcissism of minor differences," and Fink is well aware

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-

ing them does not commit the Germans to a program of overseas

expansion, but enables them to extend the base of the local Heimat.

Third, Freytag's advocacy of local imperialism over foreign adventure

may reflect concern over the rising tide of German emigration dur-

ing the 185os. As hundreds of thousands of Germans began to leave

for North and South America, Freytag urges his fellow Germans to

stay at home and solidify their position in central Europe, while

benefiting indirectly from European imperialism through interna-

tional trade.

In later years Freytag enthusiastically supported the expansion of

the German fleet, and he cosigned a call for the foundation of a Ger-

man colonial society in 1882.82 This development has been viewed as

typical for the evolution of German liberals disappointed by the failed

Revolution of 1848 into aggressive proponents of German imperial-

ism during the Wilhelmine era.83 Yet Freytag already takes pride in

Germany as a "nation of conquerors and colonizers" in Soll und

Haben. What has changed is not so much his fundamental assessment

of the German character, but his willingness to extend German

power beyond Europe. In retrospect, the Nearest East of Poland

becomes a testing ground for what is portrayed as a specifically Ger-

man form of colonialism. The Germans bring middle-class virtues to

a land populated by drunken, rebellious peasants and vain, decadent

aristocrats; hence they redeem a land mismanaged by incorrigible

208 German Orientalisms

Poles. The conviction of German cultural and, increasingly, racial

superiority could later be extended beyond eastern Europe to Ger-

man colonies in other parts of the world. Just as members of the

recently unified German nation conceived of their collective identity

in and through their local provinces, German colonists abroad con-

ceived of the German Empire as a further extension of the German

Heimat. Hence German colonists did their best to preserve their lan-

guage and culture intact while minimizing foreign influence. As a

result, as Kirsten Belgum has argued, German colonialism was

marked by a combination of pride in the fact that the Germans

were- at last!-joining the modern world of other colonial powers

and an antimodern nostalgia for a more traditional way of life.84 The

Heimat movement functioned in a similar way within Germany,

offering citizens of the newly unified nation-state a way to step for-

ward toward a new sense of collective identity while keeping one

foot in traditions of the past-whether real or invented.85

The German ambivalence regarding its belated but explosive entry

into modern times finds its characteristic literary expression in the

work of its most popular author, Gustav Freytag. Soll und Haben

combines an idealized and slightly anachronistic portrait of the Ger-

mans at work with an anticipatory vision of their destiny as a nation

of conquerors and colonizers: today, Poland; tomorrow, the world.

One might expect that the Prussian patriot Freytag would conclude

his fictional history of the German people in Die Ahnen with a cele-

bration of Bismarck's triumph in the Franco-Prussian War and the

unification of the German nation. Here, too, however, Freytag

hedges his bets, as he stops short in the early 185os. As he explained

in his autobiography, the shift from historical fiction to recent polit-

ical events would have been awkward. Besides, he continues, novels

should not be about political, religious, and social ideas. At all costs

he wants to avoid tendentious literature of the sort practiced by the

poets of the German Vormirz.86 Freytag's rejection of literary Ten-

denz goes hand in hand with his rejection of political revolution. The

Poles revolt, but we never learn why; hence their uprising appears

criminal rather than political, an irrational outburst rather than a cal-

culated attempt to correct an injustice.87 Die Ahnen also offers little in

the way of an explanation for the Revolution of 1848: "Maybe both

The Nearest East 209

the rulers and the ruled are sick, each in their own way, and we are

all in need of recovery" (13:301-2), speculates the strongly autobio-

graphical figure Viktor. By deliberately playing dumb about the

causes of the Revolution, Freytag pursues his own agenda, based on

a glorification of the politically quiescent German middle class and a

corresponding denigration of aristocrats, Jews, and Poles, all of which

are associated with the East.88 As a fellow Silesian from the German-

Polish border, Freytag shared Eichendorff s fear and loathing of the

Slavic hordes, and yet while Eichendorff looks back nostalgically to

the Teutonic Knights as an organic Christian community opposed to

both ancient heathens and, implicitly, modern, increasingly secular

Prussian society, Freytag's fiction breathes a notably secular air. Only

Baumann attends church on a regular basis; Anton spends his Sunday

mornings reading The Last of the Mohicans. Freytag's hero revels in the

modern business world and the German colonial adventure-up to a

point. The combination of a fuzzy-focus idealization of the German

world with harshly drawn caricatures of Poles and Jews no doubt

contributed to the lasting popularity and latent threat of Gustav Frey-

tag's Poetic Realism.

GUNTER GRASS AND THE LITERATURE

OF MIGRATION

If pressed to identify the single most recognizable figure of postwar

German literature, Giinter Grass would be the most obvious choice.

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

in twentieth-century German history. Die Blechtrommel, together

with the early novella Katz und Maus [Cat and mouse] (1961) and the

second novel Hundejahre [Dog years] (1963), provides an intimate

look at what it was like to grow up in Nazi Germany, and to experi-

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

1989-90. The novel was featured in a notorious cover photo in Der

Spiegel, Germany's leading newsmagazine, that showed a prominent

literary critic tearing Grass's novel in half above the caption: "The

Failure of a Great Author." Having grown up in a country where

book burnings were all too real, Grass was deeply offended by what

he termed "a barbaric act" of violence against his novel.9° In a way,

however, the very prominence of the attack reconfirmed Grass's sta-

tus.9' If some readers expressed disappointment with the work, it was

not only because they found it long and dull, or because they dis-

agreed with his critical stance toward the new nation, but because

they were hoping for the great German novel of Reunification by

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-

ate of contemporary German literature. And in a sense, simply by

writing the work and stirring up controversy about German

Reunification, he did just that.

Given Grass's reputation as Germany's most representative writer, it

might come as something of a surprise to read the following statement

in the introduction to a collection of his essays in English: "Giinter

Grass . . . is a figure of central importance in the literature of migra-

tion, and the migrant is, perhaps, the central or defining figure of the

twentieth century.'"92 The author of this introduction was none other

than Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses, who has been

living under Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah or death sentence since the

late 1980s. Rushdie is just the sort of individual who comes to mind

when thinking of contemporary migrant literature: someone who has

lost his home, his language, and his culture, and whose works focus on

the complexities of postcolonial identity. Grass, in contrast, has been a

public intellectual for decades who has spoken out on television, 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

the formerly German city of Gdansk/Danzig where he grew up. "In

one sense," he writes, "Grass is only approximately half a migrant. A

full migrant suffers, traditionally, a triple disruption: he loses his place,

The Nearest East 211

he enters into an alien language, and he finds himself surrounded by

beings whose social behavior and code is very unlike, and sometimes

even offensive to, his own" (xi). In another sense, however, Grass

qualifies as a migrant writer in the fullest sense of the word, according

to Rushdie, because he grew up in a Nazi culture that so corrupted

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

finish my paraphrase of Salman Rushdie, was doubt, a distrust of "all

those who claim to possess absolute forms of knowledge . . . all total

explanations, all systems of thought which purport to be complete";

and one of the things he lost was "the sense of home as a safe, 'good'

place" (xiii, xii).

Grass himself spoke of this loss when accepting the Nobel Prize: "I

come from a family of refugees, which means that in addition to

everything that drives a writer from book to book . . . I had the

irreparable loss of my birthplace. If by telling tales I could not recap-

ture a city both lost and destroyed, I could at least reconjure it. And

this obsession kept me going. I wanted to make it clear to myself and

my readers... that what was lost did not need to sink into oblivion,

that it could be resuscitated by the art of literature."93 Had he been a

different person or lived in a different time, Grass might have become

what was known in the late nineteenth century as a Heimatdichter, a

poet of the local homeland, an antimodern celebrant of the good old

days, in which members of a homogenous society lived in rustic sim-

plicity, bound by ties of common blood to their native soil. But the

Danzig that Grass conjures in his literary works is anything but

homogenous or harmonious: it is rather a city fraught with conflict

between Poles and Germans, Protestants and Catholics, Gypsies and

Jews, and a place of conflicted identities within individuals them-

selves. To take only the most prominent example, Oskar Matzerath,

hero of Die Blechtrommel, is never really sure if his father is a German

Catholic from the Rhine or his mother's Kashubian cousin turned

Polish patriot. The Heimat for Giinter Grass is always hybrid.

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:

"For centuries Pomerellians, Brandenburgers, Teutonic Knights,

Poles, Swedes, and a second time Swedes, Frenchmen, Prussians, and

Russians, even Saxons, had made history by deciding every few years

that the city of Danzig was worth burning."94 As a member of the

German community expelled from Gdansk after the Second World

War, Grass is particularly interested in the Teutonic Knights who first

brought Germans to the region during the Middle Ages, although he

hardly presents them in the heroic light of an Eichendorff or

Treitschke. The greengrocer Greff in Die Blechtrommel can recite the

names and dates of all the grand masters of the order and speaks

enthusiastically about "the Germanic mission in the territories of the

order" (293 [382]), but Oskar is more interested in the slovenly

charms of Greffs wife than in the fanatical patriotism of this suicidal

pederast. More ironic still is Eddie Amsel's boyhood fascination with

the Germanic heroism of the Teutonic Knights in Hundejahre, for he

is a baptized Protestant ofJewish descent who later becomes a target

of anti-Semitic violence in the Third Reich. In the same novel Grass

observes that the Stutthoff concentration camp outside Danzig was

built on land originally drained by the Teutonic Knights.95 In Der

Butt [The flounder] (1977) Grass intersplices tales of the depredations

of the Teutonic Knights with memories of the Soviet crackdown on

Polish dissent in 1970.96

Thus Danzig is both local and global for Grass, the site of his own

personal origins, but also the nexus of a worldwide movement of

peoples and a place where larger geopolitical conflicts have been

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

a great surprise when Grass, this obsessive conjurer of local history,

should have begun to expand his gaze to global concerns in the 1970s

and 1980s. In Der Butt he transforms himself into a reincarnation of

The Nearest East 213

Vasco da Gama, setting out from Europe to explore the Indian sub-

continent. He returns to the theme in his semicomic Kopfgeburten

[Headbirths] (1980), in which a German couple goes on a tour of

Asian slums while trying to decide whether or not they should have

a baby, and he documents his own stay of several months in Calcutta

in the autobiographical narrative and pen-and-ink drawings of Zunge

zeigen [Show your tongue] (1988). In the following pages I focus on

the slightly later Unkenrufe [The call of the toad] (1992). This long

novella or short novel brings together the three major themes of

Grass's career: the city of Danzig/Gdansk, the history of Germany,

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

events of 1989-90, which is to say that it is simultaneously local,

national, and global in its concerns.

Unkenrufe begins when a German man meets a Polish woman in

the city of Danzig/Gdansk on the afternoon of November 2, 1989,

one week before the opening of the Berlin Wall. The man is Alexan-

der Reschke, a widower about to turn sixty; the woman Alexandra

Pi tkowska, a widow of about the same age. On one level, Unkenrufe

is a love story about this not-so-young couple: they meet, become

involved, get married, and go off on a honeymoon. It is a told with

gentle irony by an author who was also in his early sixties at the time.

From the beginning, however, this tale of love is overshadowed by

the theme of death. November 2 is All Souls' Day, dedicated to the

memory of the dead, and when they meet, Alexandra is buying asters,

flower of the dead, to place on her parents' graves. Alexander is an art

historian who specializes in Baltic grave monuments and keeps a col-

lection of coffin nails as a hobby; Alexandra restores old works of art

that often have religious themes, including the sculpture of an angel

that is part of a resurrection scene. Convinced that they need to see

Naples before they die, the happy newlyweds head off to Italy and

visit the city, only to be killed shortly thereafter in an automobile

accident.

Death becomes the project that unites them in life as well.

Pitkowska's parents were born in Polish Vilnius, in what is now

Lithuania, and buried in Gdansk against their will. As it turns out, the

German Reschke had grown up in the city of Danzig; when he

214 German Orientalisms

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-

man cemeteries. On their first evening together Reschke and

Pitkowska decide that they want to do something to ease the pain of

what Reschke is fond of calling "the Century of Expulsions" [Das

Jahrhundert der Vertreibungen],97 and so they found the German-

Polish-Lithuanian Cemetery Association that will allow displaced

individuals to be buried where they grew up: "The Century of

Expulsions will come to an end under the sign of homecoming" (69

[72]). The Lithuanian project never gets started, but the German

cemetery in Poland proves wildly successful. As soon as Reschke and

Pi tkowska lease land, the former German refugees start lining up to

buy their plots. Before long the aging Germans set up retirement

communities next to the Polish cemeteries so they can spend their

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

and shipping the remains back to Poland. Meanwhile the German

seniors in Polish retirement communities start getting visits from

their children and grandchildren, and before long construction begins

on birth clinics for the new German babies born on Polish soil.

This increasingly grotesque fantasy takes place during the

reunification year of 1989-90. The couple spends their first night

together on November 9, and they start making plans to ship the

corpses east even as living East Germans are rushing to the west. The

cemetery is consecrated on the same day that the Federal Republic

officially recognizes the Oder-Neisse border. From the beginning,

the Polish press views the project with suspicion. They reject what

Reschke conceived as "the ultimate in international understanding"

as incorrigible revanchism and accuse him of attempting a "recon-

quest through corpses" (II5 [117]). To his concern, the Germans

start requesting provocative inscriptions on their tombstones: "Here

Rests Our Beloved Father. . . in German Homeland Soil [In deutscher

Heimaterde]" (I24 [I26]). The Polish headlines become more shrill as

the Germans start shipping the remains of their loved ones back to

Poland: "An army of German corpses is intent on conquering our

The Nearest East 215

Western provinces" (163 [163]). Before long the couple that con-

ceived the project becomes alarmed at what it has become. As

Alexandra puts it in her slightly broken German, "We better watch

out or Poland will be on German menu. I say what I see: Germans

always hungry even when full. And that makes me afraid" (205

[203]). As new German graves are planned on a field where Reschke

once marched in the Hitler Youth, he and Alexandra officially with-

draw from the German-Polish Cemetery Association.

Where does Grass stand in relation to his characters? Unkenrufe is

narrated by a schoolboy friend of Reschke who also grew up in

Danzig, now lives in the West, and was born in 1927; if he is not

quite identical to Grass himself, he is certainly close.98 As a refugee,

Grass has frequently expressed sorrow at having lost his homeland,

and, given his sympathetic portrayal of the elderly couple in this

book, he may well approve of their attempt to heal old wounds

between the Germans and the Poles. As a satirist in the tradition of

Rabelais and Swift,99 however, it is often easier to tell what Grass

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

territory to the east. He bitterly condemned Helmut Kohl's oppor-

tunistic vacillation on the question of the German-Polish border, and

his protagonist Reschke shares his sentiments.'°° Unkenrufe is also a

diatribe against German revanchism, against those former refugees

still fixated on recapturing the East. Finally, Grass opposes

Reunification for at least two reasons: German war guilt and con-

temporary capitalism. Looking to the past, Grass sees a nation for

which political unification has brought only evil to the world, while

he views the Federal Republic in 1989-90 as part of an omnivorous

Western capitalism that is about to swallow up Eastern Germany and

Eastern Europe all over again; as Alexandra puts it, "Germans always

hungry even when full."''o

Unkenrufe not only portrays intra-European conflicts but also

broadens to include issues of global concern. Later in the same

evening in which he first meets Pitkowska, Reschke goes to a bar

for a drink and strikes up a conversation with a man from India

named Chatterjee, who has a project of his own. Chatterjee has a

216 German Orientalisms

small fleet of seven bicycle rickshaws and a license for inner-city trans-

port in downtown Gdansk. To appeal to Polish customers, Chatterjee

paints his rickshaws red and white, but his customers at first are mainly

West Germans who have returned to visit their childhood homes. Very

quickly, however, Chatterjee's business starts booming, and before

long we find him taking over Gdansk shipyards, idled by the transition

to capitalism, to increase production of his rickshaws. He begins to

travel throughout Europe, extending his business to Amsterdam and

Copenhagen and many other cities in which downtown traffic is

banned, and the narrator envisions a not-too-distant future in which

his bicycle rickshaw model Solidarity "went into mass production and,

passing beyond the borders of Europe, was on its way to meeting the

needs of Africa, Asia, and South America" (176 [i77]).

Alexandra Pitkowska responds to this Asian interloper with char-

acteristic European prejudice. Claiming that he has "a foreign smell"

(136 [137]), she refuses to ride in his rickshaws and is outraged when

he hires Poles to do the pedaling: "'I should live,' cried Alexandra,

'to see Polish men doing coolie work'" (99 [O102]). Lumping Chat-

terjee into the universal foreign category of the "Turk," Pitkowska

claims that he, too, will be driven back, "same as we Poles at gates of

Vienna defeated Turks" (136 [138]). Reschke responds quite differ-

ently, however. A former liberal of the 1960s who now sympathizes

with the Green Party, Reschke is preoccupied with global warming

and the aftereffects of Chernobyl from the beginning of the novel.

We first see him in the Polish market photographing suspiciously

large mushrooms, and one of the first things that attracts him to

Alexandra is her low-tech mesh-net shopping bag. He soon becomes

an enthusiastic supporter of Chatterjee's environmentally friendly

bicycle rickshaws and even invests the profits of the German Polish

Cemetery Association in Chatterjee's business.

In Chatterjee, then, Reschke sees a glimmer of hope in his other-

wise gloomy assessment of humankind's future prospects. Reschke is

in fact so pessimistic that his students have nicknamed him "the

toad." As Reschke explains to Pi tkowska, "the call of the toad, even

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

call of the toad foreshadows disaster" (103 [Io5]). Reschke, whom

The Nearest East 217

the narrator insists once swallowed a toad as a child, begins recording

toad calls in the Polish swamps, and he and Alexandra sometimes

spend their evenings listening to the tapes. He even convinces Chat-

terjee to replace the cheerful bell of a typical European bicycle on his

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

work, a more figurative rendering might be Prophecies of Doom, or,

Impending Sense of Disaster. What sort of disaster? There are at least

three: the threat of a new German nationalism, the threat of

unchecked global capitalism, and the threat of ecological disaster at a

time of nuclear weapons, atomic energy, and global warming.

It is in this context that we need to view Chatterjee and his rick-

shaw project. Like Reschke and Pi tkowska, Chatterjee is also a typ-

ical product of this "Century of Expulsions." He was born in Pak-

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

in Calcutta and Dacca, Bangladesh. Chatterjee later studied English

literature and economics at Cambridge University and traffic science

in London; he speaks English, Polish, and German in addition to his

native Urdu. Chatterjee thus typifies the multilingual, multicultural,

hybrid identity of millions in the postcolonial world. His response to

his sense of displacement differs fundamentally from that of the Euro-

pean refugees in Grass's work, however: Pitkowska and Reschke

capitalize on the desires of the former residents of Danzig to recon-

nect with their roots. The German-Polish Cemetery Association is all

about the politics of a particular place, about the centripetal pull of

the Heimat. Chatterjee, in contrast, represents the centrifugal force of

a diaspora; uprooted several times in the past, he displays no interest

in returning home-and where would home be? England? India?

Pakistan? Bangladesh?-but is rather intent on expanding his business

in bicycle-drawn rickshaws throughout the globe.

It is quite possible to view Chatterjee's global rickshaw empire as a

largely positive, half-serious alternative to the various disasters that

Reschke fears, as it offers an environmentally friendly alternative to

modern industrialization, a cosmopolitan alternative to modern

nationalism, and a kinder, gentler form of global capital. But it is only

ha/f-serious, because the rickshaw business, like the Cemetery Asso-

218 German Orientalisms

ciation, grows with fairy-tale speed, and it is hard to take completely

seriously the image of Solidarity rickshaws filling the world's inner

cities with mournful toad calls. Largely positive, because Grass does

sound a note of caution about Chatterjee, who admits at one point

that he is "of Bengali origin only on his father's side. Not without

embarrassment he explained that his mother belonged to the mer-

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]).

Chatterjee's father, described as "a lover of poetry, possessed by

dreams of power" (137 [138]), had named his son after Subhas Chan-

dra Bose-the Bengali leader whom Grass portrays as a racist despot

in Zunge zeigen-but Chatterjee insists that he takes after his mother

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

rather dubious reputation, however, it seems difficult to take his

assertions without a grain of salt.

While Chatterjee may hope one day to conquer the world with his

rickshaws, he views himself more immediately as the spearhead of a

new Asian invasion into Europe. "As long as the old European order

prevails," he predicts to Reschke, "there will indeed be problems.

But it won't last. As the ancient Greeks knew, all is flux. We shall

come. We will have to come, because it's getting a little cramped

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

to fear, however: the Asians will not practice violent conquest of

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

together with their Black Madonna; the Lenin shipyard, formerly

known as Schichau, will bear the name of the Bengali national hero,

and streets once named after Soviet or German generals will be

named after Bengali businessmen. As Grass had already suggested in

Kopfgeburten, the Europeans will be aufgehoben into a new Euro-Asian

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

Shortly before his death, Reschke envisions a "Polish-Bengali sym-

biosis [that] announces the predestined Asian future of Europe, free

from nationalistic narrowness, no longer hemmed in by language

boundaries, polyphonically religious, superrich in gods, and above all

blessedly slowed down, softened by the new warm and wet climate"

(233-34 [23 1]).

Grass's tongue-in-cheek image of a Euro-Asian utopia contrasts

sharply with his actual experience of Asian cities. Calcutta in particu-

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

finding precisely the images of squalor and misery that he sought,

while ignoring other aspects of Indian culture, thereby perpetuating

the "hegemonic stance" and "eurocentric stereotypes" that he sets

out to refute.'02 Although the figure of Chatterjee has been said to be

based loosely on Salman Rushdie, one could argue that Grass por-

trays him as a stereotypical Indian businessman, just as his image of

the Polish Pi tkowska as moody, slightly irrational, and inclined to

bigotry could be condemned as prejudiced and misogynous.03 In

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

admire his unflinching willingness to see and record images of

extreme poverty and misery that most wealthy Western tourists

would rather avoid. More important, however, is that Grass intends

his images of India as an indictment of the West. The goddess Kali

sticks out her red tongue in shame not at Calcutta itself, but at the

gross disparities in the global distribution of wealth and power that

make such misery possible.

Grass introduces the theme of global politics tangentially into

Unkeurufe by including scattered references to the Iraq invasion of

Kuwait in August 1990 and to the subsequent outbreak of the Gulf

War in early 1991. Reschke views the war with characteristic

ambivalence, finding the allied response both justified and barbaric.

The old Erna Brakup, however, who is part of the tiny and perse-

cuted German minority that had remained in Polish Gdansk after the

Second World War, expresses spontaneous sympathy for the human

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

wrong?" (i 56 [i57]). Chatterjee goes further, viewing the Gulf War

as a symptom of the impending decline of the West. As a horrified

Reschke summarizes, Chatterjee "believes that the Gulf War is

needed to make the pauperization especially of Asia and Africa intol-

erably evident. The crushing demonstration of military might, he

believes, simply highlights the impotence of Western thinking" (165

[i66]). Where Grass stands in relation to the opinions expressed by

the various characters in Unkenrufe is difficult to say in every instance,

but he certainly shares Chatterjee's concern about the increasing

poverty of the so-called Third World. "The affluent north and west

can try to screen themselves off in security-mad fortresses," predicted

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-

gry" (300 [309]).

Unkenrufe marked Grass's last attempt to date to combine in a work

of fiction the themes of the city of Danzig/Gdansk and the Pol-

ish/German border with broader questions of globalization, migra-

tion, and impending ecological disaster. During the early 1990s he

concentrated his political and creative energies on German

Reunification and its aftermath, focusing on relations between the

two halves of the formerly divided country. More recently, however,

Grass has again worked to expand the horizons of his fellow Ger-

mans. "I know: these days everything has to be seen globally, under-

stood globally, and accepted as a global fate," remarked Grass in one

of several speeches about the plight of the Sinti and Roma minorities

within Europe.'°4 Noting that these "gypsies" have been persecuted

for centuries as a mobile minority that does not fit neatly into the

national boundaries of any single European state, Grass argues that

precisely this mobility, this willingness to cross national borders,

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-

ister President Stoiber's comment about the threat of a new "racial-

ization of the German people" [Durchrassung des deutschen Volkes]

and the xenophobic election campaign of Roland Koch, whose slo-

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-

try by encouraging Germans to devote more attention to computer

literacy among their own children.o5 Not surprisingly, Grass again

agreed to campaign for the Social Democratic Party for the 2002 fall

election. "We must acknowledge that several million foreigners live

in our country," insisted Grass in March 2002. "We must be a hos-

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

Soviet submarine on January 30, 1945, as it fled with a cargo of some

9,00ooo German refugees from the advancing Russian armies at the end

of the Second World War. By choosing to narrate this incident, Grass

broaches a topic that had been considered taboo in both the German

Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic, although for differ-

ent reasons: citizens of the GDR, who had been taught to believe

that they were antifascist resistance fighters together with their Soviet

allies, could hardly be permitted to grieve for a German ship under

Nazi command sunk by Soviet torpedoes, whereas any effort to com-

memorate German victims of the Second World War in the FRG

seemed inappropriate in a country preoccupied with its guilt at hav-

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

the Germans were wrong to suppress the memory of the Gustloff.

"Never, he said, should his generation have kept silent about such

misery, merely because its own sense of guilt was so overwhelming,

merely because for years the need to accept responsibility and show

remorse took precedence, with the result that they abandoned the

topic to the right wing."'07 Im Krebsgang represents Grass's effort to

wrest memory from the hands of those right-wing revanchists, his

effort to mourn for those who suffered and died without, however,

demonizing the enemy or exonerating the Germans from their over-

whelming guilt in the Second World War.

Grass's latest attempt at Vergangenheitsbewdltigung is only partially

successful, however, not because his artistic powers have begun to

wane-on the contrary, most reviewers agree that Im Krebsgang is

Grass's best work in years-but because of the German inability to

222 German Orientalisms

escape from the shadow of the past. The Wilhelm Gustloff was named

in honor of a Nazi functionary who was assassinated by a Jew, David

Frankfurter, in Switzerland in 1936. Frankfurter immediately turns

himself in to the police and confesses his crime: "I fired the shots

because I am a Jew" (25 [28]). While he is sentenced to life in prison,

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

Hamburg harbor under the approving eyes of Adolf Hitler. Before

the war the Gustloff was used for "Strength through Joy" excursions

for party members in good standing, but after 1939 it remained in

port as a hospital ship in Danzig. Mixing fact with fiction, Grass

includes the pregnant Tulla Pokriefke, a familiar figure from Katz und

Maus and Hundejahre, among the thousands who pressed on board in

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-

loff slips beneath the waves.

Grass narrates Im Krebsgang largely through the eyes of Paul

Pokriefke, who spent his childhood in the German Democratic

Republic before moving to Berlin shortly before the Wall was

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,

and finally as a freelance journalist. Paul marries, has a son named

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

the Internet several years later, Paul Pokriefke stumbles on a neo-

Nazi website devoted to the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, only to

discover that the webmaster is his own son. With horrified fascina-

tion he follows chatroom debates between "Wilhelm"-Konrad's

pseudonym-and "David." Together the neo-Nazi "Wilhelm" and

the presumed Jew "David" rehearse in cyberspace the ideological

debates surrounding the killing of Wilhelm Gustloff by David Frank-

furter. Eventually the virtual pair meets in reality at the site of the

former monument to Gustloff in Schwerin. Here history repeats

itself, albeit in reverse: "Wilhelm" shoots and kills "David"-who

turns out not to be a Jew at all-while "Wilhelm," that is, Konrad

Pokriefke, turns himself in to the police: "I fired because I am a Ger-

man" (188 [I75]).

The Nearest East 223

While Grass employs Paul Pokriefke as an objective reporter who

tries to give a responsible and accurate account of the Gustloff, his

son resurrects an unrepentant form of anti-Semitic German nation-

alism. Not coincidentally, Grass has Konrad grow up in Molln, site

of a notorious arson attack in November 1992 in which three Turks

were killed, suggesting that yesterday's (and today's) anti-Semitism

has close ties to the upsurge in antiforeign violence that has plagued

Germany since Reunification. Konrad later admits that he has had

loose contact with neo-Nazis in Molln, although he takes pride in

the fact that he is not a "vulgar Nazi" like some of the drunken skin-

heads who once attended his impromptu lecture on the Gustloff In

addition to his diatribes against "the world Jewish conspiracy"

[Weltjudentum] (76 [74]), Konrad resurrects the old fears of the

Russian hordes knocking at Europe's Eastern gates: "'This terror

still menaces all of Europe if no dam is erected against the Asiatic

tide . . .' As an added attraction he had scanned in and included a

poster used by the German Christian Democrats in the fifties, show-

ing a devouring monster with Asiatic features" (io6 [10o1-2]).

Although he places these words in the mouth of a discredited neo-

Nazi, Grass does not mean to deny that Soviet troops systematically

raped German women at the end of the Second World War. His

own mother was in fact raped by Russian soldiers,'o8 and he also

portrays such a rape in the chapter entitled "Die Ameisenstral3e"

[The ant street] in Die Blechtrommel. What Grass criticizes here, at

least implicitly, is the transformation of a single historical event into

a timeless stereotype that can be employed at will for reprehensible

political purposes, whether it be the quest for German Lebensraum

in Eastern Europe or the revanchist desire to reclaim former German

territories after the war.

Konrad Pokriefke's blind enthusiasm for neo-Nazi politics and his

copycat assassination of his chatroom sparring partner suggest that

German history replays itself compulsively in a way that undermines

efforts to overcome the past. Elsewhere Grass has noted the historical

irony that the Berlin Wall should have been reopened on November

9,109 and January 30 plays a similarly overdetermined role in Im Krebs-

gang as the date of Wilhelm Gustloff's birth in 1895, Hitler's seizure

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

recalls Hitler's birthday on April 20, 1889. History collapses into a

two-dimensional realm in which the past continues to haunt the

present, a point underscored in the final sentences of the novella. Paul

Pokriefke has convinced himself that his incarcerated son has finally

overcome his obsession with the Gustloff, only to discover that Kon-

rad is being hailed as a hero on a yet another neo-Nazi Web site:

"'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]).

In a sense, Grass completes the centuries-old story of the German

Ostsiedlungen in the novella Im Krebsgang: what had begun as Ger-

many's seemingly irresistible Drang nach Osten ended in panicked flight

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."

Unlike those who yearn for a new normalcy based on a repression of

the past, Grass has continued his lifelong effort to remind his readers

of that past, however uncomfortable its burden may be. As the

renewed debate about Germany's eastern frontier in 1989-90 made

clear, German designs on the East had not entirely disappeared, at least

in some quarters, just as recent outbreaks of antiforeign violence and

resistance to immigration point to the continuing existence of racism

and xenophobia in a reunited Germany as well as in other member

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

it is better to break taboos and acknowledge the victims without

excusing the perpetrators. Perhaps he has added only another chapter

to the never-ending story of Germany's relations with its Nearest East,

but he holds out the hope, despite his gloomy conclusion, that the

next installment may be in a lighter mode.

Conclusion: Toward a

"Bastard" Literature?

In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World

Trade Center and the Pentagon, many Germans responded with

spontaneous sympathy for their Western ally. For a brief period, at

least, Germans seemed willing to forget that relations with the new

Bush administration had been anything but smooth in the months

preceding the attack. On May 7, 2001, for instance, the New York

Times had run an article by Roger Cohen entitled "America the

Roughneck (Through Europe's Eyes)" that detailed what the Euro-

peans had viewed as a series of American provocations to world opin-

ion: more weapons to Taiwan, harsh criticism of North Korea, a fail-

ure to support the World Court, and the abandonment of the Kyoto

Protocol on the environment. Citing "what the German weekly Der

Spiegel recently called 'the snarling, ugly Americans,'" Cohen

reported the widespread sense of schadenfreude that had greeted the

U.S. ouster from the United Nations Human Rights Commission in

the previous week. Such concerns seemed trivial while the images of

mass destruction on September i i remained fresh, and for a few

weeks it seemed tactless at best to voice criticism of a nation that had

so recently been shaken to the core.

Perhaps inevitably, however, expressions of unconditional Ger-

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

Grass. While expressing his sympathy for the "incomparable injustice

suffered by the American people as a result of these terrorist acts" and

225

226 German Orientalisms

even his tentative willingness to support a very limited action against

Osama Bin Laden, assuming it were possible, he feared that broad

military strikes would only kill the innocent and trigger unpredictable

and potentially disastrous reprisals. He remembered that the CIA

originally supported the Taliban in their struggle against the Soviet

Union, and he condemned the American neglect of third world

poverty and the U.S.-supported Israeli occupation of Palestinian ter-

ritory. Above all, Grass resisted the simplistic division of the world

into good and evil and insisted on his right to express sympathy for

the American people, but to remain critical of American policies.'

In the months leading up to the war with Iraq, German politicians

and the German media seemed to follow Grass's lead, voicing ever

sharper critiques of what many believed were recklessly aggressive

American policies that failed to take into consideration the concerns

of their European allies. Gradually the Germans, who had declared

their allegiance to the West after September I I, 2001, began to sense

that they shared some of the anti-American sentiments of their ene-

mies to the East. In June 2002, Die Zeit summed up the mood in the

subtitle to an article in its Feuilleton section: "Why Arabs and Euro-

peans hate America, both in their own way-and yet for similar rea-

sons."2 Americans-and Israelis-seemed crass, greedy, immoral, and

hypocritical imperialists who enjoyed vast, but undeserved, eco-

nomic and military powers and thus provoked resentment among

European intellectuals as well as Islamic Fundamentalists. Once again,

in other words, Germany found itself poised between East and West,

between the latest incarnations of Oriental "barbarians" and a new

generation of ugly Americans.

What makes this latest phase in the history of German Orientalism

different is that boundaries between nations have become more

porous and populations within nations increasingly diverse. On the

one hand, to be sure, the global "war on terror" takes place across

clear geopolitical borders, pitting the Western allies against Islamic

militants in remote regions of the Middle East and Central Asia. On

the other hand, however, the conflict has taken place within the

West itself. The terrorists scored their initial success against the

United States not with overwhelming force on a distant battlefield,

Conclusion 227

but by infiltrating enemy territory and turning Western technology

against itself. Each subsequent month has brought new arrests of

alleged terrorists living throughout the West, including in such Ger-

man cities as Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Berlin. Such discoveries exac-

erbate tensions within an already nervous public and almost certainly

have contributed to the sudden surge of interest throughout Europe

in right-wing political parties with anti-immigrant policies. Mindful

of their past, the Germans have to date avoided the public contro-

versy stirred up by such figures as Joerg Haider in Austria or Jean-

Marie Le Pen in France, but fear and loathing of the foreign certainly

exists in Germany as well. Cooler heads have cautioned that what is

needed is not another round of "ethnic cleansing" but greater tolerance

and increased efforts at mutual understanding. Distinctions between

"us" and "them" have in any case become increasingly difficult to

make: second and third generation children of Turkish Gastarbeiter in

Germany, for instance, have a hybrid cultural identity that no longer

conforms to national stereotypes of either Germany or Turkey.

In light of the increasingly multicultural populations of many Ger-

man cities, and in response to an earlier rise in East-West tensions at

the time of the Gulf War, the Turkish-German writer Zafer Senocak

proposed half-seriously that it might be best if Germans and Turks

could learn to converse in a new language: "Maybe we, Germans and

Turks, would have to learn a third, common language that no one

except us would understand. . . A language that would inject us into

each other like a vaccine and immunize us against each other so that

we can be together without hurting each other."3 Elsewhere Seno-

cak refers to this new idiom as a "bastard" language brewed up by

modern alchemists: "No one knows how the new language will taste.

The bastardized language [that will create] new, unspoken, fictive

realities between the Koran and the Bible, between Byzantium and

Asia. "4 Senocak imagines a future linguistic mixture, but in a sense

the future has already arrived in the form of a bastard literature. By

way of conclusion, then, I would like to look briefly at works of con-

temporary fiction by Emine Sevgi Ozdamar (1946-) and Michael

Roes (1960-) that point toward new possibilities in the long history

of Germany's literary encounters with the East.

228 German Orientalisms

OZDAMAR'S HYBRID HEROINES

In 1992 Ozdamar published the first of two autobiographical novels,

Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei [Life is a caravansary].s The first-person

narrator tells of her childhood in Turkey during the 1950s and early

1960s. The primary focus is on her private experience in a family

forced to move frequently because of her father's largely unsuccessful

attempts to find work as a contractor, but the novel also gives a sense

of the social and political history of Turkey in the twentieth century.

The book ends when the protagonist, now seventeen, gets on the

train to become a Gastarbeiterin in Berlin, which is where the next

novel begins. Die Brhcke vom goldenen Horn [The bridge of the golden

horn] (1998) tells of the young woman's gradual sexual and political

awakening in the late 1960s. She works in factories and as a chamber

maid, becomes involved with several different men, discovers her

vocation as an actress, and becomes a committed socialist. She then

returns to Istanbul, where she studies acting and moves in radical

intellectual and political circles. The novel culminates in a chilling

account of the Turkish government's crackdown on leftist intellectu-

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

and has since worked as an actress, director, and playwright in Ger-

many and France. In 1991 she was the first nonnative German writer

to win the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann prize.6 Both novels have

gone into multiple printings, and Karawanserei "has been translated

into English, Dutch, Spanish, Polish, Turkish, and Norwegian."7

The German Quarterly, the most widely circulated scholarly journal

devoted to the study of German literature in the United States,

devoted no less than three separate articles to Karawanserei between

1996 and 2001.8 As a less official but still significant indication of her

rising cultural status, in 2001 a large framed photograph of Ozdamar

Conclusion 229

hung with other prominent contemporary German writers on the

walls of the Kiepert Buchhandlung, at that time Berlin's largest book-

store. Although Ozdamar cannot compete in sales or cultural prestige

with a Giinter Grass or a Martin Walser, she has certainly attained

modest popular success and a substantial critical acclaim that would

be the envy of most writers of her generation.

But are her novels German? They are written in German and pub-

lished by a major German firm, so it would seem fairly obvious that

they are indeed works of German fiction. As several critics have

noted, however, there is something unusual about Ozdamar's lan-

guage in Karawanserei, for she frequently renders idiomatic Turkish

sayings "in deadpan German translation."9 As a result, readers not

fluent in both German and Turkish are never completely sure if an

unusual turn of phrase is a result of Ozdamar's linguistic creativity in

German, a literal translation of a Turkish expression, or perhaps a say-

ing drawn from a hybrid dialect of nonnative speakers in Germany.'o

Die Brucke vom Goldenen Horn employs considerably less stylistic inno-

vation, but raises a different question of its relation to the "German"

genre of the Bildungsroman.": Together with Karawanserei the novel

follows a familiar pattern: the protagonist grows up, experiences sev-

eral romantic entanglements, and decides on a choice of career. Like

Wilhelm Meister before her, the unnamed protagonist of Ozdamar's

novels also pursues her "theatrical mission." Yet the typical hero of

the Bildungsroman is a young German man, not a Turkish woman. As

we have seen, moreover, many of the young men portrayed in the

German Bildungsroman undergo a pivotal experience when they

travel to the East, whereas Ozdamar's protagonist has her formative

experience in the West. Consider finally the setting of the two nov-

els: Karawanserei takes place entirely in Turkey, as does more than half

of Die Bricke vom Goldenen Horn. Should we speak of them, then, as

Turkish novels that happen to be written in German? Here again,

however, Ozdamar complicates matters: in Karawanserei she reminds

her readers that the Germans had allied themselves with Turkey

under Bismarck and again during the First World War in a belated

effort to catch up with the imperial ambitions of England and Russia:

"The Germans were in a hurry. They were late and wanted to

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-

ers," proclaim the newspaper headlines in Istanbul; "Germany is tak-

ing Turks."'3 Instead of portraying Turkey and Germany as discrete

nations, Ozdamar suggests that they are enmeshed in a symbiotic

relationship determined by individual ambition and mutual need.

The question of whether Ozdamar's novels are German or Turk-

ish turns out to be misleading. In terms of their style, content, and

genre the novels work rather to undermine such distinctions, to cre-

ate a linguistic and generic literary hybrid that corresponds to the

complexities of individual and national identities in contemporary

Europe-which both includes and does not include Turkey. The

division within the protagonist's identity in Die Brhcke vom Goldenen

Horn symbolized by her journeys between Istanbul and Berlin repeats

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

European-trained actors on the European side of town. While she

reads Kafka and Brecht, Lenin and Marx, her Europhile mother dyes

her hair blond and her father trims his moustache to look like Clark

Gable. With varying degrees of sophistication, all three try to pass as

Europeans. Such attempts at passage can be read in two different

ways, however: on the one hand, Ozdamar presents the mother and

father as touching if slightly pathetic in their effort to mimic what

they perceive a Western European ideal. The deck is stacked against

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

hand, the daughter's hybrid identity as a bilingual traveler between

Istanbul and Berlin, between Europe and Asia, provokes what

Majorie Garber has termed a "category crisis" in her study of "cross-

dressing and cultural anxiety." Resisting the tendency to resolve gen-

der ambiguity by assigning a fixed sexual identity to the figure of the

transvestite in Western culture, Garber explores ways to call estab-

lished categories into question, or, more radically, to allow them to

be constructed in the first place.'5 The mimic is doomed to failure; he

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-

erature. In a sense, Ozdamar's postmodern and postnational novels

serve as the counterpart to Wolfram von Eschenbach's premodern

and prenational romance: both disrupt understandings of the national

literature as an organic outgrowth of a homogenous culture. National

literatures are made, not born, and Ozdamar's fiction reminds us of

this fact.

MICHAEL ROES'S

POSTMODERN ORIENTALISM

While Karawanserei and Die Brhcke vom Goldenen Horn tell a new story

about the "Oriental's" experience in contemporary Germany,

Michael Roes's novel Leeres Viertel, Rub' Al-Khali: Invention Tber das

Spiel [Empty quarter, Rub' al Khali: Invention about games/playing]

(1996) revisits the familiar theme of the Western traveler to the exotic

East. Part fictional diary, part adventure novel, part ethnographic

treatise, this unconventional novel is actually two books in one, that

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

unrest in Yemen. An unnamed first-person narrator flies from Ger-

many to Yemen, where he is to begin research on traditional games

in Yemeni culture. Although warned of the dangerous political situ-

ation by his Western colleagues at his institute in the capital city of

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

as Rub' Al-Khali in the center of the Arabian peninsula. The narra-

tor carries with him a fragmentary account of an earlier expedition to

the same region. Around 18oo Alois Ferdinand Schnittke leaves

Weimar as the traveling companion of Baron de la Motte-Fauteuil

and two other German intellectuals. After a journey that takes

months to traverse the distance covered in hours by the modern pro-

tagonist's airplane, Schnittke finally reaches the Arabian peninsula.

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

of the "empty quarter."

232 German Orientalisms

Schnittke and the present-day narrator not only travel along paral-

lel routes and share similar experiences, but they also seem kindred

spirits, distinguished from their colleagues by a greater degree of

openness toward the foreign and a correspondingly greater willing-

ness to question their own society and to reflect on their cultural

prejudices. As they travel through Istanbul and Egypt on their way

toward Yemen, Schnittke's companions keep to themselves and seem

crassly insensitive to ways in which their behavior offends local sen-

sibilities. Schnittke is not blind to some of the more disturbing aspects

of the foreign culture-in Egypt, for example, he stays next to a

square used for public executions and is troubled by the sight of

freshly beheaded corpses each morning outside his room-but he

reminds himself that Europeans have their own barbaric customs such

as the slave trade. He becomes increasingly impatient with his com-

panions' arrogance and ignorance, and finally tells them that their

fixation on the ancient Orient renders them blind to their present

surroundings: "What can you know of a land whose present you

essentially detest? Your journey leads through a European dream of

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

their language and customs.

More often than not, however, both he and Schnittke become

acutely aware of their foreignness in moments when they are most

deeply immersed in the alien culture: "Now I have journeyed so long

and so far from home, but I have not really escaped it," writes

Schnittke. "It seems rather as if I had grown closer to its depths, to

the essence of that which we call home in proportion to the distance

[I have traveled]" (ioi). The contemporary anthropologist finds him-

self similarly troubled by the seemingly insurmountable gulf that

divides one culture from another: "Even if I could learn to under-

stand their world, how should it [their world] ever be able to under-

stand me?" (147). At other times he becomes suspicious of the moti-

vations behind his own academic discipline: "Isn't anthropology part

of a colonial strategy for controlling and exploiting the foreign?"

(239). As he later observes, however, even this tendency toward

compulsive self-reflection is a part of his own culture: "Still left-over

Conclusion 233

Protestant education: constant introspection, self-observation, self-

punishment" (683). The same critical awareness only pushes acade-

mic anthropology deeper into Western culture: "Even this critique

only represents the current state of anthropological reflection . . . We

cannot escape ethnocentrism. Even the critical reflection is a part of

our own cultural competence" (240).

The modern narrator is particularly aware of the extent to which

his experience of the East is mediated by images from Western pop-

ular culture. "We are not living in the imaginary Orient of Karl

May," cautions his colleague at the institute, "but in an autocratically

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

transported into the background of an Oriental feature film" (720).

This sense of being caught between cultures leads to a number of

bizarrely incongruous episodes in the novel. At one point the narra-

tor finds himself at a party at the institute in Yemen surrounded by

Westerners eating Spatzle, Knodel, rote Gritze, and other German

delicacies that have been flown in by Lufthansa. In this incongruous

setting the German culture takes on a sense of theatricality that mir-

rors the pseudo-Oriental atmosphere of a restaurant in Sanaa that

caters to foreigners: "the entire ambiance artificial in the highest

degree, an Arabic simulation of European expectations" (Soo). In

another episode the narrator has a moment of self-critical awareness

as he explains Freudian psychology to Yemeni schoolchildren: "For

a second I became aware of the craziness, indeed, the surreality of the

situation" (352).

Another such surreal episode occurs in the section titled "West-

ostlicher Diwan." The title inevitably recalls Goethe's work, but in

this case the Diwan refers not to a collection of poetry, but to a room

in Yemenese culture that serves as the rough equivalent of a Western

parlor. The difference, however, is that the visitor will never be

allowed beyond the Diwan to the interior of the home: "The wide-

spread custom in my home to first lead some guests through the

entire house is unthinkable here" (594). The Diwan thus functions as

a point of contact between the two cultures, but also as a boundary

that prevents deeper penetration. In this setting the narrator enter-

tains some of the students to whom he has been teaching English on

234 German Orientalisms

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

comes to mind is "Silent Night," which he sings softly, haltingly, and

with considerable embarrassment: "I can't think about the absurdity

of this selection" (596). Afterward he cannot tell what sort of impres-

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,

"even at home, 'Silent Night' is not exactly considered an icebreaker

[stimmungsmacher]" (596). The moment of cross-cultural exchange

threatens to become a performance in the theater of the absurd. And

yet there is no mockery on the part of the students, who confidently

sing their own songs before politely taking their leave.

The novel thus fluctuates between moments of seemingly genuine

understanding between alien cultures and scenes in which the gaps

between individuals and peoples seem wider than ever. Like

Ozdamar's protagonists, Roes's characters find themselves suspended

between two worlds in a kind of bastard literature, as the bilingual

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

part of both narrators in theatricality, in culture as performance. If

they cannot become the Other, there are at least moments in which

they can pass for the Other. Schnittke, by profession a comic actor,

scenery painter, and former director of a marionette theater, soon

finds that he can be mistaken for an Arab when he wears the appro-

priate clothing. The present-day narrator tries on a turban, has him-

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-

bian skin," comments Schnittke; "I only disguise myself as an Orien-

tal" (94). "Of course I cannot forget my own cultural background"

(419), echoes the modern narrator. "Any attempt at a purely

superficial assimilation would in any case be a disguise and would

make that which divides us all the more visible" (418). Seen from his

own cultural perspective, dressing up in flowing robes might seem

like transvestism, and he concedes that the strange clothing makes his

movements more "effeminate." Nevertheless, he points out that

"soft, graceful movements are in no way considered typically femi-

Conclusion 235

nine in this culture" (419). There is in fact nothing natural about the

performance of gender in a given culture: "Gender is representation.

Not by chance we speak of gender roles. Whatever the biological

imperatives may be, masculinity and femininity are social masks and

sexual encounters are social stage productions" (755).

In Leeres Viertel and subsequent publications, Roes is particularly

interested in the social status of homosexuality in various cultural

contexts.'7 As one of his colleagues reminds the modern narrator

shortly after his arrival in Yemen, the East has long attracted gay

European men with the promise of readily available sexual encoun-

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

scholarly knowledge" (128). In fact, the narrator is warned, homo-

sexuality is punishable by death in Yemen. While hardly the "pro-

jected paradise of countless homosexual travelers to the Orient"

(128), Yemen does offer the narrator a few furtive homosexual

encounters and more lasting relationships with at least two young

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

superiority of homosexuality over heterosexuality: "thus 'heterosex-

uality' essentially describes a relationship between unequals . . . that

is, a relationship based on force/violence, whereas 'homosexuality' is

a relationship between equals, who must and can define their roles

anew in every encounter" (302). As the quotation marks indicate,

however, the narrator finds the clear-cut distinction between hetero-

and homosexuality an oversimplification: "Sexuality is a multilayered

and contradictory phenomenon in every society. To want to describe it in terms

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

gay; it is a European exploration of the performance of masculinity in

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

tradition of the Bildungsroman, including both narrators' interest in

the theater and the desire on the part of both to learn and experience

as much as possible, including friendship and love.'9 Schnittke's ties

to classical Weimar also suggest links to Goethe and the concept of

236 German Orientalisms

Bildung. Finally, both narrators-like Gahmuret, Simplicissimus,

Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Anton Wohlfart, and Adrian Lever-

kiihn- make a journey to the East. There is a crucial difference,

however: neither Schnittke nor the modern narrator returns.

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

Sinai. The purpose of their journey, in other words, is to rediscover

the Eastern source of Western culture in a mission that recalls Parzi-

val's quest for the Holy Grail: "For if we find the tablets, then the

universality of the divine commandments cannot be denied by even

the most enlightened individual or the one most hostile to tradition"

(554). Unfortunately, Schnittke's companion, who had hoped to

return to his people "like a second Moses" (559), is bitten by a scor-

pion and dies. Schnittke alone remains to continue the search, but

when he is finally taken into a darkened room in a mysterious tem-

ple to view what he hopes may be the Ark of the Covenant, he is dis-

appointed: there is no clap of thunder, no flash of lightning. He opens

the chest, pulls out a stone tablet, and examines it closely in the

moonlight, but to no avail: "The tablets are blank" (772).

Schnittke's fragmentary text ends at this point, cut off both from

his distant homeland in Germany and from the promise of divine rev-

elation in the Orient. The modern narrator makes an unsuccessful

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

proverbial philistine who ends his Bildungsroman at home with a wife

and a job and a couple of children on the way, the modern narrator

finds himself a prisoner in a remote village on the edge of the Arabian

desert, wasted by dysentery and malaria, and filled with a paralyzing

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

word of honor to remain in the village. He had begun his journey as

a Western anthropologist who set out to produce an objective record

of the foreign culture, but his position has gradually shifted with his

increasing self-consciousness about his role as a scientist and partial

Conclusion 237

integration into Yemeni society. As he writes near the end of the

novel, he finally realized that he had chosen games as the topic of his

research not because of a desire to develop a new theory of the game,

"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).

The modern narrator travels to the East, in other words, to recap-

ture the lost innocence of childhood, a Romantic quest that parallels

Schnittke's search for the lost origins of Western culture. As in

Schnittke's case, however, the outcome of the modern narrator's

journey is profoundly ambivalent: in the final scene of the novel he

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

'effeminate' in other cultures" (801-2). He loses himself in the dance

and experiences an instant of ecstasy, but then suddenly becomes

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).

Roes's Leeres Viertel offers us an appropriately inclusive conclusion

to the ongoing story of German Orientalism, for, as recent political

events have made clear, the history of relations between East and

West has by no means come to an end, and Germany's place between

the two worlds remains a matter of debate. Perhaps in the next

decade we will see a new hardening of positions between inflexible

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

either case, literary reflections on Germany's symbolic geography

seem certain to continue for at least some time to come-to borrow

the title of Grass's Nobel Prize address, "To be continued .."

CODA: LITERATURE IN AN AGE OF

CULTURAL STUDIES

In what has quickly become something of a contemporary classic, the

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

a transnational era.20 An empty concept of "excellence" based on a

corporate model of productivity has replaced the university's former

role as the agent of Bildung to produce well-rounded subjects to

become citizens of the nation-state. Today, as departments are being

downsized and language teaching outsourced to part-timers who

often work without benefits, administrators legitimate their universi-

ties in quantifiable terms: the number of faculty publications, rank-

ings in national surveys, instructor approval ratings on course evalua-

tions, and-above all-in terms of enrollment. Immanuel Kant once

summed up the Prussian king's attitude toward the distinction

between academic and political freedom as follows: "think as much as

you want and about whatever you want, but obey!"2 Bill Readings might

have updated Kant's remarks for the modern university administrator

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

take the class."22

In welcome contrast to conservative pundits writing during the

199os culture wars, Readings does not dwell gloomily on the decline

and fall of Western civilization in an era when students have forgot-

ten how to read and politically correct professors have hardened their

hearts to the pleasure of the literary text. Instead, Readings views

changes in the university as part of the broader move toward global-

ization in the postnational era. His admittedly catchy title is some-

what misleading in that it suggests that the university that has fallen

into ruin needs to be rebuilt to its former glory. To be sure, Readings

seems to take malicious pleasure in ridiculing an institution that can

measure excellence in terms of eliminating faculty parking spaces.23

On a more serious level, however, he does not suggest that we return

to the good old days of a unified nineteenth-century national culture,

but that we learn how to "dwell in the ruins" of the modern univer-

sity. We can't go home again, as the saying goes, but even if we

could, we might find the old Heimat a little unheimlich.

Seen positively, the German theories of Bildung that emerged

around 18oo express a politically progressive humanism in which

education and ability replace the prerogatives of birth. Humboldt's

conception of the university continues to inform the philosophy of

Conclusion 239

liberal arts colleges in the United States today, although here too, no

doubt, the appeal to "excellence" has reared its ugly head. Yet the

universalizing gesture of German thought around 18oo has provoked

suspicion as well as acclaim. The idealized uniformity of the aesthetic

state looks suspiciously like the disciplinary regime that Foucault

describes in Discipline and Punish, a totality that can easily slide into

the totalitarian culture of the Third Reich. The "circuitous journey"

in which Romantics sought to regain lost innocence becomes a

prime example of Terry Eagleton's "ideology of the aesthetic," Paul

de Man's account of coercive pedagogy in Kleist's Marionettentheater,

and Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's elaboration of the "Nazi myth" as

a totalizing "ideology of the subject" that conflates art with politics and

is racist to the core.24 Not surprisingly, many postwar Germans found

Adorno's negative dialectics more compelling than yet another

appeal to das allgemein Menschliche, while more recent critics of glob-

alization's homogenizing tendencies have been willing to join hands

with Lyotard in his efforts to "wage a war on totality."'25 In practice,

of course, there was nothing universal about aesthetic education in

the nineteenth century, for access to the university was denied to all

women and the majority of young German men. German humanism

was thus ideological in the sense that it masked power under the

cloak of egalitarianism. Finally, narratives of individual subject-for-

mation could easily be extended to narratives of national identity and

universal history. Only educated men in Western Europe were said

to have the capacity for Bildung; women and Orientals remain close

to nature, but incapable of higher development. Hence, as Marc

Redfield observes, "the narrative of Bildung clearly has enormous

political utility and is in fact inseparable not just from the rhetoric of

class struggle and colonial administration in the nineteenth century,

but more generally from the very thought of history itself."26

In implicit response to these criticisms, the academic discipline of

Germanistik that took root in Humboldt's university for the Bildung 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

simplified binary oppositions between the two approaches to the

study of German literature: Germanistik works with close readings of

canonical texts; German Studies might work with the same texts, but

240 German Orientalisms

ask instead how and why they came to be considered canonical,

while other works did not.27 German Studies might also look at cul-

tural productions beyond the pale of traditional literary criticism such

as popular literature, film, national monuments, and festivals; address

questions of gender roles and sexual identity; and include formerly

silenced voices of women and minorities. The student of Germanistik

learns a discipline, symbolized most obviously by reading lists for

doctoral qualifying examinations, whereas German Studies prides

itself on being interdisciplinary in method and self-conscious about

the history of Germanistik as a discipline: when and why did German

literature begin to be taught at the university, and what cultural labor

did academic Germanistik perform for the German nation?28 Germa-

nistik has its origins in organic theories of the nation that can be traced

back through the Brothers Grimm to Herder, whereas German Stud-

ies is the product of a postnational, postcolonial era of global culture.

To give it a final twist, one might say that Germanistik was originally

a kind of German Studies: the famous Germanistenversammlung of

1846 included scholars of Germanic law, history, and language, as

well as literary historians. Their common goal was to get to know

"das deutsche Wesen" as it manifested itself in various cultural

forms.29 Again in 1933 Germanistik was redefined as Deutschkunde in

accordance with the racist ideology of Nazi Germany.30 The new

interdisciplinarity of German Studies tries to take the essence out of

Germanistik, to drain the blood from volkisch nationalism, and to

uproot Germanistik from its native soil.

There is thus a direct link between the structural transformation of

the university in the early twenty-first century and the transformation

of Germanistik into German Studies, a development that is part of a

larger move toward the globalization of literary studies. Contempo-

rary literature is often "more about nomads than natives," as Stephen

Greenblatt has put it, as traditional cultures have become increasingly

dislocated, deterritorialized, and diasporic. Hence he recommends the

study of multiple identities and impure ethnicities rather than stable

selves and organic communities.3' Contemporary German Studies has

similarly worked to decenter the discipline that Eberhard Limmert

once ruefully turned "eine deutsche Wissenschaft."32 Symptomatic of

this disciplinary shift are recent debates about the status of "Migrant

Conclusion 241

Literature" and so-called Auslandsgermanistik, that is, studies of Ger-

man literature conducted outside Germany's national borders.

In 1989 the New German Critique's special issue Minorities in German

Culture contained various articles about Turks, Poles, Jews, and Por-

tuguese living in the Federal Republic. While critics had begun to

acknowledge the existence of literature emerging from such groups,

it was not clear what it should be called: Ausldnderliteratur, Gastarbei-

terliteratur, Migrantenliteratur?33 As Leslie Adelson put it in a frequently

cited article (1990), the debate itself obscured a larger issue: "what is

at stake is not the appropriate category for the foreign 'addendum'

but the fundamental need to reconceptualize our understanding of an

identifiably German core of contemporary literature."34 There is

nothing natural about the process of canon-formation, in other

words. In fact, one of the central strategies of nineteenth-century lit-

erary historians was to discuss canonical works of German literature

as if they were products of German nature rather than the result of

cultural labor. For instance, August Koberstein begins his Grundrif der

Geschichte der deutschen National-Litteratur [Outline of the history of

German national literature] (1847) by distinguishing between books

that happen to be written in German and those works of the national

literature "which are artistic productions that bear a characteristically

German stamp in both their form and their inner essence."35 Migrant

literature unsettles such distinctions, both for contemporary literary

production and, by implication, the literature of the past.

Meanwhile, professors of German literature in the United States

were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with their dependence on

the Fatherland. A series of publications, including German Studies in

the United States (1976), Teaching German in America (1988), Germani-

stik in den USA (1989), and The Future of Germanistik in the USA

(1996), had begun to reflect on the status of the discipline in North

America.36 What emerged was a story familiar to students of Ameri-

can history: in the beginning, we were a colony. German missionar-

ies came to America around 1900oo convinced of their cultural superi-

ority and eager to shed "mehr Licht" on the dark continent of North

America.37 Two world wars tarnished the German reputation consid-

erably, but the rapid expansion of American universities in the 1950s

and 1960s, coupled with government support for foreign language

242 German Orientalisms

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-

manisten continued to orient themselves toward the homeland, pub-

lishing in German and in Germany.39 But the natives were growing

restless; in a development that recalls Benedict Anderson's discussion

of the nationalism that arose among Creole pioneers in Latin Amer-

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

mother country, American scholars of German literature began to feel

closer to their colleagues in other fields at home than to Germanisten

abroad.4° Finally, in 1995, Marc Weiner declared independence when

taking over as the editor for the German Quarterly. Pointing to the

influence of "culture studies, feminism, gay studies, and poststruc-

turalist theory" on American academics, Weiner proclaimed that we

should "no longer blur the lines between the kind of research and

teaching undertaken in this country and that found abroad, but to

acknowledge their configurations as different."4"1

Identifying institutional differences between the study of German

literature in Germany and the United States was an important first

step in the recent evolution of the discipline, but a first step only. To

many, the distinction between German Studies in the United States

and German Germanistik seemed overly simplistic at best, and evi-

dence of a new cultural arrogance at worst. The American scholars

seem either bold, innovative, and progressive in contrast to their staid

German counterparts or, to reverse the stereotype, superficial,

trendy, and politically correct. In the long run, reducing distinctions

between German and American scholars to a series of mutual carica-

tures serves little purpose, and Russell Berman has correctly warned

against a "new provincialism" among American scholars who remain

hostile to their counterparts in Germany, just as German academics

have a long history of looking down their noses at Auslandsgermani-

stik.42 From a more positive perspective, however, recognizing insti-

tutional diversity can lead to a productive cross-cultural exchange.

Some time ago Jeffrey Sammons called for the cultivation of a "dou-

ble optic" among scholars of German literature on both sides of the

Atlantic that would respect local contexts and yet inspire intellectual

discussion.43 In an analogous argument, Claire Kramsch has called

Conclusion 243

attention to the "privilege of the nonnative speaker" in foreign lan-

guage acquisition. The goal of language instruction should not be to

turn students into native speakers, she argues, not just because such a

goal would be unattainable, but because the goal itself is based on a

cultural myth: "the native speaker is in fact an imaginary construct

a canonically literate monolingual middle-class member of a largely

fictional national community."44 Within a particular national context

the language already consists of multiple layers and distinct individu-

als and groups; the nonnative speaker simply adds another voice to

the mix. Speaking a foreign language becomes an exercise in cultural

performance rather than a misguided attempt to assimilate to an ide-

alized norm. At stake in such arguments is the question of which

model of global culture will prevail in the age of empire: one that is

monolithic, monolingual, and focused exclusively on the present, or

one that acknowledges differences and encourages dialogue.

German Studies confronts a crisis in the form of a paradox: on the

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

been more endangered, as enrollments sag, tenure lines disappear,

and university presses become increasingly reluctant to publish books

in the humanities, let alone German literature.45 No sooner did

scholars in the United States declare at least partial independence

from German Germanistik than they began to worry about being col-

onized anew by imperialist English departments next door.46 Suppos-

edly innovative German scholars in America are accused of practicing

only derivative versions of the latest trend in Franco-American the-

ory, while the rise of English to the global language threatens to

reduce German departments to service units of an increasingly

monolingual university. Finally, the move toward interdisciplinarity

within German Studies and the increased range of cultural produc-

tions scrutinized has often driven literature into the background, at

best, or caused it to disappear entirely into a ubiquitous and undiffer-

entiated cultural discourse. As a result of these developments, Ger-

man professors in the United States often feel like puzzled shopkeep-

ers, convinced that their product is better than ever even as potential

customers disappear in droves.

244 German Orientalisms

In response to this sense of crisis, several prominent voices have

proclaimed that it is time to recenter the discipline and to reinstate

literature at its core.47 How might it be possible to return to literature

in an age of Cultural Studies? One might simply ignore the institu-

tional changes that have transformed the field and try to return to a

nostalgic image of the past, but this would be a reactionary gesture

doomed to failure.48 The more interesting alternative is to reread the

history of the national literature from today's decentered, diasporic,

postcolonial perspective. That is, the point is not to silence once

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

marginalized back then, but also to take a fresh look at canonical

authors and texts. We soon discover that many of the figures deemed

central to the German national literature were themselves products of

border zones and contested identities, and that they write about these

conflicts in their most famous works.

In the preceding chapters I have explored ways in which canoni-

cal German authors constructed a sense of common identity through

a symbolic geography that positioned the nation in various ways

between Europe and Asia, between the Occident and the Orient. In

doing so, I by no means intend to suggest that we should stop look-

ing at conflicted national, sexual, or ethnic identities in those writers

traditionally ignored by mainstream Germanistik, nor do I mean to

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

given national prominence at the expense of others who were

silenced. More often than not, however, the literary texts themselves

display a sense of humor and generosity that subverts attempts at ide-

ological abuse and invites renewed reading. We can begin to preserve

literature in an age of Cultural Studies by situating it in a variety of

geographical, historical, and institutional contexts, but the task will

remain incomplete unless we also appreciate the literary imagination.

For literature retains its ability to dodge dogmatism, to slip between

ideologies, and even to be in two places at the same time, as in the

triumphantly subversive conclusion to Wolfram's Parzival. In other

words, one of literature's most enduring locations is elsewhere.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

i. Hobsbawm, "Introduction"; Anderson, Imagined Communities.

2. Said, Orientalism, 2.

3. Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance.

4. Hence Sheehan begins his German History, 1770-1866 by pointing out

the "obvious . . . fact that 'Germany' did not exist" during this period (1).

5. The original German title of Fischer's study Germany's Aims in the

First World War was Grif nach der Weltmacht.

6. On the widespread interest in racial theory during the Enlighten-

ment see Poliakov, The Aryan Myth; and Eze, Race and the Enlightenment.

Bernal (Black Athena, 189-224), Zammito (Kant, Herder, and the Birth of

Anthropology, 221-53, 302-7), and Zantop (Colonial Fantasies, 66-80) focus

more closely on German writers.

7. Blumenbach, Uber die nathrlichen

Verschiedenheiten im Menschen-

geschlechte; Meiners, GrundriJ3 der Geschichte der Menschheit; Kant, "Von den

Verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen," "Bestimmung des Begriffs einer

Menschenrasse," in Werkausgabe, 11:11-30, 65-82.

8. For a more detailed discussion of Meiners, see Zantop, "The Beau-

tiful, the Ugly, and the German."

9. Meiners, GrundriJ3, 218-19.

Io. Iselin, Uber die Geschichte der Menschheit, 2: Io8.

i I. Foucault, The Order of Things, 220.

I2. Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations, 1:197.

I 3. Voltaire, Philosophy of History, 73.

I4. Iselin, Uber die Geschichte der Menschheit, 345; Blumenbach, Uber die

nathrlichen Verschiedenheiten, 213. Other proponents of the "out of Asia" the-

ory included Gatterer, Einleitung in die synchronistische Universalhistorie,

63-64; and Wiinsch, Unterhaltungen uber den Menschen, 386. Further sources

can be found in Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 183-99.

245

246 Notes to Pages 5-9

15. On Voltaire see Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 175-76; Blumenbach

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

Schlozer in the introduction to his Vorstellung seiner Universal-Historie. "How

did this smallest part of the world raise itself up so far above the others

through Enlightenment, customs, and power?" (2-3).

17. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7.

18. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 82.

19. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 7.

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-

ever, paying much attention to differences between individual European

nations. For an insightful critique of Orientalism as a monolithic discourse,

see Lowe, Critical Terrains.

21. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire, Ioo.

22. Hegel, Vorlesungen, 556.

23. Zantop in Colonial Fantasies explored just this sort of compensatory

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

also fueled the conviction that, eventually, Germans would establish a

kinder and gentler empire of their own.

24. Elias, The Civilizing Process, 3-28.

25. For a useful discussion of different types of nationalism, see Brinker-

Gabler and Smith, "Introduction."

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

orientalization were played out at home" ("Deep Orientalism?" 77). In fact,

the Germans did both.

28. Bernal, Black Athena, 62.

29. Said, Orientalism, 204.

30. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners.

31. Berman, "An Imagined Community." For a more nuanced history

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

understanding of the pressures that caused some Germans to become Nazi

perpetrators, see Browning's Ordinary Men.

33. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire.

Notes to Pages 9-16 247

34. Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 16.

35. I refer to the work of Hardt and Negri (Empire). They contend that

the era of imperialism emanating from individual nation-states has yielded

to a "new global form of sovereignty" in a period of transnational capitalism

that they call "Empire" (xii).

36. Buruma and Margalit, "Occidentalism."

37. Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation.

38. For example, Germany's ties to India-real and imagined--have

been the topic of extensive research. See Sedlar, India in the Mind of Ger-

many; Halbfass, India and Europe; and McGetchin, "The Sanskrit Reich."

McGetchin's work includes a large and up-to-date bibliography.

39. Links between gender, sexuality, nationalism, and imperialism have

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

colonial discourse (Moore-Gilbert offers a concise summary of these cri-

tiques with further references in Postcolonial Theory, 213-14 n. 6o). Useful

anthologies on the topic include Parker et al., Nationalisms and Sexualities;

and Herminghouse and Mueller, Gender and Germanness.

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,

86-o107; and Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 99-161.

42. Kontje, "Passing for German."

43. Theweleit, Male Fantasies.

44. Balke's "Orient und

orientalische Literaturen" gives a good

overview of Orientalist motifs in German literature from the Middle Ages

to the present--and also makes clear why any comprehensive survey of

Orientalism in German literature would be impossible. Spies offers an older

and shorter but readable survey of Der Orient in der deutschen Literatur. Other

studies of German Orientalism focus on individual authors or specific his-

torical periods. For instance, Tekinay focuses on the Middle Ages (Mate-

rialien), Amman on the Biedermeier period (Ostliche Spiegel), and Nina

Berman on modernity (Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne).

CHAPTER 1

i. Bartlett, The Making of Europe, 314.

2. I borrow this phrase from Bartlett, The Making of Europe, 269-91.

3. Bumke, Wolfram von Eschenbach, 156-59.

4. "Mit anderen Worten, nicht die keltisch-franzosische Gralsmythe

bildet den Mittelpunkt von Wolframs Epos, sondern das Zusammentreffen

von Orient und Okzident" (Goetz, "Der Orient der Kreuzziige," 6).

5. Tekinay, Materialien, 33. "Harun ar-Raschid und Karl der Grol3e,"

248 Notes to Pages 16-22

in Europa und der Orient 8oo- 9goo, ed. Hendrik Budde and Gereo Sievernich

(Giitersloh: Bertelsmann, 1989), 529-42.

6. Ereira and Jones's Crusades provides a lively and lavishly illustrated

introduction to the topic. For more detailed studies see Richard, The Cru-

sades; Riley-Smith, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades; Maalouf,

The Crusades through Arab Eyes; and Southern, Western Views of Islam.

7. Wentzlaff-Eggebert, Kreuzzugsdichtung, 7.

8. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages, 38-41.

9. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, 268-337.

Io. On the growing intolerance of Islam in the later Middle Ages see

Southern, Western Views of Islam; and Bartlett, The Making of Europe,

221-42.

II. Sayers, "Introduction."

12. Konrad der Pfaffe, Das Rolandslied, 394 (lines 9080-83).

13. Wentzlaff-Eggeberg, Kreuzzugsdichtung, 77-82.

14. Konrad der Pfaffe, Das Rolandslied, 8 (lines 85-86).

15. Scholars no longer accept the view of the German Romantics that

the five works generally classified as Spielmannsepen or Spielmannsdichtung

(Konig Rother, Herzog Ernst, St. Oswald, Orendel, and Salman und Morof)

were written by wandering minstrels. See Schroder, "Vorwort."

16. Kuhn, "Gestalten und Lebenskraifte."

17. See commentary to Das Ezzolied, in Frhhe deutsche Literatur, 1411-25.

18. Auerbach, "Figura," 52.

19. Das Ezzolied, 590 (section 28, lines 335-36).

20. Auerbach, "Figura," 59.

21. On Willehalm see Bumke, Wolfram von Eschenbach, 207-74; Wentz-

laff-Eggebert, Kreuzzugsdichtung, 247-77; Mustard and Passage, "Introduc-

tion"; and Classen, "Emergence of Tolerance."

22. Wolfram, Willehalm, 758 (section 450, lines 17-19); English transla-

tion, 253.

23. Bumke, Hofische Kultur, I125.

24. Bumke, Wolfram von Eschenbach, 51. On primogeniture in Parzival

see also Noltze, Gahmurets Orientfahrt, 217-28. Noltze's commentary is the

best introduction to the Gahmuret episode in Parzival; he also summarizes

earlier scholarship. On the idealized world of the courtly romance see Auer-

bach, Mimesis, 123-42.

25. Goetz, "Der Orient der Kreuzziige," II; also Noltze, Gahmurets Ori-

entfahrt, 70-71.

26. Noltze, Gahmurets Orientfahrt, 78-79.

27. Noltze, Gahmurets Orientfahrt, 95-97. See also Green, "Der Auszug

Gahmurets."

28. Tax, "Gahmuret zwischen Aneas und Parzival."

Notes to Pages 23-32 249

29. Wolfram, Parzival, volume 1.92 (section 51, line 24). I include page

references to the English translation of Parzival by Mustard and Passage par-

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

information readers should be able to locate page numbers in several differ-

ent modern editions. A cite that reads as follows: (31 [55.5]) is a cite to page

31 of Mustard and Passage's translation of section 55, line 5.

30. See comments by Noltze, Gahmurets Orientfahrt, 177 (to Parzival

49.14-15) and 195 (to 55-5).

31. See Noltze's commentary on the passages in Gahmurets Orientfahrt,

95-96, o108-9.

32. For a sensitive close reading of Gahmuret's dilemma see Pretzel,

"Gahmuret im Kampf der Pflichten."

33. Thus Green tells only half the story when he contends that Gah-

muret transcends his original material concerns to legitimate the knight's

profession as an ideal ("Der Auszug Gahmurets"). Gahmuret's furtive

departure from Zazamanc reveals the internal contradictions of that ideal.

On Gahmuret's guilt see Noltze, Gahmurets Orientfahrt, 192-214.

34. Ortmann argues that Gahmuret's adventures prefigure those of

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."

35. Bumke, Hofische Kultur, 178-83.

36. Bumke, Wolfram von Eschenbach, 164-67.

37. Schroder, "Kyot."

38. Kunitzsch, "Erneut," 88. Adolf argues that the Oriental sources for

the Grail, Prester John, and Feirefiz come from Abyssinia, not India ("New

Light"). Noltze inclines toward India as the location of Zazamanc and

Azagouc, which would provide continuity between the opening and con-

cluding books of Parzival (Gahmurets Orientfahrt, 87-89).

39. Bumke, Wolfram von Eschenbach, 121.

40. The Song of Roland, 191.

41. Orendel, 212 (lines 3168-69).

42. Bumke, "Parzival und Feirefiz," 244-45.

43. As Bumke puts it, "Parzival hat sozusagen einen doppelten Schlul3:

das Harmonieprogramm fur diejenigen, die nach einer gliicklichen Lbsung

verlangten; und der irritierende Perspektivenwechsel fur. . . die von Wol-

fram gewiinschten Zuhbrer" ("Parzival und Feirefiz," 236-37).

44. On the unresolved contradictions of this passage see Bumke, "Parzi-

val und Feirefiz," 240. Groos also offers an excellent summary of the incon-

sistencies created by Trevrizent's "retraction" (Romancing the Grail, 220-41).

45. The Song of Roland, 203.

250 Notes to Pages 32-39

46. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, I128.

47. Anderson (Imagined Communities), Gellner (Nations and Nationalism),

and Hobsbawm (Nations and Nationalism since 1780) all date modern nation-

alism to the revolutionary movements at the end of the eighteenth century.

A sense of collective identity and patriotic pride emerged much sooner,

however. For a sweeping look at the emergence of nations see Armstrong,

Nations before Nationalism; for the beginnings of German patriotism see

Fischer, Das Eigene und das Eigentliche.

48. Das Annolied, 602; commentary to this passage on 1432-33.

49. Quinn, "New Geographical Horizons," 637.

50. Quinn, "New Geographical Horizons," 629.

51i. Johnson, "New Geographical Horizons."

52. Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 18-30. On direct German participation in

exploration and conquest see Jantz, "Images of America in the German

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

Hirsch, "Printed Reports."

54. Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, 282.

55. Johnson, "New Geographical Horizons," 619.

56. Hultsch, Der Orient in der deutschen Barockliteratur, 17.

57. Daniel, Islam, Europe, and Empire, 6.

58. For an entertaining account of the German preoccupation with Tac-

itus from Humanism to Hitler, see Schama, Landscape and Memory, 75-134.

59. See Leonard Forster's introduction in Celtis, Selections.

6o. Celtis, Selections, 43. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

61. Forster, commentary in Celtis, Selections, 10o1.

62. For a useful overview in English of Hutten's life see Bernstein, Ger-

man Humanism, 116-28. See also Kurze, "Biographisches Nachwort."

63. Hutten, "Gespraichsbuchlein: Hermann," in Auserlesene Werke,

3:462-63.

64. Hutten, "Vermahnung," in Auserlesene Werke, 3:265. Hereafter cited

parenthetically in the text.

65. Luther, "An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation" (1520) in Aus-

gewdhlte Schriften, 1:189.

66. Luther, "Vermahnung zum Gebet wider den Tiirken" (1 541) in Aus-

gewdhlte Schriften, 4:278.

67. Luther, "Eine Heerpredigt wider den Tiirken," 173.

68. Luther, "Eine Heerpredigt wider den Tiirken," 173.

69. Luther, "Vom Kriege wider die Tiirken," 142.

70. Luther, "Vermahnung zum Gebet wider den Tiirken" (1 541) in Aus-

gewdhlte Schriften, 4:289.

Notes to Pages 40-47 251

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

or courtly novel goes by various names in German, including "der Heroische

Roman, der Heroisch-Galante Roman, der Hofische Roman, and also der Staats-

roman" (Alewyn, 22).

73. Commentary in Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus, 796.

74. On the reception history of Grimmelshausen's work see Meid,

Grimmelshausen, 196-244. Gerhard offers a still-useful look at the novel in

relation to Parzival and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (Der deutsche Entwick-

lungsroman, 61-86).

75. Alewyn, "Der Roman

des Barock," 31I; Heselhaus, "Grim-

melshausen," esp. 27-3 I; Meid, Grimmelshausen, 137-39.

76. Bergstedt, Reichsidee, 2. Good introductions to Lohenstein's life and

work include Just, "Leben und Werk," in Lohenstein, Turkische Trauerspiele,

xi-xxxvi; Gillespie, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein's Historical Tragedies;

Spellerberg, "Daniel Casper von Lohenstein"; Asmuth, Daniel Casper von

Lohenstein; and Newman, The Intervention of Philology.

77. Alewyn, "Der Roman des Barock," 25.

78. Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus, 17.

79. Keller, Der grune Heinrich, in Sdmtliche Werke, 3:3 I 3.

80. Bumke, Hofische Kultur, 430.

81. On the tension between "Ekel an der Welt" and "Interesse an

Empirie" in Simplicissimus, see Geulen, "Wirklichkeitsbegriff," 35.

82. Fischer, Das Eigene und das Eigentliche, 89-91.

83. Meid, Grimmelshausen, 239.

84. On the widespread interest in the Orient during the seventeenth

century see Hultsch, Der Orient in der deutschen Barockliteratur.

85. Asmuth, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, 65-74.

86. On changing paradigms of historiography in the seventeenth century

see Vosskamp, Untersuchungen zur Zeit- und Geschichtsauffassung, and Szarota,

Lohensteins Arminius als Zeitroman, 159-74.

87. Ranum, "Editor's Introduction," in Bossuet, Discourse on Universal

History.

88. Vosskamp, Untersuchungen zur Zeit- und Geschichtsauffassung, 35.

89. Just, "Lohenstein und die Tiirkische Welt," in Lohenstein, Thrkische

Trauerspiele, xxxvii-xlvii.

90. Gillespie, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein's Historical Tragedies, 29-38.

Spellerberg, "Daniel Casper von Lohenstein," 653-55.

91. Gryphius, Catharina von Georgien, in Dramen, 203 (act 4, line 427).

92. Lohenstein, Thrkische Trauerspiele, 16.

252 Notes to Pages 47-56

93. Lohenstein, Thrkische Trauerspiele, 78.

94. Asmuth, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, 40; Spellerberg, "Daniel

Casper von Lohenstein," 647, 674-76.

95. Lohenstein, Thrkische Trauerspiele, ii I.

96. Lohenstein, Thrkische Trauerspiele, 120.

97. Newman, "Disorientations," 349. In her discussion of same-sex

desire in Lohenstein's play, Newman argues that women take an unusually

active role. Ibrahim Sultan, in her view, is more about political response to

tyranny, wherever it may occur, than about anti-Turkish propaganda. Cer-

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-

whelming assault on an extreme example of Oriental decadence and despo-

tism.

98. Spellerberg, "Daniel Casper von Lohenstein," 649.

99. Szarota, Lohenstein's Arminius als Zeitroman, 15; Spellerberg, "Daniel

Casper von Lohenstein," 678; Bergstedt, Reichsidee und Liebesethik, 164.

ioo. Szarota, Lohensteins Arminius, 174-204.

1ol. Szarota argues that Lohenstein glorifies Leopold and the Holy

Roman Empire, although in a way that downplays religion and implicitly

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 autonomy for Silesia (Reichsidee und Liebesethik). Newman gives a

particularly nuanced account of the intricacies of dynastic politics in seven-

teenth-century central Europe and shows how Lohenstein balances civic,

regional, and imperial loyalties within his dramas (The Intervention of Philol-

ogy) .

102. Szarota, Lohensteins Arminius, 91.

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.

104. On the relationship between gender roles and revolutionary politics

see Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, and Hunt, The Family Romance of

the French Revolution.

105. Kontje, "Passing for German."

o106. Szarota offers a detailed overview of both ancient Armenian politics

and the intricacies of Lohenstein's plot (Lohensteins Arminius als Zeitroman,

175-84).

107. See Newman's discussion of race in Cleopatra (1680). With refer-

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

sentation of Rome's 'Other' [Africa] as an equal opponent" (The Intervention

of Philology, 152).

io8. Marcus provides a useful overview of the contrasting approaches

implied by the two terms in the title of "Renaissance/Early Modern Stud-

ies." Her work appears, appropriately enough, in a volume called Redrawing

the Boundaries.

109. See her discussion of Agrippina in The Intervention of Philology,

101-27.

I o. On Parzival's lack of psychological depth see Gerhard, Der deutsche

Entwicklungsroman, 41-45.

CHAPTER 2

i. Balke, "Orient und orientalische Literaturen," 837. See also Pape,

"Turquerie im 18. Jahrhundert"; Syndram, "Der erfundene Orient in der

europaiischen Literatur"; and Wilson, Humanitdt und Kreuzzugsideologie um

178o0.

2. Anger, Literarisches Rokoko.

3. The novel was reprinted in 1966 with an informative "Nachwort"

by Pfeiffer-Belli.

4. For example, see Bredeck, "August Bohse."

5. Other examples of Wieland's epic verse with Oriental motifs

include "Schach Lolo" (1778), "Ham und Gulpenheh" (1778), and "Clelia

und Sinnibald" (1783).

6. As Anger argued in his important monograph, "the German

Rococo forms a first and decisive step toward German Classicism" (Liter-

arisches Rokoko, 39). Wieland's influence on Goethe extends from Goethe's

earliest Anacreontic poetry to the West-Ostlicher Divan. Although Tieck and

the Schlegels were sharply critical of Wieland, his work nevertheless exerted

considerable influence on German Romanticism as well (Anger, Literarisches

Rokoko, 42-45).

7. Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, in Sdimtliche Werke, 14:281, 537.

8. Samuel, "Einleitung: Dichterische Jugendarbeiten," in Novalis,

Schriften, 1:441. See also Anger, Literarisches Rokoko, 42-46.

9. Uerlings, Friedrich von Hardenberg; Jorgensen et al., Wieland,

185-207; Sahmland, Christoph Martin Wieland, 6.

io. Samuel, "Einleitung," in Schriften, I:446; O'Brien, Novalis, 30-36.

I 1. Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance; see also Said, Orientalism.

12. Studies of German Romantic Orientalism include Willson, A

Mythical Image; G&rard, L'Orient et la Pensee Romantique Allemande; and

Behler, "Das Indienbild der deutschen Romantik." The best intellectual

254 Notes to Pages 64-70

history of relations between Indian and European (primarily German)

thought is Halbfass, India and Europe. McGetchin details the growth of

Indology as an academic discipline at the German university during the

nineteenth century ("The Sanskrit Reich").

13. On Herder's place in the "querelle des anciens et des moderns" see

Jaul3, Literaturgeschichte als Provokation, 72-75.

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

the Lamp provides a still-useful survey of the emergence of Romanticism, in

which Herder played an important role.

15. On the emerging concept of Bildung in the eighteenth century see

Stahl, "Die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsromans," as well as further

references in Kontje, The German Bildungsroman.

16. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 188.

17. Herder, Journal meiner Reise, in his Werke, 9.2:30. Zammito provides

an indispensable guide to Herder's earliest years in terms of his close rela-

tions with Kant and in the broader context of the emerging disciplinary

divide between philosophy and anthropology during the 176os in Germany

(Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology).

18. See the critical commentary to Von deutscher Art und Kunst in his

Werke, 2:110 o9.

19. In distinction to the more common but imprecise terms middle class

or bourgeois, Sheehan introduces the term nonnoble elite to characterize the

growing group of university-educated German men who worked for the

expanding state bureaucracies in late eighteenth-century Germany and from

whose ranks many of the major writers of the period emerged (German His-

tory, 132).

20. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 6.

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).

22. Herder, Werke, 2:550.

23. Herder, "Hutten," in Werke, 2:609.

24. See commentary in his Werke, 2:795-803.

25. Herder, Journal, in his Werke, 9.2:10o2.

26. Wieland, "Der Eifer, unsrer Dichtkunst einen National-Charakter

zu geben," in Werke, 3:268.

27. On the historical context of Wieland's anti-bardic polemics see the

commentary to his Werke, 3:837-42.

Notes to Pages 70-82 255

28. "But who could read Shakespeare and not forget his flaws [when

considering] his beauty?" Wieland, "Der Geist Shakespears" (1773), in

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-

tinction between Wieland's appreciation of Shakespeare and that of the

"Stiirmer und Dringer" was not as absolute as the latter liked to believe

(Christoph Martin Wieland, 39-41).

29. On the difference between aristocratic performativity and bourgeois

authenticity see Burger, "Dasein heif3t eine Rolle spielen," and Habermas,

Structural Transformation, 5-14.

30. Herder revised and expanded the material in the 1769 essay into

"Alteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts" (1774).

3 I. Herder, Werke, 5:I6.

32. Herder, Werke, 6:I6.

33. The best-known theory of climatic determinism is in Montesquieu's

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

Menschheit, I1:62-68; and Wiinsch, Unterhaltungen uber den Menschen, 340-85.

34. Fischer places particular stress on the anticolonial aspect of Herder's

thought (Das Eigene und das Eigentliche, 184). I am less convinced that

Herder's thought remains devoid of Eurocentrism (Fischer, 185; see also

Berlin's enthusiastic portrait of Herder as a singularly tolerant cosmopolitan

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-

dictory" (Colonial Fantasies, 79).

3 5. Elon, The Pity of It All, 33-66.

36. Grossman, The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany, 38. For a brief

overview of the shift from "assimilationist" to "eliminationist" anti-Semi-

tism see Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, 49-79.

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.

38. "Historische Nachrichten fiber die wahre Beschaffenheit des

Sclaven-Handels" (1790). The articles in the Gottingisches historisches Maga-

zin were not individually signed, but the editors Christoph Meiners and

Ludwig Spittler write in the preface to the first edition that the magazine

contains only their own work (I [1787]: 2).

39. "Uber die Rechtmissigkeit des Negern-Handels." Given the persis-

tent racism of Meiner's GrundrifJ3 der Geschichte der Menschheit, I suspect that

he also authored this article from Gottingisches Historisches Magazin 2 (1788):

409.

40. Hausen, "Family and Role-Division." On the transformation of

256 Notes to Pages 82-88

eighteenth-century family life see Schwab, "Familie"; Stone, The Family,

Sex, and Marriage; Weber-Kellermann, Die deutsche Familie. Laqueur argues

that the eighteenth-century scientific efforts to distinguish biological differ-

ences between the sexes were often influenced by social conventions about

seemingly natural gender roles (Making Sex).

41. On the shift from Herrschaft to Verwaltung in eighteenth-century

Germany see Sheehan, German History, 24-41.

42. For an introduction to Novalis's life and works see Kluckhohn,

"Friedrich von Hardenbergs Entwicklung und Dichtung"; Schulz, Novalis;

and Uerlings, Friedrich von Hardenberg. O'Brien has written the best and

most thoroughly demystifying study of Hardenberg to date, Novalis: Signs

of Revolution. On the nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception of

Novalis see Uerlings, Friedrich von Hardenberg, 15-o104; and Mahoney, The

Critical Fortunes of a Romantic Novel.

43. Quoted from Novalis, Schriften, 2:426. Subsequent references to this

edition are included with volume and page number parenthetically in the

text.

44. Schulz, Novalis, 19.

45. I borrow this phrase from Applegate, A Nation of Provincials.

46. Quoted from Schulz, Novalis, 25.

47. Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 17. Kant was another such individual

from an earlier generation: "travel literature allowed Kant to project a cos-

mopolitanism, to imagine safely from his provincial study a tumultuous

world of difference" (Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology,

57).

48. See O'Brien on "the profound influence of Fichte's Science of

Knowledge upon the Romantics' global aspirations" (Novalis, 145).

49. Brinkmann, "Friihromantik und Franzosische Revolution."

50. On French revolutionary polemics against Marie Antoinette as a

"bad mother" see Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution,

89-123.

5 I. O'Brien, Novalis, 16 I.

52. Uerlings, Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1o.

53. Kurzke, Romantik und Konservatismus, 237. On the controversy sur-

rounding the initial decision not to publish Europa, see O'Brien, Novalis,

227-30.

54. Kurzke, Romantik und Konservatismus, 256. "Romanticism and con-

servatism: for most modern scholars, that is considered a hopelessly outdat-

ed topic" (9).

55. O'Brien has been most vigorous in opposition to the familiar image

of Novalis as a Christian poet (Novalis, 216-71). Malsch noted earlier that

Hardenberg's Christianity is hardly orthodox ("Europa," 169).

Notes to Pages 90-100 257

56. A. W. Schlegel, Geschichte der romantischen Literatur, 20. In "Die alt-

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-

ination will not remain foreign to us much longer" (191, 189).

57. Miiller, Vorlesungen uber die deutsche Wissenschaft und Literatur, 57.

58. Both Kurzke (Romantik und Konservatismus, 12-14) and Uerlings

(Friedrich von Hardenberg, 32-35) place Miuller on the cusp of the subsequent

conservative Novalis interpretation, while stressing that his own work

remains closer to the earlier tradition of a revolutionary Early Romanticism.

59. "The talk about Novalis becoming Catholic is thus not as misguid-

ed as most modern research makes it seem," writes Kurzke; "whether or

not Novalis would have viewed the Catholic revival in late Romanticism

as a confirmation of his prophesy is something we cannot judge, but it is at

least possible" (Romantik und Konservatismus, 253). For an overview of

Miiller's life see Schroeder and Siebert, "Biographische Einftihrung."

6o. Novalis referred to Goethe with this phrase in

Vermischte

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"

(1812). See Friedrichsmeyer, "Romantic Nationalism," 57-60.

62. Quoted from Schulz, Novalis, 53.

63. For example, see Becker-Cantarino, "Priesterin und Licht-

bringerin."

64. Kittler, "The Mother's Mouth," in Discourse Networks, 25-69.

65. For a Lacanian psychoanalytic interpretation of Klingsohrs Mairchen

see Kittler, "Die Irrwege des Eros."

66. Heading toward home is not the same as arriving at home. Hence

Kuzniar cautions against reading Novalis as a secular prophet of the Golden

Age and stresses instead moments of nonclosure in his work (Delayed

Endings, 1-11, 72-132).

67. Kuzniar, "Hearing Women's Voices," 1198.

68. O'Brien, Novalis, 206.

69. Strohschneider-Kohrs, Die romantische Ironie, 250-73.

70. Kuzniar, "Hearing Women's Voices," 1202-3.

71. See further references in Kuzniar, "Hearing Women's Voices"; and

Friedrichsmeyer, The Androgyne in Early German Romanticism.

72. For an excellent discussion of early German patriotism see Sahmland,

Christoph Martin Wieland, esp. 78-123.

73. Wieland, "Uber Teutschen Patriotismus" (1793), Werke, 3:745.

258 Notes to Pages 100-108

74. Hardenberg's younger brother had referred to him as "Fritz the

flatterer." See O'Brien, Novalis, 30-36.

75. Sombart, Die deutschen Manner und ihre Feinde: Carl Schmitt-ein

deutsches Schicksal zwischen Mannerbund und Matriarchatsmythos, 267.

76. Napoleon had a bookseller named Palm executed because he pub-

lished a pamphlet titled Deutschland in seiner tiefen Erniederung (Pinson,

Modern Germany, 32).

77. Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation, 24.

78. The Order of Things, 297.

79. Humboldt, Politische Denkschriften, 10:139-40.

8o. Humboldt, Politische Denkschriften, 10:140.

81. For a detailed history of eighteenth-century university reform see

Weimar, Geschichte der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft.

82. Humboldt, Politische Denkschriften, 10:256.

83. Humboldt, Politische Denkschriften, 10:253.

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

Gelehrtenrepublik of the earlier eighteenth century (Discourse Networks, 3-4).

85. Schiller, Asthetische Erziehung, in Sdamtliche Werke, 5:570-669.

86. "Thus aesthetic, individual, and species formation all occur as an

interdependent system of homologies" (Redfield, Phantom Formations, 21).

87. Kontje, Private Lives in the Public Sphere, 51-78.

88. Goethe, Samtliche Werke, 9:884.

89. Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, 2:296-97.

90. Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, 2:320.

91. Strue-Oppenberg,

"Einleitung," clxxxviii-clxxxix. Strue-

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.

92. Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, 8:3o01. Hereafter cited parenthetically in

the text.

93. Depending on one's perspective, Schlegel's scholarly approach to

Indian linguistics either marks the end of the "mythic image" of India in

German Romantic poetry (Willson, A Mythical Image, 199) or the begin-

ning of academic Orientalism (Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance, 72).

94. See summary in Foucault, The Order of Things, 282-85; also Said,

Orientalism, 98-99; and Bernal, Black Athena, 230-33.

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

languages and cultures are more equal than others.

96. Schwab views Klaproth's switch from Indo-European to Indo-

Notes to Pages 108-12 259

Germanic as symptomatic of the "second phase of the Oriental

Renaissance" marked by an increasing German particularism against the

collaborative approach of the first phase (The Oriental Renaissance, 184-87).

97. Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, 6:177.

98. Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, 6:363.

99. McGetchin, "The Sanskrit Reich," 137.

ioo. See Riencourt, The Soul of India, 258-8I; Poliakov, The Aryan

Myth; and Bernal, Black Athena.

10o1. Pollock, "Deep Orientalism?" 90.

102. McGetchin, "The Sanskrit Reich," 298. McGetchin offers a wel-

come amount of detail that refutes the simplistic notion that all German

Indologists were racists and protofascists. Some were, to be sure, but others

were not (288-307).

103. McGetchin, "The Sanskrit Reich," 321.

104. On the simultaneous rise of German nationalism and anti-Semitism

during the Napoleonic Wars in Germany, see Elon, The Pity of It All,

99-Ioo.

105. Quoted from Schiwy, Eichendorff 291-92.

io6. Heine, Deutschland: Ein Wintermdrchen, in Historisch-kritische

Gesamtausgabe, 4:301.

107. Gorres, "Die teutschen Volksbiicher," in his Ausgewidhlte Werke,

I:I51.

io8. Kozielek, "Einleitung"; Liebertz-Griin, "Gotthold Ephraim

Lessing als Mediaivist"; Janota, "Zur Rezeption mittelalterlicher Literatur."

o109. Brackert, "Die 'Bildungsstufe der Nation.'"

Iio. On Klopstock's bardic poetry see Fischer, Das Eigene und das

Eigentliche, I 3 1-58.

III. Hunger, "Altdeutsche Studien als Sammeltaitigkeit"; "Die alt-

deutsche Literatur und das Verlangen nach Wissenschaft."

112. The Grimms' Altdeutsche Wiilder, for example, contains lengthy

articles on the German Heldenepos and the "Hildebrandslied."

113. Kleist's Die Hermannsschlacht (1808) reworks the story of Arminius

from Tacitus into a thinly veiled work of propaganda against the French.

See Angress [Kliiger], "Kleist's Treatment of Imperialism"; Fischer, Das

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

extended to many literary works of the period. Schirok, Parzivalrezeption im

MIittelalter, 173.

115. Bumke provides an appropriately cautious overview of what we

can piece together about Wolfram's career from textual evidence (Wolfram

von Eschenbach).

260 Notes to Pages 112-19

1 i6. Tieck, "Die altdeutschen Minnelieder," 194.

117. A. W. Schlegel, Geschichte der romantischen Literatur, I125.

II 8. F. Schlegel, Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur, in Kritische

Ausgabe, 6:2o01.

119. Kiihnel, "Wolfram von Eschenbach als literarische Figur."

120. On the development of German Medieval Studies in the nine-

teenth century see Kozielek, "Einleitung"; Janota, "Einleitung"; Seeba,

"Nationalbiicher"; Wyss, "Der doppelte Ursprung"; Hunger, "Altdeutsche

Studien als Sammeltaitigkeit" and "Die altdeutsche Literatur"; Fohrmann,

"Einleitung"; and Krohn, "Die Altgermanistik des 19. Jahrhunderts."

121. Janota, "Einleitung," 32-35; Wyss, "Der doppelte Ursprung,"

84-85.

122. Sparnaay, Karl Lachmann

als Germanist; see also Janota,

"Einleitung"; Krohn, "Die Altgermanistik des 19. Jahrhunderts."

I23. Spaarnay, Karl Lachmann als Germanist, 25.

124. See the anonymous introductory blurb to the first printed edition

of Lachmann, "Uber den Inhalt des Parzivals," 289-90.

125. On the significance of Lachmann's essay for Wolfram scholarship

see Gotz, Die Entwicklung des Wolframbildes, 27-3 I; and Spaarnay, Karl

Lachmann als Germanist, 108-14.

126. Mann, "Der Entwicklungsroman," in his Essays, 1:289.

127. Krohn, "Die Altgermanistik des 19. Jahrhunderts," 299, 308,

319-20.

I28. Hohendahl, Building a National Literature, 202.

I29. Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur, 5:734.

130. Vilmar, Vorlesungen, 164.

131. Schulze, "Stationen der Parzival-Rezeption," 557.

132. Weiner, Richard Wagner, 241-59.

133. Cucuel, Eingangsbhcher des Parzival, 59, 77.

134. Panzer, Gahmuret, 68.

135. Snelleman, Das Haus Anjou, 4.

136. Snelleman, Das Haus Anjou, 204.

137. Schulze, "Stationen der Parzival-Rezeption," 560-64.

138. Semper, "Der persische Anteil," 123.

139. All quotes are from Schulze, "Stationen der Parzival-Rezeption,"

563-64.

140. Fest, Hitler, 36-37.

141. I borrow this phrase from Hohendahl's Building a National

Literature.

142. On the sharp rise in antiforeign violence in Germany in the wake

of Reunification see Adelson, "Coordinates of Orientation," xiii-xv.

143. $enocak, Atlas des tropischen Deutschland, 70-71.

Notes to Pages 119-23 261

144. $enocak, War Hitler Araber? 39, 49.

145. For an interesting collection of interviews with much autobio-

graphical information see Schami, Damals dort und heute hier; on $enocak see

Adelson, "Coordinates of Orientation," esp. xxiv.

146. On the most obvious level, Goethe's Divan contrasts markedly with

the politically engaged poetry of the "Wars of Liberation." See Laimmert,

"Die vaterlaindische Lyrik und Goethes Westbstlicher Divan." Schulz pro-

vides a succinct overview of the Divan in historical context in Die deutsche

Literatur zwischen franzosischer Revolution und Restauration, 725-38.

147. Borne, cited from Mandelkow, Goethe im Urteil seiner Kritiker,

1:512. Repudiations of Goethe's politics and challenges to the assumption

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

Wilson's expose of Das Goethe-Tabu.

I48. Mann, Lotte in Weimar, I148.

149. Goethe, Sdmtliche Werke, vol. 3, bk. I, 148. Hereafter cited in the

text.

15o. Dichtung und Wahrheit, in Werke, 14:156. Goethe returned to the

Joseph theme much later in the story "Sankt Joseph der Zweite" (1807) that

he included in the beginning of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. Goethe

included fragments of his Belsazar drama in a letter to his sister from Leipzig

in December 1765 (Sdmtliche Werke, 4:658-61). He burned this early drama

in 1767 but included a prose summary of the plot in Wilhelm Meisters thea-

tralische Sendung. He substituted Hamlet for Belsazar in Wilhelm Meisters

Lehrjahre.

151. The best source on Goethe's lifelong interest in the Islamic world

is Mommsen, Goethe und die Arabische Welt.

152. For an insightful reading of the figure of Muhammad as a genius

wounded by the constraints of modern society, and hence a paradigmatic

modern subject, see Wellbery, The Specular Moment, 131-47, 156-57. Years

later Goethe returned to the theme of Muhammad, translating Voltaire's

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

nicht so bald in meinem Asyle."

154. Said, Orientalism, esp. 167-68.

155. Jean Paul expressed his enthusiasm for India most clearly in his

novel Hesperus (1795), which contains an idealized image of a Hindu sage.

262 Notes to Pages 123-33

See Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance, 204; Willson, A Mythical Image,

130-36. More recently, Tobin has argued that Jean Paul's novel Siebenkds

(1796) situates images of male homosexuality in a free-floating Orient

defined by its distance from Europe ("Jean Paul's Oriental Homo-

sexualities," in Warm Brothers, 44-64).

156. Goethe to Schiller, June 1o, 1795: "Here's a tragelaph of the first

instance" [Hierbei ein Tragelaph von der ersten Sorte]. Briefwechsel Schiller

Goethe, I:Iio. See Birus, "Der 'Orientale' Jean Paul."

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.

158. Mandelkow, Goethe in Deutschland, I:63-64.

159. Birus, "Der 'Orientale' Jean Paul," and also Schlaffer, "Gedichtete

Theorie."

16o. See Zagari, "Zu entschiedenerem Auffluge die Fittiche versuchen."

161. Commentary to Goethe's Sdmtliche Werke, 4:661.

162. On Goethe as a paradigmatically modern poet see Wellbery, The

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-

sism and being in love," presumably contrasting Suleika's focus on retain-

ing one's sense of self with Hatem's willingness to transform himself in

order to please his beloved, although he does not read the poem in detail.

As always, Freud tends to universalize his psychological categories, assum-

ing the dynamics of the Oedipal family as a timeless norm rather than the

product of a particular historical situation. I prefer to read Goethe's late

work as a particularly interesting blend of supposedly distinct historical

notions of the self. See Freud, Introductory Lectures, 520.

164. See Foucault, "What Is an Author?"

165. Goethe to Eckermann, January 18, 1827; in Samtliche Werke,

8:1062.

166. Commentary to Novelle, in Goethe, Sdmtliche Werke, 8:10o65-66.

167. Wanderjahre, in Sdmtliche Werke, 10:713.

168. Faust, line 6287; in Samtliche Werke, 7.1:257.

169. To Eckermann, January 3I, 1827; in Samtliche Werke, 39:224-25.

170. To A. F. K. Streckfluss, January 27, 1827; in Samtliche Werke,

37:443.

CHAPTER 3

i. Mann, "Pariser Rechenschaft," in Reden und Aufsatze, 1:470.

Notes to Pages 134-39 263

2. Kurzke, "Vorwort," 8. For a detailed study of the relations between

Mann and Baeumler see Bruntriger, Der Ironiker und der Ideologe. Bruntriger

wrote his work under Kurzke's supervision, and he shares his mentor's

opinion that Mann simply misunderstood Baeumler's introduction.

3. Bruntriger, Der Ironiker und der Ideologe, 450.

4. Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie, 197.

5. Gorres, Mythengeschichte der asiatischen Welt, I12.

6. Baeumler, "Einleitung," xxxi, cvii. The famous Winckelmann

phrase occurs in his "Gedanken iber die Nachahmung der griechischen

Werke," 20. Winckelmann makes his comment in the context of a discus-

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

surface of the Greek world seems based on a superficial reading of

Winckelmann. Goethe, for his part, was hardly blind to the "chthonic"

forces at work in Greek antiquity and elsewhere; he spent much of his

mature life struggling to keep those forces within himself in check-or at

least this is the way that Mann chose to portray him in Lotte in Weimar.

7. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht, 55.

8. Mann, Doktor Faustus, 88. English edition, 70.

9. Bachofen; cited from Baeumler, Der Mythus von Orient und Occident,

149.

1io. Baeumler, "Einleitung," ccxciv.

i i. Sombart, Die deutschen Manner, 32-33.

I2. Theweleit, Male Fantasies, and Sombart, Die deutschen Manner.

13. Izenberg, Modernism and Masculinity, 2.

14. Sheehan, German History, 763.

15. For an overview of the brief history of German colonialism, see

Friedrichsmeyer, Lennox, and Zantop, "Introduction."

16. According to Fritz Fischer's classic study, Germany's primary aim in

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

insists, Germany deliberately provoked the war and remained consistent in

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

Holborn, "Introduction to the American Edition"; Wehler, The German

Empire, 182-231I; and Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire,

370-72.

17. Fischer, Germany's Aims, 278.

18. On the German ambition to subordinate the Ukraine to German

interests, see Fischer, Germany's Aims, 534-45. On Lagarde and Langbehn,

264 Notes to Pages 139-44

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

Germany's territorial destiny" (Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, 220).

19. See Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire.

20. For an authoritative overview of the cultural politics of German

archaeology, see Marchand, Down from Olympus, esp. 188-227.

21. Wehler, The German Empire, 217. See also Fischer, Germany's Aims,

on the envisioned "Imperium Germanicum" (607-8).

22. Mann, Essays, I:193.

23. Betrachtungen, I14.

24. Essays, 1:202. As Izenberg puts it, "France was behaving disgusting-

ly like a woman" (Modernism and Masculinity, I45).

25. "Gedanken im Krieg," Essays, I:2o1.

26. "Der alte Fontane," Essays, I:148.

27. See Nietzsche's lectures "Uber die Zukunft unserer Bildungs-

Anstalten."

28. Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus, I123.

29. "Brief an die Zeitung 'Svenska Dagbladet,' Stockholm," in Essays,

I:269; again, "Gedanken zum Kriege," Essays, I:279. Heilbut accuses

Mann of further racism "twenty years later when he caricatured Franco's

Moorish troops. Only in America, where he became a nominal ally of Paul

Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois, did he speak out for the rights of black

people" (Thomas Mann, 280).

30. "Pariser Rechenschaft," 438.

3I. Heilbut, Thomas Mann, 576.

32. Mann, "Von deutscher Republik," Essays, 2:343.

33. On Mann's political development during the 1920S see Reed,

Thomas Mann, 275-316; Hamilton, The Brothers Mann; and Heilbut, Thomas

Mann, 355-98.

34. For detailed surveys of the German Novalis reception between

1890-1945 see Kurzke, Romantik und Konservatismus, 36-49; and Uerlings,

Friedrich von Hardenberg, 523-41.

35. As Uerlings points out, Mann's attempt to enlist Novalis for the lib-

eral cause in "Von deutscher Republik" was an anomaly in the conserva-

tive climate of the 1920S (528).

36. Mann, "Von deutscher Republik," in Essays, 2:147.

37. Mann, "Zur jiidischen Frage," in Essays, 2:93.

38. Mann, "Goethe und Tolstoi," in Essays, 2:83.

39. Mann, "Von deutscher Republik," in Essays, 2:14o; again 153.

40. "Zurjiidischen Frage," in Essays, 2:86. On Mann's complicated rela-

tionship to Judaism see Heilbut, Thomas Mann (individual references to

Notes to Pages 144-48 265

Mann and the "Jewish question" listed in his index, 628), and Kurzke,

Thomas Mann, I187-214.

41. Bliiher's glorification of homosexual strength contrasted with an ear-

lier discourse that equated homosexuality with effeminacy. On the distinc-

tion between the two discourses about homosexuality in the early twenti-

eth century, see Tobin, "Making Way for the Third Sex," and Izenberg,

Modernism and Masculinity, I o I.

42. Bliiher, Die Rolle der Erotik, 2:178.

43. Bliiher, Die Rolle der Erotik, 2:204. For a detailed explication of

Bliiher's antiliberal, anti-Semitic, and misogynist thought, see Hewitt,

Political Inversions, 79-129. Although Bliiher's thought anticipated elements

of fascist ideology, Hewitt distinguishes between his anti-Oedipal psycholo-

gy and popular racial theories of the state among fascists. Above all, Hewitt

argues against the widespread equation of fascism with homosexuality. As

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).

44. Heilbut, Thomas Mann, 371-83.

45. See, for instance, Corngold, "Mann as a Reader of Nietzsche," in

The Fate of the Self 129-59. Corngold argues that Mann's assessment of

Nietzsche undergoes no fundamental change, but that he merely--and

opportunistically--stresses different sides of a stable binary opposition at

various points in his career.

46. "Von deutscher Republik," Essays, 2:I66.

47. "Einfihrung in den 'Zauberberg,"'" in Reden und Aufsatze, 3:615-16.

48. Mann, Der Zauberberg, 9; English translation pages xi-xii. Hereafter

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

the English translation and to pages 218-19 of the original German.

49. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations,

263.

50. Miuller refers to Germany as "das gliickliche Mittelland" in his

Vorlesungen (18). See also Weigand, Thomas Mann's Novel "Der Zauberberg,"

96-139, esp. 104-7.

51. Mann's maternal grandfather was a Liibeck-born plantation owner

who had married a Brazilian of Portuguese-Creole descent. She was born

in Rio de Janeiro in 1851 and moved to Germany when she was seven

(Heilbut, Thomas Mann, 8).

52. "Tonio Kroger," in Schwere Stunde, 19.

53. "Der Wille zum Gliick," in Der Wille zum Gluck, 53.

54. Mann, Tod in Venedig, in Schwere Stunde, 191.

266 Notes to Pages 148-63

55. Mann, Tod in Venedig, in Schwere Stunde, 253.

56. On homoerotic elements in Der Tod in Venedi; see Tobin, "Why Is

Tadzio a Boy?"

57. "Einflihrung in den 'Zauberberg,"'" in Reden und Aufsatze, 6o6. On

the changing conceptions of the novel see Reed, Thomas Mann, esp.

225-46.

58. "What is the incidental yield of Hans Castorp's hermetic existence?

It is the development of genius!" (Weigand, Thomas Mann's Novel "Der

Zauberberg," 5).

59. "Der Film, die demokratische Macht," in Essays, 2:225.

6o. Goethe, Faust, lines 6275-76; in his Simtliche Werke, 3:193.

61. Lubich, "Thomas Manns Der Zauberberg."

62. Bohm, "Die homosexuellen Elemente," 147-49.

63. Weisinger, "Distant Oil Rigs," 185.

64. Mann, "Vom Beruf des deutschen Schriftstellers" (193 I) in Essays,

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

of Kaisersaschern in the sixth chapter of Dr. Faustus.

65. Weisinger, "Distant Oil Rigs," 186-88.

66. Weisinger, "Distant Oil Rigs," 189-93.

67. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 209.

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

to be read as a clear-cut allegory" (Reed, Thomas Mann, 254). Mann,

"Einflihrung in den 'Zauberberg,"'" 617.

69. Seidlin, "Doctor Faustus: The Hungarian Connection."

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

concentration camps are opened at the end of the war.

71. The article was subsequently republished together with several

responses in Gbrtz, Deutsche Literatur 1993, 255-69. All references are to this

edition.

72. Glotz, "Freunde, es wird ernst," 275.

73. Title cited from Deutsche Literatur 1993, 279.

74. "Anschwellender Bocksgesang," 261.

75. Kirchhoff defended Straul3 along these lines, claiming that his essay

had exposed weaknesses on the left: "Treffer tun eben weh" ("Die

Mandarine werden nervos," 277). Conservative critics of the "West

German PC-Society" accused the liberal mainstream of such extreme intol-

erance that they allegedly practiced a totalitarian "discourse Apartheid" that

Notes to Pages 163-76 267

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

Schneider, Die selbstbewuflte Nation.

76. Grass, "Writing after Auschwitz," in Two States-One Nation? 123.

77. In particular, see Bergfleth, "Erde und Heimat."

78. Bergfleth, "Erde und Heimat," 117, io6.

79. Zitelmann et al., Westbindung.

80. "Anschwellender Bocksgesang," 256.

8I. Brockmann, Literature and German Reunification, I 17. He surveys this

neoconservative trend in the fifth chapter (o109-36).

82. Greiner, "Der Rebell des Gesetzes."

83. Paare, Passanten, 171.

84. Paare, Passanten, 172.

85. Rumor, 33.

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

77 of the original German.

87. Herwig, "'RomantischerReflexionsRoman' oder erzahlerisches

Labyrinth?" 275; McGowan, "Botho StrauB," 255.

88. Federico, "German Identity and the Politics of Postmodernity,"

354-55.

89. On echoes of Romanticism

in Der junge Mann see Herwig,

"RomantischerReflexionsRoman"; Muller, "Transformationen roman-

tischer Inspirationsquellen"; and Willer, Botho Straufi, 77-90.

90. Liicke, Botho Straufi, 62-63.

91. Muller, "Transformationen romantischer Inspirationsquellen,"

197.

92. Federico, "German Identity and the Politics of Postmodernity."

93. Fetscher, "Wilhelm Meisters Wechseljahre," quoted in Liicke, Botho

Straufi, 163-64.

94. "Er habe im Grunde noch nie eine autobiographische Zeile ver-

fa3t," reports Hage. "Schreiben ist eine Seance," 208.

95. Herwig, "RomantischerReflexionsRoman," 276.

96. "Anschwellender Bocksgesang," 268.

97. "Anschwellender Bocksgesang," 259. "' Wiederanschlul3' (Is Botho

Straul3 aware of the historical context of this concept?)" wrote a flabber-

gasted Joachim Vogel in his response to the essay. (Vogel, "Tragodie eines

Einzelgaingers," 236-37.)

98. Hage, "Schreiben ist eine Seance," 214-15.

268 Notes to Pages 176-84

99. Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 7.

Too. Jameson, Postmodernism, 19.

101. See similar comments in Williams, "Botho Straul3 and the Land of

His Fathers," 294-95.

CHAPTER 4

I. Grass, Too Far Afield, 417; Ein weites Feld, 499. Cited henceforth

parenthetically in the text, with reference to the English translation fol-

lowed by the original German. For example, (554 [659]) is a reference to

page 554 of the English translation and to page 659 of the original German.

2. Schneider, The German Comedy, 42; Extreme Mittellage, 33. Both

versions cited hereafter in the text using the same conventions described in

note I of this chapter.

3. "Reise durch das deutsche Nationalgeftihl" is the title of the essay

that describes his trip to Poland in early 1990. In Extreme Mittellage, 33-53;

translated as "Sentimental Journey" in The German Comedy, 42-65.

4. This passage in the revised English translation of the essay is not

included in the original. On Kohl's seemingly deliberate vacillation on the

Polish-German border question, see also Fulbrook, The Divided Nation,

289.

5. Schneider, Eduard's Homecoming, 184; Eduards Heimkehr, 251.

6. Maier, The Unmasterable Past, 1.

7. Quoted in Maier, The Unmasterable Past, 30.

8. Habermas's responses to the Historians' Debate have been pub-

lished in his New Conservatism, 207-67. See also Holub, Jurgen Habermas,

162-89.

9. Maier, The Unmasterable Past, 19-23.

1o. Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang, 64-65.

II. On the history of the Teutonic Knights see Seward, The Monks of

War, 95-140; Christiansen, The Northern Crusades; Forey, "The Military

Orders, 1120-1312"; and Luttrell, "The Military Orders, 1312-1798."

I2. Seward, The Monks of War, 99.

I 3. Eichendorff, Die Wiederherstellung des Schlosses, in Werke, 5:710.

I4. Christiansen, The Northern Crusades, 78.

15. Christiansen, The Northern Crusades, 15 1.

16. See the excellent translation and critical edition of the anonymous

Livonian Rhymed Chronicle by Smith and Urban.

17. Bartlett, The Making of Europe, III, 113.

18. Bartlett, The Making of Europe, 10o6-96; Christiansen, The Northern

Crusades, 213-17.

19. Seward, The Monks of War, I1I8.

Notes to Pages 184-88 269

20. Christiansen, The Northern Crusades, 86.

21. Wippermann, Der Ordensstaat als Ideologie, 68-69.

22. Treitschke, Das deutsche Ordensland Preuflen, 17.

23. Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards, I1 . Burleigh provides a detailed,

highly readable, and utterly damning account of German Ostforschung in the

early twentieth century. On German Indologists and the Third Reich see

Pollock, "Deep Orientalism?"

24. Fischer and von Hindenburg, Bei Tannenberg 1914 und 1410, 4; see

also Evans, Tannenberg 1410o/1914.

25. Evans, Tannenberg 1410/1914, 4.

26. Hitler, Mein Kampf 140.

27. Ackermann, Heinrich Himmler als Ideologe, 195-231. On Himmler's

conception of the SS as a knightly order modeled after the Teutonic

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.

Hohne quotes Himmler's boast that the German conquest of Eastern

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

world against an irruption from Asia" (316).

28. See Herder, Ideen, in Werke, 6:696-99. For a detailed account of

German-Polish relations see Wippermann, Der Ordensstaat als Ideologie; and

Kozielek, Das Polenbild der Deutschen.

29. Wippermann, Der Ordensstaat als Ideologie, 130.

30. Delbriick, "Einleitung."

31. The most extensive collection of Polenlieder deutscher Dichter is

Leonhard's two-volume edition of 1911-17.

32. Leonhard, Polenlieder, 1:11 o.

33. Leonhard, Polenlieder, 1:79.

34. Eichendorff, commentary to "Auch ich war in Arcadien!" in Werke,

3:668.

35. Leonhard, Polenlieder, I1:32.

36. Leonhard, Polenlieder, 1:198.

37. Heine, "Ueber Polen," in Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, 6:63.

38. Heine, from the Friedrike cycle in his Neue Gedichte, in Historisch-kri-

tische Gesamtausgabe, 2:64-65.

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

people's enemies" (260).

40. Quoted from Laimmert, "Zur Wirkungsgeschichte Eichendorffs in

Deutschland," 204.

270 Notes to Pages 188-94

41. Limmert, "Zur Wirkungsgeschichte Eichendorffs in Deutschland,"

205.

42. Limmert, "Zur Wirkungsgeschichte Eichendorffs in Deutschland,"

205.

43. Schwarz, "Joseph von Eichendorff," 333.

44. For a nuanced reading of Eichendorffs portrayal of the French

Revolution in this novella see Koopmann, "Eichendorff, das Schlol3

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.

45. Schiwy, Eichendorff 667.

46. Friihwald, "Der Regierungsrat Joseph von Eichendorff."

47. Schiwy, Eichendorff 279.

48. On the idea that the sense of a collective German national identity

arose through, not against, provincial loyalties, see Applegate, A Nation of

Provincials, and Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor.

49. Quoted in Limmert, "Zur Wirkungsgeschichte Eichendorffs,"

218-19.

so. Schiwy, Eichendorff 268.

51i. Schiwy, Eichendorff 268.

52. Schiwy, Eichendorff 436.

53. The story was probably written in 1832 but not published until after

his death in 1866. See the commentary in Eichendorff, Werke, 3:661-64.

54. Eichendorff, Werke, 3:85.

55. Schiwy, Eichendorff 440.

56. On Goethe's failure to read Eichendorffs drama, see Friihwald,

"Der Regierungsrat," 259-60; on Eichendorffs belatedness, see Schiwy,

Eichendorff 1 8-25-

57. Wippermann, Der Ordensstaat als Ideologie, I146.

58. Eichendorff, Werke, 4:448. Hereafter cited with volume and page

number in the text.

59. Faber argues that Der letzte Held von Marienburg is not so much about

the Polish-German conflict as it is about the internal corruption of the

Teutonic Order ("Das Kreuz um des Kreuzes willen"). To claim that the

drama is therefore not anti-Polish seems questionable, given the consistent

negative stereotyping of the Poles in the text.

60. Schwarz, "Joseph von Eichendorff," 356. The reference is of course

to the closing lines of Goethe's Faust II: "Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns

hinan" [The eternal feminine / draws us on high].

61. Eichendorff, Werke, 6:291-308.

62. See Riemen, "Der Deutsche Orden in Eichendorffs Sicht."

Notes to Pages 194-203 271

63. Eichendorff, "Die Wiederherstellung des Schlosses," in Werke,

5:710.

64. "Die Folgen von der Aufhebung," in Werke, 5:466.

65. Adorno, "In Memory of Eichendorff," in Notes to Literature, I:60.

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,

"Freytag's Soil und Haben," 327-28.

68. Sammons, "The Evaluation of Freytag's Soil und Haben," 3 16.

69. Gustav Freytag und Heinrich von Treitschke im Briefwechsel, 193.

70. Freytag, Gesammelte Werke, 1:3. Hereafter cited with volume and

page number in the text.

71. Hegel, Vorlesungen hber die Asthetik, 216-17.

72. "Bildung degenerates into an uncritical adoption of bourgeois norms.

Its goal becomes integration into the social status quo with the least amount

of friction" (Jacobs and Krause, Der deutsche Bildungsroman, 153).

73. Bramsted, Aristocracy and the Middle-Classes in Germany, 109, 115,

132. Other studies of Soil und Haben include Carter, "Freytag's Soil und

Haben" (1968); Sammons, "The Evaluation of Freytag's Soil und Haben"

(1969); Kienzle, Der Erfolgsroman (1975), 5-53; Steinecke, "Gustav Freytag"

(1980); Berman, The Rise of the Modern German Novel (1986), 79-o104;

Holub, Reflections of Realism (1991), 176-86; Rindisbacher, "From National

Task to Individual Pursuit" (2002), 186-99.

74. Freytag, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, in Gesammelte Werke, 1:239,

251.

75. See, for example, Martini, Deutsche Literatur im bhrgerlichen Realismus:

"Dies war nicht eigentlich antisemitisch gemeint" (423). Both Sammons

("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-

traits of "Jewish hawkers, dealers, and first-generation immigrants"

("Freytag's 'Soll und Haben,'" 326).

76. See in particular Holub's withering attack on those who would

excuse Freytag's anti-Semitic caricatures (Reflections of Realism, 180). On the

lasting damage caused by such stereotypes in Freytag's immensely popular

and influential novel, see Bramsted, Aristocracy, 136; Mosse, Crisis of German

Ideology, 140, 163; Craig, Germany, 1866-1945, 84; and Steinecke, "Gustav

Freytag," 146.

77. Ammann, Ostliche Spiegel, documents the upsurge in interest in the

Orient in popular culture and literature in early-nineteenth-century

Germany.

78. Tatlock, "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country." In examining

272 Notes to Pages 205-15

the development of German national identity through rather than against

the provincial, Tatlock draws on the work of Applegate, A Nation of

Provincials, and Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor.

79. See Rindisbacher's interesting contrast between Freytag's image of

a nationalistic bourgeois world that strives for complacency and stability and

Marx and Engels's stress in The Communist Manifesto on the dynamism of

capitalism that renders national borders obsolete and occasions the rise of

the proletariat ("From National Task to Individual Pursuit," 186-99).

8o. Bramsted, Aristocracy and the Middle-Classes, 1 16.

8 I. Holub, Reflections of Realism, 174-86, 196; Rindisbacher, "From

National Task to Individual Pursuit," 186-99.

82. Kienzle, Der Efolgsroman, 8.

83. Kienzle, Der Efolgsroman, 8.

84. Belgum, Popularizing the Nation, 142-82.

85. On the role of the Heimat movement as a mediator between past

and present, see Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor. As he points out,

some of the local "traditions" supposedly preserved in the nineteenth cen-

tury were in fact "pure historical invention" (117).

86. Freytag, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, in Gesammelte Werke,

I:254-55. For further thoughts on Freytag's refusal to continue Die Ahnen

up to the historical present, see Tatlock, "In the Heart of the Heart of the

Country."

87. Kienzle, Der Efolgsroman, 33.

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).

89. Jiirgs, Burger Grass, 255.

90. "Welch ein barbarischer Kraftakt!" [What a barbaric feat of

strength!] (Grass, FhnfJahrzehnte, 112).

91. Brockmann, Literature and German Reunification, I1-2.

92. Rushdie, "Introduction," x.

93. Grass, "To Be Continued... ," 298; "Fortsetzung folgt... ," 307.

94. The Tin Drum, 389-90; Die Blechtrommel, 512.

95. Grass, Dog Years, 270; Hundejahre, 325.

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

Work of Gunter Grass, 181.

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

Feeling, Little Awareness" (1989), and "Equalizing the Burden" (1989) in

the collection Two States-One Nation? all of which criticize Helmut Kohl's

policies regarding Poland.

101. As the essays collected in Two States-One Nation? reveal, Grass

consistently opposed German Reunification since the 196os. As a left-of-

center Social Democrat, Grass opposed both Soviet-led Communism and,

more recently, the American-led move toward global capitalism. See for

example his critique of globalization in "Fortsetzung folgt ... ," 308 ("To

Be Continued... ," 299).

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-

types in Die Blechtrommel.

104. Grass, Ohne Stimme, 53.

105. Grass, Ohne Stimme, 27, 28.

1o6. "Grass nennt Unions-Verhalten unverantworlich," in Spiegel

Online, March 23, 2002.

o107. Grass, Crabwalk, 103; Im Krebsgang, 99. Subsequent references are

first to the English translation and then to the German original in the text.

io8. Preece, The Life and Work of Gunter Grass, 12.

109. Grass, MeinJahrhundert, 137; My Century, 96.

11o. On the debate surrounding Grass and other recent authors see

Hage, "Autoren unter Generalverdacht."

CONCLUSION

i. Grass, "Amerikanische Politik muss Gegenstand der Kritik bleiben."

2. Brooks, "Die biirgerliche Provokation."

3. $enocak, Atlas of a Tropical Germany, 35; Atlas des tropischen

Deutschland, 89.

4. $enocak, "Bastardisierte Sprache," in War Hitler Araber?, 32.

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.

6. Johnson, "Transnational Asthetik," 38.

7. Seyhan, "Lost in Translation," 419.

8. Seyhan, "Lost in Translation," 419, and Johnson, "Transnational

274 Notes to Pages 229-39

Asthetik," 38; Ghaussy, "Das Vaterland verlassen." Seyhan has included a

revised version of the earlier article in Writing outside the Nation, 141-50.

9. Seyhan, "Lost in Translation," 420.

10. Muller, "Ich war Midchen," 143.

I I. On the relation of Karawanserei to the Bildungsroman see both

Ghaussy and Johnson.

I2. Ozdamar, Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei, I196.

13. Ozdamar, Die Bricke vom Goldenen Horn, 14.

I4. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86.

15. Garber, Vested Interests, esp. 1-17.

16. Roes, Leeres Viertel, 284. Hereafter cited in the text. Roes employs

an antiquated orthography for Schnittke's portion of the text, while his

modern counterpart uses his own idiosyncratic style that avoids capitaliza-

tion of all nouns and replaces the German 13 with sz.

17. For instance, Roes's second novel, Der Coup der Berdache (1999)

explores the role of the "berdache" in Native American culture:

"Morphologically s/he is a man, but socially a non-man [Nicht-Mann],

which is not the same as a woman" (323). His fictional travelogue Haut des

Sidens (2000) comments at length on the homosexual relationship between

Queequeg and Ishmael in Melville's Moby Dick, while the futuristic novel

David Kanchelli (200oo1) portrays the relationship between a judge and his

condemned brother, who is portrayed both as a homosexual and a rebel

freedom fighter against an oppressive transnational empire in the year 2023.

18. On homosexual tourism in the Orient see Boone, "Vacation

Cruises." For an interesting discussion of masculinity in Leeres Viertel see

Tobin, "Postmoderne Minnlichkeit."

19. Tobin, "Postmoderne Minnlichkeit," 325-26.

20. Readings, The University in Ruins.

21. Kant, "Beantwortung der Frage," in Werkausgabe, 11:61. Italics in

original.

22. On the contemporary university's ability to tolerate controversial

courses that draw students, see Hohendahl, "The Fate of German Studies,"

86. Several years before Readings, Schmidt had critiqued the role of"excel-

lence" in American higher education ("Wissenschaft als Ware").

23. Readings, The University in Ruins, 24. Culler claims that he first sug-

gested to Readings the example of excellence in parking at Cornell

University ("Coping with Excellence," 5o-51).

24. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, "The Nazi Myth," 294. See also

Eagleton, The Ideology

of the Aesthetic and de Man, "Aesthetic

Formalization." Abrams describes the "circuitous journey" of Romantic

thought in his Natural Supernaturalism, 197-252. Redfield offers the best

Notes to Pages 239-43 275

account of aesthetic ideology in the Bildungsroman, and I am much indebt-

ed to his work (Phantom Formations, esp. 1-62).

25. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 82. On the contemporary

upsurge in increasingly local nationalisms directed against globalization, see

Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation, 188-89, 196-97.

26. Redfield, Phantom Formations, 5I.

27. Kacandes, "German Cultural Studies," 11-12.

28. Peck, "There's No Place Like Home?"

29. Meves, "Zur Namensgebung 'Germanist' "; Janota, "Einleitung,"

8-o10; Liitzeler, "Wir sind unsere krisenreiche Vergangenheit," 26.

30. Seeba, "Critique of Identity Formation," 144.

31. Greenblatt, "Racial Memory and Literary History," 59. Greenblatt's

article is one of several contributions to the special topic of "Globalizing

Literary Studies" in this issue of the PMLA.

32. Laimmert, "Germanistik-eine deutsche Wissenschaft."

33. Seyhan, "Introduction," 8.

34. Adelson, "Migrants' Literature or German Literature?" 218.

35. Koberstein, GrundrifJ3, i.

36. Lohnes and Nollendorfs, German Studies in the United States; Benseler

et al., Teaching German in America; Trommler, Germanistik in den USA;

McCarthy and Schneider, The Future of Germanistik.

37. Lange, "Thoughts in Season," II; Schmidt, "The Rhetoric of

Survival," 167.

38. Hohendahl, "The

Fate of German

Studies"; Trommler,

"Einleitung," esp. 30-31.

39. Lange, "The History of German Studies in America," 9; Sammons,

"Some Considerations on Our Invisibility"; McCarthy, "Double Optics."

On the widespread German disrespect for Auslandsgermanistik see

Trommler, "Einleitung," 19; Hohendahl, "The American-German

Divide," 23-24.

40. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 47-65.

41. Weiner, "From the Editor," vii. In a parallel move, Keel argued that

it was time for German-American Studies "to be more Americanized and

at the same time begin to be de-Germanized" ("German-American

Studies," 344).

42. Berman, "Our Predicament, Our Prospects," 2. On the debilitating

effect of mutual caricatures see Hohendahl, "The American-German

Divide," 20.

43. Sammons, "Germanistik im

Niemandsland," II8. See also

McCarthy, "Double Optics."

44. Kramsch, "The Privilege of the Nonnative Speaker," 363.

276 Notes to Pages 243-44

45. The president of the Modern Language Association, Stephen

Greenblatt, recently addressed the problem to the field of literary studies

posed by the fact that many academic presses have severely curtailed the

number of publications devoted to language and literature (letter to mem-

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?

46. Peck, "The British Are Coming!" 278.

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.

I (2000). See, for example, Berman, "Our Predicament, Our Prospects," 3;

Friedrichsmeyer, "Acknowledging

the Beautiful," 4; McCarthy,

"Centering the Discipline"; and Mews, "A Modest Proposal," 30. The

renewed appreciation of literature extends beyond the field of German

Studies. See the series of testimonials to the power of the literary text in the

cluster of responses to the question "Why Major in Literature-What Do

We Tell Our Students?" PMLA 117, no. 3 (May 2002): 487-521.

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

Lost or Bloom's wistful The Western Canon.

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Index

Abrams, M. H., 254n, 274n

Ackermann, Josef, 269n

Adelson, Leslie A., 241, 26on, 261n

Adolf, Helen, 249n

Adorno, Theodor W., 142, 161,

162, 196, 239

Aeschylus, Orestia, 137

Alewyn, Richard, 2511n

Alexander (the Great), 37

Ammann, Ludwig, 247n, 271n

Anderson, Benedict, 242, 245n,

25on, 275n

Androgyny, 13, 38, 50-54, 58-59,

98-99, 120, 132, 138, 152, 157,

159, 230, 234, 237. See also

Homosexuality

Anger, Alfred, 2531n

Angress [Kliiger], Ruth K., 259n

Annolied, Das, 27, 32

Anti-Semitism, 8-9, 12, 91,

o109-o10, II6, II8, 125, 143-45,

2o01-2, 209, 212, 221-23. See also

Holocaust; Jews, German

Applegate, Celia, 256n, 27on, 272n

Armstrong, John A., 250n

Arndt, Ernst Moritz, o101, 133, 158

Arnim, Achimvon, 11o, 1III, 190;

Des Knaben Wunderhorn, 188

Asmuth, Bernhard, 25 In, 252n

Auerbach, Erich, 248n

Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 133-38,

153, 154, 157, 163, 168; Das

MIutterrecht, 135

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 262n

Balke, Diethelm, 247n, 253

Bartlett, Robert, 15, 183

Baeumler, Alfred, 133-38, 154, 157

Becker-Cantarino, Barbara, 257n

Behler, Ernst, 253n

Belgum, Kirsten, 208

Benjamin, Walter, 147

Berman, Russell A., 9, 242, 246n,

271n, 272n, 276n

Bernal, Martin, 8, 77, 258n, 259n

Bernard of Clairvaux, 182

Bernstein, Eckhard, 25on

Bhabha, Homi K., 274n

Bildung, 7, 64, 69, 72-73, 76,

78-80, 84, 98, 114, 13,; and

national education, 101-5,

237-39

Bildungsroman [Entwicklungsroman],

41, 65, 95-96, o105, 113-15, 146,

167, 176, 198-99, 229, 235-36

Bin Laden, Osama, 226

305

306 Index

Birus, Henrik, 262n

Bismarck, Otto von, 3, Iio, 116,

139, 208, 229

Bloom, Harold, 276n

Bliiher, Hans, 13, 144-46, 157,

265n; Die Rolle der Erotik in der

Mdnnlichen Gesellschaft, 144

Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 5,

135; De generis humani varietate

nativa, 4

Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decameron,

166

Bodmer, Johann Jacob, II 1

Bohm, Karl Werner, 266n

Bohse-Talander, August, 61

Bill, Heinrich, 209

Boone, Joseph A., 274n

Bopp, Franz, lo8

Bbrner, Ludwig, 120

Bose, Subhas Chandra, 218

Bossuet, Jacques-B6nigne, Discours

sur l'histoire universelle, 46

Boucher, Francois, 61

Brackert, Helmut, 259n

Bramsted, Ernest K., 271n, 272n

Brecht, Bertolt, 230

Bredeck, Elizabeth, 253n

Breitinger, Johann Jakob, II 1

Brentano, Clemens, 110 , III; Des

Knaben Wunderhorn, 188

Brinker-Gabler, Gisela, 246n

Brinkmann, Richard, 256n

Brockmann, Stephen, 267n, 272n

Brooks, David, 273n

Browning, Christopher R., 246n

Bruck, Moeller van den, 264n

Bruntraiger, Hubert, 263n

Bumke, Joachim, 247n, 248n,

249n, 251n, 259n

Burger, Heinz Otto, 255n

Burleigh, Michael, 184

Burton, Sir Richard, 2

Buruma, Ian, 247n

Bush, George W., v, 225

Carter, T. E., 271n

Celtis, Conrad, 35-37, 43

Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 6

Chamberlain, Houston Stewart,

109

Chanson de geste, 20-21, 95

Charlemagne, 16, 46

Chateaubriand, Francois-Ren6,

Vicomte de, 2

Chr6tien de Troyes, Perceval, 16,

116-17

Christiansen, Eric, 268n, 269n

Classen, Albrecht, 248n

Clement V, Pope, 182

Cohen, Roger, 225

Columbus, Christopher, 33, 35

Confino, Alon, 27on, 272n

Cook, James, 84

Corngold, Stanley, 265n

Creuzer, Friedrich, Symbolik und

Mythologie der alten Volker,

134-35, 136

Cucuel, Ernst, 116

Culler, Jonathan, 274n

Cysarz, Herbert, 190

Index 307

Arkadien," 191; Aus dem Leben

eines Taugenichts, 188; "Die

deutsche Salon-Poesie der

Frauen," 193; Der letzte Held von

Marienburg, 191-94, 196; Das

Marmorbild, 192; Das Schlof

Durande, I189, 196; "Uber die

Folgen der Aufhebung der

Bischofe," 195; Viel Ldrmen um

Nichts, 189; "Die Wiederher-

stellung des Schlosses der

deutschen Ordensritter," 194-95

Elias, Norbert, 7

Ellis, John M., 276n

Elon, Amos, 246n, 255n, 259n

Enlightenment, 4, 51I, 69, 72, 76,

87-89, 110o, III, 140, 142, 147,

184

Ereira, Alan, 248n

Eugenius III, Pope, 182

Evans, Geoffrey, 269n

Exploration, 33-34, 42-43, 84,

129

Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, 245n

Ezzolied, Das, 19, 27

Faber, Martin, 27on

Faustbuch, Das, 42

Febvre, Lucien, 250n

Federico, Joseph, 267n

Fest, Joachim C., 26on

Fetscher, Caroline, 171

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 85, o105,

o107, o109; Reden an die deutsche

Nation, 0I o1-2

First World War, 134, 138-40,

146-47, 154, 229

Fischer, Bernd, 25on, 251n, 255n,

259n

Fischer, Fritz, 245n, 263n,

264n

Fohrmann, Jiirgen, 26on

Fontane, Theodor, 141, 177

Forey, Alan, 268n

Forster, Georg, 84; Reise um die

Welt, 3, 65; Sakontala, 63-64

Forster, Leonard, 25on

Foucault, Michel, 4, 101, 125,244,

258n, 262n; Discipline and Punish,

59, 239

Frederick II, king of Prussia (the

Great), 195

French Revolution, 51i, 63, 85-89,

99, o104, III, 130-3 I, 138,

142-44, 189, 196

Freud, Sigmund, 135,262n

Freytag, Gustav, II, 12, 196-209;

Die Ahnen, 199-200oo, 2o01, 203,

208; Die Brider vorm deutschen

Hause, 200oo; Erinnerungen aus

meinem Leben, 197-98; Soll und

Haben, 196-209, 236

Friedrichsmeyer, Sara, 257n, 263n,

276n

Friedrich Wilhelm, elector of Bran-

denburg, 49

Friedrich Wilhelm III, king of

Prussia, 86, 10o2

Friihwald, Wolfgang, 27on

Frye, Northrop, 32

308 Index

Gervinus, Georg Gottfried,

Geschichte der poetischen

National-Literatur der Deutschen,

114-15

Geulen, Hans, 251n

Ghaussy, Soheila, 274n

Gillespie, Gerald Ernest Paul, 251In

Girard, Ren6, 163

Globalization, 1O, II, 119, 142,

220, 238-40, 243

Glotz, Peter, 162

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 1o, 70,

84, 87, 91, 93, 110o, III, 114,

118-32, 144, 191, 193, 210o, 235,

263n; Belsazar, 122, 124, 261n;

Dichtung und Wahrheit, 62, 121,

125; Faust, 72, 104, 115, 124,

131, 146, 152; Goitter, Helden und

Wieland, 62; "Hegire," 122-23,

130; "Im Gegenwairtigen Ver-

gangnes," 126; "Mahomets

Gesang," 122; Noten und Abhand-

lungen, 119, 121, 123; Novelle,

119, 127-3 I; "Selige Sehnsucht,"

126; "Trilologie der Leiden-

schaft," 126; "Volk und Knecht

und Uberwinder," 125; Werther,

63, 66-67, 120, 124, 132;

West-ostlicher Divan, 118-27, 130,

132, 202, 233; Wilhelm Meisters

Lehrjahre, 41, 105, 125, 146, 167,

229; Wilhelm Meisters Wander-

jahre, 124, 130

Goetz, Hermann, 247n, 248n

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, 8-9,

255n

Gone with the Wind, 151

Gbrres, Joseph, III, 133, 136, 153,

157, 158, 190; MVlythengeschichte

der asiatischen Welt, 134-35

Goittingisches historisches Magazin, 77

Gottsched, Johann Christoph, I I I

Gbtz, Josef, 260n

Gouges, Olympe de, 5 I

Grass, Giinter, 1O, II, 12, 163,

209-24, 225-26, 229, 237; Die

Blechtrommel, 167, 209, 211-12,

223; Der Butt, 212; Ein weites

Feld, 177-80, 2o9-o10; Hunde-

jahre, 209, 212, 222; Im Krebs-

gang, 181, 221-24; Katz und

Maus, 209, 222; Kopfgeburten,

213, 218; Unkenrufe, 213-20;

Zunge zeigen, 213, 218, 219

Green, Dennis H., 248n, 249n

Greenblatt, Stephen, 240, 276n

Greiner, Ulrich, 267n

Grimm, Jacob, III, 113, 133, 240

Grimm, Wilhelm, II I, 240

Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob

Christoffel von, 1o, 46; Der

seltzame Springinsfeld, 44; Simpli-

cissimus, 40-45, 236

Groos, Arthur, 249n

Grossman, Jeffrey A., 76,255n

Gryphius, Andreas, 39-40, 190;

Catharina von Georgien, 47

Gulf War, 219-20, 227, 231I

Gulliver's Travels, 3

Index 309

Vorlesungen fiber die Philosophie der

Geschichte, 6

Heilbut, Anthony, 264n, 265n

Heine, Heinrich, 9, 87, 187-88;

Deutschland: Ein Wintermdrchen,

110o; Romanzero, 188; "Zwei

Ritter," 188

Heinrich von Veldecke, 22

Heraclitus, 72

Herder, Johann Gottfried, 9, lo,

52, 64-83, 85, 99, lo8, III, 121,

124, 146, 185, 199, 240; Auch

eine Philosophie der Geschichte,

71-72; Die ersten Urkunden des

Menschlichen Geschlechts, 70-71;

Ideen zur Philosophie der

Geschichte, 65-66, 72-83, 94;

Journal meiner Reise, 66, 69;

Von der Ahnlichkeit der mittlern

englischen und deutschen Dicht-

kunst, 68; Von deutscher Art und

Kunst, 66-67, 70

Herman of Thuringia, 21

Herminghouse, Patricia, 247n

Heroic (courtly) novel, 40-41

Herwig, Henriette, 267n

Herzog Ernst, 17

Heselhaus, Clemens, 25 in

Hesse, Hermann, Siddhartha, 14

Hewitt, Andrew, 265n

Hillgruber, Andreas, Zweierlei

Untergang, 18o-81

Himmler, Heinrich, 176, 185,269n

Hippel, Theodor von, 51

Hirsch, Rudolf, 250n

Historikerstreit, I 8o-8 1

History: as discontinuity, 147; as

exemplum, 46, 65; figural inter-

pretation of, 19-21, 27, 32; as

multilayered synchronicity, 176,

224; salvation history, 46, 64;

universal, 4-6, 46, 65, 71-80, 134

Hitler, Adolf, 8, 9, 12, 44, o110,

116-17, 134, 142, 165, 166, 174,

175, 18o, 181; Mein Kampf lo09,

185, 222-24

Hobsbawm, E. J., 245n, 25on

Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor

Amadeus, Der Sandmann, 95

Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, 260on,

274n, 275n

Hohne, Heinz, 269

Holborn, Hajo, 263n

Holocaust, 8, 75, 163, 165, 18o-81,

221. See also Anti-Semitism;

Jews, German

Holub, Robert C., 268n, 271n,

272n

Homer, 63, 71, 134

Homosexuality, 13, 140, 145-46,

155-61, 188,235. See also

Androgyny

Horkheimer, Max, 142

Hultsch, Paul, 250n, 25 In

Humanism, German, 33, 35-37, 39,

40, 158, 184

Humboldt, Wilhelm von, o102-5,

238-39

Hunger, Ulrich, 259n, 26on

310 Index

Janota, Johannes, 259n, 26on

Jantz, Harold, 250on

Jaul3, Hans Robert, 254n

Jews, German, 9, 15, 27, 75-76,

o109-o10, 143-45, 150, 158, 161,

21 . See also Anti-Semitism;

Holocaust

John Sobieski, king of Poland, 186

Johnson, Hildegard Binder, 25on

Johnson, Sheila, 273n, 274n

Jones, Sir William, 63

Jones, Terry, 248n

Joyce, James, 152

Jingere Titurel, Der, I13

Jiirgs, Michael, 272n

Jusdanis, Gregory, II, 275n

Just, Klaus Giinther, 251n

Kacandes, Irene, 275n

Kafka, Franz, 230

Kaiser, Nancy, 271n

Kant, Immanuel, 4, 83, 85, 238

Keel, William D., 275n

Keller, Gottfried, 9, 42, 167

Khomeini, Ayatollah, 210

Kienzle, Michael, 271n, 272n

Kirchhoff, Bodo, 266n

Kittler, Friedrich, A., 96, 257n,

258n

Klages, Ludwig, 163

Klaproth, Heinrich Julius, 107-8,

258-59n

Kleist, Heinrich von, 9, o101; Uber

das Marionettentheater, 239; Die

Verlobung in Santa Domingo, 13

Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb,

69-70, 91, 99, III

Klotz, Johannes, 267n

Kluckhohn, Paul, 256n

Koberstein, August, GrundrifJ3 der

Geschichte der deutschen

National-Litteratur, 241

Koch, Roland, 220

Kohl, Helmut, 178-79, 215

Konrad der Pfaffe, 18, 20, 21, 32

Kontje, Todd, 247n, 252n, 254n,

258n, 259n

Koopmann, Helmut, 27on

Korner, Theodor, 101

Kosch, Wilhelm, 188

Kosciusko, Thaddeus, 185

Kozielek, Gerard, 259n, 26on, 269n

Kramsch, Claire, 242-43

Krause, Markus, 292n

Krohn, Riidiger, 26on

Kuhn, Hugo, 248n, 249n

Kiihn, Sophie von, 63, 95

Kiihnel, Jiirgen, 26on

Kultur [culture], 7-8, 71, 89, o102,

112, 140-41. See also Zivilisation

Kunitzsch, Paul, 249n

Kurze, Dietrich, 250n

Kurzke, Hermann, 88, 256n, 257n,

263n, 264n, 265n

Kuzniar, Alice A., 97, 98,257n

Lachmann, Karl, 113-14

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 239

Lafayette, Madame de, La Princesse

de Cleves, 59

Lagarde, Paul de, 139

Index 311

Lennox, Sara, 263n

Lenz, Siegfried, Deutschstunde, 167

Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 227

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, III;

Literaturbriefe, 68-69; Nathan der

Weise, 75-76

Liebertz-Griin, Ursula, 259n

Livldindische Reimchronik, 182-83

Lohenstein, Daniel Casper von, 3,

9, o10, 82, 190; Arminius, 9, 13,

14, 40-41, 45-59, 65; Ibrahim

Bassa, 47; Ibrahim Sultan, 47-48,

56

Lohnes, Walter F. W., 295n

Louis XIV, king of France, 40

Lowe, Lisa, 246n

Lubich, Frederick A., 153

Liicke, Bairbel, 267n

Luise, queen of Prussia, 86-87

Lukics, Georg, 87

Luther, Martin, 3, 6, 38-39, 43, 46,

88, 199

Luttrell, Anthony, 268n

Liitzeler, Paul Michael, 275n

Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 239

Maalouf, Amin, 248n

Macpherson, James, 67

Mahoney, Dennis F., 256n

Maier, Charles S., 268n

Malsch, Wilfried, 256n

Mandelkow, Karl Robert, 261n,

262n

Mann, Heinrich, 143

Mann, Thomas, I, 10o, 12, 13, 132,

138, 140-61, i188, 2Io; Betrach-

tungen eines Unpolitischen, 140-43,

162; Buddenbrooks, 151; Doktor

Faustus, 136, 16o-61, 167, 236;

"Gedanken im Krieg," 140;

Joseph, I4; Lotte in Weimar, 120,

263n; "Pariser Rechenschaft,"

133-34, 136, 138, 142; Der Tod

in Venedig, 148-49, 160; Tonio

Kroger, 148; "Von deutscher

Republik," 142-46; "Der Wille

zum Gliick," I148; Der Zauber-

berg, 14, 138, 146-61, 167

Marchand, Suzanne L., 264n

Marcus, Leah S., 253n

Margalit, Avishai, 247n

Marie Antoinette, 87

Martin, Henri-Jean, 250on

Martini, Fritz, 271n

Marx, Karl, 188, 230

May, Karl, 233

McCarthy, John A., 255n, 275n,

276n

McClintock, Anne, 156

McGetchin, Douglas T., 247n,

254n, 259n

McGowan, Moray, 267n

Meid, Volker, 251n

Meiners, Christoph, 4, 135, 137,

255n

Meister Eckhart, 176

Mendelssohn, Moses, 75

Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix, 188

Metternich, Clemens, Prince von,

91

312 Index

Miiler, Adam, 13, 110, 120, 137,

138, 157, 265n; Vorlesungen fber

die deutsche Wissenschaft und Liter-

atur, 91-93, 98

Muiller, Christoph Heinrich, I I I

Muller, Heidy M., 267n

Muliler, Jan-Werner, 267n

Muliler, Max, lo9

Muller, Regula, 274n

Mustard, Helen M., 248n

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 239

Napoleon, emperor of France, 89,

101o, o102, 113, 122, 190, 199

Nationalism, German: and conser-

vatism, I0-II, 70, 87-88,

143-46, 162-67, 175-76, 190-91;

and cosmopolitanism, 62-63, 70,

90-93, 99-101, 107, 131,138,

145, 153,217; and critique of

imperialism, 65, 73-74, 79-80,

83, 89-93, 101o, 138; early mod-

ern, 32-39; eighteenth-century,

67-69; and gender roles, 81-83;

and hostility to France, 7-8, 65,

67-69, 71, 83, 99-100oo, 117-18,

121, 140-42; and hostility to

Rome, 35-39; and hostility to

the United States, 225-27; and

language, 100oo, o101-2, 105-8,

19o; and liberalism, 11-12, 110,

143-46, 186-88, 190-91, 207; vs.

patriotism, 99-1oo; and provin-

cialism, 84-85, 99-101o, 190,

203-5, 208,212-13; and rivalry

with England, 139, 155; seven-

teenth-century, 39-40, 43-44,

58. See also Orientalism

National literature, German, vi, I,

14, 40-41, 73, lo5, III-18, 121,

13 I, 188-89, 197-98, 209-10,

229-31, 238-44

Negri, Antonio, 6, 247n

Nerval, G6rard de, 2

Newman, Jane O., 48, 57-58, 59,

252-53n

Nibelungenlied, Das, I I 1-12, I 13,

114

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 135, 140, 142

Nollendorfs, Valters, 295n

Nolte, Ernst, 18o, 224

Noltze, Holger, 248n, 249n

Novalis (Friedrich von Harden-

berg), 9-10, 62-64, 83-101, 120,

131, 133, 137, 143-45, 157, 187,

193; Das allgemeine Brouillon, 98;

Blithenstaub, 84; "Die Christen-

heit oder Europa," 87-90, 98,

99, 130, 143; "Glauben und

Liebe," 86-87, 88, 96, 143; Hein-

rich von Ofterdingen, 93-99, 105,

167, 236; Die Lehrlinge zu Sais,

97-98 Mdrchen, 96, 167;

"Monolog," 97-98; "Politische

Aphorismen," 86; "Sehnsucht

nach dem Tode," 98

O'Brien, William Arctander, 98,

253n, 256n, 257n, 258n

Occidentalism, II

Oder-Neisse boundary, 178-79,

Index 313

96-97; and India (Asia), 4-5, 8,

12, 63-64, 76-80, 89-90, 92-93,

o105-o10, 117, 121, 123, 134-38,

148, 150-52; and irony, 124, 127,

130, 132; and matriarchy,

134-38, 153-54, 157-6o, 168,

170, 172; and the Old Testa-

ment, 70-71, 121; and the

Ottoman Empire, 9, 12, 34-35,

37-40, 46-49, 54, 56-58, 61,

139, 148-50; and the Rococo,

61-64, 67, 96, 124. See also

Nationalism, German

Ortmann, Christa, 249n

Ossian, 63, 66-68, 70-71

Ozdamar, Emine Sevgi, II, 227,

228-31, 234, 237; Die Brticke vom

goldenen Horn, 228-30, 231; Das

Leben ist eine Karawanserei,

228-29, 23 I1

Padfield, Peter, 269n

Panzer, Friedrich, I16

Pape, Maria Elisabeth, 253n

Parker, Andrew, 247n

Passage, Charles E., 248n

Peck, Jeffrey M., 275n, 276n

Pfeiffer-Belli, Wolfgang, 253n

Philip IV, king of France, 182

Picaresque novel (Schelmenroman),

40-41

Pinson, Koppel S., 258n

Platen, August Graf von, 186

Polenlieder, 186-88

Poliakov, Leon, 245n, 246n,

259n

Pollock, Sheldon, o109, 246n, 259n,

269n

Pratt, Mary Louise, 5S

Preece, Julian, 272n, 273n

PresterJohn, 29, 30, 140

Pretzel, Ulrich, 249n

Quinn, David B., 25on

Rabelais, Frangois, 215

Race (racism), 3-5, 8-9, 15, 17,

22-23, 25, 33, 74-75, o109-10o,

117, 134-35, 142, 162-63, 184,

199, 208, 218, 220, 239-40;

interracial romances, 12-13,

18-19, 22-23, 25, 54-56, 94-95,

172-74

Ranke, Leopold von, 46

Ranum, Orest, 251 n

Readings, Bill, 237-38

Redfield, Marc, 239, 258n

Reed, Terence J., 16o, 264n, 266n

Reformation, 34, 39, 87-88

Reunification (German, 1989-90),

12, 119, 164, 177-81I, 2o9-Io,

214-15, 220, 223-24

Richard, Jean, 248n

Richard I (the Lionhearted), king

of England, I16

Richardson, Samuel, 64

Richter, Johann Paul Friedrich

(Jean Paul), 123-24, 261n

Riemen, Alfred, 27on

Riencourt, Amaury de, 259n

Riley-Smith, Jonathan, 248n

Rindisbacher, Hans J., 271n,

314 Index

Sade, Marquis de, 59

Sahmland, Irmtraut, 253n, 257n

Said, Edward W., v, 2, 8, 95, 123,

139, 246n, 247n, 253n, 257n,

258n, 261n

Saladin, 17

Sammons, Jeffrey L., 242, 269n,

271n, 275n

Samuel, Richard, 63,253n

Sanct Oswald, 18, 19, 22, 30

San Marte (A. Schulz), 114, 115

Schacht, Ulrich, 267n

Schama, Simon, 25on

Schami, Rafik, Der geheime Bericht

hber den Dichter Goethe, 1I18-19,

132

Schelling, Friedrich, 87, 169

Schiller, Friedrich, 104, 114, 123,

133; Wilhelm Tell, 158

Schirok, Bernd, 259n

Schiwy, Giinther, 190, 259n, 27on

Schlaffer, Hannelore, 262n

Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 84, oo100,

Io8, II2, II3, 137; Geschichte der

romantischen Literatur, 90-91I

Schlegel, Dorothea, 87

Schlegel, Friedrich, 84, 87, o109,

III, I112; Geschichte der alten und

neuen Literatur, 108; Gesprach hber

die Poesie, 106, 166; Uber die

Sprache und Weisheit der Indier,

105-8

Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 87

Schlbzer, August Ludwig, 246n

Schmidt, Henry J., 274n, 275n

Schmitt, Carl, 138

Schneider, Katrin, 275n

Schneider, Peter, 9; Eduards

Heimkehr, 179; "Reise durch das

deutsche Nationalgeftihl,"

178-79

Schneider, Ulrich, 267n

Schbn, Theodor von, 184

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 135, 140

Schroder, Walter Johannes, 248n,

249n

Schroeder, Walter, 257n

Schulz, Gerhard, 256n, 257n, 261n

Schulze, Ingo, Simple Storys, 179

Schulze, Ursula, 26on

Schumann, Robert, 188

Schwab, Dieter, 256n

Schwab, Raymond, 2, 253n,

258-59n, 262n

Schwarz, Egon, 193, 27on

Second World War, 120, 16o,

177-78, 181, 219, 221, 223

Sedgwick, Eve, 155

Sedlar, Jean W., 247n

Seeba, Hinrich C., 26on, 275n

Seidlin, Oskar, 266n

Selbstbewusste Nation, Die, 163

Semper, Max, 117

Senocak, Zafer, 119, 227, 237; War

Hitler Araber? 119, 132

Seward, Desmond, 268n

Seyhan, Azade, 273n, 274n,

275n

Shafi, Monika, 273n

Index 315

Song of Roland, 17-18, 20, 22, 28,

30, 32

Southern, R. W., 248n

Sparnaay, H., 26on

Spartacus, 49

Spectator, The, 99

Spellerberg, Gerhard, 25 1in, 252n

Spengler, Oswald, Untergang des

Abendlandes, 162

Spielmannsepik, 18-19, 22, 24, 30,

95

Spies, Otto, 247n

Spinoza, Baruch, 72

Spittler, Ludwig, 255n

Stahl, Ernst Ludwig, 254n

Steinecke, Hartmut, 271n

Stern, Fritz, 264n

Stoiber, Edmund, 220

Stone, Lawrence, 256n

Straul3, Botho, o10, 162-76;

"Anschwellender Bocksgesang,"

162-64, 166, 175-76; Die Fehler

des Kopisten, 164; Derjunge

Mann, 13, 165-76; Paare, Passan-

ten, 164-65; Rumor, 165

Strohschneider-Kohrs, Ingrid, 257n

Strue-Oppenberg, Ursula, 258n

Sturm und Drang, 62, 66-70, 78,

124

Swift, Jonathan, 215

Syndram, Karl Ulrich, 253n

Szarota, Elida Maria, 252n

Tacitus, 33, 36, 37, 38, 48; Annals,

35; Germania, 35, 81-82

Tatler, The, 99

Tatlock, Lynne, 203, 271-72n

Tax, Petrus W., 248n

Tekinay, Alev, 247n

Teutonic Knights, 3, II, 182-85,

191-94, 196, 200, 203, 209, 212

Teutschen Volksbhcher, Die, I I I

Theweleit, Klaus, 138, 247n, 265n

Thomasius, Christian, 103

Thousand and One Nights, 61, 174

Tieck, Ludwig, 90, 93, III, 112,

163,257n

Tobin, Robert, 262n, 265n, 266n,

274n

Tolstoy, Leo, 144

Treitschke, Heinrich von, 197, 212;

Das deutsche Ordensland Preuflen,

184

Trommler, Frank, 275n

Trumpener, Katie, 67, 254n, 263n,

264n

Uerlings, Herbert, 253n, 256n,

257n, 264n

University, 102-5, 237-40

Urban II, Pope, 16, 34

Vilmar, August Friedrich, Vorles-

ungen hber die Geschichte der

deutschen National-Literatur, 115

Virgil, Aeneid, 22, 80

Vogel, Joachim, 267n

Voigt, Johannes, Geschichte

Preuflens, 184

Voltaire (Frangois-Marie Arouet),

5, 76; Candide, 3; Essai sur les

moeurs et l'sprit des Nations, 4;

316 Index

Weiner, Marc, 1 I6, 242, 26on

Weisinger, Kenneth, 154-55

Wellbery, David E., 26In, 262n

Wellek, Ren6, 254n

Weltliteratur, 10, 131-32

Wentzlaff-Eggebert, Friedrich-

Wilhelm, 248n

Whitman, Walt, 143-46, 158

Wieland, Christoph Martin, 62-64,

69-70, 99-100oo, 110o, 124, 131,

193; Oberon, 62; Der Teutsche

Merkur, 62

Wilhelm IV, king of Prussia, 195

Wilkins, Charles, 63

Willemer, Marianne von, 127

Willer, Stefan, 267n

Williams, Arthur, 268n

Willson, A. Leslie, 253n, 258n,

262n

Wilson, W. Daniel, 253n, 261n

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim,

135,263n

Wippermann, Wolfgang, 269n,

27on

Wolfram von Eschenbach, 9, 42,

43, 44, 231; Parzival, 10, 13,

15-16, 21-32, 41, 45, 56, 59,

o105, 112-18, 140, 146, 236, 244;

Willehalm, 20-21, 32, I112

Wollstonecraft, Mary, 5 I

World War I. See First World War

World War II. See Second World

War

Wiinsch, Christian Ernst, 5

Wiist, Walter, lo9

Wyss, Ulrich, 26on

Xenophobia, 9, 11-12, II6, 119,

162-63, 216, 220, 223-24

Zagari, Luciano, 262n

Zammito, John H., 245n, 254n,

256n

Zantop, Susanne, 9, 245n, 246n,

250on, 255n, 256n, 263n

Zigler und Kliphausen, Heinrich

Anshelm von, Die Asiatische

Banise, 61-62

Zitelmann, Rainer, 267n

Zivilisation [civilization], and impe-

rialism, 7-8, 71, 79, o102, 140-42,

159