Deploying Orientalism in Culture and History: From Germany to Central and Eastern Europe

Germanophone orientalist discourses provide the focus of eight of the twelve chapters. The introduction by [James Hodkinson] and [John Walker] gives an excellent overview of existing scholarship on German orientalism by Susanna Zantop, Russell Berman, Nina Berman, Todd Kontje, [Andrea Polaschegg], Suzanne Marchand, and Sarah Colvin. The chapters complement and expand upon these studies and also to some degree support Said's claim of German orientalism's "philological orientation" (193). John Walker examines Wilhelm von Humboldt's comparative study of language and his influence on Jürgen Habermas's idea of translation as the key to intercultural communication. The suggestion of cultural interdependency challenges Said's paradigm of orientalism as invested in a dichotomy between the European and the non-European, the civilized and the barbaric. Michael Dusche focuses on Friedrich Schlegel's romantic and nationalist engagement with Sanskrit and his "internal orientalism" that reimagines Germany as the "true" oriental self of Europe. This "positive" or "reverse" orientalism (42) differs from traditional orientalism with its negative connotations of the East as passive, mysterious, degenerate, exotic, and barbaric. Schlegel's real intention, however, lies in praising Germanic supremacy over the French. Using a similar methodology as in his book German Orientalisms (2004), Todd Kontje critically deals with Germany's "local orientalism" by considering the history of the Teutonic Knights and Germany's Jews, and by interpreting the use of orientalist motifs in Fatih Akin, Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Goethe. This intra-European orientalism undermines fixed boundaries of the Occident and Orient.