German Orientalisms
... It is true that Spanish orientalism cannot be equated with British or French orientalism. But it can be equated with that of other cases, such as that of the Germanic tradition, where -with or without an empire -it served to fight against cultural and political subordination, emphasize the belonging to modern European civilization and compensate for the limited international role (Kontje 2004). ...
... It is true that Spanish orientalism cannot be equated with British or French orientalism. But it can be equated with that of other cases, such as that of the Germanic tradition, where -with or without an empire -it served to fight against cultural and political subordination, emphasize the belonging to modern European civilization and compensate for the limited international role (Kontje 2004). ...
... It is true that Spanish orientalism cannot be equated with British or French orientalism. But it can be equated with that of other cases, such as that of the Germanic tradition, where -with or without an empire -it served to fight against cultural and political subordination, emphasize the belonging to modern European civilization and compensate for the limited international role (Kontje 2004). ...
... It is true that Spanish orientalism cannot be equated with British or French orientalism. But it can be equated with that of other cases, such as that of the Germanic tradition, where -with or without an empire -it served to fight against cultural and political subordination, emphasize the belonging to modern European civilization and compensate for the limited international role (Kontje 2004). ...
... It is true that Spanish orientalism cannot be equated with British or French orientalism. But it can be equated with that of other cases, such as that of the Germanic tradition, where -with or without an empire -it served to fight against cultural and political subordination, emphasize the belonging to modern European civilization and compensate for the limited international role (Kontje 2004). ...
... It is true that Spanish orientalism cannot be equated with British or French orientalism. But it can be equated with that of other cases, such as that of the Germanic tradition, where -with or without an empire -it served to fight against cultural and political subordination, emphasize the belonging to modern European civilization and compensate for the limited international role (Kontje 2004). ...
... It is true that Spanish orientalism cannot be equated with British or French orientalism. But it can be equated with that of other cases, such as that of the Germanic tradition, where -with or without an empire -it served to fight against cultural and political subordination, emphasize the belonging to modern European civilization and compensate for the limited international role (Kontje 2004). ...
... It is true that Spanish orientalism cannot be equated with British or French orientalism. But it can be equated with that of other cases, such as that of the Germanic tradition, where -with or without an empire -it served to fight against cultural and political subordination, emphasize the belonging to modern European civilization and compensate for the limited international role (Kontje 2004). ...
... It is true that Spanish orientalism cannot be equated with British or French orientalism. But it can be equated with that of other cases, such as that of the Germanic tradition, where -with or without an empire -it served to fight against cultural and political subordination, emphasize the belonging to modern European civilization and compensate for the limited international role (Kontje 2004). ...
... It is true that Spanish orientalism cannot be equated with British or French orientalism. But it can be equated with that of other cases, such as that of the Germanic tradition, where -with or without an empire -it served to fight against cultural and political subordination, emphasize the belonging to modern European civilization and compensate for the limited international role (Kontje 2004). ...
... It is true that Spanish orientalism cannot be equated with British or French orientalism. But it can be equated with that of other cases, such as that of the Germanic tradition, where -with or without an empire -it served to fight against cultural and political subordination, emphasize the belonging to modern European civilization and compensate for the limited international role (Kontje 2004). ...
... It is true that Spanish orientalism cannot be equated with British or French orientalism. But it can be equated with that of other cases, such as that of the Germanic tradition, where -with or without an empire -it served to fight against cultural and political subordination, emphasize the belonging to modern European civilization and compensate for the limited international role (Kontje 2004). ...
... It is true that Spanish orientalism cannot be equated with British or French orientalism. But it can be equated with that of other cases, such as that of the Germanic tradition, where -with or without an empire -it served to fight against cultural and political subordination, emphasize the belonging to modern European civilization and compensate for the limited international role (Kontje 2004). ...
... It is true that Spanish orientalism cannot be equated with British or French orientalism. But it can be equated with that of other cases, such as that of the Germanic tradition, where -with or without an empire -it served to fight against cultural and political subordination, emphasize the belonging to modern European civilization and compensate for the limited international role (Kontje 2004). ...
Was ist das »Neue« an der Neuen Rechten? Seit der Enttarnung des Nationalsozialistischen Untergrunds und den politischen Entwicklungen in den 2010er Jahren hat das Lager der hiesigen Rechtsextremisten erhebliche publizistische Aufmerksamkeit erfahren. Wesentliche Veränderungen sind hingegen unterbeleuchtet geblieben. Dies gilt insbesondere für die Neue Rechte und deren politisches Denken, ihr Verhältnis zu gesellschaftlichen Minoritäten sowie ihre Vorstellungen von Deutschlands Rolle in Europa und in der Welt. Die Beiträgerinnen und Beiträger des Bandes rücken Fragen zu Philosophie, zu Minderheiten und zu Transnationalität in den Fokus, um das tatsächlich »Neue« an diesem rechten Phänomen zu erörtern.
In his poem “Die Braut von Corinth” (1797), Goethe introduces the figure of the vampire as an early agent of his concept of “Weltliteratur.” As such, his female vampire challenges critical assumptions of a cultural divide between Christian and “pagan” religions, vampire believers and non‐believers, and finally Western and Eastern literatures. Instead, Goethe's “Braut” offers herself as a specimen of literary and cultural hybridity in a textual format entertained by Goethe for its liminality and heterogeneity—that of the “Ballade.” As a genre of originality without origin, the “Ballade” features a, in Homi Bhabha's sense of the term, “traumatic” encounter with the unfathomable—the living dead, monstrous affection, and transcultural alterity—that can not be reconciled with one's own world view, but only endured. Once endured, however, the disparate starts to form alliances across boundaries that Goethe will later refer to as “Weltliteratur.”
Although the tragedies of Daniel Casper von Lohenstein (1635–83) are nowadays known mainly to specialists in the Baroque, they amply repay attention. Set in the ancient world or the modern Ottoman Empire, they explore politics in the coolly realistic light of ‘reason of state’, a doctrine prominent in early modern absolutism. They are indebted also to neo-Stoicism. These features are illustrated by a close study of the tense intrigues and double-dealing that dominate the drama Cleopatra (the revised edition of 1680).
Abbas Khiders teilweise autobiographischer Roman Der falsche Inder (2008) porträtiert die strapaziöse Reise eines irakischen Flüchtlings, dem es schließlich gelingt, eine neue Identität als Autor in Deutschland zu finden. Dieser Essay untersucht die Formen der literarischen Inszenierung von Autorschaft, die der Text vor dem Hintergrund vorherrschender migrations‐ und islamfeindlicher Stereotype in der deutschen Öffentlichkeit entwickelt. Khiders Protagonist erkämpft sich diskursive Handlungsfähigkeit nicht nur durch eine spielerische Aneignung der deutschen Literaturtradition, sondern auch durch eine Konfrontation von Stereotypisierungen und Formen kultureller Ausgrenzung, die mit Hilfe einer selbstreflexiven Ironie und kreativer Mechanismen der Umkehr funktioniert. So kann der Text Machtstrukturen offenlegen, die den Zugang zum deutschen literarischen Diskurs regulieren. Zudem werden im Roman anhand eines Geflüchteten und seiner öffentlichen Wahrnehmung Tendenzen der geschlechtlichen Diskriminierung, die den medialen Migrationsdiskurs der letzten Jahre prägten, einer kritischen Reflexion unterzogen, sodass zugleich ein Hinterfragen von in der westlichen Gesellschaft präsenten Formen von Sexismus möglich wird.
The oriental imaginary of Heinrich Heine’s cycle, Hebräische Melodien (1851), borrows and diverges from European orientalism and its German Jewish counterpart, sephardism. In departing from these traditions, Heine launches a critique of both discourses and highlights their shared assertion of Western superiority. His recreation of the Sephardic past attacks the ideologies perpetuated by literary and historiographical treatments of the Orient. Directed against German Jewish orientalism and its idealization of Andalusi Jewish experience, Hebräische Melodien features complex, ambivalent portrayals of Sephardim and their Muslim neighbours. Heine’s Muslims reflect their shared history with Jews as Europe’s oriental others but also perpetrate violence against Jews. The cycle’s depictions of antisemitism in a poetic Orient serve to expose the lethal consequences of orientalism’s cultural hierarchy.
This chapter reviews Thomas Mann's dual role as Germany's leading novelist of his age and highly visible public intellectual, tracing his rise to the status of national representative and world author in the grand Goethean tradition. The discussion outlines the eminently productive collaboration between the author, his American translator, and his US publisher, a concerted enterprise that succeeded in mediating Mann's works and ideas across cultural divides and established him as a best‐selling international author.
The Eickstedt archive is an inventory of a German anthropologist’s perception of India of the 1920s through photographs and written accounts. His understanding forms the leitmotif of this reading of the archive, which as such is a reading along the grain. This article attempts to locate the archive’s rationale, which vacillates between expectations of the ‘primitive other’ and a rising racial anthropology. Exploring the relationship between the archive’s content and the context allows one to trace the intentions and preoccupations that influenced the archive, without neglecting the agency of the photographic subjects. Juxtaposing the archive and the published accounts as well as the related artefact collection further substantiates that the archive is constituted by the multiple influences of German anthropology of the 1920s, a conventional nationalism, and European orientalism.
This paper analyses the relationship and influence of North African and Middle Eastern architectures on the birth and development of modern architecture in Central European countries during the first three decades of twentieth century. The authors examine the contacts that the Central European architectural avant-garde had with the architecture of North Africa and the Middle East, and analyse how certain German and Austrian architects reacted to what they witnessed and how they interpreted it in their ensuing designs and projects. Architects in both countries were seeking a new formal code that responded to the needs of the era. The authors’ aim here is to determine how and to what extent each country’s avant-garde adopted the repertoire of vernacular Mediterranean architecture during the critical period of development of the Modern Movement. © 2018
Nicht nur Reiseberichte über den Mittleren, sondern auch über den Fernen Osten unterliegen Mechanismen, die dem Konzept “Orientalismus” zugeordnet werden können. Entsprechend werden in diesem Aufsatz die Asien‐Reiseberichte der wilhelminischen Aristokratinnen Elisabeth von Heyking und Marie von Bunsen im Kontext der postkolonialen Orientalismus‐Diskussion interpretiert, und es wird die Frage nach einem angeblich typisch deutschen intellektuellen Orientalismus gestellt. Dieser imaginierte Orient wird im Aufsatz mit konkreten Erfahrungen von reisenden Frauen kontrastiert. Beide Autorinnen sehen sich als Repräsentantinnen der wilhelminischen Zeit, und als Kritikerinnen und Befürworterinnen europäischer Kolonialpolitik artikulieren sie auch eine politische Botschaft. Durch das Aufeinandertreffen der Konzepte “Gender” und “Kolonialismus”, “Klasse” und “Rasse” bieten ihre Reiseberichte ein aufschlussreiches Mosaik bei der Erforschung deutscher Formen von Orientalismus und deutscher Kolonialgeschichte.
In opposition to the widely-accepted interpretation whereby the scanty territorial expansion of Spanish imperialism in the 19th century was the counterpart of a reduced will to empire, this article proposes a fresh look at the role of imperialist visions in Spanish intellectual and cultural life during the Restoration, particularly their influence on how Spaniards portrayed their own national identity in cultural terms. Looking afresh at the importance of these cultural representations in the construction of a potent alterity—the creation of a colonial «other»—this article revisits the Empire-driven orientalist vision of North Africa, in which Morocco in particular was an object of imperialist fantasies. It posits that this way of viewing North Africa within the framework of a colonial movement is a key to understanding the influence of that discourse on the Spanish national identity. The will to forge an Empire in Morocco was a logical product of pressures for the regeneration of the Spanish nation starting in the 1880s (intensifying in the wake of the colonial disaster of 1898). In this respect, the ultimate failure or inability to fully realise this imperial project does not gainsay the central position that the imperial project held in intellectual circles and in the cultural self-representation of Spanish identity during the restoration. At the heart of this imperial discourse, the portrayal of North African women as objects of desire and symbols of Moroccan backwardness served to legitimise Spain’s civilising mission. Thus, gender, nation and empire came to be integral elements of Spanish identitary discourse.
This chapter attempts to illuminate Der m?de Tod?s philosophical dimensions by placing the film in constellation with Weimar intellectual history. It argues that Fritz Lang's film registered and responded to a ?crisis of historicism? that was widely diagnosed in the Weimar era, as German-speaking intellectuals confronted the aporias that entail from reflexive historical thinking. In the author's analysis, Der m?de Tod sought to counteract the atomizing and relativizing implications of nineteenth-century historicism by positing what might be called a ?metaphysics of finitude.? In proposing the crisis of historical thought as a key context for Lang's pioneering and influential film, the chapter diverges from Tom Gunning's reading of Der m?de Tod as a meditation on the narrative and visual possibilities of the cinematic medium. Not least, it suggests that Lang's film gains new resonances when interpreted as a response to contemporaneous historical-philosophical questions.
Literary transnationalism is a relatively new term critically mediating the relationships between national literatures and the wider forces of globalizing culture. ‘Literary’ or ‘critical’ ‘transnationalism’ describes aspects of literary circulation and movement that defy reduction to the level of the nation-state. The term originated in American Studies as a means of bringing American literary discourse into a new relationship with the world that it inhabits. Can the concept of ‘transnationalism’ help in broader discussions of world literature and literary globalization? Literary transnationalism in this sense would identify that point at which two or more geo-cultural imaginaries intersect, connect, engage with, disrupt or conflict with each other in literary form. In this article I discuss transnationalism in terms of its origins and intellectual history in order to suggest ways in which transnational theory might be developed as an analytical tool of both global breadth and historical depth with particular reference to European literature.
The article explores the Islam envisioned in the extensive writings of one of the most prominent German converts to Islam in Weimar Germany, the Jewish poet, philosopher, and political activist Hugo Marcus (1880–1966). Marcus's understanding of Islam is a surprisingly Eurocentric and even Germanic one. It is not only the religion of the German past, Marcus claims, but also, given its faith in the intellect and in progress, the religion of the future. His ideas do not figure in the historiography of Weimar Germany. While many of the new political notions of the future that Weimar writers contemplated have been explored, scholars have paid less attention to the spiritual and religious utopias envisioned in the 1920s. This article engages with German responses to the rupture of World War I and the realm of imagined political possibilities in Weimar Germany by focusing on one such utopia overlooked in historiography, Marcus's German-Islamic synthesis.
The aim of this chapter, which is part of a larger project on German stereotypes of Eastern European lands and peoples during the modern period, is to discuss key terms in the vocabulary of German administration and occupation in Eastern Europe in both world wars. Examined and compared here are the vocabularies of Ober Ost (the German occupation regime in the Baltic during World War I) and the Nazi Ostland.
Scholars have debated for decades whether there has ever been any meaningful partnership between Germany and Japan. A minority of specialists rejects the idea of a significant cooperation between the two nations and points especially to various diplomatic breaches between both countries. The German participation in the Triple Intervention in 1895, the Japanese take-over of the German leasehold in the Chinese Shandong province (Qingdao) in 1914, and the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, which rendered the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936 obsolete, are examples of such incidents. Another reason why some contest the notion of partnership is the alleged joint world conspiracy of Berlin and Tokyo, a mistaken charge that turned out to be little more than the result of German-Japanese-Italian indoctrination and the Allied response with their own anti-Axis propaganda. That is, during the early 1940s, both sides portrayed the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo wartime alliance as a firmly antidemocratic or “fascist” bloc. After clearing the smokescreen of wartime verbiage, however, scholars have questioned the actual degree of solidarity and depth of the Axis agreements.1 In fact, the international situation after World War I with its threefold confrontation between democracies, militarist/fascist countries, and communism played an important role in bringing about this alliance. The German-Japanese cooperation then led to the heterogeneous anti-Hitler coalition, which collapsed after the Potsdam Conference, quickly leading to the Cold War, with divided Germany as one of its foremost battlegrounds.
Als Motto unserer Darstellung der Creuzerschen Altertumswissenschaft könnten Walter Benjamins Worte dienen: „Allegorien sind im Reiche der Gedanken was Ruinen im Reiche der Dinge.“1 Es ist überliefert, dass die mächtigen Ruinen des Heidelberger Schlosses Creuzer wie später auch Benjamin zutiefst beeindruckt haben: Der gewaltige Blick der Ruine hat ihn mit der Kleinheit neudeutscher Gegenwart konfrontiert,2 und er hätte mit Benjamin sagen können, dass die vorüberziehenden Wolken in ihren offenen Fenstern von der „Ewigkeit dieser Trümmer“ erzählen.3 Die Verfallenheit der Ruine öffnet das Auge für die Tiefenstrukturen der Geschichte.4 In solche Tiefenstrukturen alter Kulturen wollte der Heidelberger Professormit seiner Symbolik hinabreichen. Den Wunsch nach Ergänzung, Deutung der Überlieferung, den Wunsch nach allegorischer Aneignung der selbst gewählten Vergangenheit teilt Creuzers Philologie mit der Zielsetzung romantischer Altertumskunde überhaupt. Der Allegoriker, dem man immer wieder vorwarf, dass in ihm der Romantiker lediglich als „eine zweite Seele“ innewohnte,5 wusste aber zugleich, dass seine deutenden Allegorien selbst nichts anderes werden könnten, als Fragmente der Fragmente. Dieser frühromantische Zug seiner Hermeneutik wurde in den ersten Jahrzehnten des 19. Jahrhunderts zunehmend als unzeitgemäß empfunden, wenngleich er in Heidelberg vielleicht nie akzeptiert war und zur Isolation Creuzers beitrug. Ist es folglich berechtigt, Creuzers Werk zur Heidelberger Romantik zu zählen?
Anatolia played an important role in German nineteenth-century colonial aspirations that was subsequently blacked out in both the Federal Republic of Germany and the Turkish Republic, due to their political re-orientation. To recreate the important role that Anatolia played in German colonialism, classic approaches to the studies of imperialism, such as tracing government actions through official documentation, are insufficient. This approach must be combined with a close reading of consular archives, travelogues, propaganda leaflets, and personal letters, in order to ascertain correctly the dissemination of motives underlying the Germans' actions in nineteenth-century Anatolia. Based on this approach, one can differentiate between three different roles that Anatolia played in German colonial thoughts and deeds: as an untouched land destined for agricultural settlement; as a source of inspiration for the German Empire to reshape itself in the image of ancient Pergamon; and as a site where German colonialism and Turkish nationalism could cooperate to their mutual benefit.
Whether or not Indology contributed to Nazism and the Shoah from the eighteenth century onward should be a straightforward empirical question examined with historical methods based on archival documents, original publications, insights, judgments of truth, and awareness of moral or existential bias of both the researcher and the researched. In the “Indologiestreit” between Vishwa P. Adluri (2011) and Reinhold Grünendahl (2012) published in this Journal, however, the question about the Nazification of Indology is overshadowed by Edward W. Said’s political-literary narrative. Why? What is Said’s mesmeric reproach of British and French depictions of the “Orient” all about? And why does it haunt the arguments of Adluri and Grünendahl? More curiously, why does Said omit German Indologists from his indictment of Western imperial power, sexual, and biblical fantasies of the “Orient”?
This paper examines a group of German social scientists and economists who observed the Russian Empire’s efforts to colonise and develop Siberia in the two decades before World War I. In writing about Siberia, these observers exhibited a fascination with the vastness of the territory and the benefits of possessing a continental empire. For many commentators, Siberia was viewed as Russia’s America – one in which individualistic settlers were able to rapidly increase productivity and bring their goods to the global market. These developments contrasted with the peasants in European Russia, who German observers considered to be both culturally and economically backward. In writing and commenting on Russia’s development of Siberia, Germans observers were contributors to a transnational discourse on imperial governance. They also fantasised about the ways in which Germans might develop and order the territory if they were to possess the land and resources of a continental empire.
Using travel accounts to the Soviet Union as a source, this article explores the ambiguous position of Russia in Germans' global imaginary between the wars. The article first discusses the ways in which German travel accounts redefined Russia's location between Europe and Asia in the interwar years. It then focuses on travellers' fascination with Soviet internal colonization and attempts to mobilize society. Finally, it turns to the ways in which stereotypes about the Soviet rulers' and people's 'Asiatic' nature shaped German travellers' observations about violence and coercion in the Soviet state.
Conceptions of Geist (mind/spirit) associated with German Romanticism shaped ideologies of national folk, not only in Europe but elsewhere in the world. In Meiji Japan (1868–1912) psychologists drew upon Volkerpsychologie (folk psychology) and Geist to create a narrative of Japanese folk mind/spirit. Here, spirit functioned as a “hidden essence” which substantiated the integrity of the folk, positioned the folk hierarchically in opposition to other societies, and explained (and presented correctives to) the fragmentation of Japanese society. Japanese psychologists, I argue, appropriated the narrative form of Geist discourse, retaining its ideological power even as they altered its substance by divesting German psychology of its orientalist and Christian content. Attention to Japan's engagement with nineteenth-century German psychology will contribute to a more thorough account of the production of “spirit” in Meiji Japan and to a critique of present-day exclusionary ideologies of Japanese spirit and identity.
This article explores “Orientalist” accounts of hospitality to identify historical antecedents for contemporary Western demand for hospitality and tourism products in the Middle East. Scenes of hospitality in the diaries of Richard Burton and Gertrude Bell are analysed in the context of the authors’ historically locatable, subject positions. The paper finds that Orientalist expectations of hospitality form an image that is both culturally self-serving and, to an extent, impenetrable by the actual experience of the traveller. The durability of this discourse may still inform Western impressions of the contemporary Middle East. The development of the Middle East as a centre for hospitality and tourism innovation is critical to the continued global success of this industry; thus, by understanding historical antecedents, contemporary operators can begin to conceive the rich complexity of consumer attitudes towards the region. This analysis offers both an exploration of the inscription of a longstanding discourse of “difference” on contemporary consumer culture and presents a context for future research into contemporary modes of hospitality and tourism demand and commercial response in the Middle East.
Edward W. Said’s Orientalism has attained canonical status as the key study of the cultural politics of western representation of the East, specifically the imaginative geographies underwriting constructions such as the Middle East and the Islamic world. The Ottoman Empire overlapped both European and exteriorized Oriental space during much of the period that Said dealt with, yet while the existence of the empire is referred to in Said’s study, the theoretical implications of that presence for his critique of Orientalist discourse are not. The material presence of the Ottoman state, in the Arabic-speaking lands, but also crucially, and for a longer period, much of south-east Europe and Anatolia, highlights long-standing Oriental geopolitical and cultural agency in the face of unidirectional narratives of western encroachment. Attention to the specific discursive manoeuvres undertaken by the West to handle that disruptive, intrinsic Ottoman presence in Europe itself may add traction to the notion that the Orient was imagined as a radically exterior point of comparison. It is argued that the history of western representation of the Ottoman Empire constitutes a pre-Orientalist discourse, whose dual, perennial purpose is to make pragmatic accommodation for an Ottoman Oriental material presence in Europe yet never to fully acknowledge its discursive presence as being of Europe. I argue that by supplementing Said’s critique with a full consideration of the Ottoman legacy, a reformulation is possible that integrates the Islamic Orient as an intrinsic component of historically informed notions of European space, while dissolving notions of the absolute distinction of that latter construct from the wider milieus in which it is embedded.
The annual Eurovision Song Contest has provided a venue where participating nations from the former Soviet bloc, whose relation to Europeanness may be tenuous, strive to perform claims to belonging and partnership. Yet the increasing emphasis on ‘diversity’ in the representation of an expanding Europe has created difficulties for Central and Eastern European countries, which historically were positioned as ‘ethnic’, if not racialized vis-à-vis western European powers. Nevertheless, Central and Eastern European participants in the Contest have engaged with cosmopolitanism as the key term through which Europe has come to define itself. Through a close, historically contextualized analysis of two songs, the article argues that Central and Eastern European participants in the Contest have developed alternative discourses of cosmopolitanism that furnish a corrective to the increasingly reductive equation of the concept with cultural diversity.
This article explores how the early medieval past was used to justify Germanic political and cultural hegemony across East Central Europe during the first half of the 20th century. It highlights the ways in which medieval historians and archaeologists contributed to, and were influenced by, the program of “Ostforschung” (Eastern Research). A close reading of the work of two prominent German archaeologists during the interwar and National Socialist periods suggests that their conception of the early medieval eastern Alps was not only influenced by national chauvinism, but also reveals striking parallels with Western imperial ideologies typical of overseas colonial contexts.
This essay proposes the hypothesis that Central European Zionist discourse qualifies as a type of imperialism. Modern scholarship on imperialism has demonstrated the existence of common discursive strategies deployed in the service of colonialism such as depictions of the colonised territory as 'virgin wasteland', appeals to the mission civilizatrice, and images of the native population as an alien and inferior Other. In focusing on this discourse and its dialectical implications, the author draws attention to the artificiality of the conventional gap between nationalism and imperialism and suggests that from its incipience in the 1890s, Central European Zionism transcended the accepted binary.
The Deutsche Kolonialzeitung , the preeminent colonialist publication in the German Empire, was at the forefront of the German anti-slavery movement in the late 1880s.This pan-European movement, with its origins in the Roman Catholic Church, was quickly co-opted by the Kolonialzeitung to advance public enthusiasm for German colonialism. This article examines how the newspaper used the anti-slavery movement as a tool for building German national consciousness in 1888—9, at the height of the movement. To do this, the Kolonialzeitung drew upon historical examples to portray a German leadership role as preordained. By using nationalized religious language and criticizing European partners, the newspaper sought to unite Germans, who were still divided by religion as a result of Bismarck’s anti-Catholic politics. This article further seeks to address the relative lack of attention to the colonial press in examinations of German imperialism.
This article argues that the abundance of Greek figures and scenarios in Kittler’s recent work points to a shift in his oeuvre, which, however, does not represent a radical break with his ‘hardware studies’. At the turn of the 21st century, Kittler champions an emphatic notion of culture as a necessary supplement to science and technology. This conceptual marriage mediates grand historical narratives of cultural identity. Specifically, Kittler’s texts provide us with narratives of Greek origin which serve to re-capture collective identities in the age of globalization. On the explicit level, this identity is predominantly European, but the search has national components as well. With his turn to culture, the organizing trope of 19th-century German nationalism, Kittler has also embraced the legacy of German philhellenism, which articulated national identities through the theme of ‘elective affinity’. Kittler’s Greece occupies the very structural place it had in 19th-century German philhellenism: It stands in for both the foundation of European civilization and its virtual better self, a realm of sensual culture untainted by modern capitalism and Empire. Most of the figures inhabiting this realm are familiar from 19th-century discourse as well, but these discursive loops are fueled by contemporary feedback. Kittler’s Greek narratives have developed out of postwar academic discourses and connect to other post-unification Greek fantasies.
Recent work on Britain and the Middle East promises to reinvigorate the field by introducing a new set of questions and archival sources. This essay reviews current scholarship by looking back at the historiography of the Eastern Question. First defined as a field in the wake of WWI, the study of British foreign and domestic policy in the Ottoman Empire inspired generations of historical work on the region. This early wave of historiography provokingly demonstrated that the contest for the Middle East largely happened at home and helped shape the priorities of modern liberal democratic political culture. Contemporary events, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with the emergence of new methodologies have contributed to a shift in historical writing from the ‘Eastern Question’ to more regionally focused studies of the ‘Middle East.’ This shift has recast the field as an important new frontier of the New Imperial History.
This article explores the vast body of English language works on Hinduism published since 1981 by Voice of India—an influential right-wing Hindu publishing house headquartered in New Delhi, but contributed to by Indians at “home” and in diasporic communities, as well as Europeans and North Americans. Focus on the construction of the Hindu “Self” and the non-Hindu “Other” shows the manner in which European thought, primarily represented by the contributions of colonial-era British and German indologists, but bolstered by evangelicals, Utilitarians and Arabo-Islamicists from the same era, has become an important feature of postcolonial forms of Hinduism. In particular, the influence of fin de siècle German indologist Paul Deussen, mediated by such colonial-era Hindu thinkers as Swami Dayananda, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo Ghose and Mahatma Gandhi, not only defines Voice of India's theology, but leads to the construction of a Hindu Self that is the personification of “Aryan godliness” and a non-Hindu Other that is essentialized as a “Semitic Demon.” Although closely associated with and often serving the political initiatives of the Sangh Parivar, the authors of this theology have been kept at arm's length by the organization for reasons of political expediency. Both the growing network of contributors to and consumers of this view, and its periodic use by the Sangh Parivar, insure that it represents a significant development in the ideology of Hindutva.
A tension between cosmopolitanism and nationalism characterizes the career of the poet–philologist Friedrich Rückert. The German orientalist and mentor to Paul de Lagarde translated remarkable quantities of Sanskrit, Farsi, and Arabic verse, while earning popular acclaim for his Biedermeier celebrations of the German Heimat. The contradiction in these scholarly pursuits can be reconciled by examining the intersection of the local, national, and global in Rückert's conception of language. In the German Pietist tradition, national tongues embodied both the divine word of God and the particular historical circumstances of speakers. Through feats of translation Rückert expected to transform German into a universal language of spiritual reconciliation, thereby transcending Babel and distinguishing the German nation as a chosen people. This article investigates the process of cultural translation through which Rückert made “world poetry” intelligible to a German audience, arguing that cosmopolitanism underlay a German claim to cultural dominance in post-Napoleonic Europe.
This examination of representations of the Orient in Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen mediates early romantic aesthetics, normative mainstream and feminist readings of the novel, and post-colonial theory. The novel is often read as a foundation myth that depicts the genesis of the romantic poet out of the encounter with the feminine, which appears as a spiritual anchor and guarantor of poetic fulfillment. The article reveals a systematic juxtaposition of the feminine with the Orient at all crucial junctures of the developmental narrative of the poet, which suggests that this variant of Romantic neue Mythologie is vaster in scope than normally believed, as the novel is both the myth of a poet and the myth of a nation. Accordingly, the dual nature of the encounter with the other is suggestive of a double-contest, one addressing the issue of sexual difference, the other the cultural difference of Occident and Orient.
Dieser Artikel verbindet die Wahrnehmungsweisen des Fremden in den Texten der Reise-schriftstellerin Ida von Hahn-Hahn (1805–1880) mit denen im optischen Medium des Panoramas im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Panoramabilder von nicht-europäischen Kulturen können einerseits eurozentrische Erhabenheitsmomente suggerieren und andererseits diese durch die Simulation von Schwindelgefühlen auch wieder in Frage stellen. Diese widersprüchliche Perspektive auf das Andere ist auch in der panoramatisch-pittoresken Ästhetik in Hahn-Hahns Reisebericht Orientalische Briefe (1843) zu finden. Hahn-Hahns paradoxe Bilder des Orients werden in diesem Beitrag jedoch weder durch historisch-biographische Kontextualisierungen noch durch postkolonialistische Ansätze aufgelöst. Vielmehr zeigt die Optik des Panoramas, dass Hahn-Hahn ein Modell der Fremdwahrnehmung entwirft, das mit den Oppositionen des Eigenen und des Fremden, des Okzidents und des Orients experimentieren kann, ohne sich dabei auf die eine oder andere Seite festzulegen. Darauf aufbauend entwickeln Hahn-Hahns Texte eine geschichtsphilosophische Perspektive, die kulturelle Identität und Individualität in einer perspektivisch gebrochenen Einheit zu konstruieren versucht.
Fairtrade consumers, by enacting their political and moral concerns through consumer choice, are at the same time constructing themselves as ethical selves. I will argue that they can only do so by drawing on cultural contexts. While fairtrade is instituted in supranational organizations and acts on a global level, there are still differences on a national level. On the basis of an Anglo-German study, this paper seeks to map out the cultural contextualization of fairtrade consumption on both a supranational and a national level. The paper identifies the framing role of global consumer culture and an implicit ethics of equitability inscribed in capitalist practices of exchange and specifies how these play out differently in Germany and the UK. In both cases, there are strong references to sovereign consumer choice, and expectations of equitability in commodity exchange have been found. But while, in the British case, there is more emphasis on individual choice and taste, German fairtrade consumers seem to follow more what they perceive as an authoritative discourse. And, while British respondents envisaged the relation to be achieved with producers along the lines of a business relationship, German respondents conceptualized it more as a paternalistic employment relation between fairtrade organizations and producers. Differences will be explained in terms of distinctive consumer cultures, national moral economies and colonialist histories. I will argue that the two national settings not only offer different opportunities and challenges in terms of market success but also pose distinct ethical questions for fairtrade marketers.
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