[Discussion] Book review: Todd Kontje, German Orientalisms

[gpultar@cstgroup.org]

Todd Kontje. German Orientalisms. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.
v + 316 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-4721-1392-5.
Reviewed by: Jennifer Jenkins, Department of History, University of Toronto.

Published by: H-German (September, 2005)

German Orientalisms?

It is well known that Edward Said omitted German scholarship from his landmark
study of 1978, Orientalism.[1] The omission has stimulated crossings of this
terrain by both historians and Germanists.[2] Todd Kontje's German Orientalisms,
one of the most recent works to appear, takes a literary historical look at the
topic. Kontje departs from Said in his exploration of the phenomenon, claiming
that orientalism "must be understood in a more nuanced way that allows for
historical and national differences" (p. v). So can one speak of a "German
orientalism"? According to Kontje, the answer is yes. Representations of the
"orient" were central to Germany's symbolic mapping of the world, and an
imaginative focus on the "East" in its numerous permutations--India, the Ottoman
Empire, the Holy Land, Eastern Europe--was a constitutive factor in defining
German national culture. To uncover this "symbolic geography" (p. 1), Kontje
focuses on literature that "make[s] use of the Orient in [its] effort to define
what is German" (p. 13). His chosen texts are from authors "that have been
considered typically, representatively, quintessentially 'German'" and which
have Germany as their referent (p. 1). Through a series of "multifaceted"
readings Kontje explores a making and remaking of German national culture that
takes Germany's position in both Europe and the world as its starting point.
What he calls the "long tradition of German orientalism" (p. 11) in literature
is characterized by complexity. The texts he explores reveal networks of
shifting relations; they abound in unresolved tensions and ambiguity.

In his literary historical look at national culture, Kontje situates his texts
between two poles. They occupy an intellectual space between an orientalism that
lays the "groundwork for a theory of Germanic racial superiority that led to
Hitler and the Holocaust" (p. 8) and an orientalism that has "a degree of
openness toward the foreign and critical distance toward their [the authors']
own German backgrounds" (p. 10). In keeping with this choice, Kontje's own text
can be situated between older works--Leon Poliakov's The Aryan Myth, Martin
Bernal's Black Athena, and Fritz Stern's The Politics of Cultural Despair with
their project to uncover the intellectual roots of the Holocaust--and Russell
Berman's Enlightenment or Empire, which takes the opposite position. Berman's
point that "the German intellectual tradition also contains moments of genuine
openness to foreign cultures and significant cross-cultural exchange" (p. 9)
strongly influences Kontje's work, and his readings uncover many such moments of
openness.[3] He advocates a "rereading" of "the history of the national
literature from today's decentered, diasporic, postcolonial perspective" as a
way to "take a fresh look at canonical authors and texts" (p. 244).

The "orientalisms" of the title is apt. Kontje tracks through his texts a range
of references to the Orient, a term that often changes its geographical position
and alters its symbolic meaning. "[T]he 'Orient' was not a stable category,
either in terms of its geographical location or in terms of its symbolic
significance" (pp. 147-148), Kontje writes with reference to the early twentieth
century but with a characterization of the "complex and contradictory role" (p.
148) played by references to the "East" that also fits his description of
earlier periods. His many orientalisms reference the complex articulations of
national culture that the texts exhibit. The question of what Germany was is
often answered in relation to what it was not. Kontje's chosen texts, from
Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival (1200-1210) to Botho Strauss's The Young Man
(1984), work through comparison. Germany is defined in relation to its "orients"
and with the "world powers" of France and Britain, and later the United States,
with which it sees itself in competition. Johann Gottfried Herder's Another
Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind (1774) with its romantic view
of India and baleful look at France is a case in point.

Kontje relies on close readings, and through this method he teases out a panoply
of representations of the Orient. References to the "East" change and multiply
across texts but also within single works. Kontje shows two different
orientalisms at work in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's West-Eastern Divan
(1819)--the one a cosmopolitan conduit to multicultural understanding, the other
a national chauvinism invested in German cultural superiority. In Thomas Mann's
The Magic Mountain there are four Oriental geographies: "eastern Europe, the
Ottoman Empire ... the Far East, as well as ... the ancient myths of the
Mediterranean world" (p. 148). In a wonderful reading of Mann's Magic Mountain,
Kontje brings out instabilities of all sorts. Orients and Occidents multiply,
change places, and transform into one another. Clavdia Chauchat is revealed not
just a representative of the dangerous, feminized East--the familiar passionate
and diseased Orient of Mann's work--but also as an agent of a French imperialism
that aimed to subdue and plunder that East. Kontje reminds the reader that her
husband, a French citizen, lived in Daghestan, and worked presumably in the oil
industry (p. 154). Close and complicated readings of this sort reveal canonized
works of national literature as bristling with references to many worlds, most
of them imperial, many of them Oriental. We are reminded that Mann's rendering
of the landscape of Davos was anything but placid and homogenous.

Kontje's main focus is on the making of national literature, and his book takes
in many topics along the way, most notably an extended discussion of the
Bildungsroman. He raises important questions for the teaching of German
literature and for the curricula of German departments today. At times, however,
the range of topics can be bewildering, and this reviewer often wished for more
definition, context, and analysis. Themes such as the "feminized Orient" and
topics of sexual politics are treated carefully and imaginatively yet often only
in the specific textual contexts in which they arise. Topics, including
orientalism itself, receive descriptive treatments; as a result it becomes
difficult to know how to connect texts across periods. This is particularly true
for the middle section of the book, which moves rapidly from the early
nineteenth century to the period following World War I. Many of the seminal
figures of a more traditional study of orientalism--Schopenhauer, Gobineau,
Nietzsche, Wagner--are mentioned only in passing. In short, the connections
between literary text and historical context need to be more rigorously drawn.
Might a solution to this problem lie with Said's Orientalism itself? At this
juncture do we need more Said rather than less?

It has become fashionable to dismiss Said's work from explorations of
orientalism, to reject as too rigid his analysis of the power/knowledge nexus
that intellectually supported European imperialism in favor of seeing something
much more plural, fluid, and open. The certainties of Said's study are thus
undone; his Orientalism in the singular becomes the plural orientalisms of this
book's title. While this approach has its productive side--topics such as the
strongly religious character of German orientalism can be brought out that
didn't find a place in Said's secular study--it also yields analyses that can be
disconnected and apolitical. The intellectual authority exercised by orientalist
scholarship, its connections to the making of policy and the exercise of power
is lost to view. Orientalism in Kontje's work is at a far remove from Said. Here
it is a form of literary imagination, a "long history of Germany's literary
encounters with the East" (p. 227). The ideological work of literature, which
Said took seriously, is replaced by a narrative of cultural exchange. We get
textual drama rather than the construction of hegemony. While this brings out a
fascinating wealth of evidence on the complexities of German national culture,
the connections between literature, politics, and society, which Kontje wants to
draw, begin to blur. Moreover, the real bite of German orientalist narratives,
the points where such imaginings turned nasty, brutish, and powerful, is
blunted. This is particularly evident in the chapter on "Fascist Orientalism"
(chapter 3). It focuses on Thomas Mann and Botho Strauss, the first writing
before the heyday of "fascist orientalism," the second afterwards. The
imaginings of Germany's Aryan past, and the use made by Nazi writers of the
Romantic Orientalists of the early nineteenth century in assessing German racial
and cultural superiority left their tracks across popular literature, scholarly
activity, and government policies. It would have been important to have seen
more of this material. Here fruitful connections could have been drawn to the
literature on Germany's "Nearest East" in Eastern Europe (which Kontje discusses
in chapter 4), as imaginings of the "order" brought by German "settlement" and
the fear and loathing associated with "Asiatic hordes" from the "East" motivated
concrete plans for expansion and annexation during both world wars and provided
intellectual support for genocide in the latter conflict. Literature did do
heavy ideological work. While sympathetic to Kontje's opening up of the topic
and his emphasis on multiple and contradictory articulations, I wanted to see
more evidence of the lines of discursive continuity connecting the two centuries
and which tied literature to history, politics, and policy.

To be fair, the latter is not Kontje's aim. Rather he wishes to open up the
texts of German literature to raise new questions for their relevance today. He
wishes "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" (p. 244). As he continues, "[w]e 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" (p. 244). In this goal
the book succeeds admirably.

Notes

[1]. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978).

[2]. Nina Berman, Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne: Zum Bild des Orients
in der deutschsprachigen Kultur um 1900 (Stuttgart: M and P, 1997); Sheldon
Pollock, "Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj," in
Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed.
Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 76-133; Tuska Benes, "German Linguistic
Nationhood, 1806-1866: Philology, Cultural Translation and Historical Identity
in Preunification Germany" (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2001); Jonathan
M. Hess, "Johann David Michaelis and the Colonial Imaginary: Orientalism and the
Emergence of Racial Antisemitism in Eighteenth-Century Germany," Jewish Social
Studies 6, no. 2 (January 2000): pp. 56-101; James Pasto, "Islam's 'Strange
Secret Sharer': Orientalism, Judaism and the Jewish Question," Comparative
Studies of Society and History 40:3 (July 1998): pp. 437-474; Ivan Davidson
Kalmar and Derek Penslar, eds., Orientalism and the Jews (Cambridge: Brandeis
University Press, 2004); and the special issue of Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 2 (Fall 2004) on the topic of "German
Orientalism" guest-edited by this reviewer and with contributions by Nina
Berman, Tuska Benes, Susan R. Boettcher, Gottfried Hagen, and Eugene
Sensenig-Dabbous.

[3]. Russell Berman, Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German
Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998). In this context Kontje
also cites Susanne Zantop's Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family and Nation in
Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).



Citation: Jennifer Jenkins. "Review of Todd Kontje, German Orientalisms,"
H-German, H-Net Reviews, September, 2005. URL:
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=178931128702933.