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

O Printed on acid-free paper

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

4

2

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 t