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THE LOST WORLDS OF GERMAN ORIENTALISM
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 November 2012
Extract
The opening lines of Franz Delitzsch's Babel und Bibel (1902, 195) offer an unusually frank confession of the personal and psychological motives that animated German orientalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For Delitzsch and countless others like him, orientalist scholarship provided an opportunity not just to expand their knowledge of the Near East and India, but also to explore the world of the Bible and, in doing so, effect a reckoning with the religious beliefs of their childhoods. In German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, Suzanne Marchand opens up this scholarly world, exploring the criss-crossing forces and interests that shaped it, while effecting her own reckoning with orientalism as a historical and historiographical phenomenon.
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References
1 Edward, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 18Google Scholar.
2 Ibid., 19.
3 The closest competitors to Marchand's new study are Sabine Mangold, Eine weltbürgerliche Wissenschaft: Die deutsche Orientalistik im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 2004), and Ursula Wokoeck, German Orientalism: The Study of the Middle East and Islam from 1800 to 1945 (London and New York, 2009). Both studies, however, focus primarily on the history of orientalism (specifically the study of the Middle East) as a university discipline, while paying relatively less attention to orientalism as a broader cultural and scholarly practice that took place both within and outside the universities.
4 Marchand, Suzanne L., Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, 1996)Google Scholar.
5 Edward Said was certainly aware of the theological undercurrents of orientalist scholarship, but he viewed them as constituting a “substitute” or “secularized” religion rather than theology per se. On this, Orientalism, 113–23.
6 Cf. Stark, Gary D., Entrepreneurs of Ideology: Neo-Conservative Publishers in Germany, 1890–1933 (Chapel Hill, 1981)Google Scholar.
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12 It is true that Said presents other, less functionalist accounts of the relationship between orientalism and colonialism, both in his later works and in Orientalism itself, but the interpretation described here is the one that dominates the opening chapters of Orientalism.
13 A striking aspect of the history of German Orientalism is the repeated appearance of certain tropes of interpretation, including both those derived from philosophia perennis and those associated with the “Aryan myth,” that seemed to flourish especially on the margins of the academy and without significant reference to shifts in the empirical record. This would seem to be the case because they drew their strength from long-standing cultural, religious, or political ambitions and resentments rather than the internal dynamics of scholarship or the predilections of particular individuals.