Shen, Qinna

English

Scholarship;  Research;  and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr College
Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr
College
German Faculty Research and Scholarship German
2015
Book Review: Deploying Orientalism in Culture
and History: From Germany to Central and
Eastern Europe. Edited by James Hodkinson and
John Walker
Qinna Shen
Bryn Mawr College, qshen@brynmawr.edu
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Shen, Qinna 2015. Book Review: Deploying Orientalism in Culture and History: From Germany to Central and Eastern Europe.
Edited by James Hodkinson and John Walker. German Studies Review 38.2: 409-11.
 Reviews 409
Deploying Orientalism in Culture and History: From Germany to Central and 
Eastern Europe. Edited by James Hodkinson and John Walker with Shaswati 
Mazumdar and Johannes Feichtinger. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013. 
Pp. viii + 259. Cloth $90.00. ISBN 978-1571135759.
This well-edited volume is the first publication of the International Occident-Orient 
Research Network, established in 2008 by Anil Bhatti and James Hodkinson. The book 
contributes in significant ways to diversifying the orientalist discourses by covering 
German, Austrian, and, for the first time, Eastern European orientalisms. Edward 
Said’s authoritative study of colonial orientalism is used critically as a reference point. 
On the one hand, Germanophone, Hungarian, Czech, and Russian orientalisms since 
the 1750s often reinforce Said’s Foucauldian analysis, which criticizes the complicity 
of oriental studies in supplying useful “knowledge” to legitimize colonial “power.” On 
the other hand, the contributors present a variety of orientalisms that enrich and 
complicate previous debates around orientalism. The chapters no longer take British 
orientalism as the “standard orientalism” (192), rather as just one variation. Similar to 
Andrea Polaschegg’s Der andere Orientalismus (2005), this book attempts to develop 
a pluralistic “post-Saidian concept of orientalism” (192).
Germanophone orientalist discourses provide the focus of eight of the twelve 
chapters. The introduction by James Hodkinson and John Walker gives an excellent 
overview of existing scholarship on German orientalism by Susanna Zantop, Russell 
Berman, Nina Berman, Todd Kontje, Andrea Polaschegg, Suzanne Marchand, and 
Sarah Colvin. The chapters complement and expand upon these studies and also 
to some degree support Said’s claim of German orientalism’s “philological orienta-
tion” (193). John Walker examines Wilhelm von Humboldt’s comparative study of 
language and his influence on Jürgen Habermas’s idea of translation as the key to 
intercultural communication. The suggestion of cultural interdependency challenges 
Said’s paradigm of orientalism as invested in a dichotomy between the European 
and the non-European, the civilized and the barbaric. Michael Dusche focuses on 
Friedrich Schlegel’s romantic and nationalist engagement with Sanskrit and his 
“internal orientalism” that reimagines Germany as the “true” oriental self of Europe. 
This “positive” or “reverse” orientalism (42) differs from traditional orientalism with 
its negative connotations of the East as passive, mysterious, degenerate, exotic, and 
barbaric. Schlegel’s real intention, however, lies in praising Germanic supremacy 
over the French. Using a similar methodology as in his book German Orientalisms 
(2004), Todd Kontje critically deals with Germany’s “local orientalism” by consider-
ing the history of the Teutonic Knights and Germany’s Jews, and by interpreting 
the use of orientalist motifs in Fatih Akin, Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Goethe. This 
intra-European orientalism undermines fixed boundaries of the Occident and Orient.
410 German Studies Review 38 /2 • 2015
The works discussed in Deploying Orientalism in Culture and History often 
inevitably resort to orientalist stereotypes and Eurocentric rhetoric, yet the contribu-
tors point out an ambivalence that characterizes many of the writings. James Hodkin-
son uses Germanophone travelogues on the Maghreb from the 1840s by an Alsatian 
pastor and an Austrian military conscript in the French army as examples to show 
how these writers both resisted and perpetuated orientalist tropes. Their dependence 
on as well as resentment toward the French colonial government determined their 
ambiguous roles in the colony and their perception of Muslim Algerians. Shaswati 
Mazumdar examines the portrayals of three representative oriental figures—the Jew, 
the Turk, and the Indian—by primarily looking at German-language press reactions 
to three historical events: the antisemitic Damascus Affair in 1840, the Crimean 
War between Russians and the Ottoman Empire (1853–1856), and the anticolonial 
Revolt of 1857 in India. The press gave space to competing voices about the Orient 
and orientals, clearly demonstrating conflicting interests among imperial powers and 
within their respective societies.
Chapters six and seven again portray a more positive orientalism. Jon Keune brings 
to awareness an eighteenth-century “disenchanted” (entzaubert) orientalism that Mat-
thias Christian Sprengel’s political, historiographical, and empirical writings on India 
embody. This chapter strongly attests to the limitations of Said’s orientalist theory 
by presenting “an alternative form of orientalism” (118) to the nineteenth century’s 
more ideological, utilitarian, and imaginary approach. Similar to Sprengel, Willy 
Haas’s Indian exile narratives, as discussed by Jyoti Sabharwal, transcend orientalist 
jargon due to Haas’s personal experience. A Prague-born Germanophone of Jewish 
origin, who fled Nazi persecution to British-occupied India, Haas showed allegiance 
both to Gandhi’s anti-British struggle for independence and to the colonial British 
government for its role in opposing fascism. Duality is also evinced in his work as a 
scriptwriter for the Bombay cinema: He created a hybrid aesthetic that synthesizes 
the Weimar tradition with the visual codes of Indian cinema, with which he had 
recently become acquainted.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire, as examined by Johann Heiss and Johannes 
Feichtinger, adds two more variants of orientalism: the “distant” Orient (referring to 
the Ottoman Empire and the Turks) and the Orient that is “close to home” (referring 
to Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Southern Slavic peoples). The binary oppositions 
resemble Said’s concepts of an “imperial divide” and “shared experiences.” The 
ambiguous Habsburg form of orientalism that sees the Orient “as both a threat and 
as an opportunity” (159) is deployed by the Habsburg authorities to legitimize the 
monarchy’s self-proclaimed civilizing mission. 
Chapters nine to eleven move eastward to Hungarian, Russian, and Czech oriental-
isms. The geographical proximity of these regions to the traditional Orient determines 
the perception of Eastern European identity as “both oriental and Western” (166). The 
 Reviews 411
chapters repeatedly evoke a sense of hybrid, “non-Western,” and “semi-European” 
in-betweenness of Eastern Europe (210). Margit Köves explores the evolving role the 
Orient plays in the vicissitudes of Hungarian history over the last two hundred years. 
Kerstin S. Jobst discovers authors in the Russian Empire who, prior to Said, already 
tackled Russian orientalism in a Saidian manner and whose work pointed beyond 
Said. Jobst traces reasons for Said’s false claim of a relative absence of orientalist 
thinking in the Russian Empire to his biography and political convictions. Sarah Lem-
men proposes a different Czech orientalism that is “noncolonial” because the Czech 
tourists in Africa and Asia distanced themselves from colonial European societies 
around 1918. Although they orientalized their destinations and underscored their 
own European identities, their travelogues demonstrate a “third way in an otherwise 
dichotomous world” (220). Ulrike Stamm’s discussion of functions that the stereotypi-
cally sensual Orient had for French and Germanophone traveler-cum-writers, male 
or female, concludes the book. Differences aside, the depiction of oriental sexuality 
is clichéd and favors European sexual norms.
The distillation of various orientalisms here is intended to distinguish this book 
from others. It is a rewarding reading experience for anyone interested in orientalism, 
postcolonial studies, travel writing, Central and Eastern European Studies, Indology, 
and Asian German Studies.
Qinna Shen, Miami University
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: His Life, Works, and Thought. By H. B. Nisbet. Oxford: 
Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 734. Cloth £85.00. ISBN 978-0199679478.
H.B. Nisbet’s monumental biography of G.E. Lessing—one of the most influential fig-
ures of the German and indeed of the European Enlightenment—has finally appeared 
in print for English-speaking audiences. This impressive monograph first became 
available in 2008 as a German translation by Karl S. Guthke. As the culmination of 
a lifetime of erudition, the book found immediate acclaim, winning the University 
of Münster’s Hamann Research Prize and the Einhard Prize for Biography. Nisbet 
has filled a long-standing gap in research with respect to a comprehensive study of 
Lessing’s life and work, and the sheer scale, breadth, and depth of his study are unpar-
alleled in the entire pantheon of Lessing scholarship. The original manuscript has 
been reworked to reflect even the most recent developments in Lessing scholarship, 
which includes numerous references to the third edition of Monika Fick’s excellent 
Lessing-Handbuch (2010) throughout.
Nisbet’s prosopography (his prolixity consistently sends even the most learned 
reader happily scurrying to their OED) begins by connecting Lessing’s familial situa-
tion with his earliest poetic and dramatic efforts, where both the author and his works 


Book Review: Deploying Orientalism in Culture and History: From Germany to Central and Eastern Europe. Edited by James Hodkinson and John Walker

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