Encounters with Islam in German Literature and Culture (review)

Scholars interested in German-language discourses concerning the Islamic world have been generally critical of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and its lack of attention to this field. Todd Kontje’s German Orientalisms (2004) engaged in direct debate with Said’s study and offered a more conceptually nuanced study of German literature and its engagement with the Orient, from the Middle Ages to the present. By considering representations of Islam both through an Orientalist lens and on their own discursive terms, Kontje presented a diversity of specifically German “Orientalisms” that performed different functions at different points of historical time. The fourteen essays included in Encounters with Islam in German Literature and Culture—presented at the “German Encounters with Islam” conference at the University of Ireland (2007)—add to this debate by examining new texts as well as revisiting canonical ones.

Essays by Timothy R. Jackson and Cyril Edwards use the lens of identity politics to study, respectively, the medieval representation of heathens and the religious differences in the main figures in Eschenbach’s Parzival. Early modern scholars will be interested by Silke Faulkner’s contribution, who examines images of the Turk as either sexual deviant or liar in the turcica, i.e., materials printed from the late fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth; the essay by Daniel Wilson, who looks at the biological racism in the writings of Christoph Meiners (1747–1810); and Yomb May’s contribution, which revisits Goethe’s West-Östlicher Divan. James Hodkinson examines Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Der christliche Glaube (1821/1822), Friedrich Schlegel’s Philosophie der Geschichte (1829) and Philosophie des Lebens (1827), Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1801), and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Das Sanctus” (1819), while Jeff Morrison studies the travel writings of Johann Hermann von Riedesel (1740–1785) and Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (1784–1817).

Rachel MagShamhráin’s exploration of nineteenth-century German anti-Armenian propaganda in light of relations between Wilhelmine Germany and the Ottoman Empire was extremely fascinating. Her inquiry into the contradictory foreign policy of Christian Germany in alliance with Muslim Turkey against Christian Armenians posits an East-to-West Orientalism over and against the West-to-East Orientalism theorized by Said. Other essays by Kate Roy, Edwin Wieringa, and Frauke Matthes focus respectively on memoirs by Emily Ruete, Michaela Mihriban Özelsel, and Ilija Trojanow. Finally, contributions by Margaret Littler, Karin E. Yeşilada, and Monika Shafi look at the works of Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Zafer Şenocak, and Feridun Zaimoğlu, as well as recent writings such as Christoph Peters’s novel Ein Zimmer im Haus des Krieges (2006), a fictional story about a German convert to Islamist terrorism; Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s 2006 essay “Schreckens Männer: Versuch über den radikalen Verlierer,” which examines “radical losers” of Muslim background and their strong attraction to Islam; and Ian Buruma’s 2006 reportage Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance.

This intellectually stimulating collection of essays is introduced by the editors James Hodkinson and Jeff Morrison in a strong preface that initiates the reader into the various studies of Islam in German-language texts, as well as to the theoretical frameworks used to interpret this same literature. Beginning with an in-depth examination of Said’s Orientalism and Kontje’s German Orientalisms, Hodkinson’s and Morrison’s introduction summarizes the critical questions raised by the authors represented in the current collection. In short, this book is an excellent appraisal of the current state of research on representations of Islam in German-language literature.