Taming Foreign Speech: Language Politics in Shadow Plays around 1800

This article examines three German (shadow) puppet plays from the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic period—Achim von Arnim's Das Loch, oder: das wiedergefundene Paradies, Christian Brentano's Der unglückliche Franzose oder der Deutschen Freiheit Himmelfahrt and Ludwig Tieck's Hanswurst als Emigrant—through the lens of an aesthetic dissemination theory posited by Georg Jacob, the German founder of Turkology. While Jacob stressed the structural analogies between Turkish and German shadow plays, this article examines whether such a comparison is fruitful, and explores its limits in the face of the emergence of German nationalism.