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ORIENTALISM AS KULTURPOLITIK German Archeology and Cultural Imperialism in Asia Minor SUZANNE MARCHAND Despite his deft evisceration of the constitution promulgated at the time ofhis accession in 1876, Sultan Abdul Hamid II was not destined to enjoy his autocratic reign in peace. In the 1870s and 1880s, a series of humiliating financial and diplomatic setbacks debilitated the Ottoman ruler, who had hoped to centralize and consolidate his power. A breach in Franco-Ottoman relations was followed by a disastrous war with Russia in 1877, the economically paralyzing creation of a European-led committee to administer the Ottoman public debt in 1881, and the humbling extension of British colonial control in Egypt in 1882. Increasingly under attack from nationalist groups on the Ottoman peripheries , by 1890 Abdul Hamid faced the doubly disagreeable prospect of external dismemberment and internal disintegration. The new Sultan, not surprisingly, listened eagerly to overtures from the newly founded German empire, the one great power without any obvious interest in the wholesale or partial dismemberment of the Ottoman state. In 1883 General Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz led a military mission to Turkey, and began to reorganize the Ottoman officer corps on German lines; in 1888, two prominent German bankers were awarded the concession to build a railway from Ankara to Constantinople, with a view to extending the line to Baghdad. In 1889, Kaiser Wilhelm II made his first visit to the Ottoman capiSuzanne Marchand is assistant professor of European Intellectual History at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1992. Her book Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany , 1750- 1970, will be published this year (1996) by Princeton University Press. 298 ORIENTALISM AS KULTURPOLITIK 299 tal, and in the following year the two imperial powers signed a mutually beneficial trade agreement, multiplying German entrepreneurial contact with the southeast and giving new currency to mid-century fantasies about Germany's destiny in Mitteleuropa (Schollgen 1984; Trumpener 1968). This seeming abandonment of German neutrality in the East took place against the fervent opposition of Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who hoped to play Austrian, Russian, and British interests off against one another without entangling the Reich in Ottoman affairs. Even after the chancellor's departure from office in 1890, the Foreign Ministry retained the Bismarckian conviction that Germany should preserve its posture as neutral spectator in Asia Minor, and this despite increased German investment in Asia Minor, the new Kaiser's sympathy for his Turkish counterparts, and the pro-colonialist agitation of pan-Germans. Even with the further strengthening of GermanTurkish economic and diplomatic ties after 1898, the Foreign Ministry was careful to preserve the fiction of equal partnership, and to cloak colonial ambitions in high-minded rhetoric about German's civilizing mission abroadeven as it exploited raw materials and developed markets for German goods inside the Ottoman state. Disinterestedness, or at least the illusion ofdisinterestedness , was believed to be in the state's best interest. An oft-voiced motive underpinning German intervention in Asia was the notion that Germany had been entrusted with a special mission to bring Kultur to the unenlightened Turks. The intellectual counterpart of the economic modernizing mission of the Bagdadbahn (the train line to Bagdad), German cultural activity in the East aimed at the creation of a spiritual bond between the two nations as well as the cultivation of a consumer market for German products (Schollgen 1981: 142-44). This idea was neither new nor specifically German; since the Reformation, Protestant and Catholic missionaries had ventured forth to teach their faiths and German language to heathens the world over, and the French and the British, of course, had long since shouldered their own variants of the "white man's burden." But the Germans, as usual, were late in taking up as a national pursuit what had been the preserve of local or confessional groups-so late, in fact, that the state bureaucracy felt obliged to intervene in order to speed and streamline the construction of German-Turkish "friendships." Germany's "penetration pacifique" (Schollgen 1984: xiv) required state management; even cultural philanthropy, at this stage of imperialist hostilities, was too important to be left to ~ivate groups and amateur activists. Scholars, however, did have a role to play. The later nineteenth-century German scientific community had studiously cultivated a disinterested, antiutilitarian reputation, and this aura of apolitical neutrality ideally suited it for launching the practice that was later termed Kulturpolitik. The fundamental assumption of this practice was...

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