Imperial Messages: Orientalism as Self-Critique in the Habsburg Fin de Sieçle by Robert Lemon (review)

An adage warns us not to judge a book by its cover, but it is difficult to ignore the appealing cover of Imperial Messages by Robert Lemon. On the front of this small, handsome hardback with the intriguing subtitle Orientalism as Self-Critique in the Habsburg Fin de Sieçle, there sits musing an opulently dressed scholar, one hand resting lightly on his temple and the other languidly holding a book at his side. Gazing forward in thought, he is leaning comfortably on the pillows of a divan in an exotically furnished Middle Eastern room. The picture reproduces “The Scholar” by Ludwig Deutsch, created, appropriately enough, in 1901.

In that phrase “orientalism as self-critique,” The book’s ambitious subtitle promises an important theoretical contribution to the debates on Orientalism of recent decades—and the book certainly delivers. However, the small number of representatives of the culture and literature of “the Habsburg Fin de Sieçle,” an era here delineated as 1890–1919, is somewhat disappointing. Texts chosen include a poem and a tale by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a novella by Robert Musil, and five stories by Franz Kafka. This last name, subject of two of the short book’s four chapters, might surprise some readers at first. Because of his stature as a world author often considered too great to pigeonhole and his residence in Prague rather than Vienna, many readers do not usually associate Kafka with the Austrian/Habsburg/Viennese cultural blossoming of the turn of the twentieth century. However, by emphasizing Kafka’s Austro-Hungarian identity and the importance of empire, specifically the Habsburg Empire, in several important stories, Lemon sheds new light on Kafka and his relationship to Orientalism.

Lemon begins with Edward Said’s groundbreaking 1978 book Orientalism, writing that

Said at once defines and denounces orientalism as a hegemonic discourse, “a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient.” As the ideological cohort to occidental imperialism, orientalism as described by Said appears to be exclusively concerned with European self-aggrandizement rather than self-critique, invariably casting the Orient as the feeble Other dominated by the mighty West. However, in recent years, some postcolonial critics have argued against such a monolithic interpretation.

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Lemon notes that Said’s book did not even mention Austria-Hungary, a diverse, multinational empire but not a colonial power in the usual sense. The Habsburg Empire lacked overseas colonies, extended equal rights to all citizens, and had ruled many of its “subject” peoples and territories for centuries. Also unique to the Habsburg context is the fact that the East, sometimes viewed as “exotic,” “other,” or even “Oriental,” often refers not only to Asia and the Middle East but to Eastern Europe. Lemon asserts:

At the turn of the century many Viennese German-speakers held that the Orient began not at the border with the Ottoman Empire, but rather at the doors of their Slavic, Jewish, and (following the annexation of Bosnia-Herzogovinia in 1908) Muslim compatriots. To unite these increasingly restive minorities, Austria-Hungary offered the Habsburg myth.

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Franz Kafk a belongs to both worlds, of course, as a German-speaker and Habsburg government official (but not a Viennese), a Jew and citizen of the “Eastern” Czech realm. However, the primary focus of this study is rightly on Orientalism and self in fiction, not biography. Musil, not Kafk a, chooses an East European land, Moravia, as the exotic other; Kafka focuses on imagined Asian and Arabian settings.

In “Das Märchen der 672. Nacht” and “Der Kaiser von China spricht,” Lemon argues that “Hofmannsthal undermines the basic East/West dichotomy underlying traditional orientalism by endowing the supposedly Arabian protagonist of his tale with the sensibility and attitudes of a Viennese aesthete and by using the figure of the Chinese Emperor to allude to his Austrian counterpart, Franz Josef” (9). The chapter on Robert Musil’s well-known novella...