Humanität und Kreuzzugsideologie um 1780: Die "Türkenoper" im 18. Jahrhundert und das Rettungsmotiv in Wielands 'Oberon,' Lessings 'Nathan' und Goethes 'Iphigenie' (review)

346 Book Reviews 'Sympathie' und vom Aberglauben der Figuren, freilich ohne diese Ansichten ausdrücklich abzulehnen (212). As I hope to have shown, Adler's study is uncommonly important. Future research on Die Wahlverwandtschaften — and not just that work — must take it into account. University of South Carolina James Hardin Wilson, W. Daniel, Humanität und Kreuzzugsideologie um 1780: Die "Türkenoper" im 18. Jahrhundert und das Rettungsmotiv in Wielands Oberon,' Lessings 'Nathan' und Goethes 'lphigenie.' New York, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, Nancy: Peter Lang, 1984 (Canadian Studies in German Language and Literature, Volume 30). A decade ago, the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism stirred much debate about the imperialistic heritage that has historically distorted Western views, popular and scholarly, of Eastern civilizations. Thinking mostly of the post-Napoleonic West, Said defined "Orientalism" as nothing less than "a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient."1 It is curious that he all but ignored one of the most popular of all Western "images of the Other" — operas and similar works for the musicai stage dealing with the fortunes of a set of Westerners somehow thrust into an Oriental milieu. Such works attained unusual prominence in Europe during the eighteenth century, culminating in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Vienna, 1782). In a study at least partly informed by Said's thought, W. Daniel Wilson has not only brought these operas out of the wings, but set them (or rather the plot archetype they use) center-stage along with three of the greatest landmarks in the efflorescence of German letters around 1780. His argument is a daring one and, taken literally, not easy to defend, at least to the extent that he urges direct influence of "Turkish" opera on Oberon, Nathan der Weise, and lphigenie aufTauris. On the other hand, as Wilson himself proves, the mentality that spawned these operas and the diverse literary and intellectual culture from which they drew their themes is indeed relevant and fruitful for a new reading of these works. Goethe's play, in particular, yields in his analysis a layer of cultural relativism that has been mostly ignored in favor of awed admiration of its Classical timelessness. Wilson's preliminary chapter, "Die Türkenoper und das Bild des Islam," reveals the militantly modern ideological stance maintained throughout the book. But it also prudently replaces Said's one-dimensional imperialistic model of Western thought with a viewpoint more appropriate to the eighteenth century. Wilson stresses the essential ambivalence toward Islam of a century that saw the twilight of the practical military threat posed by the Ottoman Empire, but also retained a Goethe Yearbook 347 much older psychological legacy from the West's earliest contact with the East. Admiration for one of the world's great religions and for remarkable cultural attainments in the Islamic world jostled in eighteenth-century Christian minds with fears from the distant past engendered on the one hand by military history and on the other by the two features regarded as paradigmatic for Muhammadanism — sexual license and the use of unrestrained force as a means of propagating the faith. At times Wilson's generalizations become excessive in propounding his point of view — for example, that the basic scheme of abduction operas can be understood as a miscarried Crusade (33-34), or that one can regard Orestes and Pylades in exactly the same way (91). On the other hand, the theme of Western hypocrisy seems so strong in nearly all the works discussed that it merits even greater emphasis than he gives it. The concept is firmly rooted in the "Crusade mentality" Wilson so sharply delineates. Critical works on "Turkish" operas of the eighteenth century have not taken Wilson's theme very seriously. Most analyses of these works accept the Oriental setting as a pretext for criticizing Western cultural failings, rather than as an embodiment of the West's apprehension of the East. It is both refreshing and rare to read an interpretation of them based on a broad and well-developed intercultural perspective. According to Wilson, Western stereotypes underly the two Turkish figures in Die Entführung aus dem Serail: Etwas vereinfacht gesehen, sind die...