Imperial Messages: Orientalism as Self-Critique in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle (review)

With this book Robert Lemon delivers a valuable contribution to the topic of orientalism in German-language literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lemon’s work fills a gap in current scholarship, which for the most part has been lacking any focused treatment of orientalism in the context of Austro-Hungarian literature. Within this specific context, Lemon argues for orientalism’s special role as a means for writers such as Hofmannsthal, Musil, and Kafka to reflect critically on the purported cultural hegemony of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Lemon finds these authors repeatedly questioning “the basic viability of imperialism and [challenging] received notions of national identity” (15).

In his introduction, Lemon draws attention to the lack of adequate treatment of Austro-Hungarian writers in existing orientalism scholarship. These writers, he says, have so far been mostly subsumed under the same historical and political context as German writers, with no attention paid to the very different historical situation of the Hapsburg Empire at the end of the nineteenth century. In regard to the issue of colonialism, Lemon distinguishes the Hapsburg Empire from other colonial powers because its colonial policies were mostly a matter of domestic policy, and the annexed territories, such as Bohemia, Silesia, and Moravia, were not distant territories but formed a geographical unit with the rest of the empire.

In the following four chapters, Lemon analyzes selected works by Hofmannsthal and Musil, and devotes two chapters to Franz Kafka, an author on whose work he has already published several articles. He repeatedly draws attention to the writers’ subversive use of ethnic, and specifically oriental stereotypes, which are shown not to work as liminal markers, but to completely confound the protagonists’ sense of self and other. Oriental tropes are revealed not only as hollow and “repositories of Western fantasy rather than Eastern reality” (47), but in the end as undermining the notion of Western cultural identity itself. In his first chapter, Lemon focuses on Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Das Märchen der 672. Nacht” (1895) and his poem “Der Kaiser von China spricht” (1897), which he discusses in terms of the subject-object dichotomy and its ambivalent use of oriental stereotypes. He sees Hofmannsthal continually subverting and destabilizing accepted notions of ethnic and social identity, drawing in the course of his argument on the theories of Homi Bhaba and Ernst Mach. The second chapter focuses on Robert Musil’s Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (1906), a work that is rarely read in the context of orientalism. Lemon reads Törleß’s notion of the Moravian environment, in which his boarding school is located, from a colonial viewpoint—one, however, that reveals the protagonist’s personal and cultural insecurities.

The last two chapters focus on works by Kafka, such as “In der Strafkolonie” and “Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer.” In the first narrative Lemon analyzes issues of ethnocentrism, problematizing the external, sovereign position inhabited in the story by the narrator, who is confronted with abhorrent practices in the colonized territory. Lemon sees Kafka repeatedly thematizing the futility of the colonizer’s attempts at viewing the colonized with any degree of objectivity, thereby diagnosing the ultimate failure of Enlightenment principles such as impartiality, tolerance, and egalitarianism. In the last chapter Lemon uses some of Kafka’s China-narratives, such as “Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer” and “Ein altes Blatt” to question the notion of national identity and the relationship between the state and the individual as exemplified by “Eine kaiserliche Botschaft,” which is part of “Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer.” In his conclusion Lemon provides an outlook on other German literature by offering a brief comparison with the portrayal of the Chinese ghost in Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest, and by following the orientalist depictions to later Austrian works such as Hermann Broch’s Pasenow oder die Romantik (1930). In regard to the latter, Lemon sees the tendency of...