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  • "Die Entzauberung des Ostens": Zur Wahrnehmung und Darstellung des Orients bei Hermann Hesse, Armin T. Wegner und Annemarie Schwarzenbach by Behrang Samsami
  • Kamaal Haque
"Die Entzauberung des Ostens": Zur Wahrnehmung und Darstellung des Orients bei Hermann Hesse, Armin T. Wegner und Annemarie Schwarzenbach. By Behrang Samsami. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2012. Pp. 431. Paper €45.00. ISBN 978-3895287992.

Scholarly interest in works of German literature depicting what Germans speakers call "der Orient" has been growing for some time. Behrang Samsami's book "Die Entzauberung des Ostens": Zur Wahrnehmung und Darstellung des Orients bei Hermann Hesse, Armin T. Wegner und Annemarie Schwarzenbac adds to the growing secondary literature on this topic by focusing on three authors: Hermann Hesse, Armin T. Wegner and Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Samsami views these authors' encounters with the Middle and Far East as symptomatic of a flight from European modernity. As he argues, however, that which the authors find in the actual East is not what they expected.

Samsami begins his book with an overview of the history of European travel to the Middle and Far East, beginning with classical antiquity and continuing up to the time period during which Hesse, Wegner and Schwarzenbach traveled to the East. This history, covering sixty pages, is too long and not always on point to the topic at hand, including such subchapters as "Amerikanismus" and "Die Grand Tour" that, at best, only touch upon the topic of European travel to the East. Furthermore, such broad historic sweep in a lengthy introductory chapter is not needed when the focus in the following chapters is on three specific writers over the space of several decades. Readers wishing a more detailed history of European travel to the Middle and Far East would not turn to this book and those that read Samsami's work for insights on the three authors' works will not be interested in this excursus, either.

After this overview, Samsami turns to Hermann Hesse. Hesse is best known with respect to "der Orient" as the author of the 1922 novel Siddhartha. Samsami focuses, however, on lesser-known texts by Hesse relating to India: namely, the collection Aus Indien (1913), the eleven poems dealing with Eastern themes from the same [End Page 704] time period, and the novella Robert Aghion, written in 1912. Samsami's contention is that Hesse's own trip to the East confronted him with an unexpected reality: that the East was already heavily influenced by the presence of Western colonialism. As a result, Hesse's representation of the East eventually came not to resemble the reality he observed, but rather was transformed into an anesthetized and aestheticized "persönliche[s] Asiatentum" (73). This focus on a meaning beyond the reality of his observations led Hesse into the realm of Eastern mysticism which he later made famous in Siddhartha.

As Samsami notes, of the three main subjects of the book, Armin T. Wegner is the least known to readers today. Wegner, a first-hand witness to the Armenian genocide during World War I, is perhaps best known today as a chronicler of that genocide as author of such works as his 1919 Offener Brief an den Präsidenten der Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika, Woodrow Wilson, über die Austreibung des armenischen Volkes in die mesopotamische Wüste. Samsami's anlaysis is based around Wegner's Im Hause der Glückseligkeit (published 1920, but written, according to Wegner, in 1915-16) and Der Knabe Hussein (1921). This former book also provides the quote for the book's title. Writing of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, Wegner writes, "Denn ich glaube, dass die Entzauberung des Orients kommen muß, ich glaube an die Zukunst dieses neuen Amerika [sic]" (196). Samsami argues that Wegner saw this disenchantment of the East as a result, among other causes, of the modernization of war. As Samsami notes, Wegner's statements on the Middle East as contained in Im Hause der Glückseligkeit and Der Knabe Hussein are "ambivalent" (369).

The longest section of "Die Entzauberung des Orients" deals with Annemarie Schwarzenbach's life and works. Samsami chooses to only mention better-known works of Schwarzenbach's such as Tod in Persien and, instead, to analyze in detail...

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