Self-Othering in German Orientalism: The Case of Friedrich Schlegel

In the 1960s and ’70s, a number of scholars began to pay careful attention to German cultural constructions of the “Orient” in the literary and philosophical works from the Baroque period to Romanticism.¹ However, with the publication of Orientalism (1978), Edward Said’s analytical framework became, for good or ill, the dominant scholarly paradigm. In the wake of the appearance of Said’s volume, a decade or more passed before the scholarship on popular or academic Orientalism in Germany attempted to move beyond what Said had intitially said on the subject. (As we shall see, Said himself had little else to say on the topic in the years following the first appearance of Orientalism.) The purpose of this essay is to consider the exceptionalism of German Orientalism, one that employs imagery of the Orient for very different purposes than the French and British variants. The central question under consideration regards the utility of this imagery in the tradition of German Orientalism. The construction of the idea of the Orient in German thought and literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, I argue, did not allow German thinkers to identify with the dominant powers of western Europe, but rather with the Oriental Other. In other words, they were engaged in a process of self-Othering.

I do not wish to suggest that the German identification with the Asian Other had any real substance beyond the “imaginative geography” (to use a Saidian phrase), or that it was necessarily less nefarious than the images of the Orient constructed by their French and British counterparts. One hesitates to describe German Orientalism as being “special” in light of the imposing tradition of arguments over the Sonderweg thesis (though, obviously, the choice of this adjective is not unintentional). While I contend that German Orientalism was, in a significant way, “special,” it would be going too far to say that it was entirely unique. New light might be shed on a different variant of Orientalism by comparing the German phenomenon with Irish Orientalism, as described by Joseph Lennon: “[t]o study Irish writings on the Orient . . . is also to study Irish cultural narratives of antiquity, Celticism, and nation” (xvii, xviii). In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, at least, the same could be said of German intellectuals and their writings on India—Celticism being easily replaced with “Germanness”—and for similar, though obviously far from identical, reasons.

Before proceeding any further, it is perhaps best to provide an explanation of what is intended here by the term “self-Othering.” As we shall see, numerous German thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought to establish a German national identity that they envisioned as “oriental,” in contrast to classical or “occidental.” The image of the Orient with which they identified was, of course, one of their own making. To argue that these German thinkers identified with the oriental victims of western imperialism is not to argue that they were, in reality, such victims. Nor is it to argue that this identification came as a result of any genuine engagement with or understanding of the “Other” with whom they sought to identify. Self-Othering, as it is described below, was a curious rhetorical strategy which involved two distinct forms or acts of Othering—imaginative constructions of the oriental Other with whom one could identify and the western imperial Other, against whom one was seeking to construct an identity.² Both the Indian and western European Others could be made to serve as the ideal mirrors for thinkers who wished to see themselves, and their country, at twice their natural size.

As a rhetorical strategy, self-Othering has some noteworthy historical precedents in Michel de Montaigne’s essay “On Cannibals” and Bartolemé de Las Casas’s Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, both composed in the sixteenth century. Montaigne was writing in reaction to the devastation of the Wars of Religion in France, while Las Casas was issuing his condemnation of the inhumanity of Spanish imperialism. Both authors, however, were taking advantage of the blank canvas...