German orientalisms / Todd Kontje.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kontje, Todd Curtis, 1954-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

German literature--History and criticism.

German literature.

Orientalism in literature.

Orientalism--Germany.

Orientalism.

Germany.

Physical Description:

x, 316 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2004]

Summary:

Todd Kontje's German Orientalisms offers a fresh examination of the role of the East in the German literary imagination, ranging from the Middle Ages to the present. In its wide historical sweep, this book offers important new insights into many of the most famous writers in the German language, from Goethe to Thomas Mann to Gunter Grass. Building on Edward Said's Orientalism -- which defined Orientalism as a form of Western knowledge directly linked to imperial power -- Kontje offers a more nuanced version as seen through the lens of German literature of the last thousand years. Said's focus was on British and French Orientalists -- two nations with colonial interests in the East. Germany was different in that it had no stake in the Orient. Far from diminishing an Orientalist perspective, however, the absence of a German empire in the East produced a peculiarly German brand of Orientalism, one in which German writers alternated between identification with the rest of Europe and allying themselves with parts of the East against the West. Above all, Kontje asks how German writers conceived of their place in "the land of the center" (das Land der Mitte) and how their literary works help to create the imagined community of the German nation.

Contents:

Introduction: The Location of German Literature 1

1. Crusaders, Infidels, and the Birth of a Nation 15

Wolfram's Parzival and the Making of Europe 15

Early Modern Nationalism and the Ottoman Empire 32

Baroque Orientalisms: Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus and Lohenstein's Arminius 39

2. Romantic Orientalism and the Absence of Empire 61

Herder's Historicism 64

Novalis: A Provincial Cosmopolitan 83

The Bildung of the German Nation 101

Linguistic Nationalism and the East 105

Inventing Germanistik and Making Wolfram German 111

Goethe's Orientalism: Between Essence and Irony 118

3. Fascist Orientalism and Its Discontents 133

Mann, Baeumler, and Bachofen: The Dark Side of Romanticism 133

Tiptoeing toward Democracy: Mann's Sexual Politics 138

Symbolic Geographies on the Magic Mountain 146

Botho Strauss: Apocalypse Now 162

4. The Nearest East 177

Germany's Eastern Frontier 177

Teutonic Knights, Prussian Patriots, Nazi Ideologues 181

Eichendorff's Christian Soldiers 188

At Home on the Border: Heimat, Nation, and Empire in Freytag's Poetic Realism 196

Gunter Grass and the Literature of Migration 209

Conclusion: Toward a "Bastard" Literature? 225

Ozdamar's Hybrid Heroines 228

Michael Roes's Postmodern Orientalism 231

Coda: Literature in an Age of Cultural Studies 237.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 245-304) and index.

ISBN:

0472113925

OCLC:

53441429