Moving the Divan Beyond Orientalism: Rafik Schami's Instrumentalization of Goethe

Abstract

Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) has in recent years become as controversial among Germanists for its general exculpation of Germany from the practice named in the title as it was in the immediate years following its publication among scholars of French and English culture for its attribution of academic imperialism to many of these countries' leading men of letters. Scholars such as Andrea FuchsSumiyoshi, Nina Berman, and Susanne Zantop have disputed Said's assumption that Orientalism as a form of colonialist discourse was far more muted in Germany than in France and England during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries because of Germany's relatively indifferent imperial ambitions in the East, as well as its general lack of participation in nationally driven colonialism prior to unification in 1871. To cite one example: in her introduction to Colonial Fantasies, Zantop indicates that her book's basic premise contradicts Said's view: contrast to Said, who has argued that the lack of colonies made colonialist discourse more abstract, scholarly, and by implication, less powerful, I propose that it was the lack of colonialism that created a pervasive desire for colonial possessions and a sense of entitlement to such possessions in the minds of many Germans (7). Zantop and others take issue with Said's position in Orientalism that the German Orient was merely scholarly or classical – never actual as it was for French and English scholars and/or imaginative writers – because there was nothing in Germany to correspond to the Anglo-French presence in India, the Levant, North Africa (19). In making this assertion, Said singles out two authors and their respective works as exemplars of scholarly Orientalism: Friedrich Schlegel with his Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder (1808) and Goethe's West-ostlicher Divan (1819). While these works draw on writing stemming from imperial France and Great Britain, Said finds it significant that they came into being, respectively, as a result of Schlegel's forays into Parisian libraries and of a Rhine journey undertaken by Goethe (19). Indeed, the West-ostlicher Divan serves as Said's foremost poetic example of Germany's supposed penchant for engaging in a purely imaginative, even dialogic,