Orienting the Self: The German Literary Encounter with the Eastern Other by Debra N. Prager

Abstract

Reviewed by: Orienting the Self: The German Literary Encounter with the Eastern Other by Debra N. Prager Lee M. Roberts Orienting the Self: The German Literary Encounter with the Eastern Other. By Debra N. Prager. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014. Pp. 338. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-1571135940. Linking representations of the East, broadly understood, in German literature from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century, this book examines various often fantastical images of the Orient familiar to so many Western audiences. Orienting the Self draws solidly from the scholarship on the various German Orientalisms, but it does so in ways that often challenge more generally accepted scholarly views on the topic. The result is an insightful analysis of canonical literature recognizable to most scholars in German studies, including Parzival, Fortunatus, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Effi Briest, and Der Zauberberg, that traces commonalities in the various depictions across the centuries but also pinpoints the slight changes in the discourse on the so-called East-West divide. The following presents a view of some of these aspects of this thoroughly absorbing piece of scholarship. In discussing Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, this book focuses on the relationship between the eponymous hero and the equally heroic, if not ultimately superior, warrior from the Orient, Feirefiz, who is not only Parzival’s half-brother from the same father but also a man with both distinctly European and Oriental features. As such, he embodies the familiar exotic. Their encounter symbolizes the meeting of two great cultures—West and East, Christianity and Islam—but also Parzival’s own reflection of himself. Prager’s analysis shows how Parzival’s openly positive depiction of the Arab world, Africa, and India was something highly unconventional for its time. Like other similar texts, it contrasts what was generally knowable about the Orient in thirteenth-century Europe, including facts often conveyed via other literary works (e.g., place names in Chrétien’s Perceval) with what was more purely fictional (e.g., legendary monstrous creatures in India). Unlike many other fictions of the period, however, Wolfram’s Parzival places non-Western, non-Christian peoples toward the center of the action and allows them to play a key role in the hero’s—and thus also the world’s—salvation. Fortunatus, too, places the East at the center of its story, albeit from the perspective of a protagonist who appears to belong to neither West nor East. He is a Cypriot who sometimes takes a rather German view of the world, as Prager reveals. As a Volksbuch/ Prosaroman, Fortunatus departs from many of the narrative features common to courtly romance to focus more on middle-class issues (e.g., money, class conflict, and questions of identity). Prager’s emphasis, however, is on how this text presents the concept of being a foreigner abroad. In this respect, Fortunatus is unlike other works at the time, for it treats not only the East as Other, but also Europe as foreign to anyone from another part of the world. In fact, in both West and East, the hapless visitor from elsewhere can be blamed for any misfortune that occurs. Indeed, the [End Page 167] protagonist finds himself constantly on the run for things he did not do. In comparing reasons for travel between East and West, however, Fortunatus suggests that the Eastern traveler would find the German-speaking West ultimately less hospitable—more dangerous even—than the Westerner would the Orient. Like the two works considered thus far, Friedrich von Hardenberg’s novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1799) places the development of the hero in relation to various concepts of the East in the foreground. The character Zulima, a woman captured in the East by a crusader and brought to the West, is an externally recognizable element of the Orient in this novel, but the protagonist is also internally shaped by a range of romantic notions that allow him to become one with the East. Prager explains Heinrich’s character against the background of new ideas at the time about Poesie, as well as Kantian philosophy and the romantics’ interest in the languages and cultures of the East (e.g., Sanskrit, the Sakontala). In Hardenberg...