Context and Argument

ORIENTALISM IN GERMANY drew on two separate sources, the relationship between the Ottoman and Holy Roman (later Habsburg) Empires on the one hand, and the “Oriental Renaissance” spurred by the translation of Sanskrit texts into European languages on the other. While the foundational scholarly text for the study of this latter form of German Orientalism, Raymond Schwab's La renaissance orientale, was published as long ago as 1950, the German case has received much less attention than its English or French counterparts until rather recently. Certainly such eminent scholars as A. Leslie Willson (1964), Ernst Behler (1968), Léon Poliakov (1971), and Wilhelm Halbfass (1981) have made important contributions to this literature, but it was not until the 1990s that the study of German Orientalism really hit its stride with the work of Dorothy M. Figueira, Ronald Inden, Todd Kontje, Partha Mitter, Kamakshi Murti, Sheldon Pollock, and Susanne Zantop, to name only a few major contributors to what has become a growing field of inquiry. Much of this groundbreaking work, particularly with regard to German Indology, has been a response to the notion that Germany, which, unlike England and France, came to colonialism late and in a smaller way, did not share with its European neighbors the same kind of exoticizing power dynamics.