TWO ESSAYS THAT MAHLER WROTE in 1877 as part of his final exams for obtaining his high school diploma have survived. One of them deals with the Duke of Wallenstein (1583–1634), a military hero from the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) best known from a series of plays that Schiller wrote about him. Mahler was clearly not (very) familiar with them and as a consequence received a failing grade. The other essay topic asked him to discuss the impact of the Orient on German literature. For this essay, Mahler received a passing grade, even though it was clearly unfinished. And indeed he has interesting things to say; one might call Mahler's essay cosmopolitan and progressive. It argues unambiguously in favor of cultural cross-pollination: cultures should learn from each other; cultures that isolate themselves risk marginalization (he cites the Chinese as a cautionary example). Mahler links cultural differentiation (entirely in line with the theories of Herder, among others) to differences in climate and geography. The Orient's strangeness is attractive to the West, and in Mahler's view it is the German mind in particular that has sought to assimilate the cultural products of other nations.

The fact that a topic such as “The Influence of the Orient on German Literature” was assigned to high school students in a small town like Iglau is but one proof of the prominent role that Orientalism played in nineteenth-century culture. Mahler's essayistic response also illustrates that the discourse about the East emerging in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries associated the Orient with predominantly positive images. Current scholarship has come to a more nuanced reading. The term “Orientalism” was introduced into Cultural Studies by Edward W. Said's highly influential 1978 study Orientalism. Said's approach was innovative in that it pointed to Orientalism's constructed, textual nature. His study stresses that the Western view of what it called the “Orient” had its roots in literary topoi and stereotypes rather than in any form of actual experience of the East. Orientalism sought to reduce the non-Western Other to some form of unchanging “essence,” thereby suggesting far more clearly delineated differences between East and West than in fact existed. Said's analysis also calls into question the supposedly positive views of the East constructed by Western Orientalism.