THE PROJECT OF tracing the legacy, influence, and value of German culture across national, linguistic, and historical contexts might imply that scholars need to look away from the traditional exemplars of German culture. That might involve, one might think, shifting our contemporary research and teaching priorities away from German writing and cinema, now the traditional stuff of German studies, attending instead to a wider range of cultural products that may have been forgotten, marginalized, overlooked, or are simply not contained within obviously Germanophone contexts, and examining these through an appropriately expanded set of methodologies. This volume seeks to map and promote this process of expansion, and the chapters as a whole testify to how far such developments have already come within different iterations of German studies around the globe. However, this collection does not shy away from returning to the traditional core of our discipline. Key to our project is a process of viewing canonical texts afresh and reviewing how we read them—opening out interrogations of how contemporary and historical Germanophone culture speaks to models of the “world” as a complex shifting entity that is cultural, political, economic, and the object of scientific inquiry.

One fascinating and invaluable characteristic of much pre-twentieth-century German literary and philosophical production, particularly from the period around 1800, is the fact that it not only wrestled with questions of Germany's identity as a nation but also explored, often quite explicitly, such notions as “world culture,” “world consciousness,” or “world belonging.” The first part of this volume seeks to continue a process of refocusing the products of German culture, taken from that period and indeed the epoch, to show how they can be used to explore matters of transnational and worldly concern. It begins with a cluster of chapters that revisit a sequence of what might be termed “older” canonical writers. John Noyes offers one of several contributions in the volume that draw on Goethe. Noyes seeks to “sketch the dimensions of Welt as Goethe explored it” in Faust, in the writings on Weltliteratur (world literature), and in the methodological considerations of his Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors, 1810).

WHAT IS THE STATE of German studies as an academic discipline in its national and global contexts as we move deeper into the twenty-first century? What future does it face, how does this relate to its past, and how are Germanists of diverse origins and persuasions around the world responding to such issues? These questions form the nexus of this volume. They are questions that demand we consider even larger topics: not just the status of our discipline but of interdisciplinarity as a model for the arts and humanities; not just the role of the canon but the decolonization of that canon; and not just the linguistic and geographic boundaries that we have traditionally used to contour German studies but also the temporal and disciplinary boundaries we use to determine (and limit) the scope of our work as Germanists. However influential in the world the German-speaking nations have been, and might still be, German language and culture, and their academic study, increasingly seem to be at the mercy of tectonic shifts (some required and sought, others not)—from changes in the way our universities are structured and funded to the reshaping of cultural and political discourse under the geopolitical forces of nationalism and globalization.

The question of how we can define and evaluate a specifically German- language culture in such a global context is thus a fraught one. In the wake of the so-called global financial crisis of 2008, and also of large migrational population shifts that saw communities moving in truly unprecedented numbers to cross borders into safer and more prosperous territory, driven by war, famine, and poverty, positively connoted narratives of globalization have fallen out of favor in many quarters. As the former British Prime Minister Theresa May's 2017 comment that “a citizen of the world is a citizen of nowhere” demonstrates, global thinking has been increasingly rejected in favor of resurgent nation-centered thinking. In the United Kingdom, the 2016 European Union Membership Referendum rapidly became about much more than Europe’s future, and “Brexit” developed into a protest vote against globalization and its manifestations.

THUS FAR, THIS VOLUME has primarily explored the ways in which German-language literature, and the disciplinary and canonical approaches that are often used to structure it, have nevertheless addressed notions of “worldliness,” whether that be in the ways in which German-language culture has contributed to world literature; in the ways it has been shaped by voices and cultures from around the globe; or in the ways in which postcolonial and transnational approaches have fruitfully destabilized any notions of “center” and “periphery,” or indeed of “nation”—that “deterritorialization” of German studies as a discipline outlined in the introduction to this book. Part 1 has thus explored what we argue is ultimately a productive tension between the local and the worldly, and the ways in which the traditional boundaries we use to delineate and describe our discipline are, in fact, already inherently permeable. Without ignoring the continued dominance of the nation and the canon, and the patterns of exclusion these undoubtedly still create, the preceding chapters have attempted to showcase this more “intrinsic” mobility of German-language culture across a range of regional, national, and transnational contexts.

Yet German studies is mobile in other ways. After all, it is not just texts and authors that cross boundaries and are shaped by wordily influences: the discipline itself is co-constructed across global locations, and we as its scholars are equally part of this global mobility through our careers across institutions, continents, and disciplines. In this second part, then, we seek to innovatively map this wider mobility by looking at the shape and scope of German studies across a range of diverse cultural and geographic contexts, and the agility of German studies in those contexts, even at a time of perceived disciplinary crisis.

Part 2 opens with Carlotta von Maltzan's chapter on German studies in a South African context. Picking up directly from Dirk Göttsche’s closing chapter in Part 1 on the development of a postcolonial German studies, von Maltzan explores how German studies has the “the dubious status of claiming the longest [disciplinary] history on the African continent” because of its roots in the colonization of the Cape and the early “paracolonial presence” of Germany through its settlements and missionary work.

THE CONTRIBUTIONS IN THIS third part critically assess the importance and relevance of a German-language contribution to the world, where the world refers not merely to the geographical but to a plurality of cultural practices and forms of social transformation. Each explores how knowledge of German-language cultural products, ideas, and traditions has provoked and driven activity beyond the academy, and how this has impacted on the communities that come into contact with them. The chapters thus question what the world of art, culture, and society takes from German-language culture, exploring which language(s), which traditions, and which intellectual insights are required to undertake the work they do. In assessing these cultural and community contexts, these chapters also question what role, if any, academic work might have in supporting or articulating this cultural response to “Germanness”—and what academia might learn in turn from work undertaken in the cultural and community sectors.

In his opening chapter, James Hodkinson explores how processes of collaboration and co-creation have extended the reach of his research into two new worlds: first, “away from the physical space of campus and academic modes of discourse,” and second, “transnationally, by making culturally remote (German and historical) material relevant to the contemporary UK context.” Some of these materials indeed return us to a figure familiar from earlier parts of this book—namely, Goethe—with one of Hodkinson's most innovative examples of “impact” revolving around responses to the Hafez-Goethe monument in Weimar, inspired by Goethe's West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan, 1819) and his imagined encounter with the Persian poet Hafez of Shiraz. In looking at Goethe and others, Hodkinson's chapter thus demonstrates the “abiding value of German cultural products to make culturally specific contributions to contemporary debates.” At the same time, however, he showcases different models of impact and knowledge exchange, such as public lectures, exhibitions, work with schools, and artistic collaborations with figures such as the Bangladeshi artist Mohammed Ali and the Iranian-born Birmingham painter Mohsen Keiany. In exploring how we might “evaluate” these collaborations in quantitative and qualitative ways, Hodkinson ultimately argues that these collaborations and networks “beyond the world of the academy” reveal how “academics can equally benefit from engaging with nonacademic constituencies.”

Conceiving Impact

SINCE 2007 I HAVE BEEN engaged in research into the representation of Islam and Muslims in German-speaking culture from the late Enlightenment to the early nineteenth century. Latterly I have also been working to make my material and themes, and my critical discussion of them, more relevant to nonacademic communities in the United Kingdom, despite my work's obvious anchoring in a historical and cultural context detached from that of contemporary Britain. This has taken the form of an ambitious public-facing project, which has run from 2015 to date. The project, which has trialed differing methods for making my work more widely accessible and beneficial to nonacademic audiences, has also been shaped by a series of wider political contexts within the United Kingdom and further afield. The first of these has been the growth in global Islamist terrorism and the rise of ISIS / the Islamic State, and wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, as well as the resurgence of parochial nationalisms and populism within the political and media cultures of many Western democracies, often marked by Islamophobic rhetoric and treatments of Islam focused on its apparent “externality” and “otherness.” In this context, any academic work that seeks to impact the public sphere and raise awareness of how political forces shape the ways in which one culture views and represents another might be felt to be of broad social value.

Yet my work has also coincided with key developments within British academia referenced in this volume's introduction: the rise of the “impact” agenda, by which academics and their departments were compelled not only to submit research for peer-reviewed assessment but also to engage in project work that developed ways of extending and measuring its benefit to the nonacademic world. What is being termed in this volume as the natural “porosity” of the academy in its relationship to different sectors of society became, for a researcher working in my field and at this time, both a compulsion and an opportunity.

The project brought with it a number of requirements and challenges.

This chapter looks at how Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) developed and applied his particular kind of orientalist thinking and writing within the German geographical, linguistic, and cultural context of the early nineteenth century. Schlegel's orientalism developed in Paris (1802–4) in the context of the Pan-European clamor against French cultural (later political) hegemony and against modernity, capitalism, urban life, and individualism. his reflections on the orient, particularly the topos of “India,” became part of a process whereby Germany was reimagined as no longer being part of Western Europe but rather as the “true” oriental self of Europe.

Much has been written on the romantics generally and their influence on early German nationalism, and many scholars have come to similar conclusions. None, arguably, has been able to reveal through a close reading of “Reise nach Frankreich” and Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier Schlegel's use of Indian language and culture in contesting French cultural hegemony. This contribution seeks to compensate for this deficiency by bringing to bear the study of early nineteenth-century nationalism on the study of Schlegel's engagement with India.

Friedrich Schlegel in Paris

Schlegel's interest in Sanskrit studies spans a period of nearly forty years, during which an enthusiasm for India took hold of many German intellectuals. The period begins in 1791 with Georg Forster's (1754–94) translation of Kalidasa's Shakuntala and ends in 1827 with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's (1770–1831) dismissive verdict on India.

Received Orientalisms and New Departures

Over the last three decades the term “orientalism” has become a commonplace and often pejorative term within cultural studies. In Edward Said's seminal Orientalism (1978) the term was first defined critically as a mode of thought and writing by which Western discourses exercise a form of ideological power over the peoples and cultures of the East, reducing them to Europe's consummate other: exotic, degenerate, passive, fanatical, mysterious, civilized, and uncivilized by degree. The term has, though, come to be used so liberally that it seems to imply the existence of a real, unified historical school of thought, an ideological movement of like-minded people or at least a recognized set of writings, attitudes, and beliefs that carried that name within the Europe of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was not the case. Naturally, the terms “Orient” and “orientalism” permeate this volume. Here, though, they are treated within a context of critical awareness, as a contemporary tool for critically tracing patterns and tendencies within historical European discourses. The scope of what can be termed “orientalism,” of where and in what forms we might seek it, of the range of differing functions it fulfills in differing contexts, and of where, quite simply, the so-called Orient was thought to be in a geographical sense, must be considered as open to a process of redefinition.

This volume is the first publication to be generated by the International Occident-Orient Research Network, which was established in 2008 by Anil Bhatti and James Hodkinson. The network arose out of a collaborative arrangement between Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and Warwick University, UK, and it originally had a solely German Studies focus. The project expanded rapidly to include Delhi University and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW), Vienna, as its other key locations. The group has subsequently attracted scholars from Europe, Asia, and North America, who have also brought a wide range of expertise to the project: these include literary scholars of all persuasions, historians, social scientists, as well, of course, as specialists in the field known problematically as “oriental studies.”

The resulting text is an edited volume of chapters that has been developed by members of the network, working in close collaboration. Thus far the project has spanned a period of four years from January 2010 to the date of publication, and has been driven forward by three symposia, held in Delhi, Vienna, and Birmingham, UK. The editors would like to thank a great many institutions and people who have assisted the production of this volume and the research group underlying it since late 2009. These are too numerous to list in their entirety here, though others should not go without mention.

This chapter focuses on three events in the period 1840 to 1857/58 and discusses how orientalist ideas were used in each of them to construct three different figurations of the oriental: the Jew, the Turk, and the Indian. The first event is the Damascus affair (1840), in which Damascan Jews were forced to confess under torture to the ritual murder of a Christian priest. The incident was widely covered in the leading European and German dailies in general and the emerging Jewish press. The second event is the Crimean War (1853–56)—a war that is central to the oriental question as it is known in German—in which conflicting European interests in regard to the declining ottoman Empire coalesced with larger inner-European power conflicts. The war is seen as the first to become a media event. The third event is the Revolt of 1857 in India, which also became a media event though it took place in distant India and did not directly involve the states of the European continent. All three events drew an extraordinary amount of attention in the European press in general and also in the German press, while the latter two also became the stuff of popular novels. In fact these events took place at a time when “print capitalism,” as Benedict Anderson calls it, had begun to provide the basis for imagining the nation, though it is equally a time of expanding colonial interests.

There are no two words in contemporary discourse more current, or more elastic and therefore potentially more misunderstood, than “difference” and “otherness.” Both terms are constantly present in discussions of intercultural communication and therefore of the practice of orientalism, which is our theme. This chapter will interrogate this discourse in light of contemporary debates about communication between cultures and the linguistic thought of the German Enlightenment, especially the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the reprise of some key Humboldtian themes in the most recent work of Jürgen Habermas on intercultural dialogue.

Von Humboldt and a New Paradigm for Orientalism

In her seminal book Der andere Orientalismus (2005), Andrea Polaschegg shows that our constant concern to deconstruct false ideas of the other can make sameness and difference the controlling and even exclusive categories of intercultural study, so preventing us from understanding what might be really other no less than what is really part of ourselves. In other words, a concern to overcome one kind of use of orientalism—the Eurocentric construction of an artificial oriental other—can sometimes license a different kind of instrumentalism in oriental studies. Our concern to deconstruct a false other might prevent us from communicating with real others: those actual other people with whom we must speak if any true intercultural dialogue is to begin.