Germany’s “Orient”: Discursive Alliances of the Philosopher, Historian, and Fiction Writer

Abstract

In his incisive work La Renaissance Orientale Raymond Schwab presents us with a view of Orient and Occident not as mere bipolar opposites caught up in an embittered polemics, but rather as productively entangled in a web of multiple tensions. As the late Edward Said remarks in his foreword to the English translation of Schwab’s work, “;Dualities, opposition, polarities—as between Orient and Occident, one writer and another, one time and another—are converted in his writing into lines that criss-cross, it is true, but that also draw a vast human portrait.”¹ Schwab’s analysis reveals the rich intertextuality of English, French, and German writings about the Orient: … while England was the native land of Indic studies, the native land of the Indic Renaissance was Germany […]. During the 1790s the impact of oriental studies in Germany was like a rapid-fire series of explosions. […] The publications of the Indic scholars at Calcutta ignited a kind of fervid intensity in certain young Germans. […] And among the great innovators of the new ideas that were to become Romanticism, a certain Herder passed the word to a certain Friedrich Schlegel.²

…while England was the native land of Indic studies, the native land of the Indic Renaissance was Germany [… ]. During the 1790s the impact oforiental studies in Germany was like a rapid-fire series ofexplosions. […] The publications of the Indic scholars at Calcutta ignited a kind offervid intensity in certain young Germans. [… ] And among the great innovators of the new ideas that were to become Romanticism, a certain Herder passed the word to a certain Friedrich Schlegel.²