DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0017 Introduction: Visualizing German Orientalism Kristin Dickinson and Berna Gueneli University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and University of Georgia, Athens Since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), scholars in the fields of literature, art history, film, and media studies have adopted, adjusted, or criticized his initial discussion of a complex system of knowledge produced by “Western” scholars to represent and thereby contain the “Orient.” In the field of German Studies in particular, scholars such as Suzanne Marchand, Nina Berman, Todd Kontje, Venkat Mani, Kristin Dickinson, and others, have further challenged Said’s neglect of German Orientalist encounters in his specific focus on British and French colonial texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Building on this growing body of scholarship, this special issue draws attention to the ways in which German Orientalism has operated in and through visual culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, while also highlighting the artistic productions of minoritized artists who have experienced differing forms of Orientalization in Germany. Focusing on a wide range of visual art forms, the first section of this special issue includes four scholarly articles that emphasize both the persistence of Orientalist tropes across centuries and the power of art to overturn them. The second section expands our issue’s academic focus from a contemporary artistic viewpoint. Featuring poems and sketches by Turkish German author and artist Zafer Şenocak, this section also includes an interview with Kristin Dickinson, in which Şenocak discusses the imagistic quality of his poetry, the wide-ranging influences on his work, and his personal experiences with Orientalism in both Germany and Turkey. Together, the academic articles, poems, and images presented here ask what modes of (self-) representation are made possible in different media, including paintings, sketches, postcards, imagistic poetry, graphic letters, sculpture, textiles, animation and live-action film. They furthermore demonstrate German engagement with a wide range of geographies from Poland and the Middle East to the American Midwest, as well as with languages and languages-in-translation, including Polish, Hebrew, Arabic, and (Ottoman) Turkish. Through their emphases on processes of self-production, Julia Ingold and Kristin Dickinson show how German Jewish author and multimedia artist Lasker-Schüler and Turkish German visual and installation artist Nevin Aladağ in- 364 Kristin Dickinson and Berna Gueneli DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0017 vert and challenge the main tropes of German Orientalism across a time span of more than a century. These articles offer one avenue through which German Studies might build on the multidirectional approaches of scholars such as Reina Lewis, Mary Roberts, Elisabeth A. Fraser, Mohammed Gharipour and Ali Behdad, whose focus on cross-cultural exchanges and productions also take the agency and perspective of so-called “Oriental” subjects into account. How, Ingold and Dickinson ask, can visual modes of self-representation disrupt Orientalist paradigms that seek to contain and control the Orient while also encouraging viewers to reconsider the power of their own gazes? Analyzing the interplay of gender and ethnicity in filmic representations of Orientalism, Berna Gueneli and Jakub Kazecki engage with German cinema from the Weimar Republic and the post-Cold War period. Both papers show how visual art forms disrupt the strictly hierarchical relationship between West and East so central to Said’s initial theorization of Orientalism, while also recognizing persistent images of gendered Orientalism across different times and geographies, from the Middle East to Eastern Europe. Our academic section begins with Julia Ingold’s contribution “‘Ich, die Dichterin von Arabien’: Else Lasker-Schüler’s Orientalism as an Ennoblement of Jewishness.” In her examination of poems, prose, graphically elaborate letters, arabesque drawings, and performances, Ingold shows how Lasker-Schüler claims Orientalist tropes for herself. By using the logic of mystification, alienation, and commercialization to craft a specific image of herself as artist, Ingold argues, Lasker-Schüler turns herself into the other not only in terms of ‘content’ but also in her formal expressions. Expanding our focus on the early twentieth century, Berna Gueneli’s article “ The Arabian Nights in Weimar Cinema: Recontextualizing Campy Fantasies of Gender, Sex, and Ethnicity in Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) and Ernst Lubitsch’s Sumurun (1920),” examines the adaptation of The Arabian Nights into filmic narratives. What fantasies, anxieties, and dreams did these Arab “exotic” tales fulfill for audiences in Weimar Germany, where debates about colonial dreams, the simultaneous loss of colonies, and changing gender roles saturated the public sphere? Gueneli pays particular attention to the interplay between ethnicity and the cinematic use of campy performances. Looking closely at the use of costume - including fashion, props, and jewelry - and the staging of desire through mise-en-scène, casting, and performance, Gueneli argues that the films provide reactions to modern Germany’s changing socio-cultural and -political fabric. While the films’ occasional use of campy drag performances allows for nuance in their depictions of gender, Gueneli shows how they ultimately create a “ranking” among the implied ethnicities they depict. Introduction: Visualizing German Orientalism 365 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0017 Jakub Kazecki’s piece, “From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau : Orientalizing Poland in the German Cinema of the 1990s”, brings us to a post-unification discussion of Orientalism as it relates to Eastern Europe. Here, Kazecki examines how German anxieties about reunification and shifting borders are represented through Orientalist portrayals of Polish women in two post-reunification films. Building upon Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism and the idea that the concept of East-Central Europe has been invented as a counterimage of the “West,” the article argues that these films perpetuate long-standing colonial paradigms within German discourse on Poland that cast Poland as an uncivilized other, and Polish women as feminized objects of control, reaffirming German cultural superiority. By analyzing specific narrative and visual strategies in both films, Kazecki highlights the persistence of Orientalist representations of Poland in German post-unification cinema and their role in constructing national and gendered identities in the context of Germany’s changing geopolitical landscape. Finally, Kristin Dickinson’s article “Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet: Collage as Heterotopia in Nevin Aladağ’s Social Fabric Series” examines contemporary Turkish German artist Nevin Aladağ’s carpet collages Wind (2019) and Skylight Spring (2021) in relation to the iconic window designs of American Midwestern architect Frank Lloyd Wright. By cutting up and conjoining pieces of distinctly patterned carpets from around the world, Aladağ plays with the trope of the Oriental carpet and Orientalism’s hierarchical ordering system. Her collagistic compositions, which incorporate stylistic elements of Wright’s design practice, link disparate patterns, times, and places. Building on Wright’s own understanding of windows as light screens that connect inside and outside, Dickinson reads Aladağ’s collages as powerful heterotopias that cut across multiple other boundaries. Upending the scopic regime of Orientalism, they challenge the distinctions between Orient vs. Occident and traditional vs. modern, while encouraging the viewer to rethink the power of her own gaze and personal associations with the work of art. Alongside his captivating black and white drawings with crayon pastels, Zafer Şenocak’s poems “Babylon, windgeschützt,” “Letze Objekte des Orientalismus,” and “Ghasel eines Unbekümmerten” productively expand the themes of our academic section. Through their playful approach to form and their wide-ranging references to ancient and contemporary history, they produce new poetic and artistic affinities that open up our theme of visualizing German Orientalism to Babylon and Baghdad, the Tigris and the Danube, and the lyrical realm of the ghazal. Şenocak’s poems are printed here in their original German along with English translations by Kristin Dickinson and Eleoma Bodammer. 366 Kristin Dickinson and Berna Gueneli DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0017 We thank our peer-reviewers and the editorial team of Colloquia Germanica for their valuable feedback. Special thanks also go to Zafer Şenocak for sharing his work with us and giving us permission to print his poems and drawings in this special feature. Together with our academic articles, they show how multifaceted critical engagement with the history of German Orientalism can lead to productive engagement with historic tropes that stubbornly persist in our present day. We hope to continue the conversation on art as a terrain for reimagining encounters and confronting stereotypes and clichés. As a quintessential realm of continuous change and becoming, we believe art offers a particularly fruitful ground to challenge ossified stereotypes. Works Cited Behdad, Ali. Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East . Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P, 2016. Berman, Nina. German Literature on the Middle East: Discourses and Practices, 1000- 1989 . Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2011. Dickinson, Kristin. DisOrientations: German-Turkish Cultural Contact in Translation, 1811-1946 . University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 2021. Fraser, Elisabeth A. Mediterranean Encounters: Artists Between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1774-1839 . University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 2017. Gharipour, Mohammad. “Urban Landscape: Public Space and Environment in Cities of the Contemporary Middle East.” Contemporary Urban Landscapes of the Middle East . Ed. Mohammad Gharipour. London/ New York: Routledge, 2016. 1—21. Kontje, Todd. German Orientalisms . Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004. Lewis, Reina. Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation . London/ New York: Routledge, 1996. Mani, Venkat B. Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany's Pact with Books. New York: Fordham UP, 2017. Marchand, Suzanne. German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship. Cambridge/ New York: Cambridge UP, 2010. Roberts, Mary. Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists, and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture . Berkeley: U of California P, 2015.