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ISSN 0010-1338 Themenheft: Visualizing German Orientalism Gastherausgeber: innen: Kristin Dickinson und Berna Gueneli Kristin Dickinson und Berna Gueneli: Introduction: Visualizing German Orientalism Julia Ingold: “Ich, die Dichterin von Arabien”: Else Lasker-Schüler’s Orientalism as an Ennoblement of Jewishness Berna Gueneli: 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) Jakub Kazecki: From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau: Orientalizing Poland in the German Cinema of the 1990s Kristin Dickinson: Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet: Collage as Heterotopia in Nevin Aladağ’s Social Fabric Series Faces along the Mirror: Last Objects of Orientalism Zafer Şenocak in Conversation with Kristin Dickinson Images and Poems by Zafer Şenocak narr.digital Band 57 Band 57 Heft 4 Harald Höbus ch, Rebeccah Dawson (Hr sg.) C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a t i o n a l e Z e i t s c h r i f t f ü r G e r m a n i s t i k C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a ti o n a l e Z e it s c h r ift f ü r G e r m a n i s ti k Die Zeitschrift erscheint jährlich in 4 Heften von je etwa 96 Seiten Abonnementpreis pro Jahrgang: € 135,00 (print)/ € 172,00 (print & online)/ € 142,00 (e-only) Vorzugspreis für private Leser € 101,00 (print); Einzelheft € 45,00 (jeweils zuzüglich Versandkosten). Bestellungen nimmt Ihre Buchhandlung oder der Verlag entgegen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, Postfach 25 60, D-72015 Tübingen · eMail: info@narr.de Aufsätze - in deutscher oder englischer Sprache - bitte einsenden als Anlage zu einer Mail an hhoebu@uky.edu oder joseph.oneil@uky.edu (Prof. Harald Höbusch oder Prof. Joseph D. O,Neil, Division of German Studies, 1055 Patterson Office Tower, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0027, USA). Typoskripte sollten nach den Vorschriften des MLA Style Manual (2008) eingerichtet sein. Sonstige Mitteilungen bitte an hhoebu@uky.edu © 2024 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Alle Rechte vorbehalten/ All Rights Strictly Reserved Druck: Elanders Waiblingen GmbH ISSN 0010-1338 ISBN 978-3-381-12351-3 BUCHTIPP Der Band hinterfragt den Nutzen des Begriffs „Orientalismus“ zur Erforschung der vielfältigen deutsch-jüdischen kulturellen Beziehungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Dabei wird Orientalismus einerseits als postkolonialer Diskurs verstanden, der Identitätskonflikte und Sprachprobleme der jüdischen Diaspora in den Blick nimmt, andererseits als philologische Wissenschaft vom Orient. Die Beiträge behandeln folgende Fragen: In welchem Maße wurden deutsche Juden vom zeitgenössischen wissenschaftlichen Diskurs über den „Orient“ und den „Orientalen“ beeinflusst bzw. gestalteten ihn mit? Wie tief verinnerlichten Juden die stereotypen Bilder ihrer Umgebung und inwiefern konnten die deutsch-jüdischen Orientalisten diese Vorurteile und deren philosophische Legitimierung wissenschaftlich widerlegen? Wie veränderte sich das Bild des Orients, als viele emigrierte deutsche Juden sich in Palästina mit dem „wahren“ Orient konfrontiert sahen? Chiara Adorisio, Lorella Bosco (Hrsg.) Zwischen Orient und Europa Orientalismus in der deutsch-jüdischen Kultur im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert KULI. Studien und Texte zur Kulturgeschichte der Literatur, Vol. 8 1. Auflage 2019, 328 Seiten €[D] 68,00 ISBN 978-3-7720-8642-7 eISBN 978-3-7720-5642-0 Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany \ Tel. +49 (0)7071 97 97 0 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de Inhalt I INHALT Heft 1 „Es geht schon los mit den Flüchtlingen. Wie fünfundvierzig.“ Der Fallout der nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit in Gudrun Pausewangs Atomkatastrophenbuch Die Wolke (1987) Christoph Weber . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Battle of Hermann Braun: Transvaluing German Nationalism in Heinrich von Kleist’s Die Hermannsschlacht and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Die Ehe der Maria Braun Robert Blankenship and Kevin P. Eubanks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Von der Auferstehung des ehrlichen Amtmanns. Zur Chronologie und Gattung der deutschen Gedichte von Christian Donelaitis Vaidas Šeferis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Intercultural Advocacy and Antifascist Activism: Paul Zech’s Exile in Argentina, 1933-1946 Robert Kelz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Interdependenz von Wort und Bild in der Graphic Novel Marlene Dietrich. Augenblicke eines Lebens von Claudia Ahlering und Julian Voloj Dorota Tomczuk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Verzeichnis der Autor: innen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 II Inhalt Heft 2 Themenheft: German Identity and History through the Lens of Football Gastherausgeber: Oliver Knabe Introduction: German Football, History, and Identity Oliver Knabe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 The First German Football Film. Zoltan Korda’s Die elf Teufel and the Cultural Transgressions of the late Weimar Republic Rebeccah Dawson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Revisiting a Children’s Classic: The Silent Third Reich in Sammy Drechsel’s Elf Freunde müßt ihr sein (1955) Oliver Knabe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Glocal yet National-German Soccer Culture, Identity, and Vereinsgeschichte Alex Holznienkemper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Celebrity and Athlete? Depictions of German Soccer Star Jérôme Boateng in Mass Media Sabine Waas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Unruly Boys and Unemancipated Girls: Football Integration and Gendered Imaginaries of Difference Kate Zambon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 Verzeichnis der Autor: innen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Heft 3 „Schreiben Sie das auf“. Fiktives Dokumentieren und die (Un-)Möglichkeiten des Zeugnisablegens in Cemile Sahins Alle Hunde sterben Hevin C. Karakurt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 Bindungsroman : Sickness, Sexuality, and Ambiguity in Thomas Mann Jonas Rosenbrück . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 Musical Improvisation in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck Len Cagle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 Inhalt III Remembering and Forgetting the Nazi Past: Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Bernhard Schlink’s Selbs Justiz and Ferdinand von Schirach’s Der Fall Collini Eva Revesz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315 Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341 Verzeichnis der Autor: innen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361 Heft 4 Themenheft: Visualizing German Orientalism Gastherausgeber: innen: Kristin Dickinson und Berna Gueneli Introduction: Visualizing German Orientalism Kristin Dickinson and Berna Gueneli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363 “Ich, die Dichterin von Arabien”: Else Lasker-Schüler’s Orientalism as an Ennoblement of Jewishness Julia Ingold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367 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) Berna Gueneli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau: Orientalizing Poland in the German Cinema of the 1990s Jakub Kazecki . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet: Collage as Heterotopia in Nevin Aladağ’s Social Fabric Series Kristin Dickinson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 437 Faces along the Mirror: Last Objects of Orientalism Zafer Şenocak in Conversation with Kristin Dickinson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 463 Images and Poems by Zafer Şenocak . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 467 Verzeichnis der Autor: innen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 477 Inhalt Introduction: Visualizing German Orientalism Kristin Dickinson and Berna Gueneli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363 “Ich, die Dichterin von Arabien”: Else Lasker-Schüler’s Orientalism as an Ennoblement of Jewishness Julia Ingold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367 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) Berna Gueneli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau: Orientalizing Poland in the German Cinema of the 1990s Jakub Kazecki . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet: Collage as Heterotopia in Nevin Aladağ’s Social Fabric Series Kristin Dickinson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 437 Faces along the Mirror: Last Objects of Orientalism Zafer Şenocak in Conversation with Kristin Dickinson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 463 Images and Poems by Zafer Şenocak . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 467 Verzeichnis der Autor: innen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 477 BAND 57 • Heft 4 Themenheft: Visualizing German Orientalism Gastherausgeber: innen: Kristin Dickinson und Berna Gueneli 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. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0018 “Ich, die Dichterin von Arabien” Else Lasker-Schüler’s Orientalism as an Ennoblement of Jewishness Julia Ingold Bamberg University, Germany Abstract: In early twentieth-century Germany, Orientalist imagery and stereotypes provided an important and successful repertoire for the entertainment industries. Cruel colonial practices such as ethnological exhibitions appeared side by side with dreamy art and narratives in the style of the Arabian Nights . Meanwhile, antisemitism was on the rise, particularly following Germany’s defeat in World War I. In the same decades, a certain taste for Jewish mysticism, namely the Kabbalah, appeared, along with the rise of esotericism and vitalism. This article considers Else Lasker-Schüler, a German-Jewish multimedia artist whose works comprise poems and prose as well as graphically elaborate letters, arabesque drawings, and performances in Orientalist settings within this historical context. Inspired by the surrounding Orientalist entertainment industry, Lasker-Schüler’s imageries and story worlds prove exceptional among German Orientalist initiatives because of the way she claims them for herself. Using the logic of mystification, alienation, and commercialization, Lasker-Schüler creates a certain image of herself as artist that allows her to become the other not only in terms of content but also through formal expressions. Keywords: graphic arts, classical modernism, German-Jewish literature, avant-garde performance art, othering The German-Jewish artist Else Lasker-Schüler debuted as a poet in fin de siècle Berlin’s esoteric and vitalist circles before she developed into a multitalented writer and graphic artist who played subversively with the stereotype of the Jew as Oriental. In my article, I first discuss a failed but nonetheless ambitious performance project of around 1910 to demonstrate that despite her formal 368 Julia Ingold DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0018 experimentation in the early years of her artistic career, her work’s Orientalist content followed colonial prejudices and hierarchies. I then trace how her Orientalism becomes more subversive in the 1910s when she begins to use her own Jewishness to fashion her image as an ingenious artist. I highlight here her alter ego Prinz Jussuf and the illustrated epistolary novel Briefe und Bilder as well as the illustrated collection of short stories Der Prinz von Theben , in which she develops this character. In conclusion, I show that even though Lasker-Schüler challenges antisemitic and sexist stereotypes, she ultimately reaffirms racist, colonial images. This is true for her texts as well as her graphics, even as her drawings are essential for the subversive dimension of her Orientalist art, which visually challenges classic traditions and hierarchies. In Germany, Orientalism has always been closely linked to antisemitism and anti-Judaism. In Orientalism (1978), Edward W. Said characterizes the eponymous phenomenon as a form of pejorative othering , albeit without using the term himself. Orientalism describes a form of structural discrimination and a certain group of cultural artifacts, both of which reinforce each other. The artifacts - be it paintings, movies, or novels - have a content related to what Western cultures imagine to be Oriental, with ‘Oriental’ 1 denoting a relatively timeless fantasy world related to countries and cultures encompassing the Iberian Peninsula under Islamic rule, the Maghreb, northern Africa, and the southern Mediterranean area as well as Eastern Russia, India, or China. As the biblical stories take place in this territory, Jews were and are also Orientalized and thus burdened by stereotypes and othering in European arts, discourse, society, and politics. What happens in this structure is that the imaginary Orient is idealized, even fetishized, while Orientalized fellow citizens are discriminated against. In twentieth-century Berlin and Germany, Orientalist imagery and stereotypes thus provided an important and successful fodder for the entertainment industries (Berman). Cruel colonial practices like ethnological exhibitions appeared alongside dreamy art and narratives in the style of the Arabian Nights . In Berlin, these include the Zoologischer Garten Berlin with its Orientalist buildings and Völkerschauen since 1878, the Deutsche Colonial-Ausstellung in Treptower Park in 1896, or the Lunapark running from 1909 to 1933, with its variety shows and sights, such as an Egyptian street imitation, to name just a few of the numerous Orientalist leisure facilities. Such artificial Oriental landscapes and settings were built for Berlin’s city dwellers. The rise of esotericism and vitalism corresponded to this taste for the so-called Oriental, which included Judaism (Mendes-Flohr 77, 80, 81). This led to the publication of many translations, digests, and compilations of Jewish mysticism, namely the Kabbalah, legends, wisdom, and literature in general (Gilman 270—86; Heschel 87; Mendes-Flohr 77—132), attesting to a certain popularity of Jew- “Ich, die Dichterin von Arabien” 369 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0018 ish tradition and thought beginning around 1900, even though it was often driven by exoticism. Since obtaining full civil rights in 1871, Jews, or at least Jewish men, were to a certain extent normalized in German society. But these developments occurred concomitantly with growing antisemitism and fascist movements (Heschel 12). At this juncture, the multimedia artist Else Lasker-Schüler began creating imageries and story worlds inspired by Orientalist popular amusements and culture (Kirschnick). In the following, I examine Lasker-Schüler’s exceptional form of German Orientalism, which she claimed for herself as Jewess, rather than displaying through an exotic other (Körner 30—31). 2 At a time when other people of Jewish descent, such as Karl Kraus and Kurt Tucholsky, had themselves baptized in an attempt to integrate into the majority culture, Lasker-Schüler ostentatiously cultivated her image as an exotic Jewess (Bodenheimer and Kilcher). She therefore became an important representative of cultural Zionism (Körner), and its positive Orientalism (Körner 104—05). The artist was born in 1869 in Wuppertal and came to Berlin in the late 1890s, where she worked her way to the forefront of the avant-garde until she could rightfully be called the queen of Berlin’s Bohemians in the 1910s and 1920s. Early in 1933 she fled to Zurich and a few years later to Palestine; she died in January 1945 in Jerusalem. In addition to her poems, stories, novels, plays and essays, Lasker-Schüler also created a variety of graphics, including drawings and collages on any kind of paper (Schmetterling 180). 3 She was also a performance artist and even her letters often constitute graphic works of art in which she continues to take on the roles of her fictional characters. The content of her art evolved around her persona and alter egos: she was an author, narrator, and character all in one and her drawings mostly consist of self-portraits as an Oriental prince. Lasker-Schüler thereby mixes Jewish elements with references to Far Eastern or Arab religions and cultures, as well as a purely imaginary East (Al-Taie). Through her stories and illustrations, she invents a poetic parallel world, called “Theben.” Named after the ancient Egyptian city, Theben is ruled by Lasker-Schüler’s own alter ego, Prinz Jussuf. She performs this figure not only in fictional prose but also in her outfits, drawings, private letters, and other writings. As Donna K. Heizer writes, “The Orient became the space where she could define her role as an artist, a Jew, a unique individual - and be accepted by German society for it” (Heizer 32). In other words, Lasker-Schüler used the Orientalist logic of mystification, alienation, and commercialization to establish a certain image of herself as an artist. Amongst her first publications around 1900, mainly written in the style of classic fin de siècle texts, are poems in which Lasker-Schüler already - without ever having travelled to Palestine - evokes Oriental images of Judaism. 4 In Das 370 Julia Ingold DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0018 Lied des Gesalbten and Sulamith - two poems published in the cultural Zionist journal Ost und West: Illustrierte Monatsschrift für modernes Judentum - Lasker-Schüler fashions herself as a Jewish writer. With images linked to Western stereotypes of ‘the Orient,’ such as almonds and cedars (which read as Oriental, even biblical, plants and food), the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, sunrise (which highlights the idea of the Orient as a ‘Morgenland’), and of course Jerusalem, she Orientalizes Judaism. Moreover, she depicts Judaism similarly to her own stereotyped imagination of Islam, which is to say that her Judaism takes place in a timeless biblical fairyland. 5 It was nevertheless Peter Hille, Lasker-Schüler’s Catholic mentor and friend at this period, who established her reputation as an Oriental Jewish artist. 6 In an influential - and still frequently cited - review from 1904, Hille wrote: Else Lasker-Schüler ist von dunkelknisternder Strähne auf heißem, leidenschaftstrengem Judenhaupte, und so berührt so etwas wie deutsche Volksweise, wie Morgenwind durch die Nardengassen der Sulamith überaus köstlich. […] Else’s Seele aber steht in den Abendfarben Jerusalems, wie sie’s einmal so überaus glücklich bezeichnet hat. Jüdische Dichter, schöpferische Dichter aus Judäerblut sind selten. Die Glut einer entlegenen Urseele ursprünglich, stark und bei Schmähungen ungereizt zu erhalten, ist nicht leicht. (238) Hille combines an Orientalist praise for the artist with the antisemitic prejudice about Jews’ lack of genius (which Otto Weininger so prominently asserted in his Geschlecht und Charakter in 1903), while attempting to explain this lack of genius through the long history of Jewish suffering. A sensitive awareness for what Hille calls “das müde Blut verbannter Jahrtausende und greiser Kränkungen” (238) in this same article, and for the lament as a traditional Jewish genre can be detected in Lasker-Schüler’s Orientalization of Judaism from her earliest publications (Gelber 213, 216—19). The poem Mein Volk , first published in the 1905 poetry volume Der siebente Tag , is the most prominent example of this (Gelber 217): Mein Volk Der Fels wird morsch, Dem ich entspringe Und meine Gotteslieder singe … Jäh stürz ich vom Weg Und riesele ganz in mir Fernab, allein über Klagegestein Dem Meer zu. “Ich, die Dichterin von Arabien” 371 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0018 Hab mich so abgeströmt Von meines Blutes Mostvergorenheit. Und immer, immer noch der Wiederhall In mir, Wenn schauerlich gen Ost Das morsche Felsgebein, Mein Volk, Zu Gott schreit. (30) This famous poem reveals the importance and profoundness of Lasker-Schüler’s work within Jewish traditions (Körner 34). It discusses the problem of Jewishness in a secularized Europe, the fear of losing what is left of Jewish tradition, the long history of suffering and lament, and the unavoidable decision regarding how to position oneself in relation to this history (Hessing 103—35; Körner 139—53). The poem’s speaker is identifiable as a psalmist who sings “Gotteslieder.” Likewise, the word “Klagegestein” - which is an allusion to the Wailing Wall - unmistakably defines the speaker as Jewish. The explanatory insertion “Mein Volk” after the second mention of the crumbling rock then clarifies that it is the Jewish people that is spread across the earth and, in times of secularization, loses touch with its traditions and existence as a community. By calling her own blood fermented (“mostvergoren”), the psalmist is likely lamenting her own boundedness to the old religion, which she lightly criticizes for conservatism or decadence. As the poem makes clear, there is no choice of identity when othering is the surrounding society’s typical reaction to difference (Gilman ix). Crying to God in the East, the speaker finally expresses a feeling of solidarity with or belonging to the crumbling rock. She thus establishes herself as a Jewish voice speaking in the name of an ancient people and with the authority of an ancient tradition. Despite the undeniably Orientalist character of her early poetry, Lasker-Schüler’s first prose volume, Das Peter Hille-Buch from 1906, is set in a Nordic land of myths. In this, she also takes on her first relevant alter ego: Tino, who will develop into Tino, “Prinzessin von Bagdad” (97) in Die Nächte Tino von Bagdads from 1907, and later into “die Dichterin von Arabien, Prinzessin von Bagdad, Enkelin des Scheiks, ehemaliger Jussuf von Egypten, Deuter der Ähren, Kornverweser und Liebling Pharaos” (213) in Briefe nach Norwegen from 1911 and 1912. While the fictional content of Lasker-Schüler’s Orientalist works repeats the usual Western stereotypes projecting an eclectic Islamic wonderland, her Orientalist self-staging as Jewish artist occurs on the paratextual level. In a world in which a Mata Hari can make a living from her alleged Indian back- 372 Julia Ingold DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0018 ground, a Jewish-Oriental provenance serves the authentication of Orientalist art (Heizer 34). Around 1910, Lasker-Schüler also planned a performance project in which she herself intended to appear as her alter ego “Tino von Bagdad oder Schlôme von Jericho,” as she writes in a letter to Jethro Bithell ( Werke und Briefe 6, letter no. 229). Even though the play was never staged, Lasker-Schüler’s descriptions of it in her letters provide insight into her work as performance artist and the visual side of her Orientalism. She planned to read her ‘Arabic’ stories, as she called her Orientalist prose, in Arabic on a stage. Which means she would have someone translate her texts into Arabic with a phonetic transcription. She planned to read out the latter like Dadaist sound poetry. A translator would have read aloud the original German version simultaneously, while a “10jähriger Negerjunge in feuerrot, Fez etc.” (to Jethro Bithell; Werke und Briefe 6, letter no. 229) sitting at her feet would have handed her the manuscript. A dancer would also have given a physical interpretation of the text (to Jethro Bithell; Werke und Briefe 6, letter no. 237). It would have been a Dada-evening avant la lettre . This plan was already in place in 1910, namely seven years before Hugo Ball performed his famous sound poem Karawane in the Zurich-based Cabaret Voltaire, which took Orientalist imagery as pretext for avant-gardist art. In slight variations, one finds similar descriptions of this envisioned performance throughout Lasker-Schüler’s letters in 1910 and 1911. She also writes here about her outfit, the instruments she wanted to use, and many more details. After this project failed, Lasker-Schüler never planned a comparably ambitious show again, but contemporary accounts suggest that all of her readings were actually artistic performances. Although this particular performance never passed the status of a sketch, it reveals nevertheless how Lasker-Schüler worked with some of the most obvious colonial visual stereotypes, such as the Black boy with a fez, which is still present in the company logo of the Austrian coffee brand Julius Meinl. In reality, a fez was mainly worn by adult men in the Ottoman Empire. The European Jewish artist imagines herself as Oriental, but in the position of someone employing servants or, worse, owning enslaved people. Susannah Heschel writes about the Western European Jews’ double bind situation, since on the one hand they belong to the colonized other, on the other hand they are citizens of imperialist states (Heschel 95). Thus, Lasker-Schüler proceeds with the usual colonialist Orientalism, creating her own subaltern East. The Orientalist hierarchy is only disrupted in so far as Lasker-Schüler herself as Jewess is Orientalized and subordinated by the majority of German society. Like successful authors such as Karl May, she cultivates her exotic image, and by this follows fashion and contemporary commercial interests (Berman; Kirschnick; Schmetterling 176). The exotic, erotic Tino von Bagdad is of course on the one “Ich, die Dichterin von Arabien” 373 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0018 hand a figure of female self-empowerment and on the other hand just a very common sexist and marketable stereotype (Liska). Lasker-Schüler’s quite conventional Orientalism changes with the introduction of her alter ego Prinz Jussuf, who has explicitly Jewish traits and surroundings. As Ricarda Dick argues, the Orientalist “Selbststilisierung” (122) meets the contemporary taste, but Lasker-Schüler pursues it so thoroughly and in her own way that the outcome is exceptional. In her serialized epistolary novel Briefe und Bilder, published successively in different journals from 1913 to 1917 as well as her collection of short stories Der Prinz von Theben from 1914, Prinz Jussuf ’s story and his visual world take shape, and thereby the subversive dimensions of Lasker-Schüler’s Orientalism (Dick; Berman 260—345). Along with these stories she develops her own distinctive drawing style and provides illustrations. She furthermore uses her graphics to extend her play with fact, fiction, and her alter egos to a visual level (Schmetterling 171): Lasker-Schüler herself had a classic bob haircut, for example, at a time that most of her drawn figures had the same hairstyle. She also inscribed her drawings with “Prinz Jussuf ” and signed her private letters with the same name. This strategy suggests that Jussuf ’s adventures are encrypted references to real-world events. Briefe und Bilder starts as a series of letters addressed to the “blauer Reiter Franz Marc” (299), signed with “Jussuf ” (306), but written, as the headers state, by author Else Lasker-Schüler. The novel’s setting successively shifts from 1910s Berlin to the timeless and placeless eclectic Oriental world of Thebes, as well as from first to third person narrative. In the beginning, Jussuf, who is clearly identifiable as the author’s alter ego, writes that he wants to start a “kunstpolitische Zeitschrift” (306) called “die wilden Juden” (306). Later, Jussuf becomes more of a fictional character, as he calls his Theban friends or allies “wilde Juden”: “‘Die Zebaothknaben’ nennt sich der Bund der Söhne. Aus diesen wählte Ich sieben Häuptlinge und setzte Mich über sie als ihr Oberhaupt. Wir acht wilde Juden bilden nun eine Vereinigung, Ruben [= Franz Marc; J. I.]” (333). Described here as “wilde Juden” and “Häuptlinge” - with the latter word in its German-language usage denoting an association with Native Americans - Jews are made into an Orientalist equivalent of the colonial stereotype of the ‘noble savage’ (Spinner 94—120). 7 From part 12 (of 16) on, the chapters are not letters anymore but narrative prose - now not addressed but dedicated to Franz Marc who died in the war in 1916 - telling the adventures of Jussuf and his “wilde Juden” in third person. Over the course of the story, it seems the biblical Joseph becomes not only counsellor but emperor himself. He carries various titles, like “Abigail Jussuf Basileus” (319) or “Jussuf Abigail Malik von Theben” (326). Lasker-Schüler uses the Arab form of the name, ‘Jussuf,’ and merges elements and vocabulary that are 374 Julia Ingold DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0018 either associated with Islam and Arab culture or with Judaism (Al-Taie). Lasker-Schüler thereby Orientalizes both herself and (her) Jewishness (Ludewig). Beyond that she uses the Hebrew female name Abigail as a royal male title. This is paradigmatic for the way Lasker-Schüler artistically confounds common social roles. Without any hesitation or further comment she uses words and shapes motifs to disrupt matters of course (Schmetterling 171). Thus, Briefe und Bilder , later published as a collected volume under the title of Der Malik (1919), has often been called an “Anti-War Novel” (Rumold). The storyline follows the genderqueer pansexual Jewish Prinz Jussuf, who falls in love with the “Arier Giselheer” ( Der Malik 467) to his subjects’ disliking. Nonetheless, the love between the two “Fürsten der feindlichen Heere” (479) leads to a kiss instead of a battle on the day Giselheer’s “Arierschar” (479) goes to war against Thebes. This part of the story was published in 1916 in the midst of the First World War. Lasker-Schüler adopts old stories and prejudices to invert or change their usual hierarchies. By creating this Oriental Jewish kingdom she performatively ennobles Jewishness. Jakob Wassermann does something similar in his 1914 essay Der Jude als Orientale as he first attributes an Oriental side to Jews and second reframes this side as the Jewish character’s element that makes it sublime and genius (Berman 264—290; Heizer 33—34; Mendes-Flohr 83). 8 Even encyclopedias at that time record Jews’ alleged lack of genius. 9 Wassermann inverts this prejudice (Mendes-Flohr 77—132) while also employing Orientalist tropes usually denoting degradation as an explanation for uniqueness and creativity (Gilman 273). Lasker-Schüler’s well-known and well-established alter ego Prinz Jussuf is also the main character in her 1914 illustrated volume Der Prinz von Theben. Ein Geschichtenbuch . Following the episodes of Briefe und Bilder it is possible to observe the development of Lasker-Schüler’s graphic style from dilettante vignettes to dynamic, ornamental artworks. While the irregular and widespread parts of Briefe and Bilder just appear with stereotyped drawings in black and white, Der Prinz von Theben contains more elaborate reproductions of drawings with shades of grey. Lasker-Schüler’s pictures are as non-representational as possible and nonetheless need only a few lines to render a clearly Oriental scenery (Spinner 96). The illustrations are flat, decorative pen-and-ink drawings with a tendency to renew the art of the arabesque (Ingold). Whereas in Briefe und Bilder they have a subordinate function, merely illustrating the narrative, in Der Prinz von Theben they are at least of equal if not of greater importance than the texts. Containing stories and pictures from the world of Thebes (Berman 330—35), Der Prinz von Theben features pictures which are Orientalist in terms of both content and form. While Lasker-Schüler’s style is inspired by Oriental “Ich, die Dichterin von Arabien” 375 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0018 or at least what is supposed to be Oriental fine art (Dick), her dynamic, broken lines also fit perfectly with the fine arts of classical modernism. Fig. 1: Lasker-Schüler, Else. Der Prinz von Theben. Ein Geschichtenbuch. Leipzig: Verlag der weißen Bücher, 1914. Frontispiece. Image: J. I. With this eclectic approach, Lasker-Schüler not only conveys Orientalist content but also imitates Oriental style while inventing a modernist interpretation of the arabesque (Ingold 101—18). The book’s frontispiece (Fig. 1), inscribed König Abigail III. der oberste Priester empfängt sein Volk , illustrates Lasker-Schüler’s typical classical modern style with its affinity to calligraphy that may be an allusion to traditional Arab fine art. These same lines and motifs can be found in nearly all her 1910s artworks. For the frontispiece Lasker-Schüler works with pencil and ink to create a two-layered image. The composition is dominated by a figure that fills the whole size of the picture ground from upper to lower margin and depicts König Abigail III, another title for Prinz Jussuf. König Abigail III’s crown recalls the fantastic headdresses the artist already drew for some characters in Briefe und Bilder . Likewise, the face is shown in Lasker-Schüler’s signature pose and style: in profile with a bob haircut. At first glance the body of König Abigail III seems to consist only of wild lines, but upon closer look there are two hands emerging from a wide shirt, as is always worn by Jussuf and sometimes also by the artist herself in real life. As is typical in Lasker-Schüler’s drawings, the hands in this image are covered with tattoos of stars and the moon. Thicker, 376 Julia Ingold DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0018 calligraphy-like ink lines overlay thinner pencil lines forming the figure’s torso. Where the right breast might be one can recognize a domed building and some flat houses, which symbolically shows the monarch’s ties to his city as the city becomes part of his body. His body is then surrounded by parallel lines which suggest a halo, or a coat with a big tassel in the lower right half of the picture. In the lower left half of the picture, the fez-wearing “Volk” is gathered. The inscription in the right half of the bottom, with lines no less calligraphic than the drawings, holds a double status as ornament and writing. While all the stars in the picture are six pointed, the connections between the points within the stars are missing, meaning they are not clearly stars of David. In other pictures in this same volume Lasker-Schüler juxtaposes both ‘empty’ six pointed stars and stars consisting of two triangles, meaning that they serve here as a general Orientalist decoration rather than a specific symbol for Judaism. Every aspect of this picture represents an eclectic compilation of Lasker-Schüler’s already established graphic elements. The motif is rendered through light, playful lines that lend the picture a certain movement. While it is possible to identify objects, the picture can also be read as a purely ornamental sheet as figure and decoration merge. Similarly, whereas the total absence of illusionist depth and the thicker ink lines clearly drawn with a brush recall the calligraphic tradition of Islamic art (Schmetterling 176), the way lines and colors are placed to evoke identifiable objects is essential to the classical modernist artists. Until the late nineteenth century, the so-called ‘academic style’ prevailed, and even progressive painters like Édouard Manet or James McNeill Whistler worked in an illusionist way with realistic proportions and colors, as well as with depth to make the picture a quasi-traversable window into another world. The following generation of the avant-garde closed that window and made the picture a flat object with lines and color fields attached to a wall (Schmetterling 161). If they had immediately taken the radical step to stop rendering recognizable objects altogether, as Kandinsky and Kasimir Malewitsch later did, no one would have noticed the revolution. Only when expressionist painters like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner continued depicting humans - albeit as disfigured and wild with surrealist colors - did the break from academic tradition become obvious. Lasker-Schüler’s graphics mock the Old Masters. Since the beginning of Western visual arts, drapery has been an important object to express style. Drapery is the picture element through which fine artists could prove their skills. In gothic fine art, for example, art historians today call one style ‘Zackenstil’ (jagged style) just because the drapes of the figures’ clothes are captured in sharp zig-zag lines. Through all artistic developments, the drapes remained a playful motif almost losing touch with its representational function and becoming more of a demonstration of virtuosity and l’art pour l’art . Thus Lask- “Ich, die Dichterin von Arabien” 377 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0018 er-Schüler clothes Prinz Jussuf and his fellow characters in dramatic garments, playing with the objects’ defining lines as virtuously as the Old Masters. In so doing, she demonstrates her modernity by utilizing a motif of traditional visual art in her own idiosyncratic style. At the same time, she turns her back on the sublime art form of painting and turns instead to the graphic arts. This is significant in that painting and sculpture occupied the highest rank in the fine arts for centuries, whereas drawing served merely as the tool to prepare the ‘actual’ oeuvre. Classical modernists such as Lasker-Schüler challenged this hierarchy. Through her constant inversion of traditional hierarchies, Lasker-Schüler gives Judaism a noble quality and makes graphics a noble art form. The insights discussed here about Lasker Schüler’s drawing König Abigail III. der oberste Priester empfängt sein Volk apply more or less to all of Lasker-Schüler’s Theban illustrations in the 1910s. Her drawn figures are genderless and immaterial, fashioned from broken, dynamic lines. In the following years, Lasker-Schüler’s graphic arts become more and more distinguished, partly because she realized she could sell her graphics for a much higher price than her poems (Dick 148). Meanwhile, there is a general tendency in her artistic approach to ennoble the depreciated and to degrade the sublime. To treat these rough scribbles on simple paper like fully-fledged works of art is an act of ennobling seemingly worthless things. The same applies for Lasker-Schüler’s illustrations more generally, as illustrations supplement books and make them more precious. Similar strategies of ennoblement occur in her fantastic parallel worlds, when the female Jewish artist becomes the prince, the Jewish prince becomes the emperor of Egypt, and the Jewish characters figure in the highest ranks of hierarchy. Overall, Lasker-Schüler’s artistic strategies encompass content as well as form and material. Throughout her life, she worked with the simplest components, such as pencil, ink, and charcoal, and later sometimes colored crayons and chalk on paper. She also drew on old telegram blanks, wrote on ripped envelopes, and glued old shiny wrapping paper onto her graphics to gild them (Schmetterling 180). The result was not pleasing, but quirky works of art that resembled her writing style. Her works thus differed significantly from the usual Oriental sceneries (Schmetterling 176). Academic Orientalist paintings by artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme or Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres with their realistic style served colonialist hierarchies by recounting an archaic, exotic, and underdeveloped world with ‘barbaric’ customs such as slave trade and polygamy, and by mainly depicting women as erotic objects. Their realism pretends to portray the ‘real’ colonized Orient and thus even delivers justifications for colonization as an act of Western grace and enlightenment. Such paintings could thus be used like imperialist propaganda. While Lasker-Schüler did follow Orientalist fashions and fascinations as they occurred in both highbrow and lowbrow arts, 378 Julia Ingold DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0018 philosophy, and the sciences, she also adhered to the logics of the classical modernist avant-garde. Birgit M. Körner thus places her somewhere between the avant-garde and cultural Zionism (114—214). Lasker-Schüler’s ostentatiously artificial style created a flat graphic world that did not claim any connection to a geographic reality (Schmetterling 161). By bringing her own appearance in line with that of Prinz Jussuf ’s and vice versa, she claimed a connection between her Oriental story worlds and her real-life persona. In a 1921 reader’s letter she states, “Ich habe durch die Prinzenkrone nur dem Judentum einen Opal in die Schläfe gesetzt, […]” (“Zuschrift an ‘Die Weltbühne’” 21). Her visual Orientalism thus serves her self-Orientalization und with it her performative ennoblement of Jewishness. Today one might call this an empowering self-awareness and reappropriation of the disparaging label of Jewishness. 10 Despite this progressive quality of Lasker-Schüler’s work, one hierarchy that generally remains unquestioned in her prose and images is the racist world order that enslaved and subjectified Black populations. This was already noticeable in Lasker-Schüler’s plan for the aforementioned performance as “Tino von Bagdad oder Schlôme von Jericho,” where she planned for a Black child to serve as a quasi-requisite for the Orientalist stage setting. In one description of the intended show in a letter to Max Brod (8 Apr. 1910) she writes, “und einen kleinen Neger mieten wir uns zum Vortrag, der uns Sachen überreicht abends - Bläckende Zähne, rollende Augen” ( Werke und Briefe 6, letter no. 234). With the baring teeth and rolling eyes she recalls the usual racist depiction of Black persons in caricature. The editors of the Kritische Ausgabe remark that next to the n-word is a drawing of a “Gestalt mit schwarzem Kopf und Fez” (letter no. 234). The Black child as servant with fez is a European colonialist invention and a fixed component of the project. Lasker-Schüler retains the motif and transfers it to the world of Thebes where - appropriate to the shallowest stereotype - Prinz Jussuf has of course a Black servant. Lasker-Schüler then places the fez on the head of Prinz Jussuf ’s Black servant in question, Oßman. When she handwrites the latter’s name the O represents a head covered by the fez (Fig. 2). Like other fixed visual formulas ‘Oßman’ becomes one of Lasker-Schüler’s own graphic signs. Oßman is clearly marked as African since Prinz Jussuf calls him for example “Meinen treuen Somaliknecht Oßman” ( Der Malik 471), linking him to the country which was colonized by Italy and the United Kingdom at that time. Even though Oßman seems to have a deep emotional bond with Prinz Jussuf - he plays the postillon d’amour in the forbidden love story between Giselheer and Prinz Jussuf (508, 516) - he is not one of the ruler’s comrades (“Spielgefährten” [477]), the “wilde Juden,” but “der ewige Knecht” (482). “Ich, die Dichterin von Arabien” 379 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0018 Fig. 2: Lasker-Schüler, Else. Postcard to Kurt Wolff, 19 Mar. 1913. Postcard and Image courtesy of Kurt Wolff Archive. Yale Collection of German Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Call Number: YCGL MSS 3, [23]v. Briefe und Bilder , the central text about Prinz Jussuf ’s coronation and rule, was created during a longer period from 1913 to 1917. It was collected, completed, and published in 1919 under the title Der Malik . While the novel’s inverted world has a carnivalesque aspect, allowing Lasker-Schüler to subvert traditional gender roles, heteronormativity, and the colonialist suppression of the reputedly barbaric people of color in the Orient, she notably does not question the subaltern status of Black African people. Still the most carnivalesque scene evolves around Oßman on a holiday when servant and ruler switch roles, whereby Oßman’s behavior cannot be described as anything other than brutish. In his part as “Somalimalik” (497) he sniffs at a woman (497), has humans roasted (498), and devours whole animals with skin and hair. Shown as a wild creature, he clearly fulfills the cliché of an African cannibal for the amusement of Jussuf ’s subjects, “Die Schwermütigen wurden vor Lachen gesund, den Krüppeln wuchsen die Glieder wieder; alle wollten sie den schmausenden Basileus sehen” (473—74). It is thus left to the readers whether to interpret this exaggeration as a satire of colonialist stereotypes. In the context of Lasker-Schüler’s Orientalism, I nevertheless read this depiction as an unquestioned affirmation of a racist mindset, for while the Black character plays an expected role and is only ennobled on a holiday as a spectacle to entertain the voyeuristic people of Thebes, the fluid and unconventional treatment of gender, sexuality, and Jewishness gains subversive momentum. In conclusion, Lasker-Schüler’s visual Orientalism as it would have been performed on stage would have been quite conventional, whereas her art was quite exceptional. Already at the turn of the century, Lasker-Schüler used her 380 Julia Ingold DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0018 Jewishness to cultivate her image as a mystic and exotic artist. In the 1910s, her Orientalism began developing aspects as subversive as her art forms. She created an eclectic Jewish-Oriental world out of an interplay between words and image and derived benefits from the stereotype of the Jew as Oriental for her artistic self-staging to prove her works’ authenticity and inspiration. By appropriating an imposed ‘identity,’ she made emancipatory and affirmative use of her Jewishness as artistic material. While the fantastic, dreamy Orientalism of Lasker-Schüler’s works has nothing to do with any real countries east and south of Europe, this also brought an important impulse to the artistic avant-garde, with the Orient as unfilled space allowing for and inspiring further artistic experiments (Schmetterling 172). Lasker-Schüler is processing a nonexistent imaginary Orient and inscribes herself into it. Rather than displaying an other, she becomes the other. Her visual Orientalism is unique, because her graphics do not depict Oriental objects, but in imitation of arabesques, they become Oriental objects. Lasker-Schüler’s texts, graphics, and real-life self-staging are inseparable parts of a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ in which she subverts hierarchies of different areas. She remains interested in ways to uplift the discarded and depreciated, be it marginalized or powerless groups or even literal waste. Notes 1 When I use the terms Orient and Oriental here it always only means the Western fantasy since there is no ‘real’ Orient behind that. I will not use quotation marks every time I use the terms. 2 Körner describes Lasker-Schüler’s “Entwicklung einer weiblichen und orientalischen poetischen ‘Identität’” (154—72). 3 There is an online display with materials from the Lasker-Schüler Archives at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach am Neckar and the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem that gives exemplary insights into Lasker-Schüler’s graphic arts: laskerschuelerarchives.org. 4 Gelber examines Lasker-Schüler’s fin de siècle-style poetry as contribution to Eroticism and Masochism in Cultural Zionism in a chapter with the same name (203—46). 5 In Jüdischer Inslam. Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung Heschel traces the affirmative reception of Islam by Jewish scholars and artists from the 1840s to Lasker-Schüler’s times. 6 Körner, in her chapter “Die jüdische Dichterin” - Vorbehalte der Forschung (29—34), shows how this images stuck and has influenced Lasker-Schüler’s reception ever since. “Ich, die Dichterin von Arabien” 381 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0018 7 Spinner shows that Lasker-Schüler’s Orientalism includes the primitivist vision of Islam which Said already described (94—120). 8 Cf.: “Wo sich hingegen der einzelne wieder des großen Zusammenhangs bewußt wird, wo er im Schoß der Geschichte, der Überlieferung ruht, wo urewige Symbole ihn tragen, urewige Blutströme ihm Adelsbewußtsein verleihen und zugleich alles Errungene und Erworbene organisch damit verschmilzt, da mag er wohl den Weg zu Göttlichem leichter als andere finden. Der Jude als Europäer, als Kosmopolit ist ein Literat; der Jude als Orientale, nicht im ethnographischen, sondern im mythischen Sinne, als welcher die verwandelnde Kraft zur Gegenwart schon zur Bedingung macht, kann Schöpfer sein.” (Wassermann 132) 9 Cf.: “Die Arbeitsgebiete, auf denen sich die Juden in wissenschaftlicher Hinsicht betätigen, sind die dramatische und die Tonkunst, ferner die Medizin, die Mathematik, die Philologie und die Sozialwissenschaften, und zwar sind die Männer, die sie geliefert haben, mehr talentvolle als geniale Naturen.” (“Juden” 330) 10 In chapter two of his book, Mendes-Flohr examines the connection between “Fin de Siècle Orientalism, the Ostjuden , and the Aesthetics of Jewish Self-Affirmation” (77—132) in general. Works Cited Al-Taie, Yvonne. “‘Vorführung meiner Blutsverwandten’: Else Lasker-Schülers arabische Chiffren jüdischer Identität.” Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie 133.4 (2014): 553—71. Berman, Nina. Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne. Zum Bild des Orients in der deutschsprachigen Kultur 1900 . Stuttgart: M&P, 1996. Bodenheimer, Alfred and Andreas B. Kilcher. “Lasker-Schüler, Else.” Metzler Lexikon der deutsch-jüdischen Literatur: Jüdische Autorinnen und Autoren deutscher Sprache von der Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart . Ed. Alfred Bodenheimer and Andreas B. Kilcher. 2 nd ed. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2012. 327—31. Dick, Ricarda. “Else Lasker-Schüler als Künstlerin.” Else Lasker-Schüler. Die Bilder . Ed. Ricarda Dick. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010. 117—58. Gelber, Mark H. Melancholy Pride. Nation, Race, and Gender in the German Literature of Cultural Zionism . Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000. Gilman, Sander L. Jewish Self-Hatred. Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews . Baltimore/ London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. Heizer, Donna K. Jewish-German Identity in the Orientalist Literature of Else Lasker-Schüler, Friedrich Wolf, and Franz Werfel . Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996. Heschel, Susannah. Jüdischer Islam. Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung . Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2018. 382 Julia Ingold DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0018 Hessing, Jakob. Else Lasker-Schüler: “…die größte Lyrikerin, die Deutschland je hatte…” -Gottfried Benn . Munich: Heyne, 1987. Ingold, Julia. Arabeske und Klage: Aspekte des Ausdrucks bei Else Lasker-Schüler . Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2022. “Juden.” Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon: Ein Nachschlagewerk des allgemeinen Wissens . Vol. 10. Ed. Hermann Julius Meyer. Leipzig/ Wien: Bibliographisches Institut, 1908. 330. Kirschnick, Sylke. Tausend und ein Zeichen: Else Lasker-Schülers Orient und die Berliner Alltags- und Populärkultur um 1900 . Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. Körner. Birgit M. ‘Hebräische’ Avantgarde: Else Lasker-Schülers Poetologie im Kontext des Kulturzionismus . Cologne: Böhlau, 2017. Lasker-Schüler, Else. “Briefe nach Norwegen.” Werke und Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe . Vol. 3.1. Ed. Ricarda Dick. Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998. 177—261. —. “Briefe und Bilder.” Werke und Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe . Vol. 3.1. Ed. Ricarda Dick. Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998. 297—359. —. “Der Malik: Eine Kaisergeschichte mit Bildern und Zeichnungen.” Werke und Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe . Vol. 3.1. Ed. Ricarda Dick. Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998. 431—521. —. “Die Nächte Tino von Bagdads.” Werke und Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe . Vol. 3.1. Ed. Ricarda Dick. Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998. 67—97. —. “Der Prinz von Theben. Ein Geschichtenbuch.” Werke und Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe . Vol. 3.1. Ed. Ricarda Dick. Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998. 379—408. —. Der siebente Tag: Gedichte . Berlin: Verlag des Vereins für Kunst, Amelangsche Buchhandlung, 1905. —. Werke und Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe . Vol. 6. Ed. Ulrike Marquardt. Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003. —. “Zuschrift an ‘Die Weltbühne’.” Werke und Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe . Vol. 4.1. Ed. Karl Jürgen Skrodzki and Itta Shedletzky. Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001. 21—22. Liska, Vivian. Die Dichterin und das schelmische Erhabene: Else Lasker-Schülers ‘Die Nächte Tino von Bagdads’ . Tübingen/ Basel: Francke, 1998. Ludewig, Anna-Dorothea. “Between Orientalization and Self-Orientalization: Remarks on the Image of the ‘Beautiful Jewess’ in Nineteenthand Early-Twentieth-Century European Literature.” Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews: Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses . Ed. Ulrike Brunotte et al. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. 221—29. Mendes-Flohr, Paul. Divided Passions. Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity . Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991. Ott, Ulrich, ed. Else Lasker-Schüler. 1869-1945. Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schiller-gesellschaft, 1995. “Ich, die Dichterin von Arabien” 383 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0018 Rumold, Inca. “Der Malik: Else Lasker-Schüler’s Anti-War Novel.” Women in German Yearbook 14 (1998). 143—61. Schmetterling, Astrid. “‘Das ist direkt ein Diebstahl an den Kunsthistorikern.’ Else Lasker-Schülers bildnerisches Werk im kunsthistorischen Kontext.” Else Lasker-Schüler. Die Bilder . Ed. Ricarda Dick. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag 2010. 159—93. Spinner, Samuel J. Jewish Primitivism . Stanford: Stanford UP, 2021. Wassermann, Jakob. “Der Jude als Orientale.” Das Bunte Buch . Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1914. 131—35. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 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) Berna Gueneli University of Georgia Abstract: Gueneli examines the adaptation of the Arabian Nights into filmic narratives in the Weimar Republic by asking how these films participated in and shaped modern discourses on gender, sex, and ethnicity. What fantasies, anxieties, and dreams did these Arab, “exotic” tales fulfill for audiences in Weimar Germany, where debates about colonial dreams and the simultaneous loss of colonies, as much as about women’s liberation and the LGBTQ+ population’s voicing of social, political, and sexual interests saturated the public sphere? Gueneli analyzes Lotte Reiniger’s Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed ( The Adventures of Prince Achmed , 1926) and Ernst Lubitsch’s Sumurun (1920). She argues that the films’ deliberations on these questions provide reactions to modern Germany’s changing socio-cultural and -political fabric. Gueneli discusses these films from the perspective of gender and sexuality and pays particular attention to the interplay between ethnicity and the cinematic use of campy/ drag performances. Looking closely at the use of costume (fashion, props, jewelry) and the staging of desire (mise-enscène, casting, performance), Gueneli claims that through the occasional use of a campy mode/ campy drag performance the films include more nuances in their depictions of gender, yet, at the same time, create a ranking among the implied ethnicities. Keywords: Orientalism, Weimar Cinema, Gender, Female empowerment, Campy drag Ever since the first translation of the Arabian Nights into French (1704) - with English, German, and Italian translations following almost immediately - these 386 Berna Gueneli DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 tales have fascinated readers across Europe (Irwin xii). New, more erotic translations into European languages that appeared in the late 1800s and the early 20 th century inspired ballet and theater performances, art exhibitions, and fashion shows across Europe and beyond, reaching ever more audiences (Gueneli, “Orientalist Fashion” 445; Troy 109; “Once More East of Suez” 258). 1 Although such Orientalist fantasies in European cultural products were frequently rejected or revised in the arts of the Ottoman Empire (photography, literature, painting), they did have a lasting impact in the European imaginary and served different functions. 2 In this article, I examine the adaptation of the Arabian Nights into filmic narratives in the Weimar Republic, by asking how these films participated in and shaped modern discourses on gender, sex, and ethnicity. The loss of former colonies, but not the dreams about them, and the decline of Germany’s ally in the East, the Ottoman Empire (Marchand 475), as well as the changing discourses on gender and sex converged in creative ways in the public sphere and provided the fruitful ground for my inquiry. What fantasies, anxieties, and dreams did these Arab, “exotic” tales fulfill for audiences in Weimar Germany, where debates about colonial dreams and the simultaneous loss of colonies, as much as about women’s liberation and the LGBTQ+ population’s voicing of social, political, and sexual interests saturated the public sphere? I will discuss the “Araband Ottoman-inspired” fantasies in Lotte Reiniger’s Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed ( The Adventures of Prince Achmed , 1926) and Ernst Lubitsch’s Sumurun (1920) to analyze the renderings of such debates in these filmic narratives. Ultimately, I argue that the films’ deliberations on these questions provide reactions to modern Germany’s changing socio-cultural and -political fabric. In both films, we observe a certain preoccupation with progressive, contemporary contemplations about gender/ sex, while at the same time they are complicit in the period’s oblivious engagement with skin color and ethnicity. The films keep their problematic relationship to race and ethnicity throughout (Acadia 152, 155—56). Allred has identified that the powerful orientalism and eroticism of female figures in Weimar film were quickly addressed in scholarship, while the connections between masculinities and race were not sufficiently discussed (64). In what follows, I would like to discuss these films from the perspective of gender and sexuality, paying particular attention to the interplay between ethnicity and the cinematic use of campy [drag] performances in this context, especially - but not exclusively - as it relates to the male figures in the films. A closer look at the use of costume (fashion, props, jewelry) and the staging of desire (through mise-en-scène, casting, performance) will help to decipher the Orientalist staging of gender in my case studies, which - through the occasional use of a campy mode/ campy drag performance - have a few more nuances DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 The Arabian Nights in Weimar Cinema 387 compared to conventional depictions and go beyond a simple differentiation of POC and Black masculinities as malevolent perpetrators and white femininities as threatened damsels in distress (see below references to Weimar cinema). The interplay between set design, costume, performance, and casting will be of utmost importance in this context. Given selected characters’ exaggerated performances of queer gender in the context of a lavish costuming and set design in Prince Achmed and Sumurun , I am certainly tempted to read several of the performances in these films as campy drag. Reading the performances that way empowers some characters and provides them with a subversive quality that goes beyond a one-dimensional, passive Orientalism. Camp is an aesthetic of the exaggerated. A campy style or mode can be found in films, as much as in persons, architecture, performances, objects, and so forth (Mendenhall 190). 3 It is “exaggerated, artificial, garish, comical, flirtatious, and stylized” (Susan Sontag; referenced in Mendenhall 190). Moreover, camp provides a ‘comic vision of the world’ as Sontag states already in 1964. “Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious.’ One can be frivolous about the serious, serious about the frivolous” (Sontag; quoted in Mendenhall 191). Furthermore, camp or campy notions of film are closely associated with drag. Drag studies - an engagement with the artistic and aesthetic performance of drag - might help us decipher some of the cinematic performances in Sumurun and Prince Achmed . Drag is closely related to gender performance, but, according to Kayte Stokoe, it can have manifold and sometimes even contradictory definitions. Beginning her study with a reference to Judith Lorber, Stokoe introduces us to readings of drag primarily as performance and parody (Stokoe 1). Drag is, Stokoe insists, non-binary, despite earlier descriptions that would highlight the performance of cross-dressing between two genders (2—3). Stokoe sees drag as much more complex and inclusionary, postulating drag to include a variety of combinations of gender, gender identities, and gender performances (2—3), as we will also observe in the films discussed here. In this context, we need to refer to “ethnic drag,” a term that Katrin Sieg has brought to our attention with her milestone work that focuses (mostly) on West German society and its post-Nazi engagement with racial imaginations (e.g., through ‘racial masquerades’ and “mimesis” in theater and in hobbyist circles). “Ethnic drag” is therefore another useful category for Sumurun and Prince Achmed as Sieg’s concept is very much applicable to the ‘ethnic masquerades” in my case studies. 4 Here, I am using “campy drag” as a mode of performance for some of the filmic characters in Sumurun and Prince Achmed to hint at the playful exaggerations, aesthetics, and humor that go beyond a pure imitation or masquerade of 388 Berna Gueneli DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 an imagined ethnicity or gender. Ultimately, through the films’ strategic use of campy performance and mise-en-scène, the films negotiate aspects of gender and sexuality relatively positively, even if - at times - they adhere to rather problematic interpretations of race and ethnicity (Acadia 152). Both films provide insights into complicated Arab and Ottoman Orientalist fantasies in Weimar Germany’s popular culture at the crossroads of changing discourses on gender, sex, and ethnicity. As I hope to demonstrate, the films are at once ill-conceived and problematic (masquerade of ethnicity, Orientalism, cross-racial casting), but also - almost naively - well-meaning, celebratory, dreamlike, and joyful indulgences of “exotic” aesthetics, fashion, costume, and dance as put in scene through interventions of a campy style of performance, which - as a mode - helps to bring forward a progressive agenda. In what follows, I will briefly sketch aspects of German Orientalism in the early 20 th century and the reception of the Arabian Nights , before discussing these two post-WWI German films in more detail within the above-mentioned contexts. Edward Said’s iconic, but also disputed Orientalism (Osterhammel 597; Nash; Varisco) marks the beginning of a critical academic discourse on the binary distinctions made between the West/ Occident and the East/ Orient. For Said, the rough starting point for Orientalism - which he defines “as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (3) - is to be located in the late 18 th century, which coincides with an expanding colonialism in the region. However, he asserts that Orientalism continues today. In Said’s terms, “[a]nyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient - and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist - […] is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism” (2). 5 While this definition mainly has the academic expert in mind, Said reiterates that this type of recurring meaning production and distribution is not limited to the academic world. For Said, a variety of writers, including poets, politicians and others who “have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point” for their writings “concerning the Orient […]” are Orientalists (2, 3). Apart from the binary mode of thinking in Said’s tractate, many scholars, especially of German Studies, noticed further shortcomings of Said’s (already self-reported) negligence of and inattention to German (and Dutch, Russian, Belgian, et al.) studies in this context (Berman 17—18; Marchand xix; Said 1, 18—19, 24). Ultimately, for Said, colonialism is intrinsically linked to the creation of Orientalism, and with Germany’s short-lived imperial might, they were not only left out of Said’s main discussions that centered on French and British colonial (and later US) texts and contexts, but they were reduced to an “aca- DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 The Arabian Nights in Weimar Cinema 389 demic” Orientalism that built on British and French pioneering work (Said 19, Marchand xix). 6 Despite having a relatively short period of colonial rule - Germany came to colonialism in 1884/ 85 and also lost the colonies quickly with the end of WWI - Germany did continuously participate in colonial and Orientalist discourse and exploitation in myriad ways, including with other, non-colonial forms of contacts (Berman 18). For example, Germany had militaristic and mercantile relationships with the Ottoman Empire until its demise after WWI; German artists and archeologists travelled to Middle Eastern and Ottoman sites, including Mesopotamian sites, to acquire cultural goods; they studied texts and colonial cultural products in museums in France and Britain (later also in Germany); and they participated in archeological trips to study and get their hands on these materials themselves (Bohrer 1 ff., 272—73, 275; Marchand 426—29.). While after 1919 Germany was certainly left in a less advantageous position to pursue its Orientalist ambitions, Orientalism continued in the Weimar Republic, in mercantile and cultural forms, but especially also in the realms of academia that Suzanne Marchand thoroughly investigates in her work (Marchand 476—87). Marchand speaks of an “Indian Summer” referring to Orientalism studies in the Weimar Republic, before their near demise in the Third Reich (476). In the early years of the 20 th century and even more so in the postwar period, many Germans were fatigued by a callous, destructive modernism, and began looking beyond the paradigms of European modernity for alternative lifestyles and forms of spiritual and artistic fulfillment. Many found intriguing and liberating insights in the Far and Middle East, and in the (former) Ottoman Empire (Marchand 434, 482). From Indologists, Sinologist and Turkologists, to art historians and literary writers - such as Rudolf Otto, Aby Warburg, Hermann Hesse, and Thomas Mann - artists went to enormous lengths to engage with art, culture, philosophy and the languages from elsewhere (Dickinson 92 ff.; Jirka-Schmitz; Marchand 428—29, 434—35, 482). 7 Despite academic endeavors to embrace Orientalist study in the broadest sense - whether in the museum archives or in university classrooms - the larger public was rather unimpressed and uninterested in Orientalist inquiries beyond the cliché bric-a-brac of cheaply made department store products that mirrored stereotypical associations with the Middle East and the “Orient” at large (Marchand 390; Bohrer 280). This is well aligned with the commercial and advertisement culture of the Weimar Republic. Such clichéd imagery of mysterious locales, plants, creatures, and gendered exoticism were reiterated in the prosperous tobacco, coffee, travel and lifestyle industry in Germany of the time (Chahine). 8 390 Berna Gueneli DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 That is, while the general public showed an interest in the commercial aspects of an Orientalist culture, which included the Arabian Nights and its reception, it did not appreciate scholarly Orientalism, which was a far cry from the commercial clichés of advertisement (Marchand 413). As early as in the beginning of the 20 th century, satire pieces in the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (1904) or Lustige Blätter (1903) mocked, for example, Friedrich Delitzsch’s Babel-Bibel lectures and the Mesopotamian excavations, as did advertisements which increasingly started to mock the elitism that came to be associated with collectors and (educational) travel to locations in the Middle East, North Africa, or the Ottoman Empire (Bohrer 287, 294). A good early example of this mockery is a satirical 12-part cartoon published in the Viennese illustrated magazine Neue Illustrierte Zeitung in 1876 about an Austrian dandy/ artist collective and their travel to Egypt (Gartlan 141, 143). 9 There is, however, a different understanding and acceptance of the literary Orient via the famous tales of the Arabian Nights . 10 The wider distribution of the new translations of the Arabian Nights in German language around the turn of the century and the early 1920s had a deep influence on how the imagined Arab world therein was perceived in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, and what type of projections it elicited, especially after WWI. The West’s critique of modernity in general and its influences on the ‘decline of narration’ in particular are possible factors for the praising of the tales (Haase 263), which brought the narration genre back into appreciation as much as the visual sensations inscribed into them. Two things about the reception of the tales stand out: its perceived exoticism and visuality. As Donald Haase reiterates, from the beginning, commentators and reviewers of the German translation, such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Enno Littmann, and Hermann Hesse, described and praised the stories as ‘colorful,’ sensual - and most importantly - visual experiences (Haase 262—66). The “colorfulness” and “sensuality” of the tales are most certainly linked to preconceived ideas about exoticism and Orientalism (268). Referring to Lotte Eisner’s discussion of costume films in Weimar Germany, Haase further notes that there was a need for escapist, fantastic stories and sensations, particularly after the dire experiences associated with WWI and the immediate ‘poverty-stricken’ postwar period in Germany (268—69). The exotic world of the Arabian Nights most certainly fulfilled such a longed-for locale for escapist, narrative indulgences. This escapism paired literary experiences of erotic and exotic pleasures for the consumers in war-torn Germany in a time that further requested adjustments from its citizens facing challenges and achievements regarding shifting political, social, and, most importantly, gender and sexuality norms. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 The Arabian Nights in Weimar Cinema 391 The Arabian Nights themselves consist of a frame narrative and nesting narratives. The frame narrative is of a woman named Shahrazad, who, in order to survive, each night tells a story to the prince/ Sheik for his entertainment. As long as the Sheik is interested in her stories, he will not kill her. The Arabian Nights are a sequence of tales that are narrated over the duration of 1001 nights. The many stories in the Arabian Nights create an alternative, richly diverse setting and narrative that the Western European readership consumes with great appetite ever since its translations (Irwin xii ff.) The tales in their modern translations from the turn of the century include luring themes - reminiscent of the fin-de-siècle aesthetics (Troy 107, 108) - of same-sex desires, concubines, and a variety of erotic depictions, which influenced the films to be discussed in this article. Reiniger’s Prince Achmed is loosely associated with the publicly well-known themes and figures from the Arabian Nights , such as the figures of Prince Achmed, Aladdin with the magic lamp, the flying horse, and the flying carpet, but also themes and figures more generally associated with a clichéd Orient such as decorative palaces and ornamental culture more broadly. Lubitsch’s Sumurun is not per se a direct adaptation of an Arabian Nights ’ tale, but includes, for example, settings with lavish set designs and cliché figures such as the harem, Sheiks, belly dancers, and also travelling circuses and entertainers, an Oriental mercer, and exotic enslaved servants of varying skin colors, 11 which are all broadly associated with the Ottoman and Arab world, especially after the translation of the tales, in Germany. Let us now turn to the two films Sumurun and Prince Achmed to discuss their tapping into existing Orientalist fantasies and their renderings of gender, sex and ethnicity in the Weimar popular culture context. Both Sumurun and Prince Achmed are quite distinct works of art. One is a comedy by Jewish-German actor and filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch, who became famous for his costume dramas and comedies, and one a Scherenschnitt / Silhouettenfilm , the first Trickfilm / animation film that is still in existence by filmmaker Lotte Reiniger who would become almost forgotten before being rediscovered in the later part of the 20 th century (Moritz). Although quite distinct in terms of genre and form, the films share a few significant features. On a production level, both pieces were lauded for their use of innovative technology, e.g., new lighting techniques in Lubitsch (Allred 74), and all-around technological innovation for the fairly new genre of Trickfilm by Reiniger (Sterritt 399; Moritz). There are two main matters of overlap: on the one hand, both represent filmic adaptations of or inspirations from the famous Arabian Nights and, in a time of political and social upheaval and change in Weimar Germany, indulge in its exotic ‘colorful’ otherness (Haase 268—69). On the other hand, they both share similar modes 392 Berna Gueneli DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 of portrayal regarding notions of gender, sex, and ethnicity. The progressive agenda regarding gender and sexuality is often performed in a campy mode/ style - frivolously engaging with the serious and taking seriously the frivolous, as Sontag stated - while aspects of ethnicity seem to remain problematic at times. That is, both films rely on the interplay of campy Orientalist costumes, mise-en-scène, and performance to arrive at their progressive depictions of gender and sexuality. Within the first two decades of the 20 th century, Orientalist aesthetics became a popular commodity and widely known in Europe. With the beginning of the 1910s, Orientalism inspired fashion in France (see Paul Poiret’s designs) and soon also in Germany (Troy 105, 109, 116; Evans 38 ff.; Gueneli, “Orientalist Fashion” 449—51). By the 1920s, the once elitist experiences of Orientalism - including fashion shows and catalogues; the use of specific color patterns and shapes, fabrics and accessories (harem pants for women, vests, and turbans); as well as ornamental design associated with the late Ottoman Empire and Arab regions, such as the 19 th -century “Arab” or “Turkish” rooms (Hartmuth and Rüdiger 7) - became known popular costume and interior design items. These were visible and consumable in German advertisement, at costume parties, and culinary and cultural establishments such as Berlin’s famous café Mokka Efti in Friedrichstrasse. That is, for the most part, the opulent fantasy of Arab and Ottoman worlds that are created in the elaborate set designs 12 of Sumurun and Prince Achmed are known and expected Orientalist aesthetics for a Weimar audience. What is new is the connections made between these surface-level design and aesthetic elements, the staging of the “exotic” figures, and the campy performance/ portrayal of their gender and sexuality, especially as it relates to the male figures in these films. Let’s begin with depictions of femininities and female desire in Sumurun . The set design, costume, and mise-en-scène help to create the campy Arabian Nights style fantasy in Sumurun . 13 The set design introduces the viewers to the imagined Oriental locale. Here, we encounter a palace; a harem with ornamental props and décor; other palace interiors replete with vases, textiles, cushions and ornamental details; a despotic catacomb/ torture chamber; a dry, desert-like exterior setting; a mercer’s store with more Oriental fabrics and garments; as well as a wandering circus and its vagabond members. The atmosphere and associations that the opulent set design creates are augmented by the costumes of the figures. The lavish wardrobes of the main female protagonists - of the titular Sumurun ( Jenny Hesselqvist) and the “desert dancer” (Pola Negri) from the travelling circus - are fantasy costumes that borrow elements from Ottoman and Arab clothing garments. While the socially DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 The Arabian Nights in Weimar Cinema 393 higher-ranking Sumurun is dressed in more elegant variants of belly-free seethrough clothes and silky ornamental fabrics, the dancer initially wears less shiny, but nonetheless similarly belly-free garments, harem pants, and slippers. This changes once the dancer becomes a harem woman herself. Head bands, turbans and hair accessories further adorn them. Both characters are bejeweled with multiple decorative bracelets, long necklaces, and earrings, with the difference that Sumurun’s seem to be of more valuable material like pearls and gemstones versus the initial shell necklaces of the dancer. These principal female characters (Sumurun, the Sheik’s favorite harem woman, and the free-spirited “desert dancer” of the wandering circus) are both love interests, or at least sexually desired figures, of several existing male characters in the film; the Sheik, his son, the mercer Nur Al-Din, and the hunchback from the travelling circus are all depicted longing for one or both of these female figures. However, both female protagonists are themselves depicted as women with desires and interests of their own, whether they represent more modest “monogamous” types like Sumurun, or more polygamous, vamp-like figures like the dancer (McComrick, “Desire” 70). In fact, the “plot is driven by female desire” (69). McCormick discusses Sumurun as a political comedy at the intersection of “sex, gender, class, and power” (68). In his reading, the film’s female characters from the harem ultimately overcome the despotic rule of the Sheik and his heir by walking into their freedom at the end of the film (73). Furthermore, the film’s “bourgeoise” protagonist Sumurun can only be reunited with her desired love interest with the collaborative help of several figures in the film (74). How can we read these performances and depictions of female desire? One attempt is to understand that female desire is paired with female empowerment (74). Here we need to see the film in the context of Weimar’s women’s movement, its LGBTQ+ population, and its reception in popular culture . The Weimar Republic is marked by several modernity-related crises (economic, political, gender and sexuality). Although these are interrelated/ intersectional for the most part, for my discussion of Sumurun and Prince Achmed , the crisis of gender and sexuality becomes particularly important. We encounter a growing visibility of both the women’s movement and the LGBTQ+ population’s lifestyles. These emergent democratic liberties and self-determination have been extensively analyzed in scholarship (Grossmann; Marhoefer; Smith; Sutton, The Masculine Woman ; von Ankum). Swiftly changing gender expectations and renderings of the “New Woman” were publicly debated in political arenas, the popular press, culture, and the arts of the time (“The Republic”). Whether they were related to Paragraph 218 on abortion, to Paragraph 175 on the decriminal- 394 Berna Gueneli DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 ization of same-sex encounters, or to fashion and lifestyle choices, these topics were as much a popular culture issue as they were governmentally pertinent. 14 Contemporary literature, cinema, art exhibitions, theaters, and magazines all engaged with varied renderings of sexually active female and LGBTQ+ characters, avantgarde performers, and artists. 15 The mass-cultural reproduction of these images amplified discourses on the new performances of gender and sexuality across the country, in particular in urban Germany, and kept these issues palpable for the larger public. 16 However, not all renderings of these new gender roles were celebratory in tone and nature. Some were, indeed, grotesque, cynical, and unflattering and seemed to portray an indirect longing for older, more traditional, binary models of femininities/ masculinities (Gueneli, “Art” 330—31; McCormick, “Private” 3, 8; Uelzmann 161—62; Wehrling 721—23), perhaps as a result of the perception of a “masculinization” of modern women that often went hand in hand with these new discourses (Sutton, The Masculine 1). 17 McCormick speaks of (hetero-)sexual (male) anxieties (McCormick, “Private” 3, 8) in New Objectivity art, and Jan Uelzmann discusses sexual cynicism and insecurities (Uelzmann 161—62) 18 in literature of the time. The simultaneity of competing desires is well portrayed in illustrated magazines such as Das Magazin . Variations of the New Woman depictions are juxtaposed to texts, for example, which are more congruent with traditional models of gender that depict (heterosexual) masculinities as potent and powerful. 19 The Arabian Nights and the rendering of individual stories and themes from them helped to celebrate and experiment with the portrayal of new gender roles in distant, fantasy locales. Such campy treatments as in Sumurun - through an excess of set design, performance, and costumes - allowed for the creation of new and non-conformist depictions of gender and sexuality safely, while rendering them as unthreatening, or at least, less threatening than the quick and unapologetic changes that could be observed in many other Weimar cultural productions, including in its wider cinema. Aligning with such changing gender roles in the Weimar Republic, through the figures of the harem women we are presented with a cinematic celebration of female empowerment. They help each other, or fight, distract, and manipulate intruders, especially despotic, violent male figures (McCormick, “Desire” 72, 74). 20 This female empowerment is connected to expressions of female desire for the most part as we see in the figure of Sumurun especially. Sumurun (melo)dramatically persists. She survives the despotic Sheik’s bewilderment when she rejects his advances, she escapes her death sentence and is ultimately reunited with her self-chosen love interest, for whom she has romantic feelings. We see Sumurun’s agency and depiction of her own desire DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 The Arabian Nights in Weimar Cinema 395 in scenes focusing on her body. In one scene, for example, she lifts her legs to get an ankle bracelet donned by the mercer, who is ultimately also “overcome with desire” for her (McCormick, “Desire” 74). An even more “transgressive female character” is the dancer who flirts and seduces several men for material or status gains, showing her quest for upward mobility (74 ff.). Notwithstanding the dancer’s demise at the end of the filmic narrative, both figures play toward a normalization of female desire and sexuality and entry into self-chosen destinies/ futures away from tyranny (and patriarchy). It is noteworthy, however, that both characters - though othered in specific ways - have light skin color, resembling white European characters. This nuance of cross-racial casting implies that beauty is measured on a scale of whiteness in the film. We will return to this discussion, as we will observe similar notions and codes of whiteness more explicitly in Prince Achmed . Similar to Sumurun , Reiniger’s Prince Achmed reveals performances of female desire. This time, the creation is doubly othered and mediated through the genre of Scherenschnitte and “exotic” locales. While Sumurun still adheres to some cinematic realism in its set design, costumes, and mise-en-scène - despite its campy mode - the Scherenschnitt provides an unabashedly fictional fantasy world that is a completely artificial and aestheticized visual spectacle, a “stylized orientalism” that borrows an eclectic potpourri from Arab, Ottoman, Far Eastern traditions and décor for its staging of the filmic world (Acadia 150, 155). Even the form of the Scherenschnitt recalls the Turkish tradition of shadow play of Karagöz and Hacivat that became popular during the Ottoman Empire. 21 The set is designed in a way to create a sense of aesthetically pleasing, beautiful elsewhere; a campy fantasy locale that invites indulgence and pleasure for the viewing audience. This lavish world is replete with decorative/ ornamental architecture and landscapes associated with Arab and Ottoman locales in the European imaginary (the half-moon, towers resembling mosque architecture, palaces with elaborate ornamentation). Slightly different from Sumurun is the additional focus on nature settings. Here mysterious fantasy plants, animals, and animal costumes (especially feathers) are foregrounded, typical for imaginations about filmic settings in a generic “Orient” as the many film posters of contemporary artist Josef Fenneker illustrate. 22 The Ufa- Verleihkatalog [film booklet] for the 1926-1927 cinema season begins Prince Achmed ’s synopsis as follows: “Ein phantastischer Trauma aus heißer orientalischer Welt, der den Zuschauer mit einer Fülle von Wundern überschüttet” (20). I focus mainly on three female figures amidst these locales: The Peris and their queen, Peri Banu (an exoticized beauty) from the island of Wak Wak; the sorceress (an exotic witch) from the continent of Africa; and Dinarsade, a (pre- 396 Berna Gueneli DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 sumably) Arab female princess. All of these woman characters are marked as “exotic” others using (frequently racist) stereotypes associated with the Middle and Far East or with the continent of Africa. The campy visualization of their gender and otherness is primarily achieved though costumes with elaborate headdresses in the case of the Peris, and an ornate wardrobe, shoes, and jewelry in the case of Dinarsade. The “African Sorceress” is a creation that borrows racist physiognomic details (exaggerated facial features and body parts) and costumes associated with prejudiced depictions of colonized populations. Let’s begin with the depiction of the Peris and their desires in Prince Achmed . The scene on the island of Wak Wak introduces the Peris to Achmed - and through him to the film’s viewers. On one island, they flirtatiously and leisurely kiss and touch Achmed, offer him fruits and drinks, setting up erotic adventures on these faraway islands. On another island, Achmed voyeuristically watches from behind large, exotic plants Peri Banu, who bathes with her “Gespielinnen.” This scene depicts a magical, sensual-erotic image, replete of Orientalist desires: The Peris fly in with their feather costumes, their “Federkleid” - traditionally connoted with an eroticized femininity, but also with drag performances - and enter the water in the nude, after taking off their feathers. Achmed watches them longingly, insinuated through his parted lips as the women play, kiss, and touch each other (Acadia 153). Peri Banu’s almost staged, erotic posture highlights her “voluptuousness” (153). Later scenes depict Peri Banu in a fictive Chinese environment, where she is held captive and is expected to marry a king. Here, she wears an extravagant Chinese bridal dress with ornate headdress, dress, and shoes. Some of the protagonists’ dresses resemble imaginary Indian wardrobes (155). Notwithstanding the Orientalist fantasy of the sexualized exotic female other, Peri Banu has magical powers and a desire and will of her own. This is depicted on the one hand through allusions to her own female and homosexual desire and encounter on the island of Wak Wak, and, on the other hand, through Peri Banu’s initial rejection of Achmed, and later of the king, and her escape from Chinese captivity. Thereby, Peri Banu is much more than the initial assumption of an exotic-erotic object of desire to be captured and consumed by Achmed or other male figures. Her reunion with Achmed later in the film is through her own will and desire, and not through a man’s enforcement. Princess Dinarsade’s costume features elaborate, ornate headdresses, dresses, jewelry, and shoes resembling a generic, timeless Arab or Ottoman wardrobe fantasy. Like Peri Banu, she also is an object of desire (she is taken by an evil magician, who wants to marry her), but also expresses her own wishes and desires. Her erotic transgressions in the narrative are of social nature, as the princess falls in love and unites with Aladin, a figure from a lower class. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 The Arabian Nights in Weimar Cinema 397 The depiction of Peri Banu and Dinarsade - similar to the two female protagonists in Sumurun - depend on a mix of lavish exotic-erotic costumes that are loosely based on Arab and Ottoman fantasies paired with a Eurocentric beauty ideal and physiognomy. They are exaggeratedly slender and tall, with long hair. Their silhouettes resemble and are precursors of equally disproportionally slender bodies of modern Barbie dolls, with long extremities. 23 Their Orientalization is therefore reduced to an excess of costumes and environments. They are different, but not too different from their imaginary European counterparts. This reminds of Renoir’s painting Parisian Women in Algerian Costume (1872), which can be seen as an example of how European painters (like Renoir and Manet) used blond (European) women to “pass” as exotic others. Marni Reva Kessler suggests that “the painters thereby tried to limit the otherness of their subjects to clothing and jewelry. They made only some minor adjustments to skin and facial features” (139—40). Similarly, the female actors enacting desirable Oriental/ Arab femininities represent only slightly othered protagonists through costume and mise-en-scène that are physically not too distant from a traditionally accepted European beauty ideal. These Orientalized pre-Barbie dolls are opposed visually to the “powerful African Sorceress.” The sorceress also represents female empowerment - she is a willful and powerful female magician and warrior who ultimately helps Aladin, Achmed, and Peri Banu by fighting and defeating the antagonists of the story. Yet, she is visually marked as other not only by costume (presumably natural materials for skirt and headdress), but also by physical traits (she is shorter, more corpulent, and has overemphasized facial features). She represents, perhaps, a non-binary version of a female force, and not an object of desire of the traditional heterosexual male gaze. In the fine arts of the 19 th century particularly, there has been a well-known history of similar use of differentiation, often through skin color, depicting darker skinned slaves who tend to lighter skinned Arab or Ottoman captive women or concubines creating contrasts, making the concubine seem whiter and more desirable. 24 Here, too, the “whiter” coded characters of Dinarsade and Peri Banu (as well as Aladin and Prince Achmed) are tended to by the powerful sorceress. Hence, notwithstanding the gender empowerment of these femininities, the ethnic and racial traits of the depictions remain problematic. As Acadia reminds us in her discussion of gender portrayals in Prince Achmed , there is a “dehumanizing aspect” to the depiction of the figures, including Peri Banu and Dinarsade. Reiniger’s nuanced and transgressive narrative [regarding gender] is possible through the heterotopia of an uncanny, exoticized world, at the expense of the Eastern subject. There is beauty in such exoticizing tropes in Western portraits of the East. Reiniger re- 398 Berna Gueneli DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 inscribes the suggestion of smoke, misty landscapes, faded shots, geometric patterns, and intricate details, reverent symbols producing a culturally coded understanding of ‘the Orient.’ However, the beauty veils an ignorance, if not a dehumanizing otherness (155). […] It is through the medium of such orientalist narrative […] that the audience receives her message of feminist and gay empowerment, socialist political critique, and artistic innovation. Through this heterotypic other world, Reiniger was able to present same-sex love as natural (Acadia 155, 156). The complication of the representation of gender, sex, and ethnicity in Weimar Cinema is manifold. The depiction of progressive ideas on gender/ sex is in fact not so very unusual in Weimar Germany; however, the combination of such narratives with POC and Black figures further complicates the issues at hand. Much of Weimar Cinema’s progressive attitude toward new and changing gender and sexuality norms has been well documented (McCormick, “Private”; Kuzniar; Samper Vendrell). However, this has been often linked to white sexualities. Sexualities associated with different ethnicities and races have frequently been alarmingly prejudiced and ill-informed. 25 Certainly, clichéd depictions of Black or POC characters as linked to a hypermasculine sexuality that poses a threat to innocent white European female figures has had a long tradition in colonial Europe, existing well before the Weimar Republic. Ideas of violent, virile, non-white male sexualities and deceiving and threatening non-white female sexualities were culturally known fantasies and visually exploited in paintings and other art forms since at least the beginning of colonialism (McClintock 21 ff., 42). 26 In terms of cinema, Mason Allred discusses Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) in this context and shows how the film’s visual strategies have informed a racist depiction of aggressor and victim (74). 27 In Weimar Cinema there has been a tendency to link racism and sexuality in this way, too. Technology has been complicit in it. As Allred convincingly discusses in his work (69 ff.), issues of gender and race are profoundly intertwined with the technological developments of cinema in the Weimar Republic. Allred shows how lighting technologies were used to illuminate white, victim characters and how older techniques and darker renderings of characters were used to portray perpetrators and antagonistic characters: “This constructed reality only helped solidify historical narratives that mirrored the sense that darker-skinned (less reflective) figures were often undecipherable, foreign, and threatening, especially to their apparent opposite, white women” (74). 28 Weimar Cinema’s socio-political specificity certainly played into its depictions of sexuality and varying skin colors, races, and ethnicities. A glance at the post-WWI context provides some understanding of the existing German preconceptions on these issues and the widespread racism that it supported. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 The Arabian Nights in Weimar Cinema 399 Drawing from real life experiences, the occupation of the Rhineland by French colonial soldiers manifested itself into Germany’s cultural memory and helped fix a racist discourse of Black men occupying white men, as the term “Schwarze Schmach” exemplifies. 29 Referring to Iris Wigger, Allred states that Germany at the time was outraged that France would allow such a ‘crime against civilization’: “[…] Fears spread that German women were in constant threat of rape and that mixed-race children would populate future Germany” (71). Such German racial angst of misogyny was quickly moved to the movie theaters, which became a “communal space to work through these collective anxieties” (Allred 63). Allred lists several films, including propaganda films, that either directly or indirectly sensationalized these racial fears, some of which were censored because of their potential to “provoke outrage” as they “grossly exaggerated the reality of the occupation, even while expressing the frustrations felt by many Germans” (63). 30 Misogyny was certainly one of the ultimate fears that found its realization in such films. That is, “people of color depicted in film after 1920 not only spoke to the recent loss of Germany’s colonies but also visually addressed the tensions surrounding the ‘Schwarze Schmach’ […]” (Allred 62). 31 These racist attitudes and cinematic conventions related to different shades of skin color and their sexualities, lighting, and the portrayals of victims and perpetrators certainly also made their way into Sumurun and Prince Achmed , although with a slightly shifted perspective, method of storytelling, and mode. Let us now turn to the masculinities in both Sumurun and Prince Achmed , which are depicted with slightly more nuance compared to the existing stereotypes (such as effeminate homoeroticism and despotic violent masculinities known from previous narrative conventions about the Ottoman Empire or Arab world (Berman 25—26, 30—31; Gueneli, “Orientalist Fashion” 445). 32 These complexities and less-straight-forward depictions reveal themselves via elaborate costume and mise-en-scène. While we do encounter homoerotic allusions and depictions, congruent with stereotypes of an effeminate Arab or Ottoman masculinity since the 18 th century, 33 we also find, as my examples below will show, more mixed variations of Arab/ Oriental/ othered masculinities combined with a diverse, campy performance style in both films. In Sumurun , for example, we see variations of Arab and Ottoman masculinities in the figures of the mercer Nur Al-Din, his servants Mutti and Putti, the Sheik and his son, as well as their harem guards, the eunuchs. The two most commonly known associations with an Arab masculinity in Europe are represented mainly through the Sheik (Paul Wegener) and his son (Carl Clewing), as well as through the main eunuch ( Jakob Tiedtke). At first glance these figures 400 Berna Gueneli DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 represent traditional stereotypes of Arab masculinities from the period of the Ottoman invasions of Vienna as either despotic, cruel, and without ethics (e.g., Berman 25—27), but also effeminate, if we look closely at their featherand jewelry-adorned wardrobe and use of make-up. 34 Or, as in the case of the eunuchs, they represent the ultimate symbol of an effeminate, quite literally emasculated, masculinity. Yet, the main eunuch has additional qualities that the audience sympathizes with, and there are other figures that complicate these black-andwhite depictions (the mercer, Mutti, and Putti). In the following, to untangle the intersection of gender, sex, and ethnicity in these figures, I will discuss their campy fashion and the depiction of their desires. As my notes further above suggested, paying attention to the campy mode/ campy (drag) performance and the over-the-top mise-en-scène in general is helpful in these discussions. In connection to Lubitsch’s films and its criticism, the campy mode has been previously referenced in its relation to Jewish stereotypes and its comedic appropriation in film. McCormick, in reference to Valerie Weinstein and her work on Jewish stereotypes and comedies as camp, notes that seemingly stereotypical elements in Lubitsch’s films can be seen as, “examples of an appropriation […] comparable to the kind of ‘camp’ appropriation associated with another oppressed minority - gay men. Such an appropriation exaggerates a stereotype in such a way that implies critique” (McCormick, “Desire” 72). Let me begin my discussion of Sumurun ’s male characters with the figure of the mercer, whose depiction challenges binary gender dynamics through an excess of costume and the staging of implied desires. Nur Al-Din (Harry Liedtke) is a heterosexual object of desire for both principal woman figures in the film (for the dancer, whom he rejects, and for Sumurun, with whom he also falls in love). The casting of popular and highly-paid Weimar film star Liedtke suggests that the star corresponds with the beauty ideals/ desirability demands of the (implied heteronormative) Weimar Republic audience: He is of fairly athletic physique and known to play the figure of the “gentleman” love interest in many Weimar movies. 35 Béla Balász wrote in 1923 about the actor: “Er hat einen Ausdruck von schalkhafter Kraft, von Männlichkeit ohne Brutalität und Wichtigtuerei, ein lächelndes und schelmisches Pathos, das das Herz erfrischt” ( Filmportal. de , “Harry Liedtke”). That is, in contrast to the Sheik and his son, Nur Al-Din offers a suitable, democratic masculinity that is non-violent and good-natured. This new masculinity, transported into fictional Arab and Ottoman worlds, also carries a certain ambiguity regarding his gender. His costume and make-up, for example, mark a traditionally ambiguous masculinity, congruent with existing stereotypes about Arab and Ottoman-era men. He wears make-up, especially pronounced through the black eyeliner around his eyes. His dress consists of DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 The Arabian Nights in Weimar Cinema 401 colorful, patterned, “Oriental” garments, a cloth belt, dagger(s), a turban, feather, and long necklaces. Despite the fact that these clothes, ornamentations, and jewelry were traditionally coded effeminate, we encounter a spectacle of heterosexual desire in his engagement with Sumurun. All of this puts the binary assumptions about gender and sex into perspective. His servants Mutti and Putti confirm this ambiguity and, in fact, contradict, or at least unsettle, binary gender roles. Mutti and Putti are two servant figures that embody ambiguous, transgressive characters. They play, laugh, tumble, and are unserious at times, buffoon-like even. It is indeterminate if they are a romantic couple, brothers, friends, or simply work colleagues. They are similar in their comportment and dress. Both have slender physiques, resembling the somnambulant Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , without the dark dress and somber look. Their costume is unique and represents a mix of Oriental décor and gymnasts’/ acrobats’ aesthetics. They wear sleeveless shirts, wide cloth belts, Oriental-carpet-patterned harem pants, fez-type hats, and slippers. They further have earrings, and one wears a decorative flower in his hair. Their costume and dress as well as their comportment with expressive facial movements and quick body movements resemble a performance artist, a gymnast or entertainer, and places them in an ambiguous spectrum. I would place their acting in the campy drag performance style. McCormick states that there is “something a bit queer about them” (“Desire” 77) and places their characters in the realm of “slapstick, comic relief ” (77). Certainly, this campy segment’s costume and performance and its entanglement with questions of gender remind of Sontag’s previously mentioned quote on camp as being frivolous about ‘the serious’ and taking seriously the frivolous (Mendenhall 191). Mutti’s and Putti’s expressions of desire are equally ambiguous. We see them gazing at the dancer (McCormick, “Desire” 77), who incites excitement in them. But we also see them playing and wrestling with each other, or attending carefully to the mercer, for whom they work. Ultimately, their comportment and costume, reminiscent of ethnic drag - white actors masquerading as Arabs - and camp - exaggerated performance, indulging in artifice - help to unsettle strictly binary gender roles. These figures are in stark contrast to the aforementioned Sheik and his son from Baghdad. The casting of the physically corpulent Wegener - an actor famous for his roles in expressionist films playing either authoritarian (father) figures, “foreigners,” or monsters (e.g., Dagfin (1926), Der fremde Fürst (1918), Der Golem (1914, 1917, 1920), Das Weib des Pharao (1922)) - already places the figure of the Sheik into a particular/ preconceived position of despotic power. He is despotic (is the head of an undemocratic regime), evil (has torture chambers), 402 Berna Gueneli DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 and an unlovable heterosexual character (is fiercely rejected by Sumurun), with lots of wealth at his hands (his only asset is to order people around him). Not even his son is loyal to him, as he is caught red-handed with the dancer, his father’s sexual interest. Despite their despotic nature, both Sheiks are dressed in extravagant garments, with feather headdresses, necklaces, jewelry, and a dagger, congruent with popular fantasies about effeminate and exorbitantly self-indulgent, vane Arab and Ottoman masculinities. Finally, there are the harem guards, the eunuchs, with the main eunuch ( Obereunuch ) in the center of attention. The costume and comportment of the eunuchs is at times humorously put in scene. Similar to Putti and Mutti, they often provide comic relief in the film. I would further suggest that they are also campy drag performers. At the beginning of the film, we see the harem - replete with an excessive set design featuring cushions, Oriental fabrics and blankets, and other ornamental decors - with Sumurun positioned in the center of the captive women. The camera zooms out and shows the eunuchs standing and sitting in a row in front of the harem, in a dry, heat-insinuating outdoor setting. The eunuchs - quite literally emasculated, castrated, tired - are the bold, overweight guards of the Sheik’s harem women, and visually and symbolically at first sight insinuate a weakened, unthreatening masculinity. As such, they seemingly do not pose a threat to the Sheik or the women in the harem. The head eunuch for example wears large necklaces, adorns his ears with large, triangular earrings, has a shoulder free outfit, and make-up around his eyes. He is a campy character, who is ultimately also in solidarity with the harem women at large (McCormick, “Desire” 78). We cannot immediately detect a sexual desire in him; however, we do see his sympathies for the harem servants and Sumurun. Rather than reading the sympathetic male figures in Sumurun (Mutti and Putti, eunuchs) as effeminate, I read their costume, make-up, and comportment in the context of the Weimar Republic as a benevolent, campy drag performance, with the type of camp mode that Weinstein references for the Weimar Jewish comedies. Here, I believe drag and camp is used to unsettle binary gender roles, and to embrace ambiguity of contemporary gender and sex expectations in Weimar Germany. 36 Ultimately, I conclude, that in Sumurun , a binary gender dynamic is criticized though the figures of the mercer, Putti and Mutti, and the main eunuch. A similar campy mode unsettles binary gender expectations in Prince Achmed . I will focus on desire and dress in Prince Achmed primarily through a brief discussion of Achmed and Aladin. In the film , we are provided progressive images about male homosexuality through the figures of the Chinese king and his lover, and also in scenes depicting Achmed and Aladin fighting the magician (Acadia DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 The Arabian Nights in Weimar Cinema 403 156). Yet, these scenes are somewhat weakened by Orientalist assumptions, as Acadia reminds us, Achmed and Aladin comfort and touch one another while watching the Sorceress fight the Magician; Aladin even at one point appears to jump into Achmed’s arms. Yet an orientalist view of Arab men as effeminately weak distracts conservative viewers from the homoeroticism: once again, Reiniger advances a progressive agenda of homosexual equality at the expense of orientalism (156). 37 Once more, I would propose reading these two figures - similar to the sympathetic male figures in Sumurun - not as effeminate stereotypes alone, but as allusions to new masculinities that are embraced in a progressive Weimar culture. Nevertheless, despite the fact that these masculinities can be seen as a celebration of new gender norms, it is striking that they are juxtaposed with further othered male figures in the film. This opposition then creates new tensions and contrasts. Aladin and Achmed, for example, are both objects and subjects of desire. They have slender, athletic bodies and are dressed in ornamental costumes congruent with Orientalist coding, such as Aladin’s slippers, cloth pants, wide sleeves, and turban, or the feather garment in Achmed’s hair. Aladin is less adorned, representing a lower class than Achmed, but in both cases their costumes are coded as “Oriental.” Here, as with the female objects of desire discussed further above, other, more evil or ambiguous figures are opposed to their slender, lean bodies. The evil magician, for example, is undesirably skinny with long fingers, nails, and nose. Similarly, the overweight Chinese king has long nails and fingers representing a traditionally less desired unathletic body type and character. 38 Ultimately, the presumably more desirable characters for the implied Weimar audience are - as in the case with the Peris and Sumurun - adjusted to the European beauty ideals and assumed desirability of slender bodies, and their otherness is less pronounced in terms of physiognomy, compared to the African sorceress, Chinese King, and evil magician. The more desirably coded characters playfully engage in a campy drag performance and engage with otherness regarding gender, sex, and ethnicity; however, they do this while other figures must be their foils/ opponents as much more visibly othered figures. To conclude, both films manage to embrace the celebration of new and changing gender roles in the Weimar Republic by planting these concepts and models into the “exotic,” otherly worlds of fantastic Arab and Ottoman locations. Here, the main protagonists, whether masculine or feminine, can be playfully and excessively - in the mode of campy drag - exoticized and eroticized for the audience through costume, décor, and comportment/ performance. The audience can indulge in the fabric and décor of a fantasy locale, while consuming the depictions 404 Berna Gueneli DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 of progressive ideas on gender and sexuality. That is, on the one hand, we are presented with a modest exoticism (cross-racial casting, white actors playing POC; traditional West-European beauty ideals with slender bodies, oval-shaped faces), which is not too foreign, not too strange, but exotic enough (via an excess of costumes, décor) to excite an audience in war-torn and bleak post-WWI Germany. Especially for those viewers who feel threatened by changing gender norms these exoticized locales provide a safe fantasy, far away from their home. On the other hand, the blunt exaggerations, abundance and splendor of costume and performance also allow for a critique of homophobia and could perhaps even critique ethnic stereotyping. At the same time, these films maintain a problematic attitude to race and ethnicity, despite the campy drag components, continuing with existing Orientalist traditions. Orientalist depictions in general and more pronounced otherness and exaggerations of physical traits of antagonistic or more ambiguous characters are kept in the films and provide a view into colonizer fantasies and anxieties, mixed with nostalgia for a “prematurely” ended dream of German colonial exploitation. Reminding of Allred’s article, the overtly othered minor filmic characters and figures in my case studies - such as Black slaves and the Sheiks in Sumurun , and Chinese king, sorcerer, and sorceress in Prince Achmed - keep racism and xenophobia alive and well. The allusion to shades of darkness - as well as other markers of a presumed otherness marked by physiognomic differences - are used to signify a form of “ranking” system among those enslaved and/ or othered characters, similar to the aforementioned 19 th -century art works depicting Black slaves tending to and bathing white harem women (Childs). Lesser “ranked,” enslaved characters and “evil” characters are thereby distinguished through presumably more perceivable physical features from those characters which remain objects/ subjects of desire. In addition, the common practice of cross-casting itself, as in Sumurun , remains highly problematic notwithstanding the films’ benevolent or otherwise progressive notions regarding the portrayal of changing gender norms. All in all, the indulgence in Arab and Ottoman themes, décor, and aesthetics, basically played by a white cast, shows the playful engagement with a fictional East, a prefabricated East known from advertisement and visual culture as related to products associated with the regions (coffee, tobacco, luxury adventure travel), and transported into post-WWI Germany. This world provides the campy setting from which the films can access and indulge in debates about changing gender and sexuality norms in the Weimar Republic. The diversity of the people from Arab, Ottoman, and North African regions, their multi-directional movements, and their varied histories and art do not seem to be of particular interest in this context, as already Marchand noted DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 The Arabian Nights in Weimar Cinema 405 regarding the split between academic and popular Orientalism, or even the interactions of some uninformed diplomats in the far East or the Ottoman Empire who kept to themselves, ignorant of local customs, traditions, art, and languages (411—13, 434). However, the films’ worlds, as fantasy worlds, are complex and work in many ways. While not anti-racist per se, they represent a step toward imagining progressivism in cinematic terms via campy drag performances and mise-en-scène. Notes 1 The Arabian Nights travelled around the globe for much longer and had non-Western European translations well before 1704 (Irwin xii). The tales have been translated, for example, into Ottoman Turkish (already in the 15 th century in segments, and more in the 17 th century) and Persian, and as such have had traceable influences already in European literature, for example in Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale” in the Canterbury Tales (1387—1400) (Irwin ix, x, xii). 2 Zeynep Çelik discusses the painting Girl Reading (1893) by Osman Hamdi, which depicts an intellectual, reading young Ottoman woman, in opposition to the sexualized, unintellectual Harem women from Western fantasies; Mary Roberts discusses elite Ottoman women such as Princess Nazlı Hanım, who satirized Orientalist stereotypes via staged photography for example; Reina Lewis discusses travel literature written inside the harems (Çelik 25—26; Roberts 143—49; Lewis 102). For a brief discussion of these examples see also Gueneli, “Orientalist Fashion” (454). 3 With references to Susan Sontag and Judith Butler, Julia Mendenhall discusses the use of camp in film theory and gender theory and its relationship to cult films. She quotes primarily from Susan Sontag’s aphorisms in “Notes on Camp” (1964). 4 Sieg extrapolates the many forces at play in her diverse and complicated case studies throughout the 20 th century that reach from Nathan der Weise to the Karl May Festspiele, to Katzelmacher , to Keloğlan in Almanya . Sieg lucidly shows the nuances and complications of ethnic drag across time and diverse pieces. 5 When Said published his famous tractate in 1978, he mentioned that the designation of “Orientalism” and the “Orientalist” are not desired terms today, because they are understood to be “too vague” and connote “high-handed executive attitude of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century European colonialism” (2). 406 Berna Gueneli DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 6 Said states: “Yet at no time in German scholarship during the first twothirds of the nineteenth century could a close partnership have developed between Orientalists and a protracted, sustained national interest in the Orient. There was nothing in Germany to correspondent to the Anglo-French presence in India, the Levant, North Africa. Moreover, the German Orient was almost exclusively a scholarly, or at least a classical, Orient: it was made the subject of lyrics, fantasies, and even novels, but it was never actual, the way Egypt and Syria were actual for Chateauriand, […] or Nerval. There is some significance in the fact that the two most renowned German works on the Orient, Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan [sic] and Friedrich Schlegel’s Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier , were based respectively on a Rhine journey and on hours spend in Paris libraries. What German Oriental scholarship did was to refine and elaborate techniques whose application was to texts, myths, ideas, and languages almost literally gathered from the Orient by imperial Britain and France ” (19). (Emphasis mine). 7 Among the archivists, philologists, art historians and others that formed part of this so-called Orientalist “Indian Summer” were also women academics who were trained and contributed to the progress in their fields. Thereby, scholars such as Stella Kramrisch, Betty Heimann, and Annemarie von Gabain diversified the circles among German Orientalists (Marchand 478—79). This revitalization continued until many, especially Jewish scholars, were forced to quit their work or to go abroad with the advent of the Third Reich. 8 Chahine’s dissertation shows the broad visual culture that exploited stereotypical Ottoman and Arab imageries, especially in the advertisement culture beginning already in the late 19 th century. My own archival research provided endless filmic, educational, and mercantile documents, documenting the tobacco trade between the Ottoman Empire and Germany involving players across Europe (e.g., “Orientalische Tabak und Zigarettenfabrik ‘Khalif ’ A.G. Saarbrücken. Geschäfts-Bericht 1921/ 1922.” Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde, R/ 907/ Archiv Sign. 9894) 9 There was a certain public interest in the realm of the decorative arts, expressed through an appreciation of Oriental carpets and ornamental, decorative art works (Marchand 388). Yet, even these were not always bound to a positive reception by a general audience/ public (Marchand 413). Marchand recalls the Islamic Art exhibition in Munich in 1910, for example, which received bad reviews by a general audience, showing the divergent reception of the “East” between scholars and non-scholars. “Centuries of western appropriation of Islamic decorative forms and the mass marketing of imitations, combined with nineteenth-century stereotypes about the unchanging DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 The Arabian Nights in Weimar Cinema 407 Orient, made it very difficult for experts to historicize and differentiate styles, and poor exhibition techniques made the displays seem monotonous. Confronted with so much unfamiliar material, most Europeans were left cold” (413). 10 Similarly, Persian poetry has enjoyed a high standing among European academics. Kristin Dickinson refers to the relatively high regards and appreciation for Persian poetry in her discussions of Ottoman Turkish diwan poetry, which was influenced by Persian and Arab lyrics (Dickinson 37, 43). Marchand equally reiterates that Persian art, such as the art of carpet weaving next to Persian ancient poetry enjoyed a higher status and prestige among Orientalist artifacts in Europe (392). 11 According to Mary Ann Fay, in reference to Christine E. Sears, slavery in the “Islamic-lands” was not “race-based,” but more “diverse,” including “white and black slaves” (4). However, in terms of European depictions of beauty ideals, already in the 19 th -century Orientalist paintings of odalisques and bath scenes, we observe a differentiation between darker skinned enslaved females who tended to lighter-skinned enslaved concubines and harem women as Adrienne L. Childs work discusses in detail (126, 141). 12 Lubitsch had a good budget for set design and invested well in it. Kristin Thomson writes, “[he] worked with prominent and skilled designers. Hence his German sets, primarily designed by Kurt Richter and, less frequently, Ernst Stern (a prominent designer for Max Reinhardt), are often more skillfully done than usual, and their visual traits assume an unusually prominent role in the creation of the action. Precisely because they are frequently beautiful or clever in their own right, they often draw the eye away from the actors” (59). 13 Commensurate with the era’s specificities for German set design, Sumurun ’s set was also quite elaborate. “In Germany, attractive sets, whether they were used for epics or ordinary locales, remained the ideal. Set designers often got more prominent billing and proportionately higher pay than their American counterparts. Even a survey of relatively ordinary German films from the period 1918 to 1922 reveals many eye-catching sets that were either elegantly designed, had extreme depth (requiring long walks by actors before they came into close camera range), cluttered set dressing, or a combination of all of these elements” (Thompson 57). In her work on Lubitsch’s set design, Thompson also refers to Sumurun specifically: “Lubitsch tended to use settings with this kind of rosette pattern, as in this later scene from the eunuchs’ quarters in the 1920 Arabian-Nights fantasy, Sumurun . In one of the most interesting studies of Lubitsch, Eithne and Jean-Loup Bourget argue that rosette-patterned floors are part of the Viennese Secessionist 408 Berna Gueneli DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 style in Lubitsch’s films and are used in a comic-operetta manner to connote luxury and wealth.” (Thompson 59). 14 For LGBTQ+ rights see “The Republic” 20. 15 Famous examples include the novels Das kunstseidene Mädchen (1932) and Menschen im Hotel (1929); the films Pandoras Box (1929) and Der blaue Engel (1930); and the painting Masked Ball (1928). Marsha Meskimmon discusses lesbianism and the New Woman in the paintings of Jeanne Mammen. For an in-depth discussion and contextualization of the New Woman and prostitution see Jill Suzanne Smith’s Berlin Coquette . For details on Anita Berber’s art and life see Mel Gordon’s The Seven Addictions and Voluptuous Panic ; for further Orientalist queer performers see Lim. 16 Articles or photographs related to New Woman themes and beauty ideals were printed in large numbers. In the October 1924 issue of Das Magazin , for example, one piece titled “Garçonne Moden” includes photographs of Anita Berber (204—06), a second features the actor Pola Negri (207), while others show photographs of “Modenschau der hübschesten Berliner Mannequins” (208), “Die Traumtänzerin Dagmar Einstad” (181), and act photography of dancer Maud Cortez (149). 17 Richard McCormick has written about such disruptions in gender roles and the artistic engagement with this phenomenon in New Objectivity cinema and literature (McCormick, Gender and Sexuality and “Private” ). 18 While New Objectivity art certainly has multiple layers and is in a sober conversation with modern German life and society, it can also be exemplary of the sexual cynicism and insecurities of the time. Otto Dix’s paintings “Lion-Tamer” (1922), “Anita Berber” (1925), “Salon I” (1921) or “Portrait of Journalist Sylvia von Harden” (1926), for example, could be read as illustrating these anxieties produced by sexually active women through depictions of independently working women (journalists, artists, performers, sex workers). Similarly, Erich Kästner’s Fabian. Die Geschichte eines Moralisten (1931) engages within the literary realm with comparable anxieties by depicting the contemporary sexual liberation via cynicism. Jan Uelzmann discusses Kästner’s sexual cynicism in Fabian via Peter Sloterdijk and Max Brod. 19 Such expressions of established, conservative gender ideals are, for example, hunters chasing elephants and hippopotamuses in colonial Africa (“Auf afrikanischen Wildpfaden”), or men wearing military uniforms (“Einst - und jetzt”). ( Das Magazin (1924): 191—92, 153—55). 20 McCormick states in this context that “Lubitsch himself has been accused of […] ‘self-hatred’ because of his ‘Jewish comedies,’ the farcical films of the 1910s that seem to exploit anti-Semitic stereotypes - but, as Valerie Weinstein argues, these films should rather be interpreted as examples of DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 The Arabian Nights in Weimar Cinema 409 an appropriation of those stereotypes that is different from ‘self-hatred’ and is instead comparable to the kind of ‘camp’ appropriation associated with another oppressed minority - gay men” (McCormick, “Desire” 72). 21 Karagöz and Hacivat is a Turkish shadow play which was popularized throughout the Ottoman period and was spread across the Ottoman Empire and surrounding regions (Halman 112). 22 Josef Fenneker’s film posters for films set in the generalized region of the “Orient” include palm trees, desert landscapes, camels, horses, turbans, veils, belly free garments etc. (e.g., Die Augen der Mumie Ma (D, 1918), Genuine (D, 1920), Der Dieb von Bagdad (USA, 1925), Mit dem Auto ins Morgenland (D, 1926)). 23 The Barbie doll was not on the market until 1959, but the beauty ideal associated with the doll is a much longer existing Eurocentric one. Slender, longlegged female figures adorn turn-of-the-century/ fin-de-siècle European art as much as Weimar Cinema’s screens with stars such as Marlene Dietrich whose iconic long legs were a symbol of her beauty as were the images of mannequins and photo models populating the flourishing world of fashion shows and countless pages of illustrated magazines. 24 See, for example, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s paintings “The Moorish Bath” (1870) and “The Bath” (1880-85). See also Childs 126, 141 and Nochlin 78. 25 For a thorough discussion of race and Weimar Cinema see Tobias Nagl’s work. 26 In the British colonial context Ann McClintock discusses the image of the hypersexualized othered woman. Klaus Theweleit’s inquiry into gender and sexuality in the first half of the 20 th century as it relates to the fear of miscegenation between Jewish men and German women is helpful in this context as well (7—12). 27 Allred writes: “ Birth depicted ‘sex-obsessed blacks,’ like the ‘eye-rolling Gus’ who threatened order through racial transgressions captured in ‘closeups, realistic lighting and modern editing techniques.’ […] Birth also focuses our attention - in light of the campaign against the black shame - on how much race was constructed not just around skin color doused in lights but around the female body as a threatened vessel of virtue. Viewers had already been taught to beware of dark-skinned men with wide eyes and menacing grins attacking women, sometimes with guns but especially with the phallic and primitive weapons of knives. Representing black Africans with weapons was also a lasting tradition of marketing materials for human zoo exhibits” (74). 28 “Increasingly, white women were well lit […] and eventually even framed as glowing in soft focus. Through disparate levels of reflection and then 410 Berna Gueneli DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 compounded with narrative and cultural meaning, black skin provided the literal and technical counterpoint to white women” (Allred 74). 29 “France sent their colonial troops from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, and later Madagascar and Senegal into the Rhineland. By the winter of 1919, there were approximately 200,000 soldiers, and about forty to fifty thousand of them were black Africans. The occupation peaked in 1920-21, but the fears persisted, fomented by a concerted propaganda effort. Because skin color was so charged in Germany, [this occupation] […] was perceived as a type of “psychological warfare,” one that lent itself to visual expression” (Allred 70—71). 30 Propaganda pieces that were subject to censorship included Die schwarze Schmach ( The Black Horror , 1921), Die Schwarze Pest ( The Black Plague , 1921) and Eine Weisse unter Kannibalen ( A White Woman Among the Cannibals , 1921). Films such as Lubitsch’s Das Weib des Pharao ( The Loves of Pharaoh , 1922) were much more subtle in their depictions of race compared to the propaganda films (Allred 63). 31 “[A]dventure history films, such as Lubitsch’s Pharaoh , as well as colonial films such as Schomburgk’s A White Woman Among Cannibals (1921) both partook in the alarmism of black-horror campaigns that emphasized the threat of assault on white women. And whether marketed as actualities or staged historical epics, both genres wove the dark characters onscreen into a narrative of exploitation, temporalization, and exotic danger” (Allred 73). 32 Berman provides five phases of Orientalism in Germany with shifting nuances in the treatment and perception of the so-called Orient. For example, while the growing and belligerent invasions of the Ottoman Empire in the 16 th and 17 th centuries lead to images of cruel and “blutrünstig[e]” Ottoman masculinities, the 18th century “turcomania” in France and Germany was possible with a geopolitically weakening and shrinking Ottoman Empire that allowed for the creation of a sensualized and feminized Orient and a love for Ottoman fabrics, costumes, and décor (Berman 30, 31). 33 With the continuous decline of the Ottoman Empire in the 18 th century, the image and focus changed from a threatening, belligerent masculine Ottoman Empire to a sexualized, feminine Ottoman world (Gueneli, “Orientalist Fashion” 445). This included also the image of effeminate masculinities. 34 Berman discusses the nuances and different perceptions of Ottoman Turks in the long history of Ottoman-German/ Austrian encounters (Berman 36— 37). 35 He became most famous through his collaboration with Lubitsch who also cemented his image as “gentleman”. See Filmportal.de , “Harry Liedtcke.” DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 The Arabian Nights in Weimar Cinema 411 36 Such play and masquerade with Oriental costumes have been well performed in courts since the 15 th century and were more commonly performed by a wider public in the 20 th century (Evans 39; Inal 255; Jirousek 240; Gueneli, “Orientalist Fashion” 451). 37 However, Acadia further emphasizes that Reiniger queers the western fairy tale, even if “at the expense” of using Orientalism. “The western fairy tale trope is thereby queered several times over: by the man’s reliance on a more powerful woman, by Aladin’s class subversion, and because a man saves another man” (Acadia 156). 38 For the different discussions on the Weimar body culture and sports see, e.g., contemporary publications by Felix Hollaender, Fritz Wildung, Wolfgang Graeser, Ernst Preiss, and Mary Wigman (all quoted in Kaes et al. 677, 681—87). Works Cited Acadia, Lilith. “‘Lover of Shadows’: Lotte Reiniger’s Innovation, Orientalism, and Progressivism.” Oxford German Studies 50.2 (2021): 150—68. Allred, Mason Kamana. “Dark Temporalities: Technologies of Race and Lighting in Ernst Lubitsch’s The Loves of Pharaoh (1922).” Film History 33.2 (2021): 60—90. Ankum, Katharina von. Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture . Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Berman, Nina. Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne: Zum Bild des Orients in der deutschsprachigen Kultur um 1900 . Berlin et al.: Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1997. Bohrer, Frederick N. Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2003. Çelik, Zeynep. “Speaking Back to the Orientalist Discourse.” Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Paintings, Architecture, Photography , Ed. Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 19—41 . Chahine, Rima. Das orientalische Plakat Westeuropas, 1880—1914 . Diss. Carl von Ossietzky U, 2013. Childs, L. Adrienne. “Exceeding Blackness: African Women in the Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme.” Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century . Ed. Adrienne L. Childs and Susan H. Libby. London/ New York: Taylor & Francis, 2016. 125—44. Dickinson, Kristin. DisOrientations: German Turkish Cultural Contact in Translation (1811- 1946). University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 2021. Evans, Caroline. The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900-1929 . New Haven: Yale UP, 2013. 412 Berna Gueneli DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 Fay, Mary Ann. “Introduction: What is Islamic about Slavery in the Islamic World? ” Slavery in the Islamic World: Its Characteristics & Commonality . Ed. Mary Ann Fay. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 1—5. Gartlan, Luke. “Dandies on the Pyramids: Photography and German-Speaking Artists in Cairo.” Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation . Ed. Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013. 129—52. Gueneli, Berna. “Orientalist Fashion, Photography, and Fantasies: Baron Max von Oppenheim’s Arabian Nights in Context.” The German Quarterly 90.4 (2017): 439—58. —. “Art, Artifice, and Eroticized Infantilization: Imagining Japanese Femininities in the Weimar Republic in Fritz Lang’s Harakiri (1919) and Kapitän Mertens’s “Kio, die lasterhafte Kirschblüte” (1924).” The German Quarterly 96.3 (2023): 326—43 . Graeser, Wolfgang. “Body Sense: Gymnastics, Dance, Sport.” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook . Ed. Anton Kaes et al. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. 683—85. Grossmann, Atina. Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950 . Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Haase, Donald. “The Arabian Nights , Visual Culture, and Early German Cinema.” Fabula 45.3-4 (2004): 261—74. Halman, Talat S. Rapture and Revolution: Essays on Turkish Literature . Ed. Jayne L. Warner. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2007. Hartmuth, Maximiliam, and Julia Rüdiger, eds. Gezimmertes Morgenland : Orientalische und orientalisierende Holzinterieurs im späten 19. Jahrhundert . Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2021. “Harry Liedtke.” filmportal.de . Filmportal, n.d. Web. 15 Sept. 2023. <https: / / www.filmportal.de/ person/ harry-liedtke_513f17d6753f4db1bd0e62a2337a6288>. Hollaender, Felix. “Ways to Strength and Beauty.” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook . Ed. Anton Kaes et al. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. 677. Inal, Onur. “Women’s Fashion in Transition: Ottoman Borderlands and the Anglo-Ottoman Exchange of Costumes.” Journal of World History 22.2 (2011): 243—72. Irwin, Robert. “Introduction.” The Arabian Nights . Tales of 1001 Nights. Vol. 3. Trans. Malcolm Lyons. London: Penguin Books, 2010. Jirka-Schmitz, Patrizia. “The Trade in Far Eastern Art in Berlin during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933).” Journal for Art Market Studies 2.3 (2018): n. pag. Jirousek, Charlotte. “Ottoman Influences in Western Dress.” Ottoman Costumes: From Textiles to Identity . Ed. Suraiya Faroqui and Christoph K. Neumann. Istanbul: Eren Publishing, 2005. 213—51. Kessler, Marni Reva. Sheer Presence: The Veil in Manet’s Paris . Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006. Kuzniar, Alice. The Queer German Cinema . Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000. Lewis, Reina. Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel, and the Ottoman Harem . New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004. Lim, W. “Queer Orientalism and Modernism in Dance Photographs of Harald Kreutzberg and Yvonne Georgi.” The German Quarterly 95.2 (2022): 167—82. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 The Arabian Nights in Weimar Cinema 413 Marchand, Suzanne. German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2009. Marhoefer, Laurie. Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis . Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2015. McClintock, Ann. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest . New York: Routledge, 1995. McCormick, Richard. “Desire versus Despotism: The Politics of Sumurun (1920), Ernst Lubitsch’s ‘Oriental’ Fantasy.” The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema: Rediscovering Germany's Filmic Legacy . Ed. Christian Rogowski. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2010. 67—83. —. Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and “New Objectivity.” New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. —. “Private Anxieties/ Public Projections: ‘New Objectivity,’ Male Subjectivity, and Weimar Cinema.” Women in German Yearbook 10 (1995): 1—18. Mendenhall, Julia. “Cult Cinema and Camp.” The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema . Ed. Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton. New York: Routledge, 2019. 190—97. Moritz, William. “Lotte Reiniger.” awn. com. Animation World, 1 June 1996. Web. 15 Sept. 2023. <https: / / www.awn.com/ animationworld/ lotte-reiniger>. Nash, Geoffrey, ed. Orientalism and Literature . Cambridge UP, 2019. Nagl, Tobias. Die Unheimliche Maschine: Rasse und Repräsentation im Weimarer Kino . Munich: edition text + kritik, 2009. Nochlin, Linda. “The Imaginary Orient.” Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History . Ed. Kymberly N. Pinder. New York: Routledge, 2002. 69—85. “Once More East of Suez.” Life Magazine 59 (1912): 258. Osterhammel, Jürgen, “Edward W. Said und die ‘Orientalismus’-Debatte. Ein Rückblick.” Asien Afrika Lateinamerika 25 (1997): 597—607. Preiss, Ernst. “Physical Fitness: A National Necessity.” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook . Ed. Anton Kaes et al. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. 683. Roberts, Mary. Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Literature . Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Said, Edward W. Orientalism . New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Samper Vendrell, Javier. “Queer Adolescence in Mädchen in Uniform .” German Life and Letters 75.1 (2022): 22—39. Sears, Christine E. “Tyran[n]ical Masters Are the Turks”: The Comparative Context of Barbary Slavery.” Slavery in the Islamic World: Its Characteristics & Commonality . Ed. Mary Ann Fay. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 155—77. Smith, Jill. Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890-1933 . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2014. Sterritt, David. “The Animated Adventures of Lotte Reiniger.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 37. 4 (2020): 398—401. Stokoe, Kayte. Reframing Drag: Beyond Subversion and the Status Quo. London: Routledge, 2019. 414 Berna Gueneli DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0019 Sutton, Katie. The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany. New York/ Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011. “The Republic and LGBTQ+ History: Professor Katie Sutton, an Expert on German Culture, Gender and Sexuality, Discusses Weimar Queer and Trans Culture.” All About History 119 ( July 2022): 20. Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. Volume II: Male Bodies, Psychoanalyzing the White Terror . Trans. Erica Carter and Chris Turner. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Thompson, Kristin. Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood . Amsterdam UP, 2005. Troy, Nancy J. Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion . Boston: MIT P, 2003. Uelzmann, Jan. “Berlin is a Cabaret of the Nameless: The Cynical City in Erich Kästner’s Fabian .” Topography and Literature: Berlin and Modernism . Ed. Reinhard Zachau. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2009. 153—66. Ufa-Verleihkatalog 1926-1927 . Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin. Schriftgutarchiv N175_ VK_08. Varisco, Daniel M. Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid . U of Washington P, 2017. Wherling, Thomas. “Berlin is Becoming a Whore.” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook . Ed. Anton Kaes et al. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. 721—23. Wigman, Mary. “Dance and Gymnastics.” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook . Ed. Anton Kaes et al. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. 685—87. Wildung, Fritz. “Sport is the Will to Culture.” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook . Ed. Anton Kaes et al. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. 681—82. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau: Orientalizing Poland in the German Cinema of the 1990s Jakub Kazecki Bates College Abstract: This article examines how German anxieties about reunification and shifting borders are represented through Orientalist portrayals of Polish women in two post-reunification films, Polish Crash , dir. Kaspar Heidelbach (1993), and My Polish Maiden, dir. Douglas Wolfsperger (2001). 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” (Larry Wolff), the analysis reveals how depictions of Polish women as passive, vulnerable, and in need of German male assistance serve to reassert German masculinity in the face of perceived social and economic threats from the “East.” 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, the text 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. Keywords: Orientalism, Polish-German relations, German cinema in the 1990s and 2000s, Film analysis, Gender representations, Postcolonialism, Meine polnische Jungfrau , Polski Crash Since German reunification in 1989/ 90, the country’s individual, business, and cultural relationships with Poland intensified, and German audiences were also open to seeing Germany’s neighbor and its citizens on screen more frequently. The redefinition of Germany’s place in Europe in the early 2000s, the European Union’s extension to the East in 2004, and the opening of the German-Polish 416 Jakub Kazecki DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 border in 2007 have contributed to a steady output of big-screen pictures and TV productions that glance beyond the once well-guarded frontier located only 65 miles east of the new German capital. 1 The titles released in the late 1990s and early 2000s range from critically acclaimed films set in the German-Polish borderland, such as Grill Point [ Halbe Treppe , 2002], In This Very Moment [ Milchwald , 2003], or Distant Lights [ Lichter , 2003], to lesser-known, (especially to US viewers), lower-budget popular productions for commercial broadcasters. Poland functions in these narratives mainly as a “liminal space of self-discovery for the film’s German protagonists” that is “always ‘other’ to Germany, always a foil for existential self-reflection, offering the spectator a reworked version of Edward Said’s Orientalism ” (Cooke 132). When Paul Cooke refers to Poland in contemporary German film as “Germany’s oriental other,” he emphasizes that the Orientalizing construction of Poland is “less a geographical entity than a metaphorical space,” that is, a product of instrumentalized imagination highlighting the notions of Western European superiority and dominance (132). What Said called “latent Orientalism” (Said 206) frames the imagined East solely in terms of “its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness” (205). Orientalism places the East in opposition to the equally constructed “Occident”; the West is the reference point to evaluate the East’s progress and value, making it always inferior to the West. The following study demonstrates that the abundance of negative associations, which are affixed to the image of Poland and the Poles in the German cinema of the 1990s and the early 2000s, is the product of long-existing practices of Orientalism in the German discourse on Poland. The country’s depictions were instrumentalized within a particular system of representation that creates a false distinction between a supposedly tradition-bound “Orient” and a modernizing “West.” The main purpose of these techniques of Orientalizing Poland was to create a “source of impending threat that is […] successfully staved off by a successfully united and internally homogenized Germany” (Kopp, “If Your Car Is Stolen” 43). The cinematic portraits of Poland and the Pole were projections of the anxieties surrounding Germany’s reunification. Fears about the increase in criminal activity, the influx of illegal immigrants and cheap labor, and the worsening of the population’s economic situation in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) have all found their expression in the ambiguous figure of the Pole as other. Orientalizing Poland and its population became a symbolic way to ascertain that the new German Bundesländer were a part of the Western sphere, and that the seemingly chaotic transformation forces were a manifestation of the same beneficent rationality that characterizes the Occident, as opposed to the Orient’s disorderly presence on the other side of the border. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau 417 Taking Said’s description of practices of Orientalism and his note on the Orient’s “feminine penetrability” (Said 206) as my departure point, I investigate the projection of these collective anxieties about Germany’s reunification onto the land and people beyond Germany’s Eastern border and link it with the crisis of modern Western masculinity that finds its affirmation through the (re-) imagination of colonial and sexual conquest. In the example of two films, Polish Crash [ Polski Crash , 1994] and My Polish Maiden [ Heirate mir! , 2001], I demonstrate that the tactic to maintain male hegemony is to avoid German women, who are seen as economically independent, sexually demanding, and competing with males. Instead, the men in these films look beyond what is available to them domestically and find a suitable partner in Poland. Polish female characters are portrayed as passive individuals in abusive relationships; they long for intervention from German men who relish the role of finally being needed as protectors and providers. The female characters offer male protagonists a chance to prove themselves in a crisis and overcome obstacles. In both films, men reassert their position of dominance thanks to a distinct proposal of traditionally defined femininity: a domesticated exotic partner. This constellation of gender roles across borders and cultures stems from an Orientalized perspective on German-Polish interpersonal relationships. I argue that the sustenance of hegemonic masculinity can only exist against the Polish female character, as an expression of neocolonial subjugation. As I outline in the following two sections, the long-standing practices of Orientalizing Poland and its inhabitants reach back to the 18th and 19th centuries when they created a conceptual framework for actual or imaginary colonial domination. They have saturated the popular discourse on Poland ever since; they manifest themselves in the German mass media after 1989. Next, in my analysis of the films, I demonstrate that patterns of Orientalizing Poland and Polish women transpire through specific narrative solutions and by visually accentuating the difference in the portrayal of German and Polish female characters. The abundance of negative cinematic depictions of Poland in the first decade after the Wende plays into a long-existing colonial paradigm in German culture that derives from the history of German settlement in East-Central Europe, defining its lands and the people through an Orientalist vocabulary. In his influential study Inventing Eastern Europe (1994), Larry Wolff points out that this perspective was adopted already by prominent German and French intellectuals during the Enlightenment, including Fichte, Herder, Voltaire, and Rousseau. These 18 th -century travelers to Eastern Europe published accounts of their journeys popularized later by the era’s leading humanists. They were instrumental in paradigmatically orientating East-Central Europe and its people 418 Jakub Kazecki DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 in a subordinated position to the West as an immature, underdeveloped, and uncivilized other. Scholars have since challenged the notion of deliberate invention of East-Central Europe as an identity project in the 18th century and pointed out the multiplicity of standpoints and perspectives in the othering discourses at the time. 2 However, they don’t contest the existence of specific perceptual patterns that influenced and keep influencing the image of the “normatively charged transition zone between a progressive West representing the highest stage of civilization […] and the stagnant East” (Hewitson and Vermeiren 3). In explaining the dynamic between the ‘West’ and ‘East,’ Wolff, and others, adopted Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism and his concept of “imaginative geographies” that underscores the political practice of world-making through specific techniques of representation that both reflect and enable relations of power (Said 49—73). The processes of mental mapping described by Said were represented and produced through a network of institutions and shaped the perception and modes of encounter between the East and the West. They also contributed to Western discourse on the intersections and similarities between a more distant, colonial, and exotic Orient and a more immediate ‘East’ within Europe that included the regions of East-Central and Eastern Europe. The continuous practice of comparisons and contrasts made the discursive space of East-Central Europe to an ambiguous entity with imprecise boundaries, which Wolff describes as “a paradox of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, Europe but not Europe.” The author argues that “Eastern Europe defined Western Europe by contrast, as the Orient defined the Occident,” but he sees the function of the construct of Eastern Europe to “mediate between [Western] Europe and the Orient” and calls it “an intellectual project of demi-Orientalization” (Wolff 6—7). 3 This mental mapping created the dominant narrative framework for the region in the 19th and 20th centuries, preparing the groundwork for a potential civilizing mission in Poland as projection of Germany’s “adjacent colony” (Conrad 154—59). As Susanne Zantop argues in Colonial Fantasies (1997), Germany’s drive for colonial possession of territories, resources, and human labor, present in the public sphere since the late 18th century and particularly strong in the late 19th century, articulated itself primarily not in the political policies and actions but rather in literary narratives of conquest and surrender set in colonial territories, linking “sexual desire for the other with desire for power and control” (3). These narratives were a substitute for an actual conquest, establishing “imaginary testing ground for colonial action” (6) that eventually eclipsed Germany’s colonial reality. The imaginary realm to be dominated, in addition to the lands in Africa and Asia, included parts of South America and East-Central Europe that were subjected to similar representational practices, despite their DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau 419 absence from the formal group of German colonies. German historians as well as cartographers picked up on these narratives to create a “negative appeal onto the colonizer […] [that] existed in the imagination,” and to highlight the assumed special role of German Kulturträger , “culture carriers,” who brought civilization to East-Central Europe (Kienemann 168). 4 The German literary contributions to the project of Orientalism in the 19th century were a symbolic gesture of joining the group of established European powers and assuming the position of cultural and racial superiority. 5 Considering the overarching European colonial idiom, many critics also note the particular persistence with which the Orientalist representational models keep saturating contemporary German and Western European literature and film (see Newsome; Dupcsik; Kopp, Germany’s Wild East ; Kopp, “Gray Zones”). These models - as I will argue next - are repurposed to depict the Poles and Poland in terms typical for Orientalist discourse. They aim to establish a sense of German cultural and political dominance by recreating the dichotomy between the progressive West and the socially and economically belated East. The growing number of negatively coded appearances of Polish characters and narrative elements in the German cinema of the 1990s and early 2000s did not emerge in a historical and discursive vacuum. They mirror the widespread concerns about the rapid economic transformation across Germany’s Eastern border and its impact on the domestic job market and safety in German cities. A representative example of the predominant perception of Poland is its image in the German press of the time. As Piotr Zariczny commented in 2011 on the perception of Poland shortly after 1989, “Poland remain[ed] a country largely unknown to Germans, and the main source of information about it [was] still media” (168), and it was press and TV news reports that painted a rather unfavorable and enduring picture of the country not devoid of Orientalizing features. In the first years following German reunification, a large segment of the German press, including leading mainstream newspapers and weekly magazines such as Die Zeit or Der Spiegel , presented the image of post-1989 Poland as a backward nation descending into economic and social chaos (Loew and Pfeifer 72). Fears that such disorder might spill over the border were amplified by articles in the Berlin press which warned the readers against the “barbarian invasion” from the East if the visas for Polish visitors were to be abolished in 1991 (Kosmala). While it has to be noted that the press image of the Polish intellectuals and political elites was more affirmative, 6 such highly negative opinions about Poland’s general population were ubiquitous. Helga Hirsch, the correspondent of Die Zeit in Warsaw in the 1990s, quotes a survey prepared by the German public opinion research organization EMNID - Institut für Meinungsforschung 420 Jakub Kazecki DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 und Sozialforschung in the mid-1990s. According to the survey results, 87% of Germans had a distinctly negative opinion of Poland and its citizens, associating the country primarily with criminal activities, corruption, lack of efficiency, bureaucracy, and undue influence of the Catholic Church. The long-existing pejorative stereotype of a polnische Wirtschaft , or “Polish-style management,” 7 was replicated not only in the press but also in television. Among the examples of such treatment of Poland in commercial TV are degrading Polish jokes popularized by Harald Schmidt on his hit SAT.1 show Die Harald Schmidt Show until 1997 (Zeslawski 229). This deprecatory perception did not change fundamentally over the next decade. The historian Edmund Dmitrów notes in an analysis of national stereotypes on both sides of the border, conducted between 1998 and 2004, that the perception of Poles in Germany and their image in the media was split between national and local broadcasters. The German commercial TV stations focused on medially attractive, controversial, and conflicting issues related to Poland, taking advantage of negative associations connected with the country (493—500). As empirical studies have shown, a more permeable territorial state border “has not at all led to a less rigid stereotyping between the adjacent neighbors” (Dürrschmidt 126), and prejudices prevailed. The studies of German public opinion conducted from 2000 to 2008 indicated that Germans still looked down at Poland as a country “deviating from the West European standards in the political, economic, and social dimensions” (Kolarska-Bobińska and Łada 172). While the negative image of Poland in Germany didn’t go unnoticed by the Polish public, there were also voices in the Polish press that admitted that the unfavorable depictions of the Poles were, in part, self-inflicted, especially those of the new entrepreneurs venturing into the markets of the post-unification Germany. In 1999, the journalists of the influential Polish weekly Wprost observed that in the German consciousness, the dark side of the turbulent transformation in the former GDR had been firmly linked to the synecdochical Pole. For an average consumer of German media, it was a Pole who was standing at the “Polish market” in Berlin (a massive open-air market near today’s Potsdamer Platz visited by thousands of small-time Polish traders in 1989/ 90), a Polish drug dealer was selling “Polish soup” (heroin from the poppy straw) on the city streets, a Polish thief was conducting business for the “Polish car mafia,” and a Polish construction worker was hunting for jobs on the black market. The landscape of the criminal underworld in Berlin was painted with depictions of Polish prostitutes, young boys from Poland making money off the German pedophiles at the Zoo Station, and street vendors peddling cartons of cheap cigarettes from Poland (see Kot et al.; Rodzeń). It is not surprising in this context that several films made in the first decade after German reunification include characters or narrative elements associated DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau 421 with Poland’s wildly imagined crime scene, which hinder or jeopardize the chances of protagonists to navigate the turbulent times in the new German Bundesländer successfully. For example, in Eastern Crossing [ Ostkreuz , 1991] by Michael Klier, a petty criminal from Poland involves the German teenager in his schemes by using her as a front to push counterfeit money and taking her to Poland as an interpreter during the sale of a stolen car to the Russian mafia. In Little Angel [ Engelchen , 1996] by Helke Misselwitz, the cigarette smuggler from Poland awakens the wish of the main female character to start a family, and the same desire causes the protagonist’s demise. In Forget America [ Vergiss Amerika , 2000] by Vanessa Jopp, the German wannabe car dealer engages in shady business with Polish criminals and, after an initial period of prosperity, gets in trouble with his new partners. The two films analyzed below, Polish Crash and My Polish Maiden , don’t deviate from this paradigm. Kaspar Heidelbach’s Polish Crash (1993) tells the story of Tom (Klaus J. Behrendt), an entrepreneur from Dortmund, who learns that his younger brother Piet ( Jürgen Vogel) urgently needs his help in Poland. Piet is a professional car thief: he selects luxurious vehicles in Germany and brings them over the border to sell to the Polish mafia. Tom follows his brother to Poland and discovers that Piet is hiding from a vicious Polish gangster, whom Piet double-crossed, and the Polish and German police. The audience soon learns that Tom’s brother is preparing the heist of his life: he wants to kidnap a transport of German cars smuggled by the Russian soldiers on the train traveling through Poland to the home base in Russia. Tom wants to save his brother from completing the risky plan and, with the help of Piet’s Polish girlfriend Alina (Clotilde Courau), reveals Piet’s intentions to the authorities. In the dramatic finale, Piet confronts Tom and tries to kill him. He is shot by the police and dies in Tom’s arms. While Polish Crash is primarily a story about the relationship between brothers that has been put to the test, the film’s setting is not arbitrary. Several elements contribute to the exoticization of Germany’s neighbor and highlight the West-East dichotomy in which the East is dangerous yet alluring. It is first articulated clearly in the scene when Tom goes to Poland. The audience sees the train rushing from left to right, mimicking Tom’s movement on the map from West to East (10’05”). The train’s name displayed on the screen, “Ost-West-Express,” was never used to connect Cologne (and Tom’s hometown Dortmund) and Warsaw, although a direct night train service between the cities existed until 2017. The name of the fictional Ost-West-Express in Polish Crash resembles another well-known line connecting Western and Eastern European cities, the Orient Express. Warsaw, the last stop of the Ost-West-Express, corresponds here with the role Istanbul played in the imagination of Western travelers in the late 422 Jakub Kazecki DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 19th and early 20th centuries. For Tom, who intends to save Piet from trouble with the mafia, going to Warsaw is not as much a trip in space but in time: it is a nostalgic journey back to childhood when their brotherly relationship was not spoiled by greed. Warsaw epitomizes Tom’s romanticized vision of an existence guided by values other than money, similar to what Radha Jagad Dalal writes about passengers going to Istanbul on board the Orient Express: “As the final destination of the Orient Express, Istanbul is where the traveler expects to find the Orient, exotic and unsullied by the ‘secularization of life under capitalism’” (Dalal 11). While sitting on the train, a flashback from Tom’s childhood illustrates the defining moment of his relationship with Piet. Tom has been driven by guilt and a feeling of responsibility for his younger brother after the traumatic experience of their parent’s death. The motif of revisiting the past on the train is also intensified when Tom meets his old love interest Susi (Susanne Wilhelmina), who travels to Warsaw on business. An encounter in the onboard restaurant and a night together in the sleeping compartment seems like a promise to rekindle the romantic connection in Warsaw. As the audience soon learns, it is an elusive image because Susi’s motives are pragmatic: she works for the German police and wants better access to Piet through Tom. The underlying story of Polish Crash is anchored in the archetypal tale of brothers turned against each other. The source of their conflict is Piet’s greed and opportunities for making easy money in a country in which, as Alina puts it, “everything is possible” (38’52”), and law and order are suspended. Private investigators with shotguns openly stride on the street and stop individuals for a quick search (39’41”), and kidnapping someone in broad daylight is, to say the least, not surprising to pedestrians in Warsaw (28’43”). The image of Poland in the film is a blend of cinematic conventions that derive from the genres of Trümmerfilm and the Western: a bleak and gloomy landscape of run-down buildings with grim facades and abandoned or neglected industrial sites, filmed primarily in chiaroscuro lighting that creates a visual connection with the portrayal of the destroyed German cities in 1945 in the rubble films. The nod to the “year zero” in German history and the moral ambiguity of the characters taken from the rubble films is further emphasized by shots of monumental structures of the Communist era that stand as a memento of the past but not a distant regime. For German viewers in the early 1990s, it is a familiar sight: the buildings from the Stalin era in Warsaw resemble the architecture of the GDR with a visual nod to Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin. The remnants of the Communist past visible on the screen create a symbolic connection between the situation in the new states in Germany and the transformation in Poland. At the same time, the elements of the Western genre, such as the film soundtrack and the motif of a train robbery in open (and seemingly empty) spaces of the Polish province, hint at the oppor- DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau 423 tunities awaiting the brave pioneers in the Wild West: the Wild East, as the film seems to suggest, is equally suitable for colonial encroachments. This mixture of generic characteristics of the rubble film and the Western is purposefully employed to create a vision of a space that is ready for conquest and the establishment of new rules, similar to the fallacy of claims of ‘empty,’ ‘dead,’ or ‘pristine’ land in settler colonialism. The blend of diverse cinematic genres thus serves the goal of Orientalizing Poland by associating it with openness, lawlessness, and with a need for rebuilding, or other forms of civilizatory intervention. It forms a canvas on which the characters from the outside navigate the perceived exoticism of post-1989 Poland. To the Poles in the film, the German is a source of “goods” that can be traded for profit. When Tom arrives at the hotel, the small-time crook forces himself into Tom’s room and wants to buy dollars from the German visitor. He presents a card catalog of prostitutes to order for the evening (17’40”). Eventually, he offers Tom access to a gun “from Sarajevo,” which can be read as a shorthand for a product of Western Orientalism that approaches the Balkans with the same superiority as Poland. Yet, it is also a manifestation of “nesting Orientalism” 8 that labels the Balkans as more chaotic and threatening than Poland. The mafia boss, the chief of the criminal police unit, and the private detective working for a car insurance company are only interested in Tom as a provider of valuable information about his brother. Poland in Polish Crash seems corrupted by greed and ruled solely by physical violence. The main principle appears to be the survival of the most brutal agents of the emerging capitalist economy, where most participants started from scratch. Even more so, just being in Poland corrupts and changes the characters’ behavior. The perspective of getting rich fast blinds Tom’s brother Piet. After hearing Piet’s plan to rob the train, Tom observes that Piet has transformed; he is “crazy,” and Tom has never seen him act like that (1h 01’15”). Tainted by Poland, the new Piet is ready to kill his brother for a quarter of a million Deutschmark . Tom himself temporarily loses his moral compass in Poland, becomes more brutal and violent, and at one point, sexually assaults Alina. He then promptly apologizes to her by explaining: “I don’t know what I am doing anymore; I am like in a jungle here” (49’53”), which can be read as a double allusion; first to the cinematic trope of the urban jungle characterized by moral ambiguity and violence, 9 and second, to the primal environment where the civilization does not reach. The portrayal of Poland in the film, as much as it is an exaggeration of the Polish economic and social situation of the time, is also a comment on German realities in the early 1990s. It is a warning of what a post-Communist country can become without the civilization forces of the West; it is a convenient image of the Other that can caution about the potential developments in the 424 Jakub Kazecki DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 former GDR and the risks of the economic and social transformation. As Kaja Puto notes, “Poland on film is a vision of what liberal democracy could become without a multilateral social contract, without the learning experience of guilt carried from World War II, and without the accumulated capital that helps to overcome the crisis periods. In other words: what Germany would have become if it wasn’t as lucky as it was” (Puto 33). What is worth noticing is that, unlike Poland, Germany has the ability to symbolically cleanse itself in Polish Crash and thus expel the dangerous elements emanating from the East. The menacing Soviet military transport from Potsdam that smuggles the stolen cargo is part of a scheduled Russian troops departure from the former GDR in 1993/ 94. The German Mercedes and BMWs do not return to their rightful owners and disappear in “Asia” (as one of the Polish gangsters scorns), but that is a price to pay for the departure of the Russians from Germany. The soldiers’ advancing Orientalization is highlighted in the choice of music in the train car the farther they are from the West: from Western heavy metal on the boombox in Potsdam to Russian folk songs with accordion accompaniment in Poland while they are moving East. When the criminal Piet dies in the confrontation with his brother Tom, it is also a symbolic end of the allure and danger of the German ‘dark side,’ when the ‘what-if ’ scenario finds its satisfying ending, although not bereft of ambiguity caused by the loss of a beloved brother. Polish Crash doses the message that the instability in Germany originates from Poland at regular intervals by associating various facets of criminality with Polishness. The character of Tom is introduced in a scene when he is confronting dishonest car junkyard owners, the Kosinski brothers (4’19”), connoisseurs of alcohol and pornography. On the train to Poland, Tom reads a newspaper article about the Polish mafia in Hamburg setting off a car bomb (11’17”), and at the German-Polish border, the criminals in stolen cars break through the gate and rush into Poland with no resistance from the border guards (40’35”). The purposeful employment of the stigmatized elements associated with Poland sets up the East/ Poland as a black mirror to the West/ Germany. In this mirror, Tom can see who he could become if he does not stay on the straight and narrow. The film’s narrative elements follow the logic of the East/ West dichotomy. Piet is Tom’s ugly reflection, fascinated by Poland’s underworld and criminal opportunities in the country. Piet remains in the East while Tom returns from the trip. Experiencing the East and shaking off this experience, symbolized by Tom’s rescue mission and Piet’s death at the side of the train tracks, becomes a vehicle for Tom’s liberation from the past and enables him to move forward with his life. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau 425 The main Polish character on screen, Alina, exemplifies the coding of a Polish female as exotic. She is a student who has sexual relations with Western visitors in exchange for money, including an affair with Piet. However, it is emphasized in the story that Alina is not a professional prostitute to allow the morally principled Tom to be attracted to her. Like other Polish characters, she is motivated by the perspective of obtaining material goods, but she also has a chance for redemption created by the German male. And at the end of the story, Alina boards the train and joins Tom, who returns to Dortmund. The final train ride, apart from the implicated transfer to a better existence, is also an allusion to Alina’s big dream shared with Piet and the return of the Orient Express motif. While sitting in the abandoned train wagons, she imagined traveling East on the Orient Express to see a sunrise in the desert, “like in Lawrence of Arabia ” (53’45”). Her phantasy of a better life also places her within the Orientalist discourse on Poland. Even seemingly controlled in the end by her German counterpart, she is still an unstabilizing and unpredictable element; even moving West, she dreams of the East. Alina can be seen, in Valentina Glajar and Domnica Radulescu’s words, as “not fully Other, as Islamic or African women have been perceived.” Western Orientalism labels Eastern European women as strangers within who, like Alina, “are endowed with an aura of familiarity, or of Europeanness, and yet they are not fully familiar, or European, either, as they come from the most remote regions of Europe, perceived as almost Oriental, as almost exotic, yet not fully so” (Glajar and Radulescu 3—4). The ambiguity of Eastern European women is possible because the issues of race and ethnicity “figure very differently in the social realities and in the imaginary of Europe than they do elsewhere” because in Europe “[r]ace and ethnicity […] are not only about the ‘visibly other’ […] but are further, and intensely problematically, about the active othering of those who are not ‘visibly other’; about the ‘stranger in our midst’ whom we cannot, in fact, discern as a stranger unless we brand her as such” (Griffin and Braidotti 21). 10 The visual exoticization of Alina is achieved in multiple ways: first, her character’s primary costume is a leopard faux fur coat, an unusual piece of clothing that stands out, especially against Susi’s toned-down business attire, but also against the street fashion in Warsaw the audience sees on screen. Alina’s clothing choice may be interpreted as Alina’s rejection of society’s conventions and sexual emancipation. She is, after all, operating in the grey zone between full-time work in the sex industry and being in romantic relationships with Western men who occasionally support her financially. The leopard coat can also signify Alina’s status as prey: a target for a male hunter. Second, Alina’s brown hair and hazel eyes are distinctly darker physical features compared to blue-eyed and fair-haired German women Susi and Karla, accentuating her 426 Jakub Kazecki DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 position as other. In addition, unlike other Polish characters in the film, Alina (played by French speaker Courau) is dubbed with the voice of a Polish actress (Agnieszka Krukówna), which creates an aura of estrangement around her character induced by diminutive synchronicities between the audio and visual messages. On the narrative level, Alina’s exoticization is also exemplified in her role as a victim of male hegemony. As a “not professional prostitute,” she is perceived as available for exploitation by men. She is insulted by the police detectives, tortured and sexually abused by the mafia boss Malik (Mirosław Baka), and manipulated into submission by Piet. In the colonial mindset, Alina is set up as a subject ready for intervention by a good Westerner, Tom. In her essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak? ”, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak described the abolition of suttee, an ancient Hindu custom of self-immolation of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre, by the British authorities in colonial India in the 19th century. Spivak’s phrase, “white men saving brown women from brown men” (Spivak 296), sums up this intervention as one of the emanations of the civilizing mission of the colonizers, effectively presenting femininity as a metaphor for colonization. Alina, Susi, Piet’s wife in Germany, Karla (Claudine Wilde), who unsuccessfully tries to seduce Tom before his departure, are all interested in him. This triangular constellation of women creates the reference point for his positioning as a man. He is desired and has available partner choices but ultimately rejects the autonomous and outspoken women Susi and Karla. By defending Alina and returning with her to Germany, Tom is not only constituting himself as representative of the morally superior order and defining his masculinity through his actions but also symbolically establishing Poland as a colonial subject. The trope of the ambiguous Polish female character entering Germany connects Polish Crash with Douglas Wolfsperger’s comedy My Polish Maiden [ Heirate mir! ], also known in Germany under the alternative and equally condescending title Meine polnische Jungfrau . The film was produced in 1999 but first presented to the audience on the commercial TV channel ProSieben in May 2001. My Polish Maiden opens with a bus trip to Poland organized by a marriage broker: each male passenger on board intends to find a life partner in a small town in the Polish province and bring her back to Germany. Among the visitors is Eugen (Ulrich Noethen), an undertaker from Konstanz in his mid-30s who still lives with his despotic mother (Ingrid van Bergen) and hopes to find love outside his limited social circle. When Eugen is about to return home empty-handed, he accidentally meets Gośka (Verona Feldbusch), who runs from the Polish police and welcomes the opportunity to join Eugen on his trip back to Germany. Upon their arrival in Konstanz, Eugen’s work colleagues at the funeral home die one DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau 427 by one. They are stabbed, castrated, and bleed to death. The suspicion falls on Gośka, accused of the killings by Eugen’s jealous mother. Gośka feels pressured to leave, and Eugen’s best friend Fritz (Michael Schiller) convinces her to take on an illegal job in a folksy-themed nightclub, where she is sexually abused and rescued by Eugen. My Polish Maiden utilizes the idea of agency-arranged marriage as a lastchance effort to find a companion and caregiver for a socially unattractive German man. By employing caricature, the film appears to examine the relationships between German men and Polish women through a critical lens to reveal the embedded socio-economic differential of such connections. However, the criticism misses the mark as the comedy neither offers an original look at the reasons for entering intercultural relationships nor does it present an opportunity for an in-depth analysis of such connections. Bernadetta Matuszak-Loose sarcastically credits My Polish Maiden for gifting the history of German cinema with “the motif of the Polish cleaning lady regularly returning ever since” (226). The narrative replicates popular conventions representing Poland and its citizens and induces the viewers’ laughter at clichés with evident Orientalist characteristics. One of the most exaggerated moments of My Polish Maiden, which packs several stereotypes about Poland, is the sequence of the arrival of the German travelers at the Polish farm where the marriage agency arranged a display of the potential local life partners. The men disembark from the bus in a military-like formation at the whistle signal from the trip guide Overstolz (Hubert Mulzer), who calls himself their leader (“Führer”). He issues a warning to the visitors: “Even if we’re in Poland now, there will be no thefts. At least as long as I’m here with you” (5’36”). While it is unclear from the way Overstolz phrases his words of caution (in the passive voice, “Es wird hier nicht geklaut”) whether he means that the Poles are stealing, or whether the visitors would be tempted to loot while in Poland, the scene establishes, first, an association with a WWII military invasion of Poland. It also evokes the colonial concept of Drang nach Osten , the conquest of the East, which became a core element of Nazi ideology. Second, the reference to thefts reminds the viewers of Poland as a lawless terrain where only discipline brought from the outside can help maintain order. The ambiguity of Overstolz’s remark about stealing also emphasizes the corrupting nature of the location: Poland brings out the thieving instincts in everybody. The matchmaking scene between German men and Polish women doubles down on the commodification of the exotic allure of Polish feminitity. The visitors enter a run-down cattle barn, jumping over puddles of water and manure to line up facing an improvised podium. A conveyor belt carries the women, labeled with numbers and static as mannequins, through a hole in a wall. Over- 428 Jakub Kazecki DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 stolz explains that the women’s keen interest in Western men completes the men’s desire to have a Slavic companion because, “as we know, the word ‘Slavic’ derives from ‘slave’” (6’59”). Then, the German customers race to pick their female counterparts. Mistakes are expected since all women have a “14-day return warranty” (7’13”). The process of selecting a bride is entirely transactional, devoid of any romanticism Eugen hopes to encounter. It is grounded in colonially coded juxtapositions: men are deemed desirable just because they are German, not because of other attributes they possess, for example, their looks or socio-economic status. They are explorers and hunters on unknown terrain, and women are exotic prey, immobilized and passive, subjected to the male gaze. Further, one of the film’s titles used in the domestic distribution, Meine polnische Jungfrau , amplifies this message. The word Jungfrau is used to deliberately associate Gośka (dressed in white when Eugen meets her for the first time) with images of virginal and inexperienced women. It reduces the complexity of the character to one adjective, polnisch . It connects these descriptors with the possessive determiner meine , creating conditions for male fantasies of domination and colonial ownership, not only of a commodified young female but also, by extension, of the ‘untouched’ territory in the East. Anne McClintock notes about the beginnings of imperial discovery that “[a]s European men crossed the dangerous thresholds of their known worlds, they ritualistically feminized borders and boundaries. Female figures were planted like fetishes at the ambiguous points of contact, at the borders and orifices of the contest zone” (24). The presented image is of Gośka’s gendered body as something to be harvested or conquered and the colonial land, here Poland, as inherently feminine. The bride selection scene in My Polish Maiden replicates not only gender prejudice (women seeking financial support from men) but also takes advantage of the dynamic between Poland and Germany’s socio-economic conditions and exoticized erotic fantasy. The film presents a specific image of relationships between German men and Polish women which, in turn, reinforces the audience’s perception of the country as inferior. It is because, as Bonnie Zare and S. Lily Mendoza observe in the case of the tendentious way of presenting mail-order brides in the media, “the continued peddling of reductive/ stereotypical images of Third World women seeking marriage with Western men serves to perpetuate a regime of colonialist and patriarchal relations not only between the immediate contracting parties, but in the imagination of the public at large” (367). Depiction of Gośka in My Polish Maiden, which corresponds with the presentation of mail-order brides from the global South, fits into the discursive structures of colonialist thinking about women from impoverished countries seeking economic opportunities abroad. As a result, it effectively installs them as the other in relation to the mainstream. In their analysis, Zare and Mendoza point out the DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau 429 duplicity of these images: on the one hand, they portray the mail-order brides as victims who need saving from their backward setting. On the other hand, they are overtly sexualized, deceitful, and suspected of victimizing men by going after their wealth and resources. The figure of Gośka in My Polish Maiden is the other with the mercurial ability to be simultaneously a victim and a victimizer as she stands in the center of intersecting agendas in Eugen’s social circle. When alone with Eugen, she wears scanty revealing clothes, is subdued, and behaves in a childlike manner, which makes her less threatening sexually. Her inflection and German idiom resemble a child’s language, which most overtly manifests in mixing up the “mir” and “mich” pronouns. She shares with Eugen that her only chance to escape her abusive marriage in Poland was coming to Germany after she read a newspaper ad for the marriage agency, “Germany: your love and future” (1h 7’24”). In another story, she tells Eugen that her longing for family life is attached to the image of her grandmother’s house at the lake in Upper Silesia. This nostalgic vision coincides with what Eugen can offer her in her future in Germany: a residence at Lake Constance. Gośka satisfies Eugen’s need to protect and provide for, giving him a convenient object to redefine his masculine role. Eugen’s male gaze directed at Gośka is an example of the patriarchal perception of woman as a “signifier for the male other, bound by the symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of women still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning” (Mulvey 7). Eugen’s infatuation with Gośka is nothing else than an attempt to transform the relationship with his mother, Regine, an act of rebellion against matriarchal dominance. After returning from Poland, Eugen instrumentalizes Gośka to assert his position as the head of the family and remove his mother from the parental bedroom of their tiny house. Regine hangs on to the role she plays in her son’s life (and their codependency). Her resistance expresses itself in the obsessive preservation of the extensive collection of coffee pots gathered by her deceased husband: they are not only a memory of her partner and Eugen’s father but also a symbolic gesture of resistance against the changing world. As a rendition of the theme of dominant women and subordinated men, My Polish Maiden takes the fear of castration literally. Gośka is first suspected to be the Pimmelmörderin (weenie killer) because she is the other: naive, subdued, unaware of the rules, but also younger than the women around her and perceived as an available sexual object that changes the delicate power balance in the funeral home. The murder mystery is finally revealed to the viewers. Fritz’s frustrated wife, Traudl (Roswitha Schreiner), mutilates and kills the participants of the sexcapades to Poland as revenge for the attention they give to the Polish women they bring back. Traudl’s sexual unfulfillment and frustration with 430 Jakub Kazecki DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 her husband’s infidelities are literally “canned” in pickle jars (which Traudl passionately produces) until the Pole appears in town. The blond Traudl, cast similarly to the German female characters in Polish Crash as the counterpart to dark-haired and hazel-eyed Gośka, feels unappreciated and stands pars pro toto to economically independent German women (Traudl owns the house and sustains her husband financially). The physical emasculation in the film is another projection of how the German males suffer from women’s empowerment which causes their identity crisis. The trips of the German men to Poland, and the subsequent arrival of Gośka, the other from the East, magnifies the issue and induces a radical change. While meant as a not-too-subtle satire on the mail-order bride phenomenon, My Polish Maiden also touches upon real anxieties of German audiences in the 1990s regarding the perceived porosity of the border that is no longer a barrier between East and West. Unlike Polish Crash which explores the negative impact of the Polish setting on the German character and only concludes with the Polish woman moving to Germany, My Polish Maiden addresses the situation when a Polish character has the potential to upend the existing social fabric in Germany. It is a warning that polnische Wirtschaft can even reach as far as Germany’s Western border with Switzerland. As Polish Crash and My Polish Maiden exemplify, Polish characters, and Polish women figures in particular, are not readily categorized as a visible minority but are still a product of discursive practices of Orientalism. Whiteness, a characteristic shared with other East European women, define their position between familiarity and Otherness. Together with the emphasis on heterosexuality and readiness for relationships with German men, they construct erotic fantasies about Polish women on screen. They are successful competitors of emasculating German women because of their ability to prioritize the needs of the men over their own, which enables the German men to reestablish their dominance. A typical narrative solution that addresses the fear of the other is the symbolic taming of the woman by envisioning a domesticated exotic partner: an Orientalized fantasy of a subdued woman who, through her imagined exoticness, is something new and unfamiliar but at the same time also domestic, something local and familiar, associated with the Western ideology of family and home. 11 In Polish Crash, it is a promise of a relationship that survives the turbulent time in Poland and continues in Germany. In My Polish Maiden, it is a wedding and the establishment of a new family business. An essential part of constructing a domesticated exotic partner as the outcome of the masculinity crisis is the introduction of sexual exclusivity that achieves two objectives: it dispels the aura of an exotic seductress and stabilizes the notion of colonially coded male conquest. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau 431 A similar construction can also be seen in other films of the time, most notably in Heart over Head [ Herz über Kopf , 2001], which tells the story of the romance between a Polish au-pair and a German teenage rebel. The story ends with the unconditional submission of the Polish female to the socially dominant German male (see Kazecki 139—40). The result is the symbolic diffusion of any danger arising from the fear that “Eastern values” can be brought to “German lands,” including dispelling anxieties surrounding the unknown outcome of Germany’s reunification. By personalizing the undefined threats from the outer side of the new EU border and giving them an exoticized, attractive body of a Polish woman, Polish Crash and My Polish Maiden suggest that the East should not be feared but conquered. Notes 1 By my own calculation, the inventory of feature films and TV film productions in which the German-Polish relationships, Polish-coded spaces or Polish characters play a notable role in the narratives has grown to over fifty titles in the last three decades. 2 See, for example, Wolfgang Schmale’s discussion of the concept of Eastern Europe in Gender and Eurocentrism (2016) (Schmale 77—95). 3 Wolff notes that the lands of East-Central Europe, despite their diverse character and populations, were conceptually combined into a coherent whole and ultimately took a subaltern position to similarly conjoined lands of Western Europe. Bundling up the ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and social diversity of the area behind the Iron Curtain, as Dariusz Skórczewski observes, also offered a “pedagogic convenience” in explaining Europe’s division after the Second World War that survived the actual Cold War geopolitical circumstances: “East-Central Europe has indeed provided an ideal training ground for the ideas of successive generations of Western European ‘orientalists’ up until today” (178). It must be noted, however, that while trying to deconstruct the idea of Eastern Europe, Wolff’s work sometimes reifies certain stereotypes by assuming a unified Eastern European experience in contrast to the West, therefore essentializing Eastern Europe without further developing on the complexities and nuances within the regions, and how they relate to the East/ West binary. Nuancing Wolff’s argument, other scholars have outlined similar processes of the discursive invention of the Balkans by the Western European imagination (see Todorova; Bjelić and Savić; Kovačević). Similarly, scholars emphasize that the “East vs. West” dichotomy is not monolithic. Instead, there are multiple, layered “Orients” within regions of 432 Jakub Kazecki DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 East-Central Europe, each with varying degrees of perceived “otherness” and Orientalist projections that do not necessarily have to point to the geographic east (see Bakić-Hayden, outlined in a different section of this contribution; or discussion of the location of the “East” in the contemporary Polish literature in Czapliński). 4 For a more complex description of the discursive construction of East-Central Europe in the 19th century, see Christoph Kienemann’s contribution to the volume Europe and the East: Historical Ideas of Eastern and Southeast Europe, 1789-1989 , edited by Mark Hewitson and Jan Vermeiren. 5 See the discussion on the emergence of German Orientalisms in the 18th century in Todd Kontje’s study on literary images of the East, German Orientalisms (2004): “By participating in the intellectual project of Orientalism, Germans sought to overcome their sense of cultural and political subordination to other European powers, suggesting that although they had neither nation nor empire, they nevertheless belonged to modern European civilization” (Kontje 5). 6 Positive images of Polish political and intellectual leaders reflect the willingness of the elites in both Warsaw and Berlin to initiate discussions about the complicated German-Polish relations and memory of WWII and the Holocaust. See, among others, Piotr Zariczny’s description of the public discourse on the German-Polish reconciliation after 1989 (Zariczny 166-67). 7 One of the projections behind Germany’s cultural mission in the lands to the East in the 19th century was the image of social and economic backwardness of the local population. Starting in the 1830s, it was expressed through the recurring trope of a polnische Wirtschaft , used to describe the disorder and bad organization in the new provinces incorporated into the Prussian Hohenzollerns’ monarchy as a result of the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century. For a detailed discussion on polnische Wirtschaft see Orłowski; Surynt, Das “ferne”, “unheimliche” Land; Surynt, Postęp, kultura i kolonializm; Gatzke; Kordel. 8 Nesting Orientalism(s) is a concept proposed by Milica Bakić-Hayden (1995) who claims that the West/ East dichotomy (the Occident/ the Orient) has a more nuanced character. And so, within the groups in East-Central Europe, we can observe the presence of nesting Orientalisms, whereby groups within the region identify an other to the ‘East’ or ‘South.’ Setting themselves apart from what they perceive as more Oriental populations, they define themselves as the ‘West’ of that other (see Bakić-Hayden). 9 The nod to the ‘urban jungle’ and the overwhelming tone of hopelessness and despair connect Polish Crash with yet another film genre, film noir . The multidirectional referencing to different genres (Western, film noir, rubble DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau 433 film) is instrumentalized to construct an othered cinematic space: lawless and full of opportunities for brave individuals, also visually darker and filmed using low-key lighting and low camera angles to create an atmosphere of looming threat. The purpose is to contrast Poland with equally imagined Germany, located somewhere outside the danger zone. 10 As Kris Van Heuckelom points out, the representational practices of not labeling Poles as a visible minority but attributing them with othering characteristics express the “ambivalent status of Polish migrant characters in European filmmaking of the past hundred years” (Van Heuckelom 7). Van Heuckelom ties the ambiguity with what the author calls “close otherness,” the phenomenon of “cultural similarity and geographical proximity as opposed to the more distant position of postcolonial migrants.” “Close otherness” plays on the duality of Poland’s perception in Western Europe, as the Polish characters on screen are “coming from a part of Europe that has been perceived as being peripheral in space and backward in time” (31) and require a colonial intervention. 11 See also the discussion on the mail-order brides’ presentation on international dating sites by Emily Starr and Michele Adams (2016), who call the construct of modern mail-order bride a “domestic exotic.” Films Engelchen. Dir. Helke Misselwitz. Perf. Susanne Lothar, Cezary Pazura, and Sophie Rois. Thomas Wilkening Filmgesellschaft/ Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), 1996. Film. Halbe Treppe. Dir. Andreas Dresen. Perf. Steffi Kühnert, Gabriela Maria Schmeide, Thorsten Merten, and Axel Prahl. 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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 distinctions between Orient/ Occident and traditional/ modern, while encouraging the viewer to rethink the power of her own gaze and personal associations with the work of art. Keywords: Nevin Aladağ, Oriental carpet, collage, heterotopia, Frank Lloyd Wright In her Social Fabric series (2017-present), Turkish German installation and performance artist Nevin Aladağ creates textile collages by cutting up and conjoining pieces of distinctly patterned carpets from around the world. Hailing from the Maghreb, Afghanistan, Turkey, Iraq, China, Ireland, the United States, Germany, and other locations, the individual components of any given collage consist of virgin wool flatwoven kilims, silk hand-knotted pile carpets, and industrially produced tretford, sisal, and wool carpets. Using a mixture of fluid and geometric lines, Aladağ separates individual carpet pieces with cord-like border lines in black, yellow, blue, red and/ or pink. Glued onto a wooden backing and 438 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 surrounded in a simple black frame, individual collages take different shapes and range in size from approximately 4’x5’ to 9’x10’. On a metaphorical level, the multiplicity of patterns, piles, and styles of carpet built into Aladağ’s collages remind us of the myriad roles carpets have played historically: As simple and functional items, they provide warmth and comfort in the home. Folded up, more sturdy carpets double as bags to transport goods. In religious contexts, smaller carpets provide a place to pray or to hold important ceremonies such as weddings. As floor and entryway coverings, intricately designed carpets bring color and pattern into living spaces, while also at times denoting social status. Likewise, carpets’ motifs and symbols enable the multigenerational transmission of local stories and myths, even as their histories are bound up with transcultural exchange and transcontinental trade. By reminding us of the many different meanings and roles carpets have historically held, the collages in Aladag’s Social Fabric series present a powerful counterforce to the history of European Orientalism and its engagement with the so-called Oriental carpet. Through the domestication of Oriental carpets, middle-class nineteenth-century European households also vacated them of their historical and social functions. Spurred on by Orientalist paintings, exhibitions, and advertisments, middle-class interest in the Oriental carpet is indicative of its role as a “civilizational commodity,” or a “commodit[y] that serve[s] to characterize the Orient and Occident as opposing realms occupying different hierarchical positions in the civilizational ladder” (Moallem 50). Aladağ’s carpet collages serve on the contrary as powerful heterotopias, indicating the impossibility of closure or clear-cut distinctions between Orient and Occident or traditional and modern. Even as Aladağ encases the individual pieces of her collages within clearly visible border lines, her final juxtaposition of patterns, colors, and materials enacts a transgression of boundaries that undoes Orientalism’s ordering system. Whereas the European visual motif of the carpet proves static, Aladağ’s collages are thus open-ended, embracing change and becoming over being. In contrast to Orientalism, and more specifically to Orientalist carpet studies, which is generally concerned with questions of provenance and identification, Aladağ’s collages blur the concept of origins altogether. Just as the individual elements of each collage are not labeled - making it nearly impossible to determine where each piece originated - Aladağ’s patterns and images bely a wide range of design elements. While some collages take inspiration from the natural world, others draw on Celtic symbolism, impressionism, or modernist artforms such as cubism, Bauhaus, and De Stijl art, among others. Due to their open-ended and eclectic qualities, these collages also encourage viewers to draw and reflect on their own personal associations with each work of art, which in turn contributes to its multifaceted meanings and connotations. As a series, Social Fabric thus DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 439 harnesses the disruptive power of collage to bring otherwise disparate elements into relation. The often-unexpected connotations that arise therefrom hold the power to interrupt the master narratives of Orientalism, which suggest that the Orient can be easily contained, domesticated, and consumed. Fig. 1: Aladağ, Wind (2019) Fig. 2: Aladağ, Skylight Spring (2021) 440 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 In the following, I first address the significance of Orientalism for Aladağ’s overall artistic practice, before taking up her particular engagement with the Oriental carpet as a specific form of Orientalia in the Social Fabric series. In conclusion, I offer a case study, in which I explore my own personal associations between Aladağ’s carpet collages Wind (2019) and Skylight Spring (2021) and the window designs of early twentieth-century American architect and designer Frank Lloyd Wright. Central to Wright’s architectural practice, patterned windows connected interior and exterior spaces without rendering the border between them obsolete. Through their incorporation of stylistic elements from different periods of Wright’s design practice, I read Wind and Skylight Spring as linking disparate patterns, times, and places through their unique compositions, thus extending and reenvisioning Wright’s design goals. As such, they open up space for new and unexpected associations between the symbols and imagery of a wide variety of Oriental carpets and Wright’s geometric representations of the Midwestern American prairie. In doing so, they place categories such as traditional and modern into a new creative tension, revealing a fluidity of influence relevant to our readings of Aladağ’s and Wright’s design practices alike. Given Aladağ’s use of a variety of carpet types from across the world, why read her collages as a visual response to Orientalist engagement with the Oriental carpet in particular? Firstly, I see engagement with the tropes of Orientalism as a recurring theme in Aladağ’s artistic practice. Already in 2016, her public installation Screen I-III took up questions of weaving to address the power of observation and visualization so central to Orientalism. First commissioned by the public sculpture initiative Kunst im öffentlichen Raum (KÖR) in Vienna, Screen I-III was on display in the pedestrian zone at Kunstplatz Graben in 2016. The sculptures were later incorporated into a show featuring Aladağ’s work at the Sammlung Philara in Düsseldorf in 2018. Consisting of three steel frames resembling looms, Screen I-III utilizes Rauris marble and Waldviertel granite cobblestones to create designs of varying transparency along stainless steel warp and weft “threads.” These raw materials for Screen I-III were quarried at the former sites of the Mauthausen and St. George concentration camps in northern Austria. By weaving these material references to National Socialism into her sculpture, Aladağ gestures toward the racialization of minorities throughout German and Austrian history, and the grueling labor that camp inmates were subjected to in these same quarries. The marble and granite stones furthermore link past and present through their visual similarity to surrounding pavers and cobblestones at the site of installation in Vienna. Notably, these cobblestones are woven into a structure that is also reminiscent of a mashrabiya, a projecting window often found on the upper floor of buildings in Islamic architecture, which is enclosed in carved wood latticework. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 441 Functioning as a screen, the mashrabiya allows women to look out, while remaining hidden from view. The mashrabiya is often associated with early Orientalism, the exoticization of the Orient, and the objectification of women. Yet the mashrabiya also endows the person behind the screen with the power of observation, placing them in a position of privilege (Woodbridge 407). Aladağ’s screens gesture toward these complex power dynamics of visualization through their varying levels of opacity. By holding in tension disparate cultural and historical references, they form dynamic wholes that nevertheless refuse the power of racial categorization so central to National Socialism and Orientalism alike. On the contrary, they lay claim to public space in a manner that constantly asks viewers to reflect not only on what , but also how they see. The power and the politics of vision are also central to the history of the Oriental carpet. In her book-length study of Western commodification of the Persian carpet in particular, Minoo Moallem argues that we cannot understand the history of Oriental carpets outside of the Orientalist practices of seeing and displaying them (14). Such Orientalist viewing regimes projected a false legibility onto cultural codes, symbols, designs, and materials that were otherwise opaque to non-local actors. Pointing to the widespread introduction of Persian carpets into the European marketplace in the late nineteenth century, Moallem reads carpets as part of a chain of goods known as Orientalia. Ranging from jewelry to furniture, Orientalia comprise any material objects associated with Islam (often referred to as Muhammadan or Musulman at the time), the Orient, or more specifically Persia in nineteenthand twentieth-century Europe and America. By bringing “the cultural and religious difference of Eastern people to the heart of the empire,” Orientalia epitomized European Orientalist assumptions about the collectability of the cultures and art of Oriental peoples. As dislocated and decontextualized objects, Oriental carpets upheld essentialist notions of time and culture that worked to produce an image of the Orient as located outside of history (47). In contrast to the designs and weaving techniques of the carpets themselves - which attest to long histories of cultural borrowing and exchange across geographic, cultural, and ethnic lines - Oriental carpets consumed under the sign of Orientalia served as “boundary objects” (49), which signified a separation of East from West. Central to the overall discourse of Orientalism, Orientalia helped to construct the Orient as a portable and imaginary space that could be incorporated into the European home (51). As objects intended to be touched, walked on, and sat upon, carpets also engaged the senses, lending themselves well to a unique form of domestication that brought European consumers seemingly close to an otherwise distant Orient (50). By symbolizing a consumable Orient that could be brought back to Europe on demand, carpets also served more specifically as what Moallem terms “civilizational commodities.” More 442 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 than simply exotic and mysterious goods, civilizational commodities “constituted cultural distinctions and civilizational hierarchies […] that maintained the boundaries between the East and the West, the Oriental and the Occidental, the primitive and the modern, and the religious and the secular, no matter their proximity to or distance from the observer” (50). Nineteenth-century European middle-class interest in the Oriental carpet grew out of a much longer history of consumption and representation. European artists displayed an interest in Oriental carpets as early as the 1500s, for example, when Italian and Dutch Renaissance painters began portraying carpets from the Ottoman Empire as floor coverings or furniture decoration. Ironically, many carpets from the Middle East - such as the Lotto, Holbein, Ghirlandaio, Crivelli, and Memling - are now named after the European painters who depicted them in detail during this time period (Denny, “Islamic Carpets”). Due to both distance and expense, however, Oriental carpets remained a limited luxury import in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mainly utilized in the home furnishings of Italian, French, and Eastern European nobility (Helfgott 14). Fig. 3: Robertson, “A Carpet Seller, Cairo” (1885) It was not until the late nineteenth century that Persian carpets began entering the European market in large numbers. At this time, a European middle-class familiarity with and interest in Oriental carpets was in part stimulated by Orientalist painters focused on the Middle East. Presenting a romanticized and dramatized view of local life, their work often incorporated depictions of carpets and textiles as an authenticating gesture (Thompson 35—36). “A Carpet Seller, Cairo” DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 443 (1885) by British Orientalist painter Charles Robertson is an excellent example of this. On the one hand, this painting displays incredible attention to detail in its representation of three Caucasian carpets, a Turkish flatwoven prayer rug, and a hanging Uzbek embroidery, among other objects. On the other hand, it creates a heightened sense of drama in its larger-than-life portrayal of Oriental textiles, in comparison to which the human figures appear abnormally small. Fig. 4: Gérôme, “The Carpet Merchant” (1887) “The Carpet Merchant” (1887) by French Orientalist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme creates a similar effect. Depicting the court of the rug market in Cairo, which Gérôme had visited in 1885, this painting features several carpets folded up and strewn about the floor, as well as one enormous, detailed carpet draped over 444 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 a balcony. Within the overall composition of this painting, the human figures barely reach one third of this carpet’s length. From the intricately patterned carpets and realistic architectural elements to the wide variety of robes and headdresses they depict, details lend these paintings a documentary feel. Overall, however, paintings such as Robertson’s and Gérôme’s pandered to European fantasies of the Middle East through their portrayal of stereotypical costumes and settings, such as the bazar. Both paintings utilize bright and vivid colors, for example, and feature mustached or bearded men in turbans alongside the exotic goods of carpets and textiles. Perceived by European viewers as faithful records of an exotic and unchanging Orient, such representations helped to solidify an understanding of the Orient as geographically and temporally separate from Europe. Several German and Austrian Orientalist painters participated in this artistic tradition: Ludwig Deutsch’s The Scholar (1885) features a man in robe and turban lounging on patterned cushions with a carpet at his feet. Gustav Bauernfeind’s paintings of Jerusalem and the Holy Land - such as Sentinel at the Entrance to the Masjid al Aqsa (1883) and Forecourt of the Umayyad Mosque, Damascus (1880) - feature carpets and textiles as integral to their setting. Oriental Courtyard with Mother and Child (A Family Weaving) (1869) by Carl Friedrich Heinrich Werner features a mother and child weaving at the loom in an inner courtyard, and Beauty with a Tambourine (1867) depicts an interior with a woman lounging on deep red cushions, a lush, patterned carpet in gold, dark blue, and teal hues at her feet. Both paintings depict intimate scenes to which Werner likely did not have access, underscoring the importance of hearsay and imagination for Orientalist paintings. Beauty in particular draws on a widespread Orientalist fascination with the harem, and depictions of languid women, sequestered far from the eyes of strangers. Finally, Werner’s An Artist at Work in His Studio (1854) prominently displays a prayer rug and a hand-knotted pile rug in the studio of a European artist, underscoring the role of the carpet as a mobile object that could bring the exotic character of the Orient into the European home, while paradoxically solidifying the distance between Orient and Occident. In addition to their frequent representations in Orientalist paintings, Leonard Helfgott attributes two additional factors to the rise in European demand for Oriental carpets in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the European Orientalist fascination with “primitive cultures” drove a newfound demand for village and nomadic flatwoven carpets. Starting with the 1873 World’s Fair in Vienna, this style of Turkish, Caucasian, and Turkmen carpets became a standard feature of nearly all international exhibitions in both Europe and the United States. On the other hand, as colonialism and imperialism spurred renewed European scholarly and popular fascination with the DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 445 arts of Asia, private collectors and museums also began to treat sixteenthand seventeenth-century Safavid hand-knotted workshop carpets as representative of an artform in their own right. In 1892, for example, the Victoria and Albert Museum paid the extravagant sum of £2,500 for the world’s oldest dated carpet - the Ardabil carpet - which is named after the place of its creation in northwest Iran. Prior to its acquisition by the museum, this carpet adorned the burial site of Sufi leader and founder of the Safavid dynasty Shaykh Safi al-Din Ardabili (Helfgott 15). Finally, exhibitions played an important role in the popularization of Oriental carpets in turn-of-the-century Europe. In the German-speaking world, the 1891 exhibition “Ausstellung orientalischer Teppiche” [Exhibition of Oriental Carpets] arranged by the Imperial Austrian Trade Museum, was the first of its kind (Erdman 34). It was followed by a huge exhibition of “Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst” [Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art] held in Munich in 1910. Of the 3,500 items on display in this exhibition, 229 were carpets that were also catalogued by the main curator and German art historian Friedrich Sarre in a massive three-volume publication. 1 This exhibition was originally conceptualized as an “Orientalische Ausstellung” [Oriental Exhibition] by the Bavarian crown prince Rupprecht, who sought to recognize and showcase the value of a set of Safavid carpets (otherwise known as the Polish carpet group) in the Wittelsbach collection at the Residence Museum in Munich (Troelenberg 2). While Sarre drastically expanded the scope of this exhibit, Eva-Maria Troelenberg notes that the genre of the carpet as an Islamic artform did constitute a central component of the exhibition. Not only did Sarre feature the Safavid carpets in the main entrance hall, but he also displayed them in a manner reminiscent of masterpieces in an art gallery, with large pieces arranged on a neutral wall. Carpets were furthermore featured in several additional exhibit halls, including carpets from Iran and India in hall 24, carpets and textiles from India in halls 35-38, large numbers of Turkish, Iranian, and Armenian carpets in hall 39, and carpets identified as hailing from “Asia Minor” in hall 71 (Troelenberg 16—19). While Sarre and his main assistant Ernst Kühnel hoped to create an exhibition that could go beyond Orientalist clichés and popularize Islamic art, 2 they ultimately fell short of this goal. The exhibition was large and overwhelming, difficult for any single person to navigate in a single day. While the exhibition displayed many carpets as “masterpieces,” thus underscoring their value as works of art, this understanding of the masterpiece also depended on a conservative and Eurocentric approach, which took European high culture as an important reference point (Troelenberg 11). The exhibition also contained workshop-like settings, which were clearly modeled on colonial living history displays commonly found at World’s Fairs and other exhibitions in the late nineteenth and 446 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 early twentieth centuries. An example of this is the Caravanserai, where representatives from the Ottoman Empire demonstrated traditional handicrafts, including metalwork and carpet knotting (Troelenberg 3). 3 Beyond the artistic representation and exhibition of Oriental carpets, Germany - and the port city of Hamburg specifically - have been at the center of the Oriental carpet trade since the late nineteenth century. As Moallem notes, the establishment of trade routes between the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe was an integral aspect of colonialism and Orientalism alike (50). Notably, long before the establishment of the German nation state in 1871, Hamburg was already central to European colonial expansion in the sixteenth century, through its role in moving goods brought by Portuguese and Danish merchants from the West Indies and West Africa. As Germany began colonizing parts of several African countries, northeastern New Guinea, Samoa, and numerous Micronesian islands in the late nineteenth century, the free Hanseatic city of Hamburg not only became the central colonial metropolis of the German Empire but also the largest port and trading center in mainland Europe for colonial goods (Krajewsky 144—48). The massive warehouses in Hamburg’s 300,000 square-meter Speicherstadt district received, stored, and moved raw materials such as palm kernels, rubber, and ivory; exotic foodstuffs including spices, cocoa, and coffee; and goods such as Oriental carpets (Krajewsky 147). As a major entry point for handwoven carpets into Europe, the Speicherstadt housed 200-250 carpet warehouses up until the 1980s. While this number has lessened with the increased popularity of online shopping, roughly one third of the world’s carpets still move through the city’s port every year (Körber Stiftung, “Alle Teppiche”). Hamburg’s role in the carpet trade belies the links between colonialism and Orientalism. While Oriental carpets came from regions outside of the German colonial empire, such as Iran and the Ottoman Empire, Germany nevertheless sought to assert cultural and economic influence in these regions through projects such as the Baghdad Railway, which provided access to regions colonized by other European powers. In an attempt to pay homage to Hamburg’s role in the carpet trade, the Körber Stiftung unveiled a new work of public art commemorating its sixtieth anniversary on September 4, 2019: a Steinerner Orientteppich , or an Oriental carpet made of stone. Designed by artist Frank Raendchen, this twenty-seven-meter-long mosaic spans the length of Wilhelm’s Bridge and incorporates one and a half tons of marble granules to simulate the look of a knotted-pile carpet. 4 While the promotional materials for this project foreground the social aspect of historic weaving practices, the artwork itself ultimately invites a non-reflective mode of participation that flattens the history of carpet production and the European consumption of Orientalia alike. Completely sidestepping the colonial history DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 447 that underpins Hamburg’s role in the carpet trade, the Körber Stiftung presents the Steinerner Orientteppich as a beacon of cultural understanding. Through its artistic adaptation of Turkmen knotting techniques that, “Glück bringen, Unheil abwenden, Wohlstand und Fruchtbarkeit der Herden symbolisieren sollen” [“bring luck, ward off evil, and symbolize prosperity and fertility], they argue, the Steinerner Orientteppich symbolizes their organization’s generic goals of “Brücken bauen, Hilfen geben, Impulse setzen, Verständnis fördern, national und international” [building bridges, offering assistance, providing impetuses, and promoting understanding, both nationally and internationally] (“Neuer Steinerner Orientteppich”). A 360-degree virtual tour offers visitors tools to interpret the carpet’s main symbols vis-à-vis these goals. As a symbol of prosperity and openness, the lotus blossom indicates Hamburg’s openness toward new ideas and other cultures, as embodied by its port and history of international trade. The water jug symbolizes in turn purity and hospitality, serving as a welcoming sign to tourists who are invited to walk on the carpet. As a representation of rebirth, the rose gestures toward Raendchen’s re-envisioning of an earlier 2005 design for the 2019 Steinerner Orientteppich . Finally, the evil eye - portrayed in pared-down geometric diamond shapes - serves as a talisman for the carpet and the city alike (“360-Grad-Tour”). In addition to its metaphoric placement on a physical bridge, the Steinerner Orientteppich is intended to symbolize the “bridging” of cultural domains, by transferring these traditional motifs from the Middle East into the German public domain. With an empty nod to communal weaving practices, the Körber Stiftung invited the people of Hamburg to participate in the artistic process by laying stone pieces together with Raendchen and his team. In stark contrast to the historic embodied practice of weaving, however, these “helpers” were then presented as mere statistics for the execution of the project: “4 weeks, 27 meters, 2,000 kilograms of stone, 120 liters of synthetic resin, 50 helpers” (“Neuer Steinerner Orientteppich”). Overall, the production process and promotional materials for the Steinerner Orientteppich reflect the historic consumption and domestication of Oriental carpets in Europe. The Körber Stiftung displays no understanding of how the European demand for Oriental carpets completely transformed the historic production of carpets in the Middle East, for example, or how the European consumption of Orientalia served as one important lynchpin for the discourse of Orientalism. By instructing viewers how to read the Steinerner Orientteppich as a symbol of Hamburg’s openness to the world, the 360-degree virtual tour also ignores the significance of its port for the movement of colonial goods and thus also the economic underpinnings of colonialism. The promotional language for the Steinerner Orientteppich echoes rather that of UNESCO and the city of Hamburg more generally, which bill the Hafencity and 448 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Speicherstadt as “must-see” tourist destinations with UNESCO world heritage status, without ever mentioning Hamburg’s important role in the larger history of European colonialism or the German colonial empire more specifically. 5 Aladağ’s carpet collages present a striking counterexample to Raendchen’s Steinerner Orientteppich . Through the practice of collage, I argue, Aladağ invites viewers to reflect on their own personal connections and associations with individual works of art in the Social Fabric series. Given the complexities of her collages - which not only incorporate but also obscure and cut off symbols and designs - Aladağ creates a whole that is not easy to consume. Rather than invite any clear-cut form of interpretation, Aladağ’s unique combinations of colors and styles stress the impossibility of pinpointing the origins or definitive meanings of woven designs and symbols that have been utilized by many different cultures across generations. By highlighting the social function of carpets and textiles more generally, Social Fabric asks viewers rather to critically reflect on their own personal associations with works of art in the series, with the understanding that these associations may vary drastically from person to person. This emphasis on the personal is also borne out through Aladağ’s titular phrase “social fabric,” which draws a metaphorical connection between the thousands of individual threads that are woven together in a piece of fabric and the myriad metaphorical threads that hold us together as a society. While the tightly woven warp (lengthwise threads) and weft (crosswise threads) of a fabric are invisible to the naked eye, they function similarly to the social interactions and connections that bind us to one another, helping to create a set of shared values and sense of community. In relation to the history of the carpet, Aladağ’s title calls to mind another well-known phrase relevant to carpet studies, namely “ties that bind.” Pointing again to structures of social cohesion, this phrase also more specifically recalls the art of carpet making, particularly hand-knotted pile carpets, more commonly referred to as “Oriental” or “Persian” carpets. These carpets are created through an intricate process of tying hundreds of thousands of knots around warp threads. Tightly anchored by weft threads, these knots are then cut to a specific length (pile), which determine the color and pattern of the rug. The value of said carpets is partly determined by knot density, or knots per square inch (KPSI), which may range anywhere from 25 to 1,000. 6 The phrase “ties that bind” thus highlights both the final woven or knotted product of the carpet and the processes of weaving and knotting. It also gestures metaphorically toward the important social function weaving has played as a communal activity, particularly for tribal and nomadic communities such as the Turkmens. Much more than a subset of technical knowledge, weaving was historically a social and an embodied activity undertaken by women and their daugh- DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 449 ters. In Oriental Carpets: From the Tents, Cottages and Workshops of Asia (1988) for example, Jon Thompson highlights the importance of traditional kilims, or flatwoven rugs, for the preservation of knowledge across generations. Patterns, he argues, are passed on like melodies from mothers to daughters; these patterns are not sketched or written down but are rather retained from generation to generation through a process of live transmission. While patterns are distinct to local communities, they also change over time, reflecting local socio-economic conditions, and processes of exchange with neighboring communities (16). This social aspect of carpet weaving is often ignored, undermined, or used to uphold denigrating views of weavers in Orientalist scholarship. Thompson himself, for example, notes that while weavers have nicknames for the patterns they use, these names have “no value in determining the root meaning of a design” (155). He portrays weavers as both ignorant of the meanings behind the designs they use, and as incapable of retaining in their memories the large and more complex patterns used in workshop carpets (5, 155). In her survey of European connoisseur books on Oriental carpets from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Moallem notes similar trends. These books repeatedly emphasize carpet weaving techniques, which are described as an extension of nature, and thus as distinctly separate from modern technological advancements (34). In Rugs of the Orient (1911), for example, C.R. Clifford concludes that the “simple” designs of flatwoven carpets are not worthy of “logical analysis” because they have been “inspired always by primitive thought” (71). By associating traditional patterns and weaving techniques with the primitive, authors like Clifford relegate carpet weaving to an older temporal order than the one they write from. These patterns in scholarship persist well into the twentieth century. In the 1980s, for example, E. Gans-Ruedin laments the difficulty of obtaining an explanation of carpet designs from the weavers themselves: “They use such and such motif in accordance with tradition,” he writes, “but they are no longer aware of its original meaning” (7). Already in her series’ title, Aladağ counters this separation of the carpet from its social dimensions. By gesturing toward the carpet as a form of “social fabric,” Aladağ reminds us of the important role it can play in structuring a living space or serving as a transmitter of cultural memory. In her personal reflection on the role of the Persian carpet in the expatriate American home, for example, Behin Forghanifar describes carpets as “salient objects for a shared remembering of […] history, religious beliefs, and traditional values” (n. pag.). Handmade carpets in particular, she notes, are often passed down as cultural heritage. Due to their complex symbolism, they are regularly used in special occasions such as ceremonies or religious rituals. Beyond this, the Persian carpet has also been central to daily interactions among family members. Given that sofas were not common in 450 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 middleor working-class homes of the early twentieth century, families would often gather around the carpet to engage in collective activities such as eating or dancing; in contemporary homes, carpets still often structure living spaces, with furniture arranged around them. Reflecting on the significance of woven carpets for families in rural Morocco, textile artist Terra Fuller further notes the multiple roles they play within the entire cycle of life: “Newlyweds sleep on the carpets; babies are conceived and are born on the carpets, and the elderly pass away on the carpets. In other words, the entire cycle of life from conception to death occurs on these carpets” (qtd. in Moallem, “Weaving Connections”). As these examples show, the social function of carpets is often strongly linked to the act of weaving. But handwoven carpets are only one aspect of Aladağ’s collages. Machine-made carpets with minimal to no designs also play a prominent structural role in the Social Fabric series. Whereas an Orientalist fetishization of the primitive simultaneously evacuates the carpet of its social function, Aladağ arguably calls attention to the social function of carpets and carpet making by contrasting valuable hand-knotted pile carpets with industrially produced ones. In her restaging of an otherwise horizontal form in a new vertical format, Aladağ also brings the carpet to eye level, calling attention not only to juxtapositions in pattern, but also pile, texture, and material that are visible to the naked eye. Fig. 5: Closeup of Carpet Collage, photograph by Trevor Good DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 451 While undiscerning visitors may not be able to determine a carpet’s origins, or even a handwoven from a machine-made patterned carpet, certain pieces clearly resemble uniformly colored, industrially produced wall-to-wall carpets, whereas others incorporate patterns and piles historically associated with handmade Oriental ones. Aladağ’s collages consist only of contemporary carpets, however, meaning it is entirely plausible that the more “Oriental” looking pieces were produced in Europe or the United States, whereas the industrial office-style carpets could just as easily come from Turkey or Morocco. By withholding this information from visitors, Aladağ fosters an uncertainty, which both emphasizes each collage’s individual parts, while also creating a work of art that exceeds the sum of those parts through its collagist composition. 7 Aladağ’s strategic placement of what appear to be industrially produced monochrome carpet pieces inside more intricately patterned pieces exemplifies this uncertainty. In the top lefthand corner of Wind , for example, a small, bright yellow circle is inserted inside a nearly square piece with a more intricate arabesque design in white, beige, and subdued blues. Arabesque designs often portray vines, tendrils, leaves, and blossoms, and require a high knot density to achieve a fluidity of line (Stone 28). In Wind , this arabesque piece is juxtaposed on its bottom left with a bright red half-oval shape that also appears to have been industrially produced. Given the lack of labels for individual pieces, such juxtapositions do not solidify binaries such as handwoven and machine-made, traditional and modern, or valuable and inexpensive, but rather put the assumed tension between these categories into question. This idea is exemplified through the three interlocking circles in Skylight Spring , in which pieces from a wide variety of carpets overlap and interconnect to create the main focal point of the collage. In this collagist design format, all individual carpet pieces are integral to the overall design, meaning no single piece is more important than another, regardless of potential origin or value. Derived from the French word coller , meaning to glue or stick together, “collage” indicates the technique of creating a new work of art from a wide range of other materials, such as fibrous paper, photographs, newspaper and magazine clippings, or fabric to a given surface. While collage is a very old and common practice all over the world, it gained importance as a critical tactic in the early twentieth century, when it was embraced by artists dedicated to revolutionary change in society, such as the Dadaists and Surrealists on the left, and Italy’s futurists on the right (Higgins 25). Like the work of these artists, Aladağ’s carpet collages disrupt the illusion of a whole, coherent, organic artwork, reminding us that so-called Oriental carpets cannot be so easily consumed and domesticated. Through both their individual component parts and final designs -which carry meanings and emotive resonances that may exceed the viewer’s own knowledge or capacity for understanding, even as they evoke new, unexpected associations 452 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 - Aladağ’s collages undo the Orientalist regime of carpet gazing by hinting at more complex forms of reading and legibility. Through the collage form, Aladağ also reminds us of the heterotopic qualities of carpets more generally. In his 1996 essay “Of Other Spaces,” Michel Foucault coined the term “heterotopia” to describe spaces that both mirror and upset the outside world. Unlike utopias, which are sites without a real place, heterotopias juxtapose several spaces within a single real place, or several sites that may otherwise seem incompatible (25). In addition to the cinema and the theater, Foucault lists the traditional Persian garden as one example of a heterotopia, the confined space of which represents a symbolic microcosm of the world. Ships represent in turn heterotopias par excellence: as a floating piece of space, a ship is both closed in on itself, while also moving and connecting peoples, places, and goods from across the globe (27). Moallem describes Persian carpets as embodying the inherent danger of heterotopias, in that they resist closure by “spill[ing] over [their] frame aesthetically” (8). They are both commodities that are bought and sold on the international market and phantasmatic objects linked to long-standing Orientalist tropes such as the flying carpet. Handwoven carpets further link production and consumption, as well as labor and leisure. Through their history of exportation to the West, Persian carpets also force us to consider categories such as “East” and “West” together via a commodity that “moves in space, but [whose] localization continuously integrates a form of extension, a relation to other sites” (8). In many ways, the concept of heterotopia is akin to the process of weaving itself. The act of weaving entails shuttling a transverse weft thread over and under, as well as back and forth across stationary warp threads, which are held in place on the loom’s frame. It is in this tension between movement and stasis that Françoise Lionnet locates a form of “double critique” in the metaphor of weaving. Through a series of crossings that both overlap and bind together, the weft yarn must constantly double back on itself, while simultaneously extending the textile by transcending a previously established boundary (404—05). Whether hand woven or machine made, the individual pieces in Aladağ’s collages work together to exemplify and extend the heterotopic quality of carpets. As such, these collages stand in direct contradiction to the field of carpet studies, which is highly concerned with questions of provenance and classification. Experienced carpet scholars often identify a carpet’s origin by examining its design. If this method fails due to the shared use of symbols across cultural and geographic borders, experts also look to other key elements of identification, including a carpet’s structure (coarser vs. finer weave; flatwoven vs. knotted-pile carpet), material (wool, cotton, silk, mohair, camel hair, etc.), size and shape (rectangular, square, circular), color palette (bold vs. earth-toned colors; natural vs. synthetic DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 453 dyes), and fringe and/ or selvedge edge. Finally, the most reliable method of identifying a carpet’s origin is by looking at its backside. Noting the many intricacies of weaving and knotting techniques, P.R.J. Ford goes so far as to argue that trained carpet scholars and merchants can trace a given carpet to its precise village of origin with only a quick glance at its backside (10). This is also the main method of identifying “authentic” carpets from imitation products with similar designs. Aladağ’s collages thwart the desire to pinpoint carpets’ origins on many levels. Many snippets of carpets are simply too small to identify a clear design; others isolate a single element - such as a star, triangle, or hook - that would otherwise be repeated within the carpet to create a larger pattern such as a central medallion or a border. Importantly, Aladağ does not label the individual pieces of her designs. Cut up and pasted onto a wooden backing, each carpet’s backside is furthermore rendered inaccessible, as are its original edges, size, shape, and overall design. What remains accessible to the viewer are pieces of designs, which often appear to be strategically interrupted and/ or rearranged to create an entirely new design through the collage format. An example of this can be found in the bottom left section of Wind . Here, one carpet fragment clearly depicts part of a geometricized animal in red and gold on a beige background, with several other smaller figures in red, gold, and blue tones surrounding the larger animal. Such stylized, abstract, and geometric animals are common in Oriental carpet designs. Nomadic peoples often incorporated domesticated animals such as goats and horses into their designs, whereas tigers are often found in carpets from Southwest Tibet and lions are prominent in carpets from Southwest Iran. Such animals often symbolize a specific trait. The crane, for example, is a symbol of longevity in China. In other cases, however, animal designs hold no specific symbolic importance. At times, geometric designs may even recall the shape of an animal, where no likeness was necessarily intended, such as the Eagle Kazak or running dog border designs (Stone 26). While the red and gold shape represented in Aladağ’s collage clearly depicts an animal, her strategic decision to cut off its head renders the image ambiguous to viewers. With only its back half visible - including one leg, a tail, and what could possibly be a wing - the figure resembles the shape of the Akstafa Peakcock design, for example, but could just as easily represent a mammal wearing a saddle. Examples such as this take the issue of authenticity out of the equation altogether, raising instead more complex questions about cultural borrowing through the new associative connections they give rise to. By removing identifiable elements of a design, Aladağ encourages viewers to let go of the urge to pinpoint specific meanings, asking them instead to reflect on their desire to do so in the first place. In contrast to the Steinerner Orientteppich in Hamburg, Aladağ’s collage practice encourages us to think of carpet weaving not as the production of 454 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 specific symbols that serve as singular points of reference, but as a cross-cultural practice steeped in relationality: symbols gain meaning not simply within individual, insulated cultures, but in relation to other symbols, or variations on a given symbol. Rather than foster a superficial mode of understanding, Aladağ’s collages thus reflect on the semiotic processes whereby cultural artifacts and their meanings are created again and again in a relational and open-ended manner. Evoking many potential associations, Wind and Skylight Spring are no exceptions. Their bright colors and strong lines punctuated by spheric structures have celestial qualities, recalling planets aligning or stars surrounded by beams of sunlight. Pasted together, certain strips of fabric also form letters, such as a P embedded in a D in the top lefthand quadrant of Wind . And the repetition of rectangular carpet strips in Skylight Spring emulates wall tiles rearranged in vertical format, recalling Aladağ’s decision to display her carpet collages on the wall instead of the floor. Fig. 6: Wright, Tree of Life Window (1904) © 2024 Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. All Rights Reserved. Licensed by Artists Rights Society. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 455 As a scholar situated in the American Midwest, Wind and Skylight Spring also evoke for me the iconic window designs of Frank Lloyd Wright. While incorporating elements of Wright’s Prairie-style Windows (1897-1909) - which utilize rectilinear and chevron motifs to form large symmetrical patterns - these collages also utilize the bolder colors, circles, and asymmetrical designs of the windows Wright would later create for the Coonley Playhouse in 1912. Fig. 7: Wright, Coonley Playhouse Windows (1912) © 2024 Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. All Rights Reserved. Licensed by Artists Rights Society. Skylight Spring in particular incorporates bright reds, yellows, and blues, which give the impression of a stained glass window in the sunlight. Given Aladağ’s use of the word “skylight” in her title - which suggests an association with windows - her use of black border lines between carpet pieces also recalls the 456 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 brass-, zinc-, or copper-plated cames separating individual pieces in Wright’s so-called “light screens.” Wright not only used this term to refer to the patterned windows of his earlier designs, but he also used the language of textiles to describe their function within a building: “woven about the space as enclosure, [they take] the place of the solid walls” (qtd. in Sloan 45). What might we gain by bringing Wright’s conception of light screens to our reading of Wind and Skylight Spring? More than one-to-one comparisons or studies of influence, Aladağ’s compositions invite us to extend the work of collage, by juxtaposing her own work with that of others. Viewing Aladağ’s compositions alongside Wright’s may then remind us of the varied influences on his work at the turn of the century. In his autobiography, for example, Wright names Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament (1856) as an important source of inspiration for the decorative patterns of his early windows (75). Jones’s lavish folio incorporated 112 illustrated plates featuring patterns, motifs, and ornaments from nineteen diverse cultures, including Arabian, Byzantine, Indian, Greek, Persian, and Moresque. Wright recalls making one hundred tracings from this book , pointing to the early importance of so-called Oriental ornamental designs for his own design practice, which is generally understood as quintessentially modern. Small facts such as these play into Aladağ’s critical engagement with the tropes of Orientalism through the associative connections her collages evoke. Notably, Wright’s use of weaving terminology was not limited to discussion of his windows. In his architectural notes, he also describes the vertical and horizontal elements of a building as the “warp and woof ” of the structure (Sloan 45). Julie L. Sloan traces Wright’s persistent interest in fabric and weaving to his childhood, when his mother gave him a set of Froebel gifts (45). First designed by German pedagogue Friedrich Froebel in the 1840s, these toys support children in their fine motor development while also allowing them to explore elements of math, science, engineering, and architecture through an emphasis on pattern and geometric order (“Froebel’s Gifts”). The fourteenth gift of the Froebel system is “weaving paper,” or a sheet of paper with slots representing the warp, through which children weave additional paper strips as a woof. 8 Sloan reads many of Wright’s window patterns - such as the stairwell windows of the Dana House or the windows’ checkerboard patterns in houses for E.A. Gilmore - as taking inspiration from woven designs. Notably, Wright also created a “glass tapestry” for the Susan Lawrence Dana House. Supported only at the top, this piece hangs like a fiber tapestry in front of a plate glass window (Sloan 45—46). Reading Aladağ’s carpet collages alongside Wright’s window designs brings the significance of weaving for Wright’s practice to the fore. Recalling a like- DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 457 ness between fabric and glass, it highlights how both windows and carpets may serve as screens, through which to see the world. Indeed, one reason Foucault describes carpets as heterotopias is due to the historic role of Persian carpets as “reproductions” of gardens through their symbolic representations of flowers, vines, and trees. Whereas the vegetation of the garden represented a microcosm of the world, sixteenth-century Persian carpets present “a sort of garden that can move across space” (Foucault 26). While not all carpets represent gardens, their diverse motifs and symbols gesture toward broad forms of human experience, incorporate talismans to ward off evil, and contain images that narrate cultural histories. Notably, Oriental carpets also employ a series of frames: In addition to a wider main border, most Oriental carpets have several thinner guard stripes, or a series of bands that flank the main border on each side. These multiple borders usually incorporate repeated motifs, such as flowers, stars, or geometric shapes; together, they frame the carpet’s center field, which contains its main pattern or design. This structure underscores the carpet as a kind of window onto other frames of reference, such as the cosmos or the cycle of life. Rather than highlight definitive interpretations for certain symbols or structural elements, Aladağ’s collages invite us to relish in the heterotopic quality of carpets. One way she does this is by playing with the concept of the border itself. In both Wind and Skylight Spring , for example, Aladağ employs long strips of carpet that appear to have once been part of a guard stripe; they display repeated flower designs, triangular and diamond shapes, and crosses that would likely have been part of a flatwoven rug from Anatolia or the Caucasus. Other border-like pieces display more recognizable designs such as the cloud band, a recurring, horseshoe shaped motif often found in carpets from China, the Middle East, and the Caucasus (Stone 73). Indicative of Aladağ’s collage practice overall, her rearranging of the borders and structural elements of the Oriental carpet changes the way we might traditionally read it. No longer encompassing a central field, fragments of borders gesture toward the constantly shifting frames of reference Aladağ’s collages evoke, depending on the experiences and knowledge each viewer brings to them. As such, Aladağ reminds us that weaving is a living and changing practice, through which symbols can be reinterpreted anew across generations and cultures. On a more general level, Aladağ’s collages remind us of the porousness of borders themselves, which are discursively produced through the paradigms of Orientalism. Indeed, many of the carpet pieces Aladağ selects for her collages feature design elements that are shared across diverse cultures and geographies. In the bottom left corner of Wind , for example, a prominently placed panel in orange, yellow, and grey tones features variations on a “latch hook,” which is a subsidiary motif of a geometric pattern with repeating diamond shapes. The 458 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 latch hook consists of parallel projections with “hooks” at right or acute angles pointed in the same direction, most often arranged around a diamond or medallion, or on the edge of a broad stripe, as in a border (Stone 172). While the latch hook is often traced to the flatwoven carpets of the Lurs, or the aboriginal inhabitants of what is now Southwest Iran, it is also widely use in Anatolian kilims. Given how little we know about the Lurs, this motif could easily have originated in the woven rugs of Turkic tribes before migrating into Luri weaving practices (Ford 212). Peter F. Stone also notes the prominence of latch hooks in the broad, zig-zag borders of Kazak rugs produced in nineteenth-century Borjalou in the Caucasus (51). Notably, there is no definitive or symbolic meaning attached to the latch hook design. Comparing it rather to a musical motif, Ford notes the wealth of opportunities the latch hook offers weavers for elaboration and creative interpretation, both within and across cultural borders (213). Through the overall composition of Aladağ’s collages - which evoke the patterns of Wright’s windows - the widespread motif of the latchhook in the Middle East and the Caucasus comes into contact with the American Midwest. These regions are brought together through the compositional elements of Wind as well. While Wind incorporates several straight lines radiating outward from the center left of the collage, its title evokes the unruly character of a natural phenomenon - air that is capable of fluidly streaming over, under, and around any given object or space. Together, the naturally inspired title and composition of Aladağ’s collage recall the wild sumac-inspired windows Wright created for the Susan Laurence Dana House in 1902-1904. In multiple variations throughout the house, Wright represented the natural, unruly, and asymmetrical character of this plant through geometric pattern. The sumac windows are also an excellent example of the significance of framing for Wright’s design practice and his understanding of windows as screens. One of the largest and most ambitious Prairie-style houses Wright built, the Dana house contains 250 windows in total. Rendered geometrically through a chevron motif in warm-toned orange and yellow glass, the sumac blossom is featured throughout the house, including in the Dana house’s reception room, the gallery, and the dining room bay (Sloan 70). Calling attention to Wright’s use of asymmetrical patterns, which mimic the natural growth of a tree or bush, Thomas Heinz notes the “organic” quality of the window designs in the Dana house (37). In the dining bay in particular, one can look out through Wright’s geometrically patterned sumac windows onto the wild sumac bushes surrounding the house. Windows thus connect the house to the outside world, without rendering the border between inside and outside invisible. Wright’s conception of the sumac windows as a kind of framing device is central to his pioneering reconfiguration of space in modern architecture. Where- DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 459 as traditional interiors featured clearly defined and compartmentalized rooms, Wright envisioned buildings as open and interconnected totalities. By treating interior partitions like screens or panels, as opposed to impermeable walls, his designs allowed for a newfound sense of spatial continuity. Notably, Wright’s emphasis on continuity was not limited to the interior of a building; on the contrary, he was highly attentive to the relationship between buildings and their surrounding environments. Accordingly, he also envisioned exterior walls as screens with long expanses of windows (De Long 14). Whereas Wright initially saw windows as a challenge to his architectural design, and even lamented the need to cut “holes” into his buildings, by 1920 he had come to understand glass as a “miracle,” a “jewel,” and a “super material” (qtd. in Sloan 43). Indeed, intricately designed windows quickly became a signature aspect of Wright’s architectural design, and it is primarily through windows that Wright allowed his buildings to open out to the outside world (De Long 14). 9 Commenting especially on Wright’s earlier window designs, often referred to as Prairie Style, Jason De Long notes the importance of pattern to Wright’s overall approach. By the early twentieth century, architectural advancements had already made it possible to incorporate large panels of undivided glass into modern building designs (De Long 18). Wright was not fond of this approach, in which windows serve as invisible membranes, offering uninterrupted views of an exterior vista. By endowing windows with patterns, he treated them rather like visible screens. While connecting inside and outside, patterned windows remain visible, creating a frame through which to view the outside world. Notably, Aladağ does ultimately frame her collages within a simple black border. Barely thicker than the cording separating each individual piece in a given work, however, this external frame mimics the practice of collage itself. Like Wright’s windows, which emphasize a dynamic relationship between inside and outside, Aladağ’s collages enact a series of temporal, geographic, and discursive juxtapositions that ask viewers to rethink the relationship of categorical binaries. In the examples I have discussed here, Aladağ’s present moment comes into contact with Wright’s turn-of-the-century. Through their place within the larger Social Fabric series and their particular design elements, Wind and Skylight Spring also bring Wright’s architectural visions for the modern American house into contact with the discourse surrounding the Oriental carpet. In doing so, these collages force us to rethink Orientalist assumptions about “Eastern” versus “Western,” and modern versus traditional cultural and artistic practices. Without collapsing these categories, Aladağ’s collages ask us rather to reflect on the production of borders and border concepts themselves, all while fostering a different mode of engaging with textiles as art pieces. By displaying her DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 460 Kristin Dickinson collages on the wall, Aladağ evokes the Orientalist practice of carpet gazing, as reproduced in the many Orientalist paintings that display carpets like tapestries on a wall or hung from a balcony. In doing so, Aladağ nevertheless invites us to rethink the scopic regime of Orientalism, which attributes value to Eastern objects only when viewed by a discerning Western eye. In contrast to Orientalist viewing practices, which necessarily posit an insurmountable temporal distance between contemporary Western viewers and Oriental art objects relegated to the past, Aladağ’s collages challenge us to rethink textiles as dynamic processes whose meanings continue to be worked out even after their production has seemingly come to an end. Notes 1 Carpets are discussed in volume 1. 2 Additional academic collaborators for the exhibit included art historian Rudolf Meyer-Riefstahl, the Orientalist Arnold Nöldeke, and historian of Iranian and Islamic art Ernst Diez (Troelenberg 7). 3 For more on the colonial underpinnings of living history exhibitions, which upheld social and racial hierarchies through their display of indigenous peoples alongside ethnographic objects, see de Matos et. al. 4 The Körber Stiftung offers a 360-degree virtual tour of the stone carpet: https: / / koerber-stiftung.de/ en/ projects/ the-oriental-stone-tapestry/ 5 UNESCO describes the uniformity of the neighborhood’s neo-Gothic architecture simply as a result of “rapid growth in international trade” at the time of its construction between 1885 and 1927. 6 Anything above 330 KPSI is considered to be very good quality. 7 For a similar definition of collage, see Higgins 26. 8 Sloan also notes the significance of other elements of the Froebel system - such as sticks, quadrangular and triangular tablets, and rings - for Wright’s window designs in general. See Sloan 43—45. 9 We might also consider Wright’s windows as heterotopias, in that they undo the strict division between inside and outside. Works Cited Aladağ, Nevin. Wind . 2019. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco. —. Skylight Spring. 2021. Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles . Clifford, C.R. Rugs of the Orient. New York: Clifford & Lawton, 1911. Denny, Walter. “Islamic Carpets in European Paintings.” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet 461 De Long, David G. “Introduction: Meaning and Pattern in the Work of Frank Lloyd Wright.” Light Screens: The Leaded Glass of Frank Lloyd Wright. By Julie Sloan. New York: Rizzoli, 2001. 12—21. De Matos, Patrícia Ferraz, Hande Birkalan-Gedik, Andrés Barrera-González, and Pegi Vail. “Introduction: World Fairs, Exhibitions and Anthropology: Revisiting Contexts of Post-colonialism.” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 31.2 (2022): 1—14. Erdmann, Kurt. Seven Hundred Years of Oriental Carpets . Ed. Hanna Erdmann. Trans. May H. Beattie and Hildegard Herzog. Berkeley: U of California P, 1970. Ford, P.R.J. Oriental Carpet Design: A Guide to Traditional Motifs, Patterns and Symbols . London: Thames and Hudson, 1981. Forghanifar, Behin. “Coping with Culture Shock through Handicrafts: The Persian Rug in the Ex-Patriate American Home.” Plots: Journal of Design Studies (6) 2019: 38—48. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22—27. Gans-Ruedin, E. The Great Book of Oriental Carpets . Trans. Valerie Howard. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. Gérôme, Jean-Léon. The Carpet Merchant . 1887. Minneapolis Institute of Art. Heinz, Thomas. Frank Lloyd Wright: Glass Art . Berlin: Ernst and Sohn, 1994. Helfgott, Leonard M. Ties that Bind: A Social History of the Iranian Carpet . Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994. Higgins, Scarlett. Collage and Literature: The Persistence of Vision . New York: Routledge, 2018. Jones, Owen. The Grammar of Ornament . London: B. Quaritch, 1928. Körber-Stiftung. “Neuer Steinerner Orientteppich auf Hamburgs Wilhelminenbrücke.” koerber-stiftung.de . Körber-Stiftung, 2019. Web. 17 Oct. 2024. <http: / / www.steinerner-orientteppich.de/ >. —.“Steinener Orientteppich: 360-Grad Tour.” koerber-stiftung.de . Körber-Stiftung, 2019. Web. 17 Oct. 2024. <https: / / koerber-stiftung.de/ projekte/ steinerner-orientteppich/ >. —. “Alle Teppiche erzählen eine Geschichte.” koerber-stiftung.de . Körber-Stiftung, 2019. Web. 17 Oct. 2024. <https: / / koerberstiftung.de/ en/ projects/ the-oriental-stone-tapestry/ alle-teppiche-erzaehlen-eine geschichte/ >. Krajewsky, Georg. Koloniales Erbe verhandeln: Erinnerung und Macht bei der Aufarbeitung der Kolonialvergangenheit in Hamburg . Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2023. Lionnet, Françoise. “Counterpoint and Double Critique in Edward Said and Abdelkebir Khatibi: A Transcolonial Comparison.” A Companion to Comparative Literature . Ed. Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2011. 387—407. Moallem, Minoo. Persian Carpets: The Nation as a Transnational Commodity . New York: Routledge, 2018. —. “Weaving Connections: Carpet Art, Community + Environment.” fams.org. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1 Mar. 2023. Web. 17 Oct. 2024. <https: / / www. famsf.org/ stories/ weaving-connections-carpet-art-community-environment>. Robertson, Charles. A Carpet Seller, Cairo . 1885. 462 Kristin Dickinson DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0021 Sloan, Julie. Light Screens: The Leaded Glass of Frank Lloyd Wright. New York: Rizzoli, 2001. Stone, Peter F. Oriental Rugs: An Illustrated Lexicon of Motifs, Materials, and Origins. Rutland: Tuttle Publishing, 2013. Thompson, Jon. Carpets: From the Tents, Cottages and Workshops of Asia . London: John Calmann and King Ltd., 1983. “Training and Resources: Froebel’s Gifts.” froebel.org.uk . Froebel Trust, n.d. Web. 17 Oct. 2024. < https: / / www.froebel.org.uk/ training-and-resources/ froebels-gifts>. Troelenberg, Eva-Maria. “Regarding the exhibition: The Munich exhibition Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art (1910) and its scholarly position.” Journal of Art Historiography 6 (2012): 1—34. Woodbridge, Lydia. “Materializing Migration: Weaving the Mashrabiya in Nevin Aladağ’s Screens I-III. ” Textile 17.4 (2016): 402—11. Wright, Frank Lloyd. Frankl Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography . Richmond: Pomegranate, 2005. —. Sumac Windows . 1902. Illinois Historical Preservation Agency. Photograph by Doug Carr. —. Tree of Life Window . 1904. Princeton University Art Museum. —. Coonley Playhouse Windows . 1912. The Met Fifth Avenue. New York. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0022 Faces along the Mirror: Last Objects of Orientalism Zafer Şenocak in Conversation with Kristin Dickinson This interview was first conducted in German and translated into English by Kristin Dickinson. KD: First of all, thank you so much for sharing some of your unpublished work with us for this special issue of Colloquia Germanica. While the poems and sketches presented here were not necessarily created in conjunction, they complement each other in interesting ways. Your poems often have a fragmentary and imagistic quality, for example, and your images depict entangled figures and versions of fractured selves, which are often themes of your poetry. Do you ever create poems in relation to specific images or vice versa? Or does your work as a visual artist ever influence your use of language? ZŞ: The connection between my poems and sketches is very strong. Not only because I’ve been drawing for a good fifteen years now, but also because I created many of my sketches almost in parallel to poems. I draw much more in the phases when I’m writing poetry than when I’m working on prose. That isn’t intentional, it just happens automatically. And when I think back to the early 80s when I first began writing poetry, it really was like painting in language. My texts are very much based on memories, and the language of memory is the image. While we might recall certain words or situations from our early childhood, our memory is first and foremost visual. And that memory is often deceptive. Just like the poem, it’s not necessarily based on reality. So, for me, it’s not about reality at all, but about the fact that there is something other than reality. Even though we can’t name this other realm directly, we are exposed to it, and we work with it. This is essentially the function of the writer for me, to work on and with this other reality. KD: Do writing and drawing ever open up different creative processes or modes of expression for you? ZŞ: It’s easier for me to play with gender identity in images. My male figures are often very feminine, or lacking any attributes that might be characterized as masculine. I also find it easier to depict violations of border lines in images than in language. Why? Because I don’t write in a broken language. I write in a more elevated, poetic language in both German and Turkish. And that’s a risk. Some people might read my poems and say there’s nothing postmodern about them. But that doesn’t mean that the poems are old-fashioned. Rather, they offer a different, complementary perspective to my drawings. My poems are often cynical, for example, and I think I am able to find a language that doesn’t fall into stereotypes, which saves me from the romanticizing tropes of Orientalism. KD: At times, you also use very classic forms, such as the ghazal. The ghazal is an amatory poem with a strict rhyme scheme that originated in Arabic poetry of the seventh century. It later made its way into the Persian-speaking world, the Indian subcontinent, the Ottoman Empire, and even European countries such as Germany via Orientalist poets like August von Platen und Friedrich Rückert. What does it mean for you to use this poetic form in German? Do you see yourself as participating in or speaking back to a German Orientalist tradition? At its core, the ghazal is of course a poetic expression of both love and separation, beauty and pain. Do these juxtapositions also hold the potential to challenge systematizing tendencies of Orientalist scholarship? ZŞ: The form of the ghazal is indeed very well suited for thematizing a certain dissolution of boundaries. It foregrounds self-abandonment and then a redrawing of boundaries. There is no farewell or arrival in this form, but a sense of continuation and connection. In my own poem, “Ghazal eines Unbekümmerten,” there is a disintegration of the self, which is also a form of love. But writing a ghazal is never a conscious decision for me. I don’t set out to use this form. Rather, the poem first comes into being and then I realize that I have captured the tone of a ghazal. I don’t use the strict rhyme scheme of a ghazal either, and in that way, I differ from earlier poets like Platen and Rückert. It’s the sound of the ghazal that I transport back into German. I must confess I really like these poems when they arise, because they seem to be connected to my innermost self, in a way that I don’t otherwise usually recognize myself. I would generally consider myself to be a “Western” and “secular” person in terms of my way of life. But I seem to have a lot of rhythms, ideas, and dream-like images from my childhood that point elsewhere. Where does that all start to become Orientalist? That’s a very difficult question. Such writing can easily become overly romanticized as an expression of lust for the beautiful world before your eyes or a glimpse of paradise. It’s tricky, because the ghazal does trigger a kind of longing in me and longing is always difficult to write about without becoming sentimental. In my own writing, such longing is always interrupted by the present. This is one way I avoid the tropes and traps of Orientalism. KD: Do your drawings also play with established forms or norms? What influences have shaped your sketches? 464 Faces along the Mirror: Last Objects of Orientalism DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0022 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0022 ZŞ: Whereas color is an essential component of Orientalist artwork, I always work with black pastel crayons. My black and white images thus present a kind of counter approach to romanticizing images of the Orient that utilize very vibrant colors. In terms of influence, black and white films and especially film noir are one important source of inspiration for my sketches. Lyric poetry is another. And the German Jewish tradition to which Else Lasker-Schüler and Paul Celan belong has also had a lasting influence on my work. Lasker-Schüler is a great example of someone for whom text and image belong together. She wasn’t an Orientalist, but she developed an image of the Orient that was connected to her soul, to her own identity. This is also what I was trying to describe with my own work and my use of forms like the ghazal. KD: That’s an interesting distinction you make between being “Orientalist” and developing your own image of and connection to the so-called “Orient.” How would you describe your personal connection to Orientalism as someone who migrated to Germany from Turkey as child? ZŞ: For me, the question of Orientalism is more a kind of practice or experience than a theory. When I first came to Germany as a child in 1970, I suddenly saw an incredible amount of romanticized images of the Orient. These images were much more present in Germany than in Turkey. So, I was exposed to and became a subject of Orientalism at a very young age. On the other hand, Turkey experienced massive societal ruptures in the twentieth century. The history of Westernization practices there led to a situation in which part of society really valued the West and secularism whereas another part of society led a more traditional way of life. At the same time, everyone wanted to draw something different from a shared cultural heritage. The negotiation between these different positions is of course a central theme of my literature. Later, when Edward Said’s book came out in 1978, I read his understanding of Orientalism against my childhood and my own position on the borderline between Turkey and Germany. That disjuncture is an important site of emergence for many of my poems. For me, it’s also important to put Said’s concept of Orientalism in historical context with the Sandinista uprising during the Nicaraguan Revolution (1978- 79), the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1979), and the foundation of the Greens in Germany (1980). All of these events brought about an anti-system discourse, through which everything that was considered Western was challenged. And in its early stages, this was a very positive kind of stimulus for me. Even though this movement collapsed within a few years, at its inception it provided a way out of the standard postcolonial institutions that were still exercising power all around us. Faces along the Mirror: Last Objects of Orientalism 465 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0022 466 Faces along the Mirror: Last Objects of Orientalism Overall, I find Orientalism to be a very difficult, even contradictory topic, because I think different cultural patterns do exist across the world. Whether you’re writing a history of Cologne, for example, or of Kayseri or Damascus, these cities present very different social and cultural constellations. But in the end, we are all heirs. We inherit everything that previous generations have done. And this inheritance is of course heavily burdened from the nineteenth century onwards through the ever-increasing speed of cultural encounters. Which means that this word Orientalism now evokes a completely different set of images and ideas for our present than it does for the nineteenth century. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0023 Images and Poems by Zafer Şenocak DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0023 468 Images and Poems by Zafer Şenocak DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0023 Images and Poems by Zafer Şenocak 469 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0023 470 Images and Poems by Zafer Şenocak Babylon, Sheltered from the Wind I. say say an unwritten word lay your head on the line keep your tongue straight say say nothing if you are asked whether marvel marvel at so many stories II. the thoughts dissolve on the tip of the tongue Babylonian stillness whoever still has a brother in faith sinks into the loam let yourself be kneaded brother not even the finest poets escape Neruda was said to have been sitting on the barge that drifted down the Tigris not far from Baghdad a rainy day it pours into the hands of the women kneading dough in the sand the deep tracks from the armored tank fill up with rose oil from antique bottles how did they manage not to break it rains on I ask the rain poet whose name threatens to smudge on curled up paper Badr Shakir al-Sayyab I ask him the way to Neruda fellow travelers on different continents DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0023 Images and Poems by Zafer Şenocak 471 Neruda has no address here anymore tugboats on the Tigris at night with corpses during the day with oil the winter vegetables behind the house declare themselves in favor of life Neruda lives but the tugboats night for night do not rest how nice an empty barge would be now swaying at the shore Part I translated by Kristin Dickinson Part II translated by Eleoma Bodammer Babylon, windgeschützt I. sage sage ein ungeschriebenes Wort halte den Kopf hin die Zunge waagrecht sage sage nichts wenn du gefragt wirst ob staune staune über so viele Geschichten II. auf der Zungenspitze lösen sich die Gedanken auf babylonische Stille wer noch einen Bruder hat im Glauben versinkt im Lehm lass dich kneten Bruder es entkommen nicht mal die feinsten Dichter Neruda sei auf der Barkasse gesessen die den Tigris hinuntertrieb DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0023 472 Images and Poems by Zafer Şenocak unweit von Bagdad ein Regentag es schüttet in die Hände der Teig knetenden Frauen auf dem Sand füllen sich die tiefen Spuren von Panzerketten mit dem Rosenöl aus altertümlichen Flaschen wie sie es geschafft haben nicht zu zerbrechen es regnet weiter ich frage den Regendichter dessen Namen zu verwischen droht auf gewelltem Papier Badr Schakir as-Sayyab ihn frage ich nach dem Weg zu Neruda Weggenossen auf verschiedenen Erdteilen Neruda hat hier keine Adresse mehr auf dem Tigris Schleppkähne nachts mit Leichen tags mit Öl das Wintergemüse hinter dem Haus spricht sich für Leben aus Neruda lebt aber die Schleppkähne Nacht für Nacht ruhen nicht wie schön wäre jetzt eine leere Barkasse am Ufer schwankend Last Objects of Orientalism When the unknown territory was dark love Déjà-vu in the banlieues of the newcomers built up and abandoned by long-distance travelers under collapsed roofs stormier than before mirror games of gender inventors who divide themselves into nameless fingers and toes pass through well-formed hands to mingle anew as uninscribed sex organs among the fair-skinned the only face that makes itself unrecognizable through the ambience of Asia Images and Poems by Zafer Şenocak 473 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0023 brownish shadows on the cheeks Bangkok’s fever on which river does the Orient begin in salons with a view of the Danube becoming visible on the ripening fruit of foreign trees graceful and rootless beauty covered only by the veil of a glance again and again unbridled released into the night of small anonymous deaths waking from a sleep bordering on eternity how much freedom is consumed by the monsoon of the south by the heavy breath of prophecy the peninsular disease of the spirit carried incurably from ship to ship across the world’s oceans they say that merchants, not warriors, handed out the last revelation here in the time of caravans the first parachutes cast shadows on every certainty in the meantime, airplanes have abolished all religions erased the belief in the one and only forever from the sky the sky is reflected in the body of a woman who is allowed to fly all the thirteen-year-olds walk up and down in front of the movie theaters looking for an inconspicuous gap that leads into the light disappointing colors of the sky until the veil lifts and nudity takes on a convincing form desire has regained its credibility which is valid from the first moment in life so we will not die at eighteen Translated by Kristin Dickinson Letzte Objekte des Orientalismus Als das unbekannte Territorium dunkle Liebe war Déjà-vu in den Banlieues der Neuankömmlinge bebaut und verlassen von Langreisenden unter eingestürzten Dächern stürmischer als früher Spiegelspiele der Geschlechtererfinder DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0023 474 Images and Poems by Zafer Şenocak die sich aufteilen in namenlose Finger und Zehen durch wohlgeformte Hände gehen um als unbeschriebene Geschlechtsteile sich neu zu vermischen unter den Hellhäutigen das einzige Gesicht das sich unkenntlich macht durch das Ambiente Asiens bräunliche Schatten auf den Wangen Bangkoks Fieber An welchem Fluss beginnt der Orient In den Salons mit dem Blick auf die Donau sichtbar werdend auf reifenden Früchten fremder Bäume Schönheit graziös und wurzellos verhüllt nur durch den Schleier eines Blicks wieder und wieder zügellos entlassen in die Nacht kleiner anonymer Tode aufwachen von einem an Ewigkeit grenzenden Schlaf wie viel Freiheit wird verbraucht vom Monsun des Südens vom schweren Atem der Prophetie die Halbinselkrankheit des Geistes unheilbar von Schiff zu Schiff über Weltmeere getragen es heißt Kaufleute und nicht Krieger hätten hier die letzte Offenbarung ausgeteilt zur Karawanenzeit die ersten Flugschirme warfen Schatten auf jede Gewissheit inzwischen haben Flugzeuge alle Religionen abgeschafft für immer den Glauben an das Eine und das Einzige aus dem Himmel gelöscht der Himmel spiegelt sich im Körper einer Frau die fliegen darf alle Dreizehnjährigen gehen vor den Kinos auf und ab und suchen eine unscheinbare Lücke die ins Licht führt enttäuschende Farben des Himmels bis der Schleier sich hebt und die Nacktheit eine überzeugende Form bekommt die Begierde hat ihre Glaubwürdigkeit wieder die vom ersten Augenblick an gilt im Leben so werden wir mit achtzehn nicht sterben DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0023 Images and Poems by Zafer Şenocak 475 Ghazal of a Carefree One How the other became my wing I did not notice I flew and was completely still I accepted not knowing The language of flying Saw no point in saving myself I was flying and the winds knew not what to make of me That too, I did not notice The other flew me to my limit Until everywhere the world was at its end That there was no place left to land That too, I did not notice Translated by Kristin Dickinson Ghasel eines Unbekümmerten Wie mir der Andere zum Flügel wurde Habe ich nicht bemerkt Ich flog und war ganz still Ich nahm es hin mich nicht auszukennen Mit der Fliegersprache Sah in einer Notlandung keinen Sinn Ich flog und war den Winden nicht geheuer Auch das habe ich nicht bemerkt Der Andere flog mich aus Bis die Welt überall zu Ende war Dass es keinen Platz mehr zum Landen gab Auch das habe ich nicht bemerkt Verzeichnis der Autor: innen Prof. Kristin Dickinson Dept. of Germanic Languages and Literatures The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 3110 Modern Languages Building 812 E Washington St Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA dickins@umich.edu Prof. Berna Gueneli Dept. of Germanic & Slavic Studies The University of Georgia, Athens 201 Joe Brown Hall Athens, GA 30602 USA Berna.Gueneli@uga.edu Dr. Julia Ingold Otto-Friedrich-Universität Professur für Neuere deutsche Literaturwissenschaft und Literaturvermittlung (Prof. Dr. Christoph Jürgensen) 96045 Bamberg Germany julia.ingold@uni-bamberg.de Prof. Jakub Kazecki Dept. of German & Russian Studies Bates College 3 Andrews Road Roger Williams Hall, room 231 Lewiston, ME 04240-8331 USA jkazecki@bates.edu Die Zeitschrift erscheint jährlich in 4 Heften von je etwa 96 Seiten Abonnementpreis pro Jahrgang: € 135,00 (print)/ € 172,00 (print & online)/ € 142,00 (e-only) Vorzugspreis für private Leser € 101,00 (print); Einzelheft € 45,00 (jeweils zuzüglich Versandkosten). Bestellungen nimmt Ihre Buchhandlung oder der Verlag entgegen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, Postfach 25 60, D-72015 Tübingen · eMail: info@narr.de Aufsätze - in deutscher oder englischer Sprache - bitte einsenden als Anlage zu einer Mail an hhoebu@uky.edu oder joseph.oneil@uky.edu (Prof. Harald Höbusch oder Prof. Joseph D. O,Neil, Division of German Studies, 1055 Patterson Office Tower, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0027, USA). Typoskripte sollten nach den Vorschriften des MLA Style Manual (2008) eingerichtet sein. Sonstige Mitteilungen bitte an hhoebu@uky.edu © 2024 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Alle Rechte vorbehalten/ All Rights Strictly Reserved Druck: Elanders Waiblingen GmbH ISSN 0010-1338 ISBN 978-3-381-12351-3 BUCHTIPP Der Band hinterfragt den Nutzen des Begriffs „Orientalismus“ zur Erforschung der vielfältigen deutsch-jüdischen kulturellen Beziehungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Dabei wird Orientalismus einerseits als postkolonialer Diskurs verstanden, der Identitätskonflikte und Sprachprobleme der jüdischen Diaspora in den Blick nimmt, andererseits als philologische Wissenschaft vom Orient. Die Beiträge behandeln folgende Fragen: In welchem Maße wurden deutsche Juden vom zeitgenössischen wissenschaftlichen Diskurs über den „Orient“ und den „Orientalen“ beeinflusst bzw. gestalteten ihn mit? Wie tief verinnerlichten Juden die stereotypen Bilder ihrer Umgebung und inwiefern konnten die deutsch-jüdischen Orientalisten diese Vorurteile und deren philosophische Legitimierung wissenschaftlich widerlegen? Wie veränderte sich das Bild des Orients, als viele emigrierte deutsche Juden sich in Palästina mit dem „wahren“ Orient konfrontiert sahen? Chiara Adorisio, Lorella Bosco (Hrsg.) Zwischen Orient und Europa Orientalismus in der deutsch-jüdischen Kultur im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert KULI. Studien und Texte zur Kulturgeschichte der Literatur, Vol. 8 1. Auflage 2019, 328 Seiten €[D] 68,00 ISBN 978-3-7720-8642-7 eISBN 978-3-7720-5642-0 Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany \ Tel. +49 (0)7071 97 97 0 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de ISSN 0010-1338 Themenheft: Visualizing German Orientalism Gastherausgeber: innen: Kristin Dickinson und Berna Gueneli Kristin Dickinson und Berna Gueneli: Introduction: Visualizing German Orientalism Julia Ingold: “Ich, die Dichterin von Arabien”: Else Lasker-Schüler’s Orientalism as an Ennoblement of Jewishness Berna Gueneli: 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) Jakub Kazecki: From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau: Orientalizing Poland in the German Cinema of the 1990s Kristin Dickinson: Not Your Typical Oriental Carpet: Collage as Heterotopia in Nevin Aladağ’s Social Fabric Series Faces along the Mirror: Last Objects of Orientalism Zafer Şenocak in Conversation with Kristin Dickinson Images and Poems by Zafer Şenocak narr.digital Band 57 Band 57 Heft 4 Harald Höbus ch, Rebeccah Dawson (Hr sg.) C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a t i o n a l e Z e i t s c h r i f t f ü r G e r m a n i s t i k C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a ti o n a l e Z e it s c h r ift f ü r G e r m a n i s ti k