German Orientalism stayed textual because Germany held no colonial presence in the Orient

Evidence

Yet at no time in German scholarship during the first two-thirds 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 correspond 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 Chateaubriand, Lane, Lamartine, Burton, Disraeli, or Nerval. There is some significance in the fact that the two most renowned German works on the Orient, Goethe’s Westöstlicher Diwan and Friedrich Schlegel’s Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, were based respectively on a Rhine journey and on hours spent 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. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 84

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Direct scaffold into Islamophobia readings: distinguishes scholarly/theoretical Orientalism from the colonial-experiential kind that produced the ‘actual’ Orient — sets up the later argument that imperial power, not scholarship alone, makes Orientalism consequential.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the claim that German Orientalism was textual/classical versus the Anglo-French ‘actual’ Orient, a distinction central to Orientalism’s core thesis.

Related

• German Orientalism was purely scholarly because Germany lacked imperial presence in the Orient (similarity 0.96)
• Early Orientalism studied classical texts, not living societies (similarity 0.86)
• Sustained national imperial interest was required for Orientalist scholarship to thrive (similarity 0.85)
• Sympathetic German Orientalism also enabled anti-imperialist critique of Western academia (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist scholarship cannot be detached from its imperial context (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist scholarship mounted political and ideological edges rather than neutral knowledge (similarity 0.84)
• German Orientalists led the field despite Germany having no Arab empire. (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist scholarship expanded in tandem with European imperial conquest. (similarity 0.84)
• Scholarly Orientalism telescoped textual detail into policy about the whole Orient (similarity 0.84)
• German Orientalism reproduced colonial logic without needing actual colonies (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism functions as a self-enclosed Western text rather than knowledge of an actual Orient. (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism generated a free-floating mythology detached from actual Orientals (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist scholarship is inseparable from imperial power and its orthodox attitudes (similarity 0.83)
• Imperial ambition converted scholarly Orientalist study into active colonization (similarity 0.83)
• Academic study of Islam only began with Orientalism’s language training (similarity 0.83)