German Orientalism was purely scholarly because Germany lacked imperial presence in the Orient

Evidence

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

• XREF: Establishes that colonial power presence, not just scholarship, explains a nation’s relationship to the Orient — a mechanism directly reusable in the Islamophobia readings on how empire shapes knowledge production.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the distinction between a ‘scholarly’ Orient (texts, fantasies, no real territorial contact) and an ‘actual’ Orient (imperial presence) — a key framing in Said’s toolkit.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 84