The fighting races of the orient :|German orientalism and imperial discourses in postwar memory

Abstract

In this thesis, through the deconstruction of the memoirs of two German military officers who served in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, I argue that it becomes possible to view these life-narratives in a new light: as post-colonial colonial propaganda, in which cultural and racial hierarchies are deliberately established with an eye towards the discursive construction of the Ottoman Empire as a colonial space and its people as colonial subjects in-waiting. This retroactive ‘colonial construction’ is unique, in that it attempts to grasp a particular moment of ‘coloniality’ in German-Ottoman relations which was in many respects a wistful imperial fantasy. The two authors, Liman von Sanders and Gerold von Gleich, construct Ottoman coloniality through extensive reliance on the discursive language of extant European Orientalisms, which equates alterity with inferiority, presupposes the existence of an empirical Oriental mindset with defined characteristics, and readily assumes the audience’s familiarity with the tropes of Oriental despotism. Furthermore, Liman and Gerold forgo the idea first propagated by Colmar von der Goltz several decades earlier of the Turks as a “nation in arms” in favor of a conceptualization of the Turks as merely the most military of the peoples of the Ottoman Empire, thereby utilizing the theory of “martial races.” This study therefore inserts itself into a historical debate which predominantly interprets the worldview (Weltanschauung) of German officers of the First World War as a derivative of earlier German military missions to the Ottoman Empire