Notes on the Development of Turkish and Oriental Studies in the German Speaking Lands1
Türkiye Araştırmaları Literatür Dergisi, Cilt 8, Sayı 15, 2010, 7-76 Notes on the Development of Turkish and Oriental Studies in the German Speaking Lands1 Christoph HERZOG* HISTORICALLY, the academic fields of Turkology and Turkish studies2 have emerged as a part of a discipline that will be termed here “Oriental studies.”3 For the past decade, an upsurge of interest in the history of Oriental studies in Germany has been experi- enced.4 Because of the overarching character of Oriental studies, the tendency has been to treat them together. In fact, it would be hardly imaginable to delineate the field of Turkish studies without taking into account the general background of Oriental studies.5 The Birth of Turkish Studies out of Orientalist Philology In the first decades of the 19th century an evident, if undramatic, upswing of interest in Oriental themes occurred in German cultural production. In translations, travelogues, poetry, novels, but also in the opera, the imagination of the Oriental was reproduced for * Prof., Turkish Studies at the University of Bamberg, Germany. 1 Special thanks to Wayne Brittenden, Werner Ende, Barbara Henning and Klaus Kreiser for help with this article. Of course, any remaining errors are still mine. 2 Both expressions can be used synonymously, but there is a tendency to confine the term “Turkish studies” to the study of Turkey and its history, including the Ottoman Empire. The expression “Turkic studies” refers to the purely linguistic field of study of the Turkic languages. In German no equivalent of this term exists. 3 The German term “Orientalische Studien” was used already in the 1830s, while the word “Orientalistik” seems to have been coined only at the end of the 19th century; cf.
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