With the Whip Into the Dirty Orient: the Depiction of the Orient in Oskar Mann’s Travel Letters

Abstract

The present article deals with the travel letters of the German orientalist Oskar Mann (1867-1917). With financial support from the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, Mann made two expeditions to the Ottoman Empire and Iran between 1901 and 1906 to research the Iranian languages and dialects. Travel letters and travel diaries are texts with relatively subjective value judgments, in which people and cultures are often described using ethnocentric stereotypes, because a real journey represents a cultural encounter and confrontation with the other that offers unique and invaluable information about the new world. The description of a foreign culture cannot be separated from the subjective value judgments of a traveller. This means the foreign world in which the traveller moves is represented by the subject who experiences it. According to Mann, the Orientals are people from a place that has surrendered to the West. He separates the Orient from the Occident with precise and sharp lines and divides them Eurocentrically into two separate categories. During his travels, Mann produced and imparted knowledge about the foreign cultures on the one hand, and on the other hand he spread and reinforced images and prejudices as well as stereotypes that led to the ontological differentiation between Orient and Occident. This essay tries to show that he perceived the Orient with hegemonic thought patterns and that his foreign imagination remained deeply rooted in the classic European orientalist discourse of the 19th century, and as a consequence the Orient was devalued. This study discusses the stereotypes, images and pattern of ideas that he used to represent the population of the foreign country where he travelled.