This is a rather curious book, so interdisciplinary that it sent me scurrying to the Bryn Mawr College website to check Christiane Hertel's officially designated home department (it is History of Art, though she has undergraduate and master's degrees in art history and German literature). One thing that was clear to me from the beginning, however, is that the author of Siting China in Germany was not a historian, and certainly not a scholar who approached the topic of German Orientalism from the perspective of the history of scholarship or the history of luxury industries, as have I. By no means are the divergences in our approaches cause for concern; “Orientalism” is a mansion with many rooms. Nor do I condemn Hertel's methods out of hand; I mention our different approaches only to underline, at the outset, that I was always likely to be puzzled by a book of this sort.

In keeping with Hertel's training, Siting China is at once an art historical and a literary study of some of the ways in which Chinese motifs have been deployed in the German states over the course of what she calls the long eighteenth century, between roughly 1700 and 1840; the final chapter cleverly treats the eighteenth century's afterlife by focusing on Thomas Mann's Lotte in Weimar. The first three chapters are primarily art historical—focusing on architecture and decorative arts rather than painting or sculpture—and even in the final, fourth chapter, the visual comes to the fore, as the author returns repeatedly to the porcelain and jade objects in Thomas Mann's study. The book is beautifully illustrated; in addition to thirty-five high-quality color plates, there are eighty-five black-and white-images. Perhaps only those who have produced illustrated books of their own will be able to appreciate just what a scholarly (and financial) feat this represents.

Hertel's argument is complicated, to my mind overly so, but her aim is honorable: to get past shallow dismissals of chinoiserie as mere escapism and instead to explore “how this art made room for imaginative creations but also for reflection about cultural and historical difference” (3). Hertel emphasizes chinoiserie's “representational and stylistic openness and its material and formal diversity” (3), borrowing Kristel Smentek's term “cultural translation” to allow hybrid objects to represent, in Smentek's words, “‘a negotiation of difference rather than a denigration or subjugation of it’” (118). In each of her chapters, Hertel explores a different form of translation. In chapter 1, imitation and superfluity describe the ways in which the palaces and porcelain collections of Dresden and Baden-Baden “translate” China. In chapter 2, Hesse-Kassel's Wilhelmsthal and Wilhelmshöhe palaces and gardens offer shifting frames for Asia. In romantic Dresden (chapter 3), translation becomes an act of distancing the self from the Other, while in Thomas Mann's re-created Weimar (chapter 4), China is invoked to palliate friction by making comic the novel's tragic indictment of Goethe: that he had used his own passion for poetic purposes, and, unlike his supposed alter ego Werther, never would have sacrificed his life for the beloved (161). Each chapter, then, treats both a “sited” form of Orientalism (in chapter 3, for example, this is Pillnitz's Chinese Pavilion, used by the Saxon Prince Johann for the meetings of a society devoted to the translation of Dante's Divine Comedy) and offers a fresh theoretical approach, reiterating the point that chinoiserie cannot be reduced to a single style or cultural function.

One learns much, here, about the many artifacts, architectural follies, literary works, and amateur treatises that populate Hertel's pages, and the author's innovative idea of “siting” China makes possible the eclectic and open-ended approach necessary to understand imitations, adaptions, invocations, and juxtapositions as something more than trivial but less than proto-colonizing endeavors. The range of Hertel's familiarity with eighteenth-century German architecture and decorative arts is enviable, as is her wide-ranging knowledge of German literature and poetry; her detailed and deft analysis of Lotte in Weimar demonstrates her sophisticated interpretive skills. Readers also should be grateful to her for not dealing with chinoiserie in a vacuum, as if neoclassicism, medievalizing, and baroque styles did not exist as rival choices or intermixtures with “Orientalizing” forms.

But the fact that the subject of chinoiserie as a whole is not particularly well documented, or perhaps even subject to documentation, means that Hertel packs each exposition of a “site” with a bevy of digressions on loosely related subjects or speculations on what contemporaries might have experienced at Margravine Sibylla Augusta's “Chinese Banquet,” held in Ettlingen in 1729, or at the meetings of the Accademia Dantesca in the Chinese Pavilion at Pillnitz. How significant were the porcelain figurines in Thomas Mann's study? The Lotte in Weimar chapter teems with digressions, on Mann's interest in silhouettes, on books he owned but never seems to have read, on elephants. In analyzing material objects, it is of course necessary to get at meaning in a variety of indirect ways. But some of Hertel's efforts seem tenuous and her juxtapositions iffy (such as the juxtaposing of the “glossy” appearance of the boulders in the gardens of Wilhelmshöhe with the porcelain in the palace [90]). One closes this book feeling that German “sitings” of China were on the whole episodic and incoherent—though that is surely an improvement over analyses that purport to wrap all of this heterogenous material into one tidy package labeled “the German idea of China.” Christiane Hertel has given us a great deal to think about, including the freedom to see German chinoiserie in new ways.