The present volume is yet another and welcome contribution to an already sizable literature on orientalism inspired by Said's classic 1978 work. It is a collaborative product of ten European and two Indian scholars, focused mostly on German, but also Central and East European contexts. Given these foci, the conspicuous absence of any reference to the substantial scholarly work on the subject in the context of Southeast Europe, namely the Balkans (e.g., Todorova, Bakić-Hayden, Goldsworthy, Mishkova, Longinović, Baskar) that has developed over the past twenty years, raises the questions of where East Europe starts or ends for the present authors; what its conceptual scope is, and how it relates to the discourses on Mitteleuropa from the 1980s (at the time juxtaposed to the Soviet Union). One would expect such questions to be at least briefly addressed in a volume like this, especially in the light of its claim to an innovative approach to the subject (1).

This flaw notwithstanding, the collection at hand presents refreshingly interesting materials that offer new possibilities of application and further (re)interpretation of Said's seminal concept. While the basic cognitive model, a binary opposition of “Orient” and “Occident,” underlies the volume, giving it thematic coherence, in some cases the “Orient” is granted more cultural or intellectual dignity even when the sense of European supremacy is harbored, partly because the orientalisms examined here do not stem from colonial contexts like the French or the British. That the discourse about the Other is always also about the Self is evident from Michael Dusche's chapter that shows how Friedrich Schlegel's emphasis on the importance of German language was a way to overcome French linguistic and cultural hegemony while reimagining “Germany as the true oriental self of Europe” (45) and thus inverting the standard orientalist paradigm.

What role such reimagining may have played in the construction of the non-Indo-European Other—the Jews—whose language lay outside the “Aryan” family is indirectly reflected in Jyoti Sabharwal's fascinating story of a Prague-born, German-speaking Jew in exile in India during the Nazi occupation. It also suggests why M. C. Sprengel's eighteenth-century writings on India in terms of its political rather than cultural realities, as revealed in Jon Keune's study, were marginalized in subsequent romantic searches for the Urheimat. Additional examination of not only the Jew, but also the Turk and the Indian, as Others in the German-speaking world is undertaken by Shaswati Mazumdar. In the section on the Crimean War (1853–56) in particular, characterized as “the first modern media war,” with “the liberal, pro-Western lobby” using orientalist tropes to stigmatize the Russians or the Turks “as barbaric orientals” (104–105), the topic regains currency in the present time. Kerstin Jobst situates the Russian orientalism within broader European contexts, with which it is certainly comparable to a point. Nonetheless, Russia constitutes a specific case, more ambiguous by being both the subject and object of orientalizing. Noteworthy is Jobst's insightful parallel between Russian and American self-understanding of their imperial expansion as each having a “natural quality” or being a “manifest destiny” (199).

More intertwining of past and present is found in Todd Kontje's interesting analysis of a film based on a contemporary Turkish immigrant story, with its syndrome of “the orientals are in our midst,” that interplays with the examination of literary orientalism in the works of Kafka, Mann, and Goethe, which both reinforces and undermines popular orientalist prejudices (72)—the kinds that have often been perpetrated in travelogues. James Hodkinson delves into two travelogues, written by an Austrian soldier and a missionary in the service of French colonialism who, while reimagining the physical geography and sociocultural space of today's Algeria (81), at the same time reveal their own imperial background and bias. In the same genre, Sarah Lemmen's analysis of the travelogues written by Czech tourists in Egypt highlights their ambivalent predicament as “part of the European and therefore colonizing world” while, in fact, being “a ‘small,’ noncolonial nation” (220). Similar in-betweenness is evident also in Hungarian “identity as both oriental and Western: as the other of the oriental identity” (166) that Margit Köves examines in great detail in various genres of literature. In Ulrike Stamm's demonstration of sexual mastery as being symbolic of mastery over culture, the case of European women's observations of oriental women's sexuality stands out; centered around the harem, it is indeed “an extraordinary appropriation of this imaginary space” (238).

In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Johann Heiss and Johannes Feichtinger argue for two forms of orientalism: one “distant” (Turks) and one “close to home,” i.e., pertaining to the Slavic populations (some Islamicized) within its boundaries. It is here that the lack of awareness of the literature on orientalism in Southeastern Europe is most acutely felt, and where the discussion would benefit from concepts such as “nesting orientalisms” and “balkanism.” John Walker's inspiring invitation to rethink orientalism today in the context of Jürgen Habermas's notion of intercultural communication and translation, inspired by Wilhelm von Humboldt's comparative linguistics and translation, illustrates the potential relevance that these concepts have for our time, in which enough of the orientalist rhetoric is still alive and well.