ABSTRACT

The mild surprise Friedrich Schlegel felt at Goethe’s late ‘Turkishness’ carries within it a number of different, delicate ironies. The two men had, after all, worshipped different Orients, at different times. By 1819, Schlegel’s early Indomania had subsided into a much milder form of philological curiosity, one more concerned with apocalyptic eschatologies and the construction of a comprehensive world-history than any investigations into a Sanskritic Uroffenbarung. Goethe’s ‘Turkish’ turn must have struck Schlegel as the fi rst stages of a familiar illness he had now recovered from, thanks to his 1808 conversion to Roman Catholicism. Goethe, in a sense, was experiencing in his old age the same Romantic passion for the exotic that Schlegel himself had tasted in his youth; if both fi gures chose to idealize different portions of the planet, dedicating their energies to different faiths, this did not prevent them from elevating their chosen Orient at the expense of the adjacent one. Goethe’s thoughts on how terrifying “Indian monstrosities”2 must look to Muslims run parallel to Schlegel’s own mistrust of Indian Muslim historians and their “inability to grasp . . . a belief system as foreign and deep” as Hinduism.3 There even arose, at least on Schlegel’s part, a distinctly colonial sense of possessiveness with regards to the literary directions of their endeavours-Schlegel’s dissatisfaction, in a letter to his brother, at the representation of India and Indians in the Divan reveals a deeper indignation at Goethe for having dared to encroach upon what he considered to be his own intellectual territory.4