Nina Berman. German Literature on the Middle East

Nina Berman sets herself no small task in this book. Not only does she take on almost a thousand years of literary history, she stages an “intervention” (p. 7) of sorts for a discourse theory that has too often lost sight of its grounding in concrete political, social, and economic realities. The result of this study, she hopes, will be twofold: on the one hand, a more nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between “textual discourses and nontextual practices” (p. 13), and, on the other, an invitation to scholars to more carefully “consider cultures, our own as well as others, as participating in change and exchange over time and across space” (p. 244). She is more successful in the latter goal than the former. In this study, Berman—an accomplished scholar with an impressive list of publications and awards in the fields of cultural studies, world literature, and minority literature—turns her experienced eye toward the long history of German interaction with the cultures, ideas, economies, and peoples of the Middle East from the Middle Ages to the transformative events of 1989. In 2005, Berman challenged her colleagues in German literary studies to broaden the horizons of their students, to encourage them to tie together European and non-European cultures in ways that had previously been almost unimaginable (e.g., the influence of Johann Gottfried Herder's work on the Pan-African movement or the place of Bertolt Brecht in Turkish-German theater). This book is a welcome step in that direction, and one that will doubtless succeed in “further[ing] inquiries into the complex history of German—and more broadly European—Middle Eastern relations” (p. 240).

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