Orientalen oder Christen?

With the aid of 19 travel documentaries the author in her study analyses the impression which German theologians had of the Orient towards the end of the 19th century. Whether Moslem or Christian, a person from the East awoke in the Protestant traveller a sense of ‘otherness’ whilst at the same time a sense of superiority. In the face of the ‘disintegration of the Orient’ German theologians felt themselves compelled to account for the theological and cultural legacy of the Orient in German Protestantism, which frequently resulted in racist, derogatory and distorted polemic in their travel documentaries. Gustrau links the journeys to the Middle East to the travellers’ biographies and to a comprehensive picture of perceptions generally held by all the travellers, and by means of detailed analysis of the works of Friedrich Naumann and Paul Rohrbach demonstrates the interweaving of theological, political and racial theories of contemporary discourse.