Franziska Torma: Turkestan-Expeditionen. Zur Kulturgeschichte deutscher Forschungsreisen nach Mittelasien (1890–1930). Bielefeld: transcript, 2011. 282 S., Abb., Ktn. = 1800 / 2000. Kulturgeschichte der Moderne, 5. ISBN: 978-3-8376-1449-7

Franziska Torma: Turkestan-Expeditionen. Zur Kulturgeschichte deutscher Forschungsreisen nach Mittelasien (1890–1930). Bielefeld: transcript, 2011. 282 S., Abb., Ktn. = 1800/2000. Kulturgeschichte der Moderne, 5. ISBN: 978-3-8376-1449-7.

This fascinating account of German expeditions into Turkestan at the “long turn” of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries is rich and incisive. Because it is more about Germany than about Central Asia, the readers of this journal may not find it particularly interesting. Nevertheless, Franziska Torma highlights the singular importance of Turkestan in German cultural and intellectual history before the age of National Socialism.

Turkestan, a geographical name which fell into disuse in the 1920s, fascinated the Europeans in the age of empire. This was particularly the case in Germany. Germany came late to colonialism, had only a few overseas colonies (and certainly fewer than Britain, France, and other European colonial powers), and, unlike Russia and the Habsburgs, had none on the Eurasian continent. To a certain extent this circumstance gave Germany a sense of the world somewhat different from that of the major European colonial powers. In a word, the age of post-colonialism reached Germany sooner than it did others. Even though this new idea was not free from German imperial conceptions, it presaged the age of post WWII de-colonization. German scholars and the public whom they influenced did not take German African colonial possessions as something that could complement Germany. “Bidding farewell” to Africa, they saw in Asiatic Russia, rich in land and mineral resources, the future of a prosperous Germany (pp. 172–174). This bet on Asia (more specifically Turkestan) was combined with romantic notions about it, which in turn were a reflection of their own understanding of European identities.

Following the work of scholars like Suzanne Marchand on German Orientalism, Torma shows that unlike the Orientalism of Britain, France and the United States, treated by Edward Said, the German version was not overly burdened by a binary distinction between “West” and “East”. Instead of a European epistemological and ontological superiority over Asia (which in turn reflected unequal power relations), Torma sees German Orientalism questioning the superiority and self-assurance of Europeans through the study of old, Asiatic high culture. Instead of a backward, inferior land, German Orientalists saw in Turkestan their own ancient, vanquished past. Instead of a distinct Europe, they saw a long history of mutual interaction and interconnection between West and East. Turkestan was not so much an Asiatic backwater as the genesis of Europe and the preserve of the long lost life of Europeans. True, this romantically imagined and historicized conception of Turkestan was not free of European paternalistic condescension or German imperial ambitions. Yet it was at least ambivalent about whether to view the Orient as Europe’s “genesis”, or as Europe’s “Other”. Certainly it was a far cry from the Nazi racist conception of the East (although the Nazis sought to utilize the Central Asian Muslims against Moscow during WWII).

Instead of focusing on famous adventures such as Sven Hedin (a Swede) and Wilhelm Filchner, Torma details engagingly the travels and the writings of now forgotten German travelers to Turkestan – scholars like Willi Gustav Rickmer Rickmers, Paul Rohrbach, and Rudolf Amis. As experts, many of them ended up working for the Nazi government. Still their views and the views widely accepted in Wilhelmine Germany and Weimar Germany were not absorbed into Nazism, Rather they contained elements of anti-colonialism and began to resurface in the form of German support of a post-colonial world after WWII. Torma attributes the peculiarity of German Orientalism to a fundamental shift in the world order that was taking place precisely at this time: the slow birth of post-colonialism. As a latecomer to colonialism, Germany was receptive to the perceived beginning of post-colonialism. In this particular realm at least, the Weimar Republic had powerful alternatives to Nazi racism.

Torma ends her discussion with the German-Soviet joint expedition to the Pamir-Alai in 1928, after which Germans were no longer invited. She tends to accept at face value the apparent German-Soviet friendship in the post-Rapallo years when the two countries even secretly engaged in military cooperation. She consulted neither archival sources in the former Soviet Union nor published materials in Russian or Asian languages. Had she consulted them, she would have noticed that even then Moscow treated the visiting German scholars and travelers with extreme suspicion. She does discuss Germany’s effort to organize a spy network in Central Asia during WWI (pp. 136–138), which contributed to Moscow’s distrust of Germany even after Germany’s defeat in the war.

Hiroaki Kuromiya, Bloomington, IN