4 - Tales from the Oriental Borderlands: On the Making and Uses of Colonial Algiers in Germanophone Travel Writing from the Maghreb around 1840

Summary

German Speaking Travelers and the Maghreb around 1840

Contemporary and historical writing about the region of coastal North Africa known today as the Maghreb has, for the obvious reason of its long and complex colonial history, usually been a focus for scholars of French literature and history. The most recognizable literary text in German is Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's less-than-well-known Karl V. Angriff auf Algiers, a historical-fictional account of the camaraderie of sixteenth-century German and Spanish soldiers in the service of Emperor Charles V during his military campaigns against Barbary corsairs, published in 1845. The advent of modern French colonial expansion into Algeria from 1836 involved the familiar patterns of military and political deployment. Also familiar, though, was the economic migration and religious missionary travel to the region by people from a range of non-French European backgrounds. The 1840s saw a renewed flowering of writing on the region in the German language, and there exists a wealth of largely neglected travel writing on the Maghreb produced during this period by German speakers of different backgrounds and affiliations. This chapter deals with two contrasting examples of such writing, produced by travelers from the German-speaking world who journeyed to French Algiers during the 1830s and 1840s.