7 - Forms of Encounter with Islam around 1800: The Cases of Johann Hermann von Riedesel and Johann Ludwig Burckhardt

Summary

IN THE CONTEXT OF A VOLUME CONCERNED WITH German encounters with Islamic culture it may seem bizarre to deal with two authors who write of or publish their travels in a language other than German. Clearly, many highly interesting authors have reported on their experience and interpretation of Islamic culture in German and might appear to be of more obvious interest to German scholars. However, the case will be made in this chapter that the two authors under discussion, namely the German travelogue writer Johann Hermann von Riedesel (1740–85) and the Swiss adventurer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (1784–1817), are particularly revealing of a period of German/Swiss cultural development and that their travel accounts provide, alongside overt discussion of foreign cultures, testimony of the fragility of their own cultural positions. The discussion will begin with Riedesel's travel report, the Remarques d'un voyageur moderne au Levant of 1773, which appeared in translation as Bemerkungen auf einer Reise nach der der Levante in 1774 and in a new translation in 1940 as Randbemerkungen über eine Reise nach der Levante, 1768. The perceived significance of the text is reflected in the fact of its double translation — and indeed in the speed of the first translation — although this is rather at odds with the progressive downgrading of Riedesel's observations from a “modern traveler's notes” in the French edition to mere notes and then marginalia in the German versions.