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While German Romantics typically depicted the Orient as the exotic other, contrasting it with an oppressive Germany, family magazines around the time of the formation of the German Empire attempt to invalidate this image as being a projection of the imagination. Invoking the discourse of literary realism, they represent the Orient, the city and the harem in particular, as fascinating only from a distance. By adopting a narrative perspective from inside the cities and harems, the ‘truth’ of Oriental ‘reality’ is unveiled as prosaic and unattractive. The articles thus not only evoke colonialist stereotypes and fantasies of a role for Germany as coloniser, but also articulate by contrast to Oriental reality a project in which Germany could be unified as a nation. On the one hand, the Orient is evoked to educate future generations of German colonisers who are supposed to realise Germany’s assumed responsibility as a colonial power superior to other European nations. On the other hand, the articles appropriate the Orient in the veiled process of the cultural construction of a German national identity and thus serve as a logical extension of a nationalist realism ala Freytag, aiming at the ‘Verbürgerlichung’ and domestication of its reading public.
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