Transnational encounters in Algeria: para-colonial writing in the travelogues of German soldiers in colonial Algiers, 1830–1890

ABSTRACT

This essay analyses travel writing by German-speaking soldiers serving in the French military in nineteenth-century colonial Algiers. It suggests that their position – that of Europeans associated with and employed by the French colonial powers without necessarily being culturally or politically aligned with the colonial project – can be described as “para-colonial”. That perspective allowed soldiers writing in German both to participate in and endorse, though also to critique, the process of colonisation, albeit in ambivalent terms. The texts do not describe binary, German–Algerian relationships, but rather “triangular” intercultural encounters, whereby the soldiers’ shifting attitudes to the French influence their feelings and writing about local people and culture, and vice versa. Examining the representations of the “first encounter” each soldier has with the new continent, the triangular intercultural relationship, and the written treatment of urban and rural spaces, the discussion contrasts two travelogues produced in 1840 and 1881, respectively, considering how the absence and, later, the advent of a German colonial Empire left its mark on German writing about the colonisation of Algiers.

KEYWORDS:

• Algiers
• colonialism
• German
• soldiers
• empire
• space

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Jungmann's text is referred to hereafter as Scenes and Sketches. All translations are my own.

2 Bock's text is referred to hereafter as Diary. All translations are my own.

3 Following the absorption of the coastal regions into the French state in 1848, military rule was initially maintained over the more untamed regions of the Algerian interior. However, Napoleon III halted inland expansion from 1860 and issued a number of decrees enshrining the autonomy of the tribal leaders he had come to admire. The civil government subsequently put in place by the Third French Republic later resumed expansion inland, partly in a bid to resettle French Alsatians displaced by the Franco-Prussian Wars, all of which provoked further insurrection by Arabic and Kabyle tribal groups.

4 Sessions (2011) emphasises that political control and infrastructural development of colonised spaces transcended the chaos of French governmental forms throughout the nineteenth century (3–4).

5 The term is not synonymous with the use of it by, for instance, Stephanie Newell, who describes the attempts of indigenous communities to carve out a new cultural identity by borrowing from and subverting the culture of the coloniser (Newell 2002, 27–29).

6 Marchand (2009) seeks these alternative modalities of writing about the Orient largely in the history of Germanophone academic oriental studies. She writes at length against Said's theoretically predicated notion of occidental-oriental encounters as a static, self-other binary, favouring instead a source-led approach that exposes different forms of European engagement with the Orient, influenced by institutional and intellectual history, scholarly methodology and the personal circumstances of the Orientalists concerned (xxv–xxix). She discusses, for example, the works of the scholar Theodor Nöldeke (1836–1930), whose History of the Koran (1860) marked a sophisticated departure in European Islamic scholarship. In reconstructing the origins of the Koran, Nöldeke privileged Islamic sources over Christian texts and thus broke generally with the long tradition of presenting Mohammed as the imposter of religious history (174–175). This, though, did not mark a simple Islamophilia on his part, but a genuine drive to philological accuracy. When, at times, Nöldeke wrote condescendingly on the spiritual value of the Koran, this was no simple Islamophobia: it marked a Western, Eurocentric gesture perhaps, but one that expressed the scholar's increasing drift towards rational secularism, rather than a bias against Oriental religion. To collapse Nöldeke's complex position on Islam, partly dialogical, partly sympathetic, though equally dismissive, into a form of unilateral othering, is to be wholly reductive, according to Marchand (176).

7 See: http://www.romanistik.uni-wuerzburg.de/mitarbeiter/emeriti_und_ehemalige_mitarbeiter/ruhe/forschung/reiseberichte_maghreb/ (accessed November 14, 2016).

8 On associations and representations of the Barbary coast in German culture see Ruhe (1993).

9 Clancy-Smith (2009, 34) shows that Jungmann draws on an ethnic typology first laid out by Thomas Shaw in his Travels and Observations Relating to Several Parts of Barbary and the Levant (1738).

10 Ulrike Stamm (2013) examines a number of nineteenth-century francophone and germanophone texts, exploring different forms of sexual domination of oriental women by male European colonists and exposing patterns of male revulsion for oriental women following sexual conquest.

11 The long-standing Spanish colonial presence in Oran comprised the descendants of colonists from the period of Spanish colonial rule ca. 1509–1792, and more recent economic migrants who arrived after 1830.

12 Bock closes his travelogue by expressing his affection for individual French comrades, but offers a protracted and detailed explanation of why the French military is inferior to the German Imperial army, citing everything from the lack of camaraderie between ranks to the rigid repetitiveness of training manoeuvres (58–68).

13 A recent survey of the diverse range of approaches to travel literature, which sheds light on historical epochs and genres can be found in Moroz and Sztachelska (2010).