...numerous books essays on Indian religious traditions and philosophy. Fluent in Sanskrit, possessing intimate knowledge of India's sacred texts, Dahlmann knows India. Yet, perhaps following the trend of increasing popularization of academic subject matter, Dahlmann desired to inspect the purported enormous transformations occurring in Asia at the turn-of-the-century. After his three-year excursion (1902-1905), which included India, Japan and China, Dahlmann published his travel account in 1908, Indische Fahrten, in which most of 2 volumes reports on India. In my presentation, I explore how Dahlmann's intimate knowledge of India's cultural heritage informs and conflicts with those impressions attained through travel--how Dahlmann puts the standards of his Enlightenment reason into practice. By emphasizing how Enlightenment reason plays out in this travel report I will examine how this enlightened German explorer/Wissenschaftler discovers the "real" India--how Dahlmann's assessment of India's present-day cultural conventions authorizes a kind of German "Oriental" discourse through his use of social science, thus disregarding Enlightenment dictates, arguing instead that even Dahlmann's application of "scientific" knowledge of the Orient is filtered by a colonialist consciousness.

Spengler's Decline of the West in its Colonial Context. David Choberka, University of Michigan, Ypsilanti, MI 48197-4606

Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West became available to the German public in 1918, just as four years of catastrophic warfare were coming to a close and an equally traumatic internal crisis was taking shape. The time could not have been more opportune and inopportune for the book's reception. Widely received as a document of Germany's crisis, Spengler's work, with its theory of inevitable cultural decline and assertion that the West was in the latter, violent stages of that process, was commercially successful and, more importantly, permeated cultural political debates. In that respect, the time of its publication could not have been better. But the apparent link between the book and Germany's immediate problems caused the much grander scope that Spengler had intended to be often overlooked. Absolutely formative to Spengler's depiction of Western decline in his first, most famous book and his later writings was European colonialism and the process of globalization. In my research, I use some of the tools and questions developed in postcolonial studies to examine critically the ways in which Spengler's vision of Western decline and Germany's future is framed within a colonizer's image of the world and fear of its collapse.

Auf die Frage: "Was ist Deutsch(Rap)"--Language and Nation in Recent German Rap Music. Jonathan Wipplinger, University of...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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