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Overlhaus, M.: Introduction: Leitmotif of the German presidency and the partners' perspectives. - S. 4-12 ( ... )

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), founder of Anthroposophy and the Waldorf schools, is one of many German intellectuals who have turned to the Orient in pursuit of poetic and philosophical inspiration, and religious rejuvenation. In my paper I argue that Steiner's turn to the East is an attempt to reconstitute religious norms as a modernized, secular religion, and I show how Steiner's thought manifests a different kind of colonial discourse from the one found in state-oriented Orientalism. Steiner sought to create a new 'universal' religion for mankind, and hence a colonialism based on a psychological type purportedly outside race, class and ethnicity. Yet Steiner's occult science and the underlying Orientalism upon which he built it implicitly represent a discourse which designates Western cultural traditions as superior. As a result, Steiner's analysis of the Bhagavad Gita can be approached most likely as a source for redefining a German national identity not necessarily tied to visions of the Enlightenment state and a reconstituted understanding of human beings. Though Steiner was certainly a well-meaning humanist and would-be humanitarian, his Orientalism selectively interprets and recontextualizes cultural meaning with biased discursive purposes and thus naturalizes a colonialist world-vision in a more subtle way than assumed for Western, and more specifically German, forms of colonialism.

This paper reframes prevailing discourses around realism and nostalgia in the heritage film through a close look at one particularly rich 'figure' in the film text: letters and letter-writing. By focusing on the figure of the letter in two romantic period dramas - The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993) and Onegin (Martha Fiennes, 1998) -this paper explores the visual rhetoric of the letter in the film text to articulate narratives of desire and deferral. Beyond its cultural and narrative significance, the letter stands for the motif of woman as the 'unreachable/unreadable love object' from which the films derive their emotional impact. However, by inscribing a figure of absence in the visual text the letter also rewrites the familiar realism of period reconstruction with the strangeness of the codes and rituals that enact these fantasy scenarios of desire and loss.