The Great Cauldron by Marie-Janine Calic

Author:Marie-Janine Calic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

The Colonialization of Perceptions

As the Eastern Question intensified, the Balkans moved to the forefront of European attentions. Within the mental map of Europe—shaped by Crusades, Ottoman wars, and the Renaissance—the region had once been considered part of “the Orient.” But since the Serbian and Greek uprisings of the early nineteenth century, “the Balkans” was increasingly perceived as its own distinct entity. In Germany, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Brothers Grimm, the historian Leopold von Ranke, the geographer Felix Kanitz, and the philhellenes contributed to a romanticized image of Christian peoples who were fighting heroically against Ottoman despotism. The Great Eastern Crisis and the Congress of Berlin, when the great powers competed openly over the division of former Ottoman possessions, marked a shift toward perceptions that were more strongly colored by imperialist interests. Oriental clichés and stereotypes were transferred to “the Balkans,” so that the region began to appear overwhelmingly anarchic, violent, and backward—thereby compelling the powers to reinstate order and civilize its inhabitants.

In contrast to “Orientalism,” “Balkanism” did not imagine the object of its fantasy as a polar opposite to the European self, but rather as a zone of transition between East and West, largely because of its majority Christian population. Similar to the Orient, the Balkans exuded an exotic mysticism—including the romanticism of simple peasant life, the eroticism of the harem, the adventures of fierce, noble warriors, and the horrors of archaic violence. Countless ethnographic portraits steeped in colorful folklore made the rounds. All this provided a wistful, romantic contrast to the uncertainties brought forth by the technical advances of the modern era. The Balkans became a space of projection for repressed fantasies and escapism.203

The rapidly developing mass press and new medium of photography encouraged the spread of the Balkanist discourse. The first illustrated war reportage came from the Crimean War. The Illustrated London News, the German Illustrirte Zeitung, and other newspapers covered the Great Eastern Crisis with pictures as well as words. The news, commentary, and readers’ letters pages teemed with emotional depictions of politically sensitive events, and new visual media such as photography and lithography conveyed (or sometimes feigned) authenticity. The London Daily News reports of journalists Januarius MacGahan and Eugene Schuyler on the “Bulgarian horrors” helped to stir up popular opinion.204 Because of censorship, however, war correspondents’ reports on frontline events were generally secondhand accounts. The London Daily Chronicle wryly noted that many reporters wrote about battles “which have only been fought in the heated imagination of the author.” The press nevertheless outdid itself with spectacular embellishments about carved-out eyes, severed tongues, and other grisly details. In 1876 the Kölnische Zeitung complained that such reports were based largely on the “tangles of lies” that were spun by the official dispatches of the warring capitals.205 These stories fed the voyeurism of a sensation-seeking public.

These events coincided with burgeoning scholarly, literary, and artistic interest in foreign cultures, including the “wild Balkans.” Balkan themes were a familiar staple of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, which was fascinated by things foreign. In

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