Kurban Said’s The Girl from the Golden Horn (1938): Play with Orientalism in Inter-War Berlin and Vienna

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Das Mädchen vom Goldenen Horn ( The Girl from the Golden Horn ), a novel published in 1938 in Vienna under the pseudonym Kurban Said, was most likely written by Lev Nussimbaum, a multilingual exile from Azerbaijan, who converted from Judaism to Islam in Berlin in the early 1920s and published widely under the name Essad Bey. Although virtually unknown, this novel deserves an important place in the global history of German literature on account of its complexity and self-conscious play with literary and cultural traditions, especially the long-standing presence of Islam in German-speaking Europe, and the Orientalist tropes associated with it.