Istanbul: kulturelle (Re)Konstruktionen und mediale Inszenierungen im Frankreich des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts

The history of the city of Istanbul has been marked bys the constant shifting of territorial power
between European States and the Ottoman Empire. With the beginning of the 19th century, Istanbul
became the West’s most important political target and the East’s most hybrid cultural center. This
thesis examines representations of Istanbul in minor works of three French travelers: Newspaper
articles by Théophile Gautier (Constantinople, 1853), journal entries by Pierre Loti (Le cycle turc,
1879-1921) and a film script by Alain Robbe-Grillet (L’Immortelle, 1962; 1963). Their writings on
Istanbul work as a means of reconstructing fantasy, experience, and memory which leave the
margin of written language and search for complementary expression within pictorial languages.
The main corpus of analysis here, the verbal description, is used in connection with painting,
photography, and film in order to determine some of the forms and characteristics in which
Istanbul manifests its own identity.

Another leading line of the thesis focuses on Edward Saïd’s argumentation in Orientalism in which
he shows that the Western image of the East is a stereotype and therefore has no value of
authenticity. This analysis tries to explain that not all ‘image’ can be underestimated as cliché:
There are certain distinctions to be made according to which images – even though adequately
generalized as cliché – have fundamental values as individual historical documents based,
unavoidably, on subjective perceptions. To this end, the work examines those individual
perceptions in different media and explores the limits of expression: What are the processes of
seeing and perceiving the ‘other’? What are the results of such encounters with what is named
‘alien’ from a distance? And, most importantly, what is the ‘reality’ of what seemed to be a
promising picturesque dreamland – Istanbul?