The Diplomat and Orientalist Andreas David Mordtmann (1811-1879) as Witness of the Late Ottoman History and Early Representative of the Discipline of Ottoman Studies.

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The proposed research project centers on the oriental scholar and diplomat Andreas David Mordtmann (1811-1879). Mordtmann came to Istanbul in 1846 as chargé d´affaires for the Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck; after his dismissal from this post in 1859 he became an Ottoman civil servant, working privately as an academic and journalist. His positioning between the German and the Ottoman culture as well as his various professional spheres of activity shape his distinctive perspective as scholar and historical witness. Possessing more first-hand information than most of his European contemporaries while being cut off from the institutional environs of established academia he described the political and social upheavals of the late Ottoman reform period known as Tanzimat (1839-1876) from an ambivalent in-between position. The analysis of the various writings he left behind will therefore focus on his particular transcultural outlook on late Ottoman history as well as the substantial impact of his research in the still young field of Ottoman studies. By positioning his writings in the context of the orientalist and occidentalist discourses of his time the study will thus make a substantial contribution to the history of Orientalist scholarship, complementing and challenging some of the common assumptions about the way how in the nineteenth century, pre-imperial German context knowledge about 'the orient' was produced.