In the context of German Orientalisms, the engagement with the Ottoman Empire occupied a special place throughout the centuries. German views of Ottoman space were based on a discursive appropriation of the regions in question and of their cul- ture, on the assumed power to define the Orient, and on an imaginary ability to domi- nate this space.3 Real power, lasting influence, and successful intervention, however, were hardly ever exercised by Germany in a significant or enduring way. Scenarios of a German Hinterland stretching down the Danube and into Asia Minor, dreams of German influence in Ottoman lands that would establish them as actual colonial rulers, never came anywhere close to fruition: indeed they never even achieved suf- ficient momentum to match the positions already attained by Germany's rivals for Empire, Britain, France, and Russia. German influence barely became a meaningful political or cultural force in the desired and contested Ottoman space, in spite of the Kaiser's highly symbolic visits to Constantinople (1889) and to Palestine (1898), in spite of the Baghdad Railway project, and in spite of military expertise exported to Turkey with a view to forging lasting alliances. There is one exception to this general assessment, a short period on the eve and during the first phase of World War I when Germany's military alliance with Turkey seemed to afford the opportunity for all the ambitious plans of previous decades to be realized. These three years between 1914 and 1917 were the period of the most intense Orientalist discourse ever to have been conducted in the German public domain. During that time, the floodgates of desire opened and commentators abandoned the "sanitizing, palliating" register employed "to make Germany's intervention both less perturbing to the other Great Powers and more palatable to itself," that had restrained the earlier discourse-and attitudes towards controversial issues like the treatment of the Armenians-well into the twentieth century