The Orient still appears to many as a mythical world from a thousand and a night, a dream of wisdom, wealth and eroticism. At the same time, however, it is also a projection surface of European fears and object of power fantasies. To date, there is the idea of ​​the Orient as a “other world” in literature, in children's books, films and pictures, filled with exoticly fantastic and partly reproachful ideas and pictures. Orient pictures also run through the literature of the 20th century. Cups of references to the Orient discourse can be found in Vienna Modernity (Hugo von Hofmannsthal), in the vicinity of Expressionism (exemplary: Gottfried Benn and Franz Kafka), in the 1930s (Friedrich Glauser and Hermann Hesse), in the first few years after 1945 (exemplary: Arno Schmidt) and in the context of an ethnological interest in the 1980s (Hubert Fichte). The relationship between 'Occident' and 'Orient' is always reflected. With every Orient presentation, the identity formation of one's own culture through the design of self-image and external images is also involved.