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With the economic and political rise of East Asia in the second half of the twentieth century, many Western countries have re-evaluated their links to their Eastern counterparts. Thus, in recent years, Asian German Studies has emerged as a promising branch within interdisciplinary German Studies. This collection of essays examines German-language cultural production pertaining to modern China and Japan, and explicitly challenges orientalist notions by proposing a conception of East and West not as opposites, but as complementary elements of global culture, thereby urging a move beyond national paradigms in cultural studies. Essays focus on the mid-century German-Japanese alliance, Chinese-German Leftist collaborations, global capitalism, travel, identity, and cultural hybridity. The authors include historians and scholars of film and literature, and employ a wide array of approaches from postcolonial, globalization, media, and gender studies. The collection sheds new light on a complex and ambivalentset of international relationships, while also testifying to the potential of Asian German Studies.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Introduction: Re-Investigating a Transnational Connection: Asian German Studies in the New Millennium
Martin Rosenstock and Qinna Shen
PART I: JAPAN AND GERMANY IN THE SHADOW OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM
Chapter 1. Beauty and the Beast: Japan in Interwar German Newsreels
Ricky W. Law
Chapter 2. Reflecting Chiral Modernities: The Function of Genre in Arnold Fanck’s Transnational Bergfilm The Samurai’s Daughter (1936–37)
Valerie Weinstein
Chapter 3. Prussians of the East: the 1944 Deutsch-Japanische Gesellschaft’s Essay Contest and the Transcultural Romantic
Sarah Panzer
PART II: FROM 1920s LEFTIST COLLABORATION TO GLOBAL CAPITALISM
Chapter 4. Otherness in Solidarity: Collaboration between Chinese and German Left-Wing Activists in the Weimar Republic
Weijia Li
Chapter 5. A Question of Ideology and Realpolitik: DEFA’s Cold War Documentaries on China
Qinna Shen
Chapter 6. China Past, China Present: The Boxer Rebellion in Gerhard Seyfried’s Yellow Wind (2008)
Martin Rosenstock
PART III: NEGOTIATING IDENTITY IN MULTICULTURAL GERMANY
Chapter 7. Anna May Wong and Weimar Cinema: Orientalism in Postcolonial Germany
Cynthia Walk
Chapter 8. Rewriting the Face, Transforming the Skin, and Performing the Body as Text: Palimpsestuous Intertexts in Yōko Tawada’s “The Bath”
Markus Hallensleben
Chapter 9. Love, Pain, and the Whole Japan Thing: Dancing MA in Doris Dörrie’s Film Cherry Blossoms/Hanami
Erika M. Nelson
PART IV: TRADE, TRAVEL, AND ETHNOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVES
Chapter 10. Hairnet Manufacturing in Vysočina and Shandong 1890–1939: An Early Globalizing Home Industry
Chinyun Lee and Lucie Olivová
Chapter 11. Orbiting Around the Void: Emptiness as Recurring Topos in Recent German Short Stories on Japan
Gabriele Eichmanns
Chapter 12. Discovering Asia in the Footsteps of Portuguese Explorers: East Asia in the Work of Hugo Loetscher
Jeroen Dewulf
Bibliography
Index