East Asian-German Cinema

The Transnational Screen, 1919 to the Present

Joanne Miyang Cho

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367743772
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000461381
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

This is the first edited volume dedicated to the study of East Asian-German cinema. Its coverage ranges from 1919 to the present, a period which has witnessed an unprecedented degree of global entanglement between Germany and East Asia. In analyzing this hybrid cinema, this volume employs a transnational approach, which highlights the nations' cinematic encounters and entanglements. It reveals both German perceptions of East Asia and East Asian perceptions of Germany, through analysis of works by both German directors and East Asian/East Asian-German directors. It is hoped that this volume will not only accelerate cross-cultural exchange, but also provide a wider perspective that helps film scholars to see the broader contexts in which these films are produced. It introduces multiple compelling topics, not just immigration, multiculturalism, and exile, but also Japonisme, children's literature, musical modernity, media hybridity, gender representation, urban space, Cold War divisions, and national identity. It addresses several genres—feature films, essay films, and documentary films. Lastly, by embracing three East Asian cinemas in one volume, this volume serves as an excellent introduction for German cinema students and scholars. It will appeal to international and interdisciplinary audiences, as its contributors represent multiple disciplines and four world regions.

1 German Cinema, German Hybrid Cinema, and Organization

Joanne Miyang Cho

DOI: 10.4324/9781003157540-1

In the twentieth-first century, Germany and the nations of East Asia (China, Japan, and Korea) have engaged in frequent contact to an unprecedented degree, despite being located at opposite ends of the globe. In the first half of the twentieth century, however, when the East-West relationship was typically defined in colonial terms, their relationship was fundamentally different. Even though Germany was a colonial power in China until 1915, they renegotiated their relationship to become key partners in trade and military affairs in the 1920s and 1930s. Germany was Japan’s model during the Meiji Restoration in the fields of medicine, law, and military affairs. However, due to the rapid pace of Japan’s modernization, they came to see each other as equals, eventually becoming allies during World War II. Korea’s case was also atypical, because it was not colonized by a Western power but rather by Japan. German and East Asian relations have increasingly reached a level of parity in the last half century. Japan’s GNP became larger than Germany’s by 1970, and contemporary Japan “has gained confidence that its own social systems function as well as, and perhaps better than, those of most European countries.”¹ The South Korean and Chinese economies have also rapidly expanded since the 1970s and China is currently Germany’s largest trading partner. They also see themselves as equal partners. Not surprisingly, this unique and evolving power dynamic from the interwar era to the present has influenced cinematic relations between the nations. Scholarship on East Asian-German cinema has only just emerged in the last decade, largely as an offshoot of Asian German studies, although a few short works predate this trend. The present volume is the first edited volume dedicated to the study of East Asian-German cinema. It introduces several new fascinating topics that have not yet received attention. It highlights the cross-civilizational exchanges and entanglements that have existed between Germany and East Asia in multiple fields. It also examines German perceptions of East Asia and East Asian perceptions of Germany by analyzing works by both German directors and East Asian/East Asian-German directors.

This introductory chapter will address German cinema, German hybrid cinema, and the organization of this volume in three sections. The first and second sections attempt to situate this volume within current English-language scholarship on German film. The first section focuses on two roughly defined “camps” of film scholars. The first addresses German cinema primarily from within a German national context. They tend to emphasize German peculiarity (Sonderweg), favor Weimar and the New German Cinema of the 1970s, and are ambivalent about German cinema’s transnational turn. The latter studies German cinema in its Western context (i.e., in conversation with Europe and Hollywood), or, what I refer to as German “Western” cinema. They believe that the Western context is more relevant to Europeans, although they do accept a global turn in principle. The second section explores some of the key characteristics of German hybrid cinema. At present, its two subfields are Turkish German cinema and East Asian-German cinema. A brief sampling of scholarship on Turkish German cinema will be followed by a survey of recent scholarship on East Asian-German cinema. The third section introduces the key arguments of the following 12 chapters in this volume. These chapters examine a wide range of compelling topics, such as Japonisme, cultural diplomacy, children’s literature, Jewish exile, gender representations, Cold War divisions, urban space, musical hybridity, media hybridity, immigration, and multiculturalism. The chapters examine these topics across a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. While the majority of the chapters treat feature films, the remainder analyze essay films, TV dramas, documentaries, and a mockumentary.

German Cinema: A National Context or a Western Context?

Several important works on German cinema have already appeared in English in the twenty-first century. Stephen Brockmann’s A Critical History of German Film (2010) is perhaps the clearest example of approaching German films from a specifically national context. He points to “the overwhelming critical consensus” that German cinema is “a ‘national cinema.’” He argues that “The critical study of German film history is . . . part of the study of twentieth-century German history.”² He therefore agrees with Siegfried Kracauer’s view that the study of German cinema gives one “special access to the understanding of German history.” He contrasts Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947), which is an “eminently critical history of German cinema,” to Sabine Hake’s “revisionist” book, German National Cinema (2^nd ed., 2008). He criticizes Hake for emphasizing the international elements of German cinema rather than its “German peculiarities.”³ Moreover, he is critical of globalization, which he conflates with “uniformity,” and instead expresses support for anti-globalization, which is “a powerful counter-movement toward distinctness and singularity.” Consequently, he sees national cinema as existing in tension with Hollywood.⁴ Ten years later, in the second edition of the book (2020) Brockmann expands upon his earlier critique of globalization, but his position remains unchanged. He wants to probe German film “in the context of German nationhood,” since nations are “the primary players on the global stage.”⁵

Other authors have shown more openness toward a Western re-contextualization of German cinema than Brockmann, albeit to varying degrees. The next three volumes accept the premise of German peculiarity (Sonderweg) with respect to its cinema, but they diverge in favoring a more national or Western contextualization of the field. Nora M. Alter’s Projecting History. German Nonfiction Cinema, 1967–2000 (2002) is different from the other books in this section, in that she exclusively analyzes essay films. She is critical of most film studies from the 1980s and 1990s; by overwhelmingly focusing on narrative feature films, they implicitly privileged New German Cinema.⁶ Although she discusses at length the global connections of a number of films discussed in her book, she chose them in accordance with her emphasis on German peculiarity: “The films address basic problems of German history, including its overall ‘peculiarity’ within the European context, and, in particular, the specific ways in which the National Socialist legacy continues to haunt Germans.”⁷ Although her main focus is essay films, the question concerning the tension between national and transnational is also of significance for her work. In studying these films, she subjects them to the “national-transnational structure.” It is both national, since she analyzes the ways in which “the nonfiction genre develops within Germany,” and transnational, because she examines the ways in which these films are in communication with nonfiction films produced globally. Despite her advocacy for the transnational perspective, her critical view of Hollywood is different from other scholars who support a more Western-oriented context. This stems from her opposition to Hollywood feature film production, which historically has overshadowed essay film production.⁸

The editors of A New History of German Cinema (2012), Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Michael D. Richardson, express some reservations toward studying German cinema in an exclusively national context, but they also see a strong need for a nation-centered focus. On the one hand, they provide reasons for preferring a Western context. The global film industry and global audiences are constantly expanding and diversifying. They see the idea of “a ‘German’ national cinema” as “shifting and porous.” They want to study “moments of international influence and exchange,” as well as acknowledge both the contributions of German filmmakers working overseas and that of German language cinema to other countries’ film cultures. This work does contain some chapters on Asian and Hollywood connections to German cinema. On the other hand, Kapczynski and Richardson firmly defend the importance of a national context because of its central role “in representing, shaping, and interpreting German history and culture.” They foreground the films that were made “within the historical political boundaries of the nation.”⁹ Moreover, the chapters are structured around a series of specific dates, which could shed light on “something larger about the history and future of German cinema.”¹⁰ As “an event centered history of German cinema,”¹¹ it is closely tied to the German national context.

Thomas Elsaesser’s book, German Cinema since 1945 – Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory (2014), connects “nationalization” (i.e., the German Sonderweg) and “transnationalization” (i.e., Europeanization) by reframing the legacy of the German Holocaust into a shared European project. On the one hand, he explains how “Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past)” drove him to write the book. Despite the book’s title, which indicates a focus on the post-1945 era, his main concern is “the consequences and afterlife” of the Nazi state and the Holocaust. He was also motivated by his earlier work (2007) on the Red Army Faction (RAF), in which he examined the RAF “in the particular counter-public sphere of the New German Cinema” of the 1970s and early 1980s.¹² On the other hand, Elsaesser compliments European institutions for turning “accountability for and commemoration of the Holocaust a common project.” During the 1980s and 1990s, several countries in the European Union passed laws criminalizing Holocaust denial and proscribed racial hatred out of awareness of their shared historical guilt related to anti-Semitism and the destruction of the European Jews.¹³ Moreover, his Western framework rejects “the binary divide” between Hollywood and European cinema, which he sees as “heavily Euro[-]centric and self-interested.”¹⁴

The next three books do not subscribe to the theory of German peculiarity and instead analyze German cinema...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 German Cinema, German Hybrid Cinema, and Organization
• Part I Film Adaptations and Representations of the East Asian-German Relationship, 1919–1945
• Part II Representations of Gender in the 1950s and 1960s: Asian Femininity and Idealized Masculinity
• Part III Cultural Globalization and the Persistence of the Popular Since the 1970s
• Part IV East Asian-German Entanglements since the 1980s
• Contributors
• Index