Beyond Alterity

German Encounters with Modern East Asia

Qinna Shen, Martin Rosenstock

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781782383604
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782383611
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction — Re-investigating a Transnational Connection: Asian German Studies in the New Millennium
• Part I — Japan and Germany in the Shadow of National Socialism
• Chapter 1 — Beauty and the Beast: Japan in Interwar German Newsreels
• Chapter 2 — Reflecting Chiral Modernities: The Function of Genre in Arnold Fanck's Transnational Bergfilm, The Samurai's Daughter (1936–37)
• Chapter 3 — Prussians of the East: The 1944 Deutsch-Japanische Gesellschaft's Essay Contest and the Transcultural Romantic
• 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
• Chapter 5 — A Question of Ideology and Realpolitik: DEFA's Cold War Documentaries on China
• Chapter 6 — China Past, China Present: The Boxer Rebellion in Gerhard Seyfried's Yellow Wind (2008)
• Part III — Negotiating Identity in Multicultural Germany
• Chapter 7 — Anna May Wong and Weimar Cinema: Orientalism in Postcolonial Germany
• Chapter 8 — Rewriting the Face, Transforming the Skin, and Performing the Body as Text: Palimpsestuous Intertexts in Yöko Tawada's "The Bath"
• Chapter 9 — Love, Pain, and the Whole Japan Thing: Dancing MA in Doris Dörrie's Film Cherry Blossoms/Hanami
• Part IV — Trade, Travel, and Ethnographical Narratives
• Chapter 10 — Hairnet Manufacturing in Vysocina and Shandong 1890–1939: An Early Globalizing Home Industry
• Chapter 11 — Oribiting around the Void: Emptiness as Recurring Topos in Recent German Short Stories on Japan
• Chapter 12 — Discovering Asia in the Footsteps of Portuguese Explorers: East Asia in the Work of Hugo Loetscher
• Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index