Full Description
This collection of new essays explores how Germany's imagined Asia informed its national fantasies at crucial historical junctures. It will influence future scholarly explorations of Asian-German cultural transfer.
The first collection of essays in the new field of Asian-German Studies, Imagining Germany Imagining Asia demonstrates that Germany and Asia have always shared cultural spaces. Indeed, since the time of the German Enlightenment, Asia served as the foil for fantasies of sexuality, escape, danger, competition, and racial and spiritual purity that were central to foundational ideas of a cohesive German national culture during crucial historical junctures such as fascism or reunification. By exploring the complex and varied phenomenon of German "Orientalism," these essays argue that the relation between an imagined Germany and an imagined Asia defies the idea of a one-way influence, instead conceiving of their cultural transfers and synergies as multidirectional and mutually perpetuating. Examining literary and non-literary texts from the eighteenth century to the present, these essays cover a wide rangeof topics and genres in disciplines including philosophy, film and visual culture, theater, literary studies, and the history of science. Ideally positioned to shape further contributions, Imagining Germany Imagining Asiawill attract a wide range of readers interested in German, Asian, colonial, postcolonial, and transnational studies.
Contributors: Sai Bhatawadekar, Petra Fachinger, Veronika Fuechtner, Randall Halle, David D. Kim, Hoi-eun Kim, Kamakshi Murti, Perry Myers, Mary Rhiel, Qinna Shen, Quinn Slobodian, Chunjie Zhang
Veronika Fuechtner is Associate Professor of German at Dartmouth College. Mary Rhiel is Associate Professor of German at the University of New Hampshire.
Contents
Introduction
East-West Globality and the European Mode of Film Production
Citizenship-Shifting: Race and Xing-Hu Kuo's Claim on East German Memory
Narratives of Transnational Divide: The Vietnamese in Contemporary German Literature and Film
Factories on the Magic Carpet: Heimat, Globalization, and the "Yellow Peril" in Die Chinesen kommen and Losers and Winners
Germany's India: A Critical Re-interrogation
Indians, Jews, and Sex: Magnus Hirschfeld and Indian Sexology
The Ambivalence of a Spiritual Quest in India: Waldemar Bonsels's Indienfahrt
Traveling through Imperialism: Representational Crisis and Resolution in Elisabeth von Heyking's and Alfons Paquet's Travel Writing on China
Measuring Asian-ness: Erwin Baelz's Anthropological Expeditions in Fin-de-Siècle Korea
The Tat Tvam Asi Formula and Schopenhauer's "Deductive Leap"
German Indophilia, Femininity, and Transcultural Symbiosis around 1800
Reading Genji in German: Reflections on World Literature and Asian-German Studies
Bibliography
Notes on the Contributors
Index
