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.

Martin Rosenstock is Assistant Professor of German at Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara and has held visiting positions at Iowa State University and the University of Connecticut. He has published on the depiction of crime and detection in literature and film as well as on German colonial literature inMonatshefteandColloquia Germanica.

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 Fancks TransnationalBergfilm The Samurais Daughter (193637)
Valerie Weinstein

Chapter 3.Prussians of the East: the 1944Deutsch-Japanische Gesellschafts 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: DEFAs Cold War Documentaries on China
Qinna Shen

Chapter 6.China Past, China Present: The Boxer Rebellion in Gerhard SeyfriedsYellow 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 Yko Tawadas The Bath
Markus Hallensleben

Chapter 9.Love, Pain, and the Whole Japan Thing: Dancing MA in Doris Dörries FilmCherry Blossoms/Hanami
Erika M. Nelson

PART IV: TRADE, TRAVEL, AND ETHNOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVES

Chapter 10.Hairnet Manufacturing in Vysoina and Shandong 18901939: 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