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Transnational Encounters between Germany and East Asia since 1900
This volume contributes to an emerging field of Asian German Studies by bringing together cutting-edge scholarship from international scholars working in a variety of disciplines. The chapters survey transnational encounters between Germany and East Asia since 1900. By rejecting traditional dichotomies between the East and the West or the colonizer and the colonized, these essays highlight connectedness and hybridity. They show how closely Germany and East Asia cooperated and negotiated the challenges of modernity in a range of topics, such as politics, history, literature, religion, environment, architecture, sexology, migration, and sports.
238 pages, Hardcover
Published March 7, 2018
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November 11, 2019
As typical for a book with many authors this was an up and down for me.
An interesting premise for sure, you see whereas most Western and non-Western relationships were defined in colonial terms, this picture was more complex in the case of Germany and East Asia. Moreover, there have been substantive cultural and intellectual flows between them. Currently, this flow moves in both directions and there have been many cases of transnational cooperation between Germany and East Asia on multiple levels.
It was interesting to read of Chinese interest in Prussian military, especially after the latter won the Franco-Prussian War. Also, Kim Il-Sung was in East-Berlin in 1984, the Korean-German connections went up and down since 1883 and the whole kidnapping of 17 students and intellectuals by 50 South Korean agents in 1967 was called the Berlin Affair 1967 and the two countries only normalized in 1979. Interesting.
Also, German social historians narrowed the scope of German historical scholarship and their critics have highlighted strong globalizing tendencies in Germany during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
This was also the first time I read that Chinese mothers-in-law were so notorious for abusing daughters-in-law at that time that the problem featured in Republican-era periodicals. I wonder whether the stereotype of the "Dragon lady" actually comes from Anglos observing abusive Chinese mothers in law. And widowhood was a common dilemma for women from poor families in the late Qing as it left them at the mercy of their in-laws. Matthew Sommer notes that remarriage was frequent among the non-elite, where women were effectively sold by their late husbands' family. The latter wished to avoid being left with a financial burden and therefore ignored the Qing-promoted ideal of chaste widowhood.
It was quite interesting to read what happened in southern Guangdong in late Qing when the official enforcement did not work so well anymore. There are more cases of single women, delayed marriages, unmarried widows and even some cases of polyandry. And not necessarily due to poverty and somewhere profiting from the silk boom. It seems to be an interesting mix of factors. Would probably make for interesting movies.
There was an informative short account on the Boxer uprising, but I do wonder why there is no mentioning of the attacks by the Boxers on the Manchu civilians. Only Chinese Christians and Europeans are mentioned. This was the first time that I ever read of a) sympathetic contemporary European accounts of the Boxer Uprising and b) Non-Christian Chinese people (non-elite also) who are not on the side of the Boxers. Usually the accounts are notoriously simplified. And opinion on the Boxer Uprising had shifted afterwards in Europe.... again, something you rarely hear about. I wonder why that is.
And reading about the emotional remoteness and stiffness towards Germany (despite admiration for its achievements) and at the same time effusive embrace of American culture and amiable reflection of Britain and France in Japan explains every choice of region for every Pokémon generation so far (and other things). Which also makes me believe that Nintendo is more likely to remake a prior one than do a new region after Galar.
And speaking of Germany and Japan: So, in the heckmeck over the Liaotong Peninsular unfortunately for Germany, Japanese media mistook Berlin for the ringleader, although it was Russia that had initiated the intervention. Blaming Germany for something someone else initiated... sounds familiar.
I skipped the chapter about the land relocation system called Lex Adickes. Sure, you can name it as another case of transnational connections between Germany, Japan and Korea but it simply does not interest me, at all.
In regard to first Prussian-Japanese relations it was interesting to read how each regarded the other as struggling under the same burden: both fated to play "catch up" against stronger nations in working toward modernization, which often was used to justify an imperialist-aggressive or even colonialist foreign policy. And having belonged to the "West" and been positioned against and threatened by the Communist "East" during the Cold War, Germany and Japan are more similar in their interests, values, and strategies now than in the past. The political fall-out of the nuclear incident in Fukushima in March 2011 may prove to mark a fundamental shift in how the two countries view themselves as well as the world.
The statement of East Asia having advanced, in only a few decades, from colonial occupation, poverty, and obscurity since the 1960s is pretty misleading in my mind. Especially since from the places mentioned only Malaysia, Taiwan and maybe South Korea fit all of these criteria."
This whole section about the economic growth of Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore seems to ignore that these countries neither started from scratch nor isolated, especially Japan, South Korea and Taiwan received massive support due to the Cold War politics. Not to diminish the achievement but I think this is misleading here.
Similarly, the popular assumption that the corporate culture of East Asia, with its emphasis on lifetime employment, loyalty to the group, and self-sacrifice, is due to traditional culture needs to be reexamined within historical contexts. lndeed, recent scholarship suggests that this system was established precisely because it served economic rationality.
The chapter about Zweig's reception in China was not really interesting to me. And I remember nothing of it.
"Ming Ying transreads women" … was another chapter that I was completely uninterested in.
The whole thing with the Atlantic Charter is huge hypocrisy a far as Roosevelt and especially Churchill were concerned in my eyes. Maybe Roosevelt was sincere about universal freedom and destruction of philosophy of "conquest or the subjugation of other people" but Churchill was not. The British Empire and big parts of the USA were based on exactly these principles.
This book also made me question some common wisdoms in my country. You see, statistically, the Soviet denazification program proved to be far more aggressive than what took place in the other Allied zones. And in combination with the given numbers of convicted war criminals here, I really have to wonder what the often-stated charge of "Most were never convicted" is really based on. I am serious, I don't think I have ever seen a source on this.
One chapter states that the defeat and occupation of Japan proved to be very different from what took place in Germany, in large part because the US had played a singular role in the defeat of Japan. But what about the British and the Soviets? Didn't they fight in the East as well? And from there the book went to something more questionable in my mind as it claimed that Stimson told Truman that he thought it would take an invasion force of 5 million to take the Japanese home islands, with as many as a million US casualties. But did he? And it would take two bombs - one on August 6 over Hiroshima and another three days later over Nagasaki - to convince Japanese leaders to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. And the Soviet attack? Did that have no influence?
And the statement regarding the restoration of Germany and Japan: “This was a doubly remarkable lesson given that the Allies had far more substantial reasons to despise the Germans and the Japanese in 1945, given the untold horrors they committed in Europe and Asia. “
So? All the allied powers had similar horrible stuff in their histories and fact is that they rebuilt Germany and Japan out of self-interest in the main part if you ask me.
The last chapter I completely forgot about the moment I stopped reading the book.
So, all in all I think this book is worth reading even if it is a bit chaotic and boring in places.
An interesting premise for sure, you see whereas most Western and non-Western relationships were defined in colonial terms, this picture was more complex in the case of Germany and East Asia. Moreover, there have been substantive cultural and intellectual flows between them. Currently, this flow moves in both directions and there have been many cases of transnational cooperation between Germany and East Asia on multiple levels.
It was interesting to read of Chinese interest in Prussian military, especially after the latter won the Franco-Prussian War. Also, Kim Il-Sung was in East-Berlin in 1984, the Korean-German connections went up and down since 1883 and the whole kidnapping of 17 students and intellectuals by 50 South Korean agents in 1967 was called the Berlin Affair 1967 and the two countries only normalized in 1979. Interesting.
Also, German social historians narrowed the scope of German historical scholarship and their critics have highlighted strong globalizing tendencies in Germany during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
This was also the first time I read that Chinese mothers-in-law were so notorious for abusing daughters-in-law at that time that the problem featured in Republican-era periodicals. I wonder whether the stereotype of the "Dragon lady" actually comes from Anglos observing abusive Chinese mothers in law. And widowhood was a common dilemma for women from poor families in the late Qing as it left them at the mercy of their in-laws. Matthew Sommer notes that remarriage was frequent among the non-elite, where women were effectively sold by their late husbands' family. The latter wished to avoid being left with a financial burden and therefore ignored the Qing-promoted ideal of chaste widowhood.
It was quite interesting to read what happened in southern Guangdong in late Qing when the official enforcement did not work so well anymore. There are more cases of single women, delayed marriages, unmarried widows and even some cases of polyandry. And not necessarily due to poverty and somewhere profiting from the silk boom. It seems to be an interesting mix of factors. Would probably make for interesting movies.
There was an informative short account on the Boxer uprising, but I do wonder why there is no mentioning of the attacks by the Boxers on the Manchu civilians. Only Chinese Christians and Europeans are mentioned. This was the first time that I ever read of a) sympathetic contemporary European accounts of the Boxer Uprising and b) Non-Christian Chinese people (non-elite also) who are not on the side of the Boxers. Usually the accounts are notoriously simplified. And opinion on the Boxer Uprising had shifted afterwards in Europe.... again, something you rarely hear about. I wonder why that is.
And reading about the emotional remoteness and stiffness towards Germany (despite admiration for its achievements) and at the same time effusive embrace of American culture and amiable reflection of Britain and France in Japan explains every choice of region for every Pokémon generation so far (and other things). Which also makes me believe that Nintendo is more likely to remake a prior one than do a new region after Galar.
And speaking of Germany and Japan: So, in the heckmeck over the Liaotong Peninsular unfortunately for Germany, Japanese media mistook Berlin for the ringleader, although it was Russia that had initiated the intervention. Blaming Germany for something someone else initiated... sounds familiar.
I skipped the chapter about the land relocation system called Lex Adickes. Sure, you can name it as another case of transnational connections between Germany, Japan and Korea but it simply does not interest me, at all.
In regard to first Prussian-Japanese relations it was interesting to read how each regarded the other as struggling under the same burden: both fated to play "catch up" against stronger nations in working toward modernization, which often was used to justify an imperialist-aggressive or even colonialist foreign policy. And having belonged to the "West" and been positioned against and threatened by the Communist "East" during the Cold War, Germany and Japan are more similar in their interests, values, and strategies now than in the past. The political fall-out of the nuclear incident in Fukushima in March 2011 may prove to mark a fundamental shift in how the two countries view themselves as well as the world.
The statement of East Asia having advanced, in only a few decades, from colonial occupation, poverty, and obscurity since the 1960s is pretty misleading in my mind. Especially since from the places mentioned only Malaysia, Taiwan and maybe South Korea fit all of these criteria."
This whole section about the economic growth of Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore seems to ignore that these countries neither started from scratch nor isolated, especially Japan, South Korea and Taiwan received massive support due to the Cold War politics. Not to diminish the achievement but I think this is misleading here.
Similarly, the popular assumption that the corporate culture of East Asia, with its emphasis on lifetime employment, loyalty to the group, and self-sacrifice, is due to traditional culture needs to be reexamined within historical contexts. lndeed, recent scholarship suggests that this system was established precisely because it served economic rationality.
The chapter about Zweig's reception in China was not really interesting to me. And I remember nothing of it.
"Ming Ying transreads women" … was another chapter that I was completely uninterested in.
The whole thing with the Atlantic Charter is huge hypocrisy a far as Roosevelt and especially Churchill were concerned in my eyes. Maybe Roosevelt was sincere about universal freedom and destruction of philosophy of "conquest or the subjugation of other people" but Churchill was not. The British Empire and big parts of the USA were based on exactly these principles.
This book also made me question some common wisdoms in my country. You see, statistically, the Soviet denazification program proved to be far more aggressive than what took place in the other Allied zones. And in combination with the given numbers of convicted war criminals here, I really have to wonder what the often-stated charge of "Most were never convicted" is really based on. I am serious, I don't think I have ever seen a source on this.
One chapter states that the defeat and occupation of Japan proved to be very different from what took place in Germany, in large part because the US had played a singular role in the defeat of Japan. But what about the British and the Soviets? Didn't they fight in the East as well? And from there the book went to something more questionable in my mind as it claimed that Stimson told Truman that he thought it would take an invasion force of 5 million to take the Japanese home islands, with as many as a million US casualties. But did he? And it would take two bombs - one on August 6 over Hiroshima and another three days later over Nagasaki - to convince Japanese leaders to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. And the Soviet attack? Did that have no influence?
And the statement regarding the restoration of Germany and Japan: “This was a doubly remarkable lesson given that the Allies had far more substantial reasons to despise the Germans and the Japanese in 1945, given the untold horrors they committed in Europe and Asia. “
So? All the allied powers had similar horrible stuff in their histories and fact is that they rebuilt Germany and Japan out of self-interest in the main part if you ask me.
The last chapter I completely forgot about the moment I stopped reading the book.
So, all in all I think this book is worth reading even if it is a bit chaotic and boring in places.
Displaying 1 of 1 review