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East Asian-German Cinema

This is the frst 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 Ger-
man 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 flm scholars to see the broader contexts in which these flms
are produced. It introduces multiple compelling topics, not just immi-
gration, multiculturalism, and exile, but also Japonisme, children’s liter-
ature, musical modernity, media hybridity, gender representation, urban
space, Cold War divisions, and national identity. It addresses several
genres—feature flms, essay flms, and documentary flms. 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 con-
tributors represent multiple disciplines and four world regions.

Joanne Miyang Cho is Professor of History at William Paterson University

of New Jersey.
Routledge Studies in Cultural History

108 The Formal Call in the Making of the Baltic Bourgeoisie

Kekke Stadin

109 Audience and Reception in the Early Modern Period

Edited by John R. Decker and Mitzi Kirkland-Ives

110 The Retornados from the Portuguese Colonies in Africa

Edited by Elsa Peralta

111 Folklore and Nation in Britain and Ireland

Edited by Matthew Cheeseman and Carina Hart

112 The Politics and Polemics of Culture in Ireland, 1800–2010

Pat Cooke

113 Emotions as Engines of History

Edited by Rafał Borysławski and Alicja Bemben

114 East Asian-German Cinema

The Transnational Screen, 1919 to the Present
Edited by Joanne Miyang Cho

115 The Afterlife of the Shoah in Central and Eastern

European Cultures
Concepts, Problems, and the Aesthetics of
Postcatastrophic Narration
Edited by Anna Artwińska and Anja Tippner

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

com/Routledge-Studies-in-Cultural-History/book-series/SE0367
East Asian-German Cinema
The Transnational Screen, 1919
to the Present

Edited by
Joanne Miyang Cho
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Joanne Miyang Cho;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Joanne Miyang Cho to be identifed as the author
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested

ISBN: 978-0-367-74377-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-74378-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-15754-0 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003157540

Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
To Henrik Juho
Contents

List of Figures xi
Acknowledgments xiii

1 German Cinema, German Hybrid Cinema,

and Organization 1
J OA N N E M I YA N G C H O

PART I
Film Adaptations and Representations of the
East Asian-German Relationship, 1919–1945 25

2 Implicating Buddhism in Madame

Butterfy’s Tragedy: Japonisme and Japan-Bashing
in Fritz Lang’s Harakiri (1919) 27
QI N NA SHEN

3 The Familiar Unfamiliar: Japan in Interwar

German Feature Films 59
R I C K Y W. L AW

4 “A Loving Family” (Ai no ikka, 1941): The Transcultural

Film Adaptation of a Classic German Children’s Book in
Wartime Japan 80
H A R A L D SA LOMON

5 Documentaries about Jewish Exiles in Shanghai: Witness

Testimony and Cross-Cultural Public Memory Formation 100
B I RG I T M A I E R- K AT K I N
viii Contents
PART II
Representations of Gender in the 1950s and 1960s:
Asian Femininity and Idealized Masculinity 121

6 A Façade of Solidarity: East Germany’s Attempted

Dialogue with China in The Compass Rose
(Die Windrose, 1957) 123
Q I N G YA N G Z H O U

7 The World(s) of Anna Suh: Race, Migration,

and Ornamentalism in Bis zum Ende aller Tage
(Until the End of Days, 1961) 146
Z AC H R A M O N F I T Z PAT R I C K

8 Idealized Masculinity, National Identity,

and the Other: The James Bond Archetype in
German and Japanese Spy Fiction 176
A A RO N D. H O RT O N

PART III
Cultural Globalization and the Persistence
of the Popular since the 1970s 195

9 China’s Encounter with Mozart in Two Films:

From Musical Modernity to Cultural Globalization 197
J I NSONG CH EN

10 The Persistence of the Popular: The Cinemas of

National Division in Germany and Korea 218
ST EV E CHOE

PART IV
East Asian-German Entanglements since the 1980s 237

11 Temporal Structures and Rhythms in Wenders’

Tokyo-Ga (1985) and Ottinger’s The Korean
Wedding Chest (2009) 239
S H A M B H AV I P R A K A S H
 Contents ix
12 My Own Private Tokyo: The Japan Features
of Doris Dörrie 262
B RU C E W I L L I A M S

13 Claiming Cultural Citizenship: East Asian-German

Presence on YouTube and Public Television’s
www.funk.net 282
S A B I N E VO N D I R K E

Contributors 299
Index 303
Figures

2.1 Production announcement of “Madame Butterfy”

in Lichtbild-Bühne (1918) 29
2.2 “Madame Butterfy” in Der Kinematograph (1918) 30
2.3 Screenshot. A table of Oriental objects in Olaf and
Eva’s European home (54:57) 33
2.4 Screenshot. The daimyo bows before a Buddhist altar
before committing seppuku as the scene fades out with
a typical iris shot (19:37) 35
2.5 Screenshot. O-Take-San kneels before a Buddhist altar
before killing herself (1:25:15) 36
2.6 Screenshot. First appearance of the bonze (4:17) 37
2.7 Screenshot. The bonze threatens O-Take-San: “Buddha
will certainly punish you” (11:05) 39
2.8 Kaiser Wilhelm and Hermann Knackfuss, “The Yellow
Peril” (lithograph, 1895) 42
2.9 Harakiri poster (in Rolf Aurich, Fritz Lang and Thersa
Matsuura, Uncanny Japan) 44
2.10 Harakiri poster (in Aurich, Fritz Lang) 46
2.11 Harakiri poster (source: “Harakiri,” IMDB) 47
6.1 Helene Weigel in the opening scene 129
6.2 Weigel points to each country on the globe 130
6.3 The main character Chen Hsiu Hua in the
Chinese segment 132
6.4 Chinlin (left) and Hsiu Hua (right) feeding the calf 134
6.5 Hsiu Hua’s mother (center left) and husband (center
right) at the election 136
7.1 Suzie Wong (Nancy Kwan) and Robert in The World of
Suzie Wong (1960) 149
7.2 Aki (Akiko Wakabayashi) and James Bond (Sean
Connery) in You Only Live Twice (1967) 152
7.3 BzEaT, Anna Suh gazing back at Glen while
serenading him 154
7.4 BzEaT, one of the point-of-view shots angled upward as
Glen rides through the streets of Hong Kong 155
xii Figures
7.5 BzEaT, Anna Suh’s room flled with Asian-coded
objects that “stand in for greater unknowns” 156
7.6 BzEaT, Anna Suh and Kuddel in the picturesque Tiger
Balm Garden 157
7.7 BzEaT, Anna Suh feeding Glen after he fails
to use chopsticks 161
7.8 BzEaT, fve children in Hong Kong eating with
chopsticks, while pointing and laughing at Kuddel 162
7.9 BzEaT, Anna Suh eating contently with
chopsticks in Olesund 162
7.10 BzEaT, Anna Suh’s dejected body language, while Glen
futilely apologizes 163
7.11 BzEaT, Glen and Kuddel are transfxed by
Anna Suh when she frst appears 165
7.12 BzEaT, Anna Suh unwillingly wearing the
red dress at the pub 166
Acknowledgments

The editor would like to express her appreciation to the Routledge editor
Max Novick for his very generous assistance and accommodation. She
would also like to convey her appreciation to the Routledge editorial
assistant Jennifer E. Morrow. She is grateful to her fellow Asian German
Studies scholars, many of whom are regular participants at the Ger-
man Studies Association annual conferences, where they present their
exciting new research and support each other’s scholarly endeavors. The
contributors are especially thankful to Sarah Panzer for her tireless and
invaluable assistance in editing the manuscript.
1 German Cinema,
German Hybrid Cinema,
and Organization
Joanne Miyang Cho

In the twentieth-frst century, Germany and the nations of East Asia

(China, Japan, and Korea) have engaged in frequent contact to an un-
precedented degree, despite being located at opposite ends of the globe.
In the frst half of the twentieth century, however, when the East-West
relationship was typically defned in colonial terms, their relationship
was fundamentally different. Even though Germany was a colonial
power in China until 1915, they renegotiated their relationship to be-
come key partners in trade and military affairs in the 1920s and 1930s.
Germany was Japan’s model during the Meiji Restoration in the felds 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, be-
cause it was not colonized by a Western power but rather by Japan. Ger-
man 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 confdence that its own so-
cial 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 infuenced 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 frst edited
volume dedicated to the study of East Asian-German cinema. It intro-
duces 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 felds. 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.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003157540-1
2 Joanne Miyang Cho
The frst and second sections attempt to situate this volume within current
English-language scholarship on German flm. The frst section focuses
on two roughly defned “camps” of flm scholars. The frst 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 Ger-
man 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 subfelds
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, gen-
der representations, Cold War divisions, urban space, musical hybrid-
ity, 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 flms, the remainder
analyze essay flms, 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-frst century. Stephen Brockmann’s A Critical
History of German Film (2010) is perhaps the clearest example of ap-
proaching German flms from a specifcally national context. He points
to “the overwhelming critical consensus” that German cinema is “a ‘na-
tional cinema.’” He argues that “The critical study of German flm his-
tory 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 his-
tory.” He contrasts Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947), which is
an “eminently critical history of German cinema,” to Sabine Hake’s “re-
visionist” book, German National Cinema (2nd ed., 2008). He criticizes
Hake for emphasizing the international elements of German cinema
rather than its “German peculiarities.”3 Moreover, he is critical of glo-
balization, which he confates 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
 German Cinema, German Hybrid Cinema 3
second edition of the book (2020) Brockmann expands upon his earlier
critique of globalization, but his position remains unchanged. He wants
to probe German flm “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 pecu-
liarity (Sonderweg) with respect to its cinema, but they diverge in favor-
ing a more national or Western contextualization of the feld. Nora M.
Alter’s Projecting History. German Nonfction Cinema, 1967–2000
(2002) is different from the other books in this section, in that she ex-
clusively analyzes essay flms. She is critical of most flm studies from
the 1980s and 1990s; by overwhelmingly focusing on narrative feature
flms, they implicitly privileged New German Cinema.6 Although she
discusses at length the global connections of a number of flms discussed
in her book, she chose them in accordance with her emphasis on Ger-
man peculiarity: “The flms address basic problems of German history,
including its overall ‘peculiarity’ within the European context, and, in
particular, the specifc ways in which the National Socialist legacy con-
tinues to haunt Germans.”7 Although her main focus is essay flms, the
question concerning the tension between national and transnational is
also of signifcance for her work. In studying these flms, she subjects
them to the “national-transnational structure.” It is both national, since
she analyzes the ways in which “the nonfction genre develops within
Germany,” and transnational, because she examines the ways in which
these flms are in communication with nonfction flms produced glob-
ally. Despite her advocacy for the transnational perspective, her criti-
cal view of Hollywood is different from other scholars who support a
more Western-oriented context. This stems from her opposition to Hol-
lywood feature flm production, which historically has overshadowed
essay flm production.8
The editors of A New History of German Cinema (2012), Jennifer M.
Kapczynski and Michael D. Richardson, express some reservations to-
ward 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 flm
industry and global audiences are constantly expanding and diversify-
ing. They see the idea of “a ‘German’ national cinema” as “shifting and
porous.” They want to study “moments of international infuence and
exchange,” as well as acknowledge both the contributions of German
flmmakers working overseas and that of German language cinema to
other countries’ flm cultures. This work does contain some chapters
on Asian and Hollywood connections to German cinema. On the other
hand, Kapczynski and Richardson frmly defend the importance of a na-
tional context because of its central role “in representing, shaping, and
4 Joanne Miyang Cho
interpreting German history and culture.” They foreground the flms
that were made “within the historical political boundaries of the na-
tion.”9 Moreover, the chapters are structured around a series of specifc
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 Euro-
pean project. On the one hand, he explains how “Vergangenheitsbewäl-
tigung (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 commemora-
tion of the Holocaust a common project.” During the 1980s and 1990s,
several countries in the European Union passed laws criminalizing Ho-
locaust 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 pe-
culiarity and instead analyze German cinema from within its broader
Western context (Europe and Hollywood). In German National Cin-
ema (2nd ed., 2008), Sabine Hake does not reject the idea of a national
cinema, but refutes it when it is the product of “internal coherence” and
“exclusion and demarcation.” She also questions “a cinematic Sonder-
weg (special path) in the ways suggested for modern German history.”15
Like a number of German global historians who criticize Hans-Ulrich
Wehler and Klaus Hilderbrand for emphasizing the German historical
Sonderweg and who instead interpret modern German history from a
more transnational perspective,16 Hake argues that German cinema has
been transnational from the beginning. Thus she wants to acknowledge
“foreign infuences, international developments, and global forces” as
well as “the mechanisms of integration, assimilation, and hybridiza-
tion” in relation to other cinemas.17 Yet, her analysis suggests that, with
respect to German cinema, the transnational denotes primarily a Eu-
ropean or Western framework. She highlights bi-directional infuences
among Europeans and between Europe and Hollywood: many foreign-
ers contributed to the German flm industry as directors, producers,
 German Cinema, German Hybrid Cinema 5
cameramen, etc., and several waves of German flmmakers emigrated to
Hollywood and other places.18
In The German Cinema Book (2nd ed., 2020), the four editors, Tim
Bergfelder et al., state that they do not intend to repudiate the national
as an analytical tool, for the nation is seen as “a powerful administra-
tive fgure for social experiences of collectivity and belonging.”19 How-
ever, they agree with Hake’s rejection of “a ‘national cinema striving for
an internal coherence and unity.’”20 They dispute the claim of German
cinema as having frm borders, a fxed framework, and “nativist nar-
ratives of national cinema.” Instead, it constantly fuctuates, refecting
changes on all levels of human societal experiences, from the local to
the global. By embracing the transnational turn, they emphasize “his-
tories of transfers, translations, travel, and exchange in an increasingly
interconnected world” in their study. Moreover, the book traces forms
of cultural exchange between Germany and other European countries,
as well as with Hollywood, Turkey, India, and Africa. 21 One of the ed-
itors, Deniz Görkürk, wants to rethink “the history of these exchanges
in a global context of transnational migration.”22 Yet most chapters in
the book are framed within a Western context and there are only a few
chapters engaging with the idea of hybrid cinema.
In German Film after Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic
(2008), Randall Halle similarly does not reject the notion of German
national cinema. He is opposed, however, to national narratives based
upon “Romantic nationalist essentialism.” Instead, he wants to bring a
transnational perspective to the study of German cinema through “na-
tional and transnational mediation.”23 For him, the transnational also
means primarily “a European orientation.”24 He points out that “The
transnationalization of Europe” makes large-scale flm productions
possible, such as Enemy at the Gate. 25 He is skeptical of the theory
of the German Sonderweg, for while something might seem “partic-
ular and peculiar” to a single nation-state, it is often “ubiquitous and
quite mundane” from a broader perspective. 26 Thus, the global does
not necessarily mean losing sight of particularity, but seeking “common
denominators” and “shared interests in a broader scale.”27 He supports
the project of comparing German productions not only to Hollywood
productions but also against those of other European countries (e.g.,
French, Dutch, and Polish) as well as those of non-Western countries
(e.g., Hong Kong, Japan, or Thailand). 28
The editors of The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the
Global Imaginary, 1945 to the Present (2007), Stephan K. Schindler
and Lutz Koepnick, have gone even further than the aforementioned
scholars in advocating for a transnational perspective. They analyze
two dominant ways in which German cinema has been framed as es-
sentially national. Prior to the 1990s, flm scholars preferred Weimar’s
expressionist cinema and the New German Cinema for what it could
6 Joanne Miyang Cho
reveal about German national peculiarity. After the 1990s, flm schol-
ars positioned themselves in opposition to Hollywood cinema and
thus shared a renewed interest in the national, ironically at around the
same time when the hegemony of the modern nation-state was being
disrupted. 29 Instead, Schindler and Koepenick welcome a new German
cinema which emerged around 2000, and which challenged the national
through a “new geopolitical or transnational aesthetic.” They attribute
a new realignment in German flm study to young flmmakers like “Fa-
tih Akin, Thomas Arslan, Vanessa Jopp, Dani Levy, Christian Petzold,
Hans-Christian Schmid, and Tom Tykwe.” Schindler and Koepenick
situate their study in “this recent budding of global, transnational, and
cosmopolitan sensibilities.”30 In particular, they see Akin’s characters,
Gabriels and Sibels, as revealing contemporary German society to be
“one of surprisingly transnational and globalized sensibilities.”31 Yet,
this volume’s focus is still primarily Eurocentric, albeit “a new Europe of
decentered national boundaries and multilateral orientations.”32

German Hybrid Cinema

This section explores German hybrid or transnational cinema. What
are the key characteristics of transnationalism or transnational cinema?
First, Randall Halle distinguishes “globalization, as primarily an eco-
nomic process, from transnationalism, as an affliative and ideational
network.”33 But there are different opinions on this distinction. For
example, several German historians, such as Sebastian Conrad, Dom-
inic Sachsenmaier, and Jürgen Osterhammel, prefer to speak of global
history rather than transnational history. 34 In the USA, however, there
is less consensus. Even the two editors of The Palgrave Dictionary of
Transnational History (2009) disagree on the appropriate usage of
these terms. For Pierre-Yves Saunier, transnational history is only ap-
plicable for the last 200–250 years, whereas global history can be used
in analyzing historical change since 1500.35 His co-editor Akira Iriye,
on the other hand, references the global and the transnational in his
analysis more or less interchangeably.36 It is indeed reasonable to argue
that the global and the transnational can be seen as analogous, if not
interchangeable, theoretical frames, although the transnational is used
more often than the global in cinematic studies. Second, transnational
cinema is distinct from the concept of post-colonialism, for postcolonial
theory can only explain elements of one’s experiences, and often omits
the life of the former colonized before the arrival of the West. Moreover,
the world is increasingly shaped by “its technological future,” rather
than its colonial past.37 Also, in contrast to post-colonialism, transna-
tionalism can provide “a more multivalenced approach” in dealing with
“the issues of immigration, exile, political asylum, tourism, terrorism,
and technology.”38 Third, transnational cinema rejects “the ‘us’ and
 German Cinema, German Hybrid Cinema 7
‘them’ binaries of world or national cinemas.”39 It also rejects “‘myths
of national exceptionalism,’ ‘purity’ and ‘containment.’”40 Instead, it
emphasizes hybridity, impurity, and border-crossing. Due to the strong
hybridizing tendencies of the present, it is impossible to strictly demar-
cate Hollywood from other local and regional cinemas. Not only are
there Euro-American co-productions, but there are also several major
non-Western international production centers, especially in “South and
East Asia.”41 Lastly, transnational cinema highlights the important role
of globalization in flm production, distribution, and reception.42 Glo-
balization has also greatly increased the circulation of flms through
“technologies such as video, DVD, and new digital media.”43
At present, one can identify two German hybrid cinemas—Turkish
German cinema and East Asian-German cinema. Both belong to the
cinema of immigration, which centers on the various immigrant groups
present in Germany today, as well as their connections to their countries
of origin. However, there is one difference between these two cinemas.
For East Asian-German cinema, immigration and labor are just two
among several important topics, in contrast to Turkish German cinema,
because the number of East Asian immigrants in Germany is compara-
tively small. Instead, a number of cross-civilizational topics are equally
important within East Asian-German cinema. With respect to scholar-
ship, since scholarship on Turkish German cinema began in the mid-
1990s, there are currently several substantial works engaging with it.
By contrast, there are mostly shorter works and only a few longer works
dealing with East Asian-German cinema, because this feld has only
emerged in the last decade. This disparity in coverage is also refected
in the seven works on German cinema discussed in the previous section.
While six of them have at least one chapter on Turkish German cinema,
there are only three chapters on East Asian-German topics across the
seven volumes collectively. In the following, I will briefy review some
recent English-language work on Turkish German cinema, and then sur-
vey the current scholarship on East Asian-German cinema.
In addition to two short monographs by Daniela Berghahn and Ali
Nihat Eken,44 there are several longer works dealing specifcally with
Turkish German cinema. The editors of Turkish German Cinema in the
New Millennium (2012), Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel, argue that
Turkish German flms expand “standard accounts of German flm his-
tory” by Bergfelder et al. (2008), Hake (2008), and Brockmann (2010),
the works that were discussed in the previous section.45 Describing Ger-
man cinema as being, from its beginning, “multicultural, accented, hy-
brid, and hyphenated,”46 they see Turkish German cinema as only the
most recent manifestation of German cinema. Nonetheless, they note its
unique position in occupying both German and Turkish sides “marked
by the absent hyphen: of being self and other, at home and abroad, for-
eign and native.”47 Due to its involvement on both sides, they reject
8 Joanne Miyang Cho
applying a binary logic of either-or to these categories. Moreover, they
consider Turkish German cinema’s typical association with “national
belonging and ethnic embodiment” and the politics of identity as inad-
equate in a globalized world.48 Although ethnicity is still a justifable
category of investigation, they recommend conceiving it “beyond its re-
ductive, normative, or exclusionary functions.”49
In Post-Unifcation Turkish German Cinema (2018), Gozde Nai-
boglu examines feature flms, documentaries, and videos on labor mi-
gration from Turkey to Germany, mostly by Turkish German directors
(“Thomas Arslan, Christian Petzold, Aysun Bademsoy, Harun Farocki,
Feo Aldag, Yüksel Yavuz”). She does so “in a broader context of Euro-
pean art cinema.” Her analysis is embedded in the broader context of
political and social changes in the age of globalization, for it can shed
light on a shift in cinema occurring in the 1990s. 50 Like many current
scholars in the feld, she objects to the older flm scholarship on Turk-
ish German cinema that focused on “identity-oriented approaches” and
“narrative tropes such as integration, entrapment and female victimiza-
tion through spatial terms.” This scholarship marginalized key topics
in Turkish German Cinema, such as “work and labour.” She also high-
lights the importance of reformulating “issues of ethics, subjectivity, la-
bour and reproduction” in the context of global capitalism. 51
Among Turkish German directors, Fatih Akin has received the most
attention. In Fatih Akin’s Cinema and the New Sound of Europe (2019),
Berna Gueneli highlights Akin’s flms as denying “fantasies of homog-
enous and monolingual nation-states” in Europe through his emphasis
on “demographic diversity.”52 She compliments Akin’s cinema for de-
picting European diversity subtly and innovatively and showing it “in
terms of plot and story, aesthetics, and intertextualities.”53 In doing so,
it challenges the conventional images of Europe and European cinema,
which focus on ethnic and cultural homogeneity. Instead, Akin’s cinema
shows Europe’s ethnic diversity in a globalizing world. It also opposes
“xenophobic, Islamophobic discourses in Europe” which have grown in-
creasingly loud since 9/11.54 Although Akin is often regarded as a Euro-
pean flmmaker, Gueneli sees this European label as limiting and wants
to expand it by including northeastern Turkey. 55 In fact, she goes even
beyond it, since she wants to discuss his cinema’s “elaborate intertextu-
alities” not only with Turkish and German flm histories, but also with
other European and global flm histories. 56
Although some German flm scholars are not themselves specialists
in Asian German cinema, they favor incorporating analysis of Asian
cinema into the study of German and European cinema. Thomas El-
saesser recommends adopting an open perspective toward Asian cin-
emas (East Asia, South East Asia) which have received “a remarkably
high recognition value in markets” in the West. He prefers Asians’
openness to infuences from Hollywood to that of Europeans. Asian
 German Cinema, German Hybrid Cinema 9
cinemas became “so much more hybrid, ‘postmodern’ and eclectic,”
after fully adopting Hollywood (and Hong Kong) movie style, whereas
European cinema was “more self-consciously concerned with national
specifcity and cultural identity” during Hollywood’s slump during the
mid-1960s. 57 Similarly, Lutz Koepenick recommends studying East
Asian art cinemas, which are responding to “larger processes of uneven
globalization across various national, regional, and cultural divides.”
Referring to Marco Abel’s attribution of “a tendency to ‘stare’” to Ber-
lin School flms, he points it out that it was “a common mark of inter-
national art house flmmakers since the mid-1980s and early 1990s.”
Perhaps its best formulation can be seen in the flms of East Asian
flmmakers, such as “Taiwanese Hou Hsiao-hsien, Malaysian Tsai
Ming-liang, Korean Kim Ki-Duk, Thai Apichatpong Weerasethakul,
and mainland Chinese Jia Zhangke.”58 While the study of the Ber-
lin School has energized American German flm scholars, he criticizes
them as having failed to properly embed the School within broader dis-
cussions in international art cinema studies or to connect Berlin School
flms with major Asian flmmakers. 59
As stated above, since East Asian-German cinema study has only just
emerged in the last decade, it is still too early to identify scholarly trends,
except in the case of the cinema produced in the context of the alliance
between Nazi Germany and Japan. This survey, nonetheless, will pro-
vide some observations in situating the current scholarship and may help
to map out future possible research topics. Many of these works were
published in recent edited volumes in Asian German studies, as well as
in some journals. At present, only a few book-length works exist. This
overview starts with Japanese German cinema. Iris Haukamp’s article
(2017) examines “the Japanese industry’s early push on to the German
market” around three German-Japanese co-productions between 1926
and 1933.60 Ricky W. Law’s chapter (2014) delves into “the infuence
newsreels exercised in molding public perceptions of Japan in interwar
Germany” and “its impact on German-Japanese relations in the mid-
1930s.”61 In a chapter from his 2019 monograph, he shows that in the
1920s and 1930s, “flm contributed to German-Japanese convergence”
by marking “Japan as ideologically acceptable.”62 So far, two versions
of the same movie have received particular scholarly attention. As the
most famous example(s) of German-Japanese co-productions, the flms
used the same script by Arnold Fanck and employed the same cast—
Fanck’s The Samurai’s Daughter (Die Tochter des Samurai) and Itami
Mansaku’s The New Earth. Janine Hansen’s chapter (2001) argues that
Fanck’s movie failed to function as “a gate-opener for later Japanese
flms for German audience.”63 Valerie Weinstein’s chapter (2014) shows
how the Japanese protagonist combined “native traditions and moder-
nity” through his choice of a Japanese bride.64 Iris Haukamp’s article
(2014) analyzes the lead actress of the flm, Fräulein Setsuko Hara, who
10 Joanne Miyang Cho
played the role of Mitsuko.65 Christin Bohnke’s article (2017) compares
and contrasts the two flms.66
There are also longer treatments on this topic. Iris Haukamp’s mono-
graph, A Foreigner’s Cinematic Dream of Japan (2020), which com-
pares the respective versions of the flm by Fanck and Itami, reveals
their behind-the-scene histories. The book examines “the power play
in transnational encounters and representation, the volatility of subject
positions, how subtle twists change interpretations.”67 It avoids oversim-
plifcation based on national identity, and instead reveals the complex
dynamics of this cross-cultural co-production. Christin Bohnke’s disser-
tation (2017) examines the intersections of race and gender in flm and
print media in the twentieth and twentieth-frst centuries. Her analysis
of the silent flm Bushido (1926) shows “Japan’s complex situation as
simultaneously belonging to an Asian and European cultural realm in
often contradictory ways.” The two co-productions by Fancke and Itami
show how Germany and Japan played down their differences in order to
forge a wartime alliance.68
Post-1945 German-Japanese cinema was far less ideologically moti-
vated compared to the war years. It is notable that several postwar Ger-
man directors showed a special interest in Japan. Wim Wenders made
two essay flms, Tokyo-Ga (1985) and Notebooks on Cities and Clothes
(1989). Nora Alter’s chapter (2002) examines these flms as revealing
“the tension in Japan” between the modern and the postmodern.69 Bruce
Williams’ chapter (2021) examines them “from the perspective of the
director as an aesthetic cosmopolitan.”70 Alice A. Kuzniar’s article ana-
lyzes Doris Doerrie’s flm, Cherry Blossom (2008), and two other Ger-
man flms on East Asia, and argues that they “represent through their
Asian setting the journey of self-exploration via the exotic Other.”71 Er-
ika M. Nelson’s chapter (2014) analyzes how the same flm depicts “the
graceful manner in which Japanese culture deals with bereavement.”72
Bonke’s dissertation (2017) also examines a recent flm by a Japanese
director in Germany, Marie Miyayama’s Red Dot (2008), which follows
a Japanese woman in post-Cold War Germany.73
When one looks at the scholarship on Chinese German cinema published
in English during the last decade, one notes that the pre-1945 period top-
ics discussed are diverse, despite the limited number of publications. Cyn-
thia Walk’s chapter (2014) analyzes the flms that the Chinese-American
actress Anna May Wong made with German directors, and interrogates
how they “allowed Wong to engage in a performative display of race and
gender.”74 Tobias Nagl’s chapter (2012) describes how Chinese students
raised “charges of racism in 1920 against the eight-part 1919 silent flm
Die Herrin der Welt.”75 The movie, John Rabe (2009), which depicts
the humanitarian role of the German businessman John Rabe during the
Nanking massacre, is the topic of articles by both Qinna Shen (2011) and
Bruce Williams (2021).76 Shambhavi Prakash’s chapter (2018) treats two
 German Cinema, German Hybrid Cinema 11
documentary flms on German-speaking Jewish refugees in Shanghai in
the 1930s and 1940s.77 Qinna Shen is perhaps the most prolifc author
for the Cold War period. Her two book chapters analyze DEFA flms
and documentaries (2014, 2016). A more recent chapter (2018) treats the
reception of Chinese flms in divided Germany.78 For the post-Cold War
period, her chapter (2013) analyzes a comedy (Die Chinesen kommen,
1987) and a documentary (Losers and Winners, 2013), which depicts
Chinese workers taking parts from German factories back to China for
reassembly.79 Her most recent article (2021) highlights Lou Ye’s Chinese
German flm, Summer Palace (2006), which was de facto banned in the
People’s Republic of China.80
Compared to both Japan and China, Korean German cinema has re-
ceived less attention, despite the two countries’ parallel histories during
the Cold War era. The aforementioned chapter by Kuzniar (2008) also
discusses Ottinger’s essay flm, Korean Wedding Chest. Two common
topics in German-Korean relations, the Cold War division and Korean
Gastarbeiter, have been depicted in narrative and documentary flms.
Bruce Williams’ chapter (2018) explores the depiction of inner-national
borders by analyzing four Korean and German flms. Aaron D. Horton’s
chapter (2018) analyzes the similar stereotypes—“ignorant, inferior
people”—frequently applied to North Koreans in South Korea and to
former East Germans in unifed Germany.81 While most documentary
flms on Korean Gastarbeiter examine the lives of Korean nurses and
miners in Germany,82 the documentary analyzed by Suin Roberts (2018)
focuses instead on “their seasonal returns to the newly founded German
Village (Dokil Mael) in the south of South Korea.”83

Organization of the Book

As the frst edited volume on East Asian-German cinema, this volume
addresses new scholarly demands and priorities. This volume makes sev-
eral unique contributions. First, it introduces several compelling new
topics. While four chapters explore previously examined topics, albeit
from different angles and with new interpretations, eight chapters in-
troduce new topics that have not been previously analyzed in English.
While three chapters treat the topics of immigration, multiculturalism,
and exile, nine chapters focus on various topics in cross-civilizational
relations between Germany and East Asian nations, such as children’s
literature, musical modernity, Japonisme, gender representation, media
hybridity, spy flms, Cold War divisions, national identity, and urban
space. Second, this volume addresses an imbalance in the existing liter-
ature. As discussed in the previous section, there is more existing schol-
arship on Japanese German cinema than on the other two cinemas. This
volume therefore gives nearly equal space to Japanese German cinema
and Chinese German cinema (each fve chapters), and Korean German
12 Joanne Miyang Cho
cinema receives more attention than has been previously the case with
three chapters. Third, this volume presents both German and East Asian
perspectives. Nine chapters involve German directors and six chapters
involve East Asian or East Asian-German directors. Lastly, this volume
discusses several different genres—seven chapters on feature flms, two
on essay flms, one on TV dramas, one on documentary flm, and one
on YouTube.
The volume is organized topically and chronologically in four parts.
Part I examines flms and documentaries regarding German-Japanese
relations and German-speaking Jewish refugees in Shanghai between
1919 and 1945. In Chapter 2, Qinna Shen examines extensively and in
depth Fritz Lang’s Harakiri (1919), an adaptation of the Madame But-
terfy story made by Lang during his frst year as a director. It studies
the production and reception histories of the flm, which was believed
to be lost until a print was discovered in the Netherlands. In compar-
ing the restored version of Harakiri with earlier versions of the story,
the chapter observes that Lang’s flm distinguishes itself by dramatizing
the double hara-kiri of O-Take-San and her father and by transform-
ing the Buddhist bonze (monk), who makes only a brief appearance in
Puccini’s opera, into Butterfy’s principal antagonist. By portraying the
bonze as evil, the flm shifts the responsibility for Butterfy’s tragedy to
Buddhism and, by extension, to Japanese culture itself. The chapter con-
siders both historical and contemporary reasons for the harsh portrayal
of Buddhism in the flm, while recognizing that the negative projection
of Japan stands in tension with the flm’s own Japonisme, a product of
Lang’s passion for East Asian art. Furthermore, a spectacular scene de-
scribed in a contemporary review but missing from the restored version
of the flm alludes to the fact that Harakiri did not provide a vehicle for
Lang’s preferred visual style.
In Chapter 3, Ricky Law examines the depictions of Japan in interwar
German feature flms. It argues that the narrative trope of the “familiar
unfamiliar” pervaded the flmic depictions of Japan in Germany in the
1920s and 1930s. The familiar unfamiliar comprises characters, props,
costumes, sceneries, plotlines, dialogues, promotional strategies, and
other cinematic elements depicting Japan and the Japanese as essentially
foreign to Germany. Yet these elements recurred so habitually and pre-
dictably in feature flms that cinemagoers in Germany could not have
been strangers to them. The chapter surveys the portrayals of Japan in
lost and surviving movies. For most of the 1920s, German movies in-
voking Japan indulged in elements of traditional Japan, such as geishas,
samurais, and Buddhist monks. From about 1928, old Japan faded from
the screen, but German movies continued to apply the familiar unfamil-
iar trope in order to portray a modern Japan. The chapter concludes that
convenience, the infrequency of Japan as a topic, and the versatility of
the trope contributed to its dominance in interwar German movies.
 German Cinema, German Hybrid Cinema 13
In Chapter 4, Harald Salomon examines the transcultural flm ad-
aptation of a classic German children’s book in wartime Japan. In June
1941, the Japanese flm studio Nikkatsu announced the premiere of the
movie “A Loving Family” (Ai no ikka, 1941) featuring the violin prod-
igy Toyoda Kōji. According to the advertising campaign, director Suno-
hara Masahisa and his collaborators had adapted a popular “National
Socialist family novel.” In truth, the flm was based on the children’s
book Die Familie Pfäffing (The Pfäffing Family, 1906), written some
20 years earlier during the Wilhelmine era by the renowned author Ag-
nes Sapper. The novel about a poor family of musicians was arguably
one of the most popular German-language children’s and youth stories
of the twentieth century, and was quickly translated into Japanese and
many other languages. Against the background of an expanding cultural
relationship between Japan and Germany during the frst half of the
twentieth century, this chapter explores the circumstances of the novel’s
translation into Japanese and examines the subsequent screen adapta-
tion, which led to one of the rare music-oriented flms of wartime Japan.
In doing so, the questions of how the story was adapted for contempo-
rary audiences, and how the adaptation project was received by flm
critics receive particular attention.
In Chapter 5, Birgit Maier-Katkin reconsiders Maurice Halbwachs’
argument that individual memories have to come into alignment with
the leading thoughts of the society in order to be incorporated into col-
lective memory. This chapter focuses on the cross-cultural interrela-
tionship between individual and public memory in three documentaries
about German-speaking Jews in wartime Shanghai: (1) Shanghai Ghetto
(2002), (2) Survival in Shanghai (2015), and (3) Above the Drowning
Sea (2017). Each flm addresses witness testimony, intersecting with
aspects of German, Austrian, Chinese, Japanese, Shanghai, and Jew-
ish experience, and reaching across continents, languages, and Eastern
and Western cultural traditions. Focusing on the flms’ respective nar-
rative strategies and depictions of transcultural relationships between
European Jews and East Asians, this chapter examines the construc-
tion of collective public memory across socio-political, national, and
cultural borders. Although each flm documents past experiences en-
compassing multiple cultures and continents, each ultimately reveals
that cross-cultural or global collective discourse is still constrained by
national discourse and imagination. Although remembrance of the suf-
fering under the Nazis continues to inform collective cultural memory
formation—as is evidenced by all three documentaries—the suffering of
the Chinese in Shanghai does not ft neatly into the Western Holocaust
narrative and is therefore only depicted tangentially.
Part II explores gender representation in the 1950s and 1960s in
Japanese German and Chinese German feature flms, as well as German
and Japanese TV spy dramas. They examine Asian femininity and
14 Joanne Miyang Cho
idealized German/Japanese masculinity. In Chapter 6, Qingyang Zhou
explores cultural relations between East Germany (GDR) and China
(PRC) in the 1950s through the lens of The Compass Rose (Die Win-
drose, 1957), a co-produced anthology flm composed of fve distinct
stories. It argues that the flm’s format as a travelogue trivializes encoun-
ters between the East German audience and their socialist comrades as
merely sight-seeing. Moreover, the frst four segments of the anthology
are presented with their original foreign-language dialogues, which are
faithfully summarized or paraphrased by a German voiceover. In the
concluding Chinese segment, however, the German narrator imperson-
ates a minor fgure in the diegetic world, without translating any of the
Chinese characters’ spoken dialogue. Whereas the visual element of the
Chinese segment, flmed by director Wu Guoying, portrays the PRC as a
progressive socialist state eager to embrace modernization, the German
voiceover added by the East German studio during postproduction mis-
represents the Chinese dialogue, plot, and images, thus misrepresenting
the PRC in turn as a traditionalist society in which conservative views
about women’s incompetence in the public sphere still predominated. As
a result, the GDR missed an opportunity to establish genuine solidarity
with the PRC.
In Chapter 7, Zachary Ramon Fitzpatrick argues that Bis zum Ende
aller Tage (Until the End of Days, 1961) is perhaps the very frst flm in
post-WWII German cinema to focus on migration and prejudice against
immigrants. This chapter proves that the flm is an essential piece of
East Asian-German transnational flm history. After the frst half of the
story, spent in the vibrant and Orientalized metropolis of Hong Kong,
bar dancer Anna Suh moves with the sailor Glen to the North Frisian
Islands. Following a comparison to the better-known British-American
The World of Suzie Wong (1960), the chapter then considers the flm
in the context of over a century of Asian representation within Ger-
man cinema. This leads to a discussion of race in melodrama. Finally,
Anne Anlin Cheng’s theory of ornamentalism as it relates to the “yellow
woman” informs an in-depth analysis of Anna Suh and her wardrobe,
most notably her striking red cheongsam. Ultimately, the melodramatic
presentation of the ornamental Asian woman in Germany facilitates an
antiracist critique; this is substantial, because the little-known 1961 flm
predates by over a decade the New German Cinema’s acclaimed por-
trayal of the immigrant’s plight and interracial romance in Rainer Wer-
ner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974).
In Chapter 8, Aaron Horton reveals how in the 1960s, the interna-
tional success of United Artists’ James Bond flms spawned a slew of
imitations around the world. Many, such as the German Kommissar X
series, were campy, playful spoofs of Bond and the spy genre, but others,
such as Germany’s Mister Dynamit and Japan’s Golgo 13, were pre-
sented more seriously. This chapter examines post-World War II German
 German Cinema, German Hybrid Cinema 15
and Japanese spy flms, focusing on their representations of German,
Japanese, and American national identity and their constructions of ide-
alized masculinity, via their respective “James Bond” archetypes. This
work also explores how German and Japanese spy flms present and de-
fne masculinity, not only as a means of better understanding the flms’
appeal, but also in order to compare German and Japanese construc-
tions of the “ideal man,” a concept often paired with discourses sur-
rounding national identity. Finally, this chapter also examines the ways
in which German and Japanese spy flms present essentialized American
characters, either as protagonists (in Kommissar X) or as antagonists (in
Golgo 13). In exploring these themes, the chapter aims at achieving a
better understanding of how German and Japanese spy flms embodied
national identity and aspirations alongside idealized representations of
masculinity.
Part III probes cultural globalization and the persistence of the pop-
ular since the 1970s by looking at all three cinemas. In Chapter 9, Jin-
song Chen reveals how the documentary From Mao to Mozart: Isaac
Stern in China (1980) and the feature flm Mozart in China (2008) stage
China’s encounter with Mozart and his music, which becomes an indis-
pensable component of the flmic narratives while also carrying social,
cultural, and political implications. Rather than dwelling directly on
Chairman Mao, the documentary revisits the historical trauma caused
by the Cultural Revolution (1967–77) and inadvertently highlights the
often imbalanced terms of musical exchange and Eurocentric concep-
tualizations of Chinese modernity. In the latter flm, Mozart’s fctional
encounter with China dismantles the hegemony of Western culture, and
the dynamic exchange of music between the West (Austria) and China
stimulates the construction of a globalized music culture. This chapter
focuses on the re-mystifcation of Mozart and his music, and explores
the voyage undertaken by China in its pursuit of musical modernization
within a globalizing context, a process accelerated through the dynamic
exchange of music with the West (Austria), through mutual cultural ac-
ceptance, through a global musical practice, and through the promotion
of a more universal musical aesthetic.
In Chapter 10, Steve Choe looks at a number of more recent popular
flms from Germany and Korea that address the issue of divided na-
tionhood. It places them in conversation with two key discourses: the
melodramatic mode of popular cinema and Jürgen Habermas’s 1996
essay, “National Unifcation and Popular Sovereignty.” In melodrama,
the experience of division is typically depicted as emotionally moving,
and this emotion is thought to serve as the motor for inspiring and driv-
ing popular sovereignty within the political sphere. In engaging with
these discourses, this chapter critically addresses the ostensible univer-
sality of melodrama and the notion of the nation that is associated with
it. While discussing individual German and Korean flms, the chapter
16 Joanne Miyang Cho
revisits Habermas with this deconstruction in mind and points to the
compromises of the nation-state form when melodrama and its politics
of emotion are transferred, seemingly unproblematically, from one his-
torical context to another.
Part IV explores German directors in East Asia and East Asian You-
Tubers in Germany since 1980s. In Chapter 11, Shambhavi Prakash ex-
plores how the documentary flms Tokyo Ga (1985) by Wim Wenders
and The Korean Wedding Chest (2009) by Ulrike Ottinger engage with
temporal rhythms. Wenders and Ottinger probe the connections be-
tween the new and the old in Tokyo and Seoul respectively, especially
in the way that images—through flms and photography—mediate the
relationship between the two. The two directors investigate this relation-
ship in their flms by evoking different aspects of temporality. Wenders
highlights the acceleration of work and life rhythms as well as the circu-
lation of images that mark life in Tokyo, while simultaneously harkening
back to the spaces and fgures familiarized through Japanese flmmaker
Yasujiro Ozu’s (1903–63) flms. Ottinger focuses instead on the rhythms
of lifecycle rituals and their intercalation with the rhythms of the wed-
ding industry, through her portrait of a Korean wedding in Seoul. This
chapter examines how both flms illustrate the importance of temporal-
ity to considerations of space, underscore the polyrhythmicity of urban
spaces, and call attention to the link between cinematic rhythms and
representations.
In Chapter 12, Bruce Williams discusses how, between 1999 and
2019, German director Doris Dörrie made four feature flms set in Ja-
pan, which were largely inspired by the study of Zen Buddhism and
affnity for Japanese culture that had marked her life. The flms Enlight-
enment Guaranteed (1999), Cherry Blossoms (2008), Greetings from
Fukushima (2016), and Cherry Blossoms and Demons (2019) do not
constitute an in-depth exploration of Japanese culture per se, but rather
focus on Germans who embark on a journey to self-discovery by visiting
the island nation. Japan is thus personalized, and what is gleaned from
the cross-cultural experience is a sense of peace through the acceptance
of one’s life. Dörrie’s protagonists come to grips with grief, with the
overwhelming power of memory, and with their own gender and sexual-
ity. Dörrie’s Japan is, in part, one defned by stereotypes—her characters
dream of Mount Fuji and cherry blossoms. Yet, more importantly, it is
also a land of the avant-garde and a bridge between this world and the
realm of the supernatural. Dörrie’s personalized Japan, however, tran-
scends the individual and provides a meditation on historical memory.
In Chapter 13, Sabine von Dirke observes that the representation of
East Asian Germans on their home country’s television screens has been
scarce, generally informed by Asian stereotypes, and that they are typi-
cally coded as foreign Others rather than as citizens. Digital media, how-
ever, has leveled the playing feld and the second generation of East Asian
 German Cinema, German Hybrid Cinema 17
Germans has taken to YouTube in embracing a powerful new medium of
self-representation since the millennial turn. This chapter analyzes the
pop cultural formats and aesthetic strategies deployed by the frst co-
hort of East Asian-German YouTubers in negotiating their positionality
in the German nation. The analysis elucidates how their use of parody
and comedy aims to debunk Asian stereotypes circulating in the major-
ity society. A detailed discussion of the mockumentary Planet Supreme.
King of Westberg, featuring the Korean German YouTuber Joon Kim and
employing North Korea as a foil, assesses the critical potential of these
strategies, especially if they are incorporated into public television. The
mockumentary was commissioned by funk.net, German public televi-
sion’s own YouTube channel, which began broadcasting in October 2016.
This volume traces the cinematic encounters and entanglements be-
tween Germany and East Asia since the end of World War I. Although
East Asian-German cinema has been a part of German cinema for over a
century, flm scholars have only begun to engage with it in the last several
years. It is clear that the emergence of this feld has been enabled both
by increasing interest in transnational cinema since the end of the Cold
War and by the growing popularity of East Asian movies in the West. As
demonstrated by the prestigious international flm awards that are now
regularly given to East Asian flms, contemporary East Asian cinema
possesses sophisticated flm techniques, persuasive storylines, and pop-
ular appeal. It is hoped that this new East Asian-German cinema study
can accelerate cross-cultural exchange by introducing East Asian cinema
study to German cinema study and vice versa. A wider perspective will
necessarily enable flm scholars to engage more productively with the
broader contexts in which these flms are produced, as suggested by Lutz
Koepinick earlier in this chapter. In short, as the frst edited volume in
this new exciting feld, it is quite encouraging to see a growing number
of invested scholars. The next 12 chapters introduce a diverse range of
engaging and compelling topics. By embracing three East Asian cinemas
in one volume, this work should serve as an excellent introduction for
German cinema students and scholars. Lastly, this volume should appeal
to international and interdisciplinary audiences, because its contributors
come from three different continents (North America, East Asia/South
Asia, Europe) and from a multitude of different disciplines—German
cinema, German literature, history, and East Asian studies.

Notes
1 Toru Takanaka, “A Close Country in the Distance: Japanese Images of
Germany in the Twentieth Century,” in Transnational Encounters between
Germany and East Asia since 1900, ed. Joanne Miyang Cho (New York:
Routledge, 2018), 96–97.
2 Stephen Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film (Rochester, NY:
Camden House, 2010), 8, 5.
18 Joanne Miyang Cho
3 Ibid., 2–3.
4 Ibid., 9.
5 Stephen Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film, 2nd ed. (Rochester,
NY: Camden House, 2020), 8.
6 Nora M. Alter, Projecting History. German Nonfction Cinema, 1967–
2000 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2000), 3.
7 Ibid., 7.
8 Ibid., 6.
9 Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Michael D. Richardson, eds., A New History of
German Cinema (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), 6.
10 Ibid., 4.
11 Ibid., 1.
12 Thomas Elsaesser, German Cinema since 1945 – Terror and Trauma:
Cultural Memory (New York: Routledge, 2014), 4–5.
13 Ibid., 265–66.
14 Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 491, 494.
15 Sabine Hake, German National Cinema, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge,
2008), 4–5.
16 Sebastian Conrad, “Double Marginalization: A Plea for a Transnational Per-
spective on German History,” in Comparative and Transnational History.
Central European Approaches and New Perspectives, ed. Heinz-Gerhard
Haupt and Jürgen Kocka (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 52; Dominic
Sachsenmaier, “Alternative Visions of World Order,” in Competing Visions
of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s, ed. Se-
bastian Conrad and Dominic Sachenmaier (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2009), 172; Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A
Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 19.
17 Hake, German National Cinema, 5.
18 Ibid.
19 Tim Bergfelder et al., “Introduction,” in The German Cinema Book, ed.
Tim Bergfelder et al., 2nd ed. (London: The British Film Institute, 2020), 5.
20 Ibid., 2.
21 Ibid., 5.
22 Deniz Görkürk, “Introduction” to Part 6, in The German Cinema Book,
ed. Tim Bergfelder et al., 2nd ed. (London: The British Film Institute, 2020),
443.
23 Randall Halle, German Film after Germany: Towards a Transnational Aes-
thetic (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 28.
24 Ibid., 7.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 28.
27 Ibid., 15.
28 Ibid., 29.
29 Stephan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick, “Introduction,” in The Cosmopol-
itan Screen. German Cinema and the Global Imaginary, 1945 to the Pres-
ent, ed. Stephan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2007), 3–4.
30 Ibid., 5.
31 Ibid., 6–7.
32 Ibid., 9.
33 Halle, German Film after Germany, 28.
34 Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2017); Osterhammel and Petersson, Globalization; Dominic
 German Cinema, German Hybrid Cinema 19
Sachesenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Ap-
proaches in a Connected World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011).
35 Pierre-Yves Saunier, Transnational History: Theory and History (Bas-
ingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 8.
36 Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History. The Past, Present, and Fu-
ture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
37 Lucia Nagib, in Austin Fisher and Iain Robert Smith, “Transnational Cin-
emas: A Critical Roundtable,” Frames Cinema Journal, accessed January
30, 2021, https://framescinemajournal.com/article/transnational-cinemas-
a-critical-roundtable/.
38 Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, “General Introduction. What Is Transna-
tional Cinema?” in Transnational Cinema. The Film Reader, ed. Elizabeth
Ezra and Terry Rowden (New York: Routledge, 2006), 5.
39 Steven Rawl, Transnational Cinema. An Introduction (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018), 1.
40 Tim Bergfelder, in Austin Fisher and Iain Robert Smith, “Transnational Cin-
emas: A Critical Roundtable,” Frames Cinema Journal.
41 Ezra and Rowden, “General Introduction,” 2.
42 Ibid., 13.
43 Ibid., 1.
44 Daniela Berghahn, Head-On (Gegen die Wand) (London: British Film Insti-
tute, 2019; 96 pp); Ali Nihat Eken, Representations of Turkish Immigrants
in Turkish-German Cinema: Tevfk Baser’s 40 Square Meters of Germany
and Faith Akin’s Head-On (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag, 2009; 80 pp).
45 Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel, “Introduction,” in Turkish German Cin-
ema in the New Millennium. Sites, Sounds, and Screen, ed. Sabine Hake
and Barbara Mennel (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 10. In the case of
Bergfelder et al., the previous section discussed the second edition (2020),
not the frst edition that was referred in this passage.
46 Ibid., 12.
47 Ibid., 10.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid., 9.
50 Gozde Naiboglu, Post-Unifcation Turkish German Cinema: Work,
Globalisation and Politics Beyond Representation (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018), 2.
51 Ibid., 4.
52 Berna Gueneli, Fatih Akin’s Cinema and the New Sound of Europe
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 11.
53 Ibid., 2.
54 Ibid., 9.
55 Ibid., 11.
56 Ibid.
57 Elsaesser, “European Cinema,” 495–96.
58 Lutz Koepnick, “German Art Cinema Now,” in Sabine Hake and Lutz
Koepnick, “Forum: German Film Studies,” German Studies Review 36, no.
3 (Oct. 2013): 655–56. I restore “Oct.” Please see above for an explanation.
59 Ibid., 660, 658.
60 Iris Haukamp, “Early Transcontinental Film Relations: Japan, Germany
and the Compromises of Co-Production, 1926–1933.” Historical Journal of
Film, Radio and Television 37, no. 2 (2017): 174–202.
61 Ricky W. Law, “Beauty and the Beast: Japan in Interwar German News-
reels,” in Beyond Alterity: German Encounters with Modern East Asia,
20 Joanne Miyang Cho
ed. Qinna Shen and Martin Rosenstock (New York: Berghahn Books,
2014), 17.
62 Ricky W. Law, Transnational Nazism. Ideology and Culture in
German-Japanese Relations, 1919–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2019), 205.
63 Janine Hansen, “The New Earth (1936–37) -- A German-Japanese Mis-
alliance in Film,” in Praise of Film Studies. Essay Collection in Honor of
Makino Mamoru, ed. A. Gerow and A. M. Nornes (Yokohama/Ann Arbor,
MI: Kinema Club, 2001), 184–98.
64 Martin Rosenstock and Qinna Shen, “Introduction. Re-investigating a
Transnational Connection: Asian German Studies in the New Millennium,”
in Beyond Alterity, 6.
65 Iris Haupkamp, “Fräulein Setsuko Hara: Constructing an International
Film in Nationalist Contexts,” Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 6,
no. 1 (2014): 4–22.
66 Christin Bohnke, “The Perfect German Woman: Gender and Imperialism
in Arnold Fanck’s Die Tochter des Samurai and Itami Mansaku’s The New
Earth,” Women in German Yearbook 33 (2017): 77–100.
67 Iris Haukamp, A Foreigner’s Cinematic Dream of Japan: Representational
Politics and Shadows of War in the Japanese-German Coproduction New
Earth (1937) (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 24.
68 Christin Bonke, “Postcolonial Theory Reconsidered: Discourses of
Race, Gender, and Imperialism in the German-Japanese Realm” (PhD
diss., University of Toronto, 2017), https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/
handle/1807/80744.
69 Alter, Projecting History, 11.
70 Bruce Williams, “The Road to Japan: The Tokyo Films of Wim Wenders,” in
German-East Asian Encounters and Entanglements: Affnity in Culture and
Politics since 1945, ed. Joanne Miyang Cho (New York: Routledge, 2021), 15.
71 Alice A. Kuzniar. “Uncanny Doublings and Asian Rituals in Recent Films
by Monika Treut, Doris Dörrie, and Ulrike Ottinger,” Women in German
Yearbook 27 (2011): 176–99.
72 Rosenstock and Shen, “Introduction,” 15.
73 Bohnke, “Postcolonial Theory Reconsidered.”
74 Cynthia Walk, “Anny May Wong and Weimar Cinema: Orientalism in Post-
colonial Germany,” in Beyond Alterity, 9.
75 Tobias Nagl, “March 1920: Chinese Students Raise Charges of Racism
against Die Herrin der Welt,” in A New History of German Cinema, 73–79.
76 Qinna Shen, “Revisiting the Wound of a Nation: The ‘Good Nazi’ John
Rabe and the Nanking Massacre,” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies
47, no. 5 (November 2011): 661–80; Bruce Williams, “Between Imagined
Homelands: Florian Gallenberger’s John Rabe,” in Sino-German Encoun-
ters and Entanglements: Transnational Politics and Culture, 1890–1950,
ed. Joanne Miyang Cho (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2021).
77 Shambhavi Prakash, “Representations of Jewish Exile and Models of Mem-
ory in Shanghai Ghetto and Exil Shanghai,” in Transnational Encounters
between Germany and East Asia since 1900, ed. Joanne Miyang Cho (New
York: Routledge, 2018), 62–81.
78 Quina Shen, “A Question of Ideology and Realpolitik: DEFA Documenta-
ries on China,” in Beyond Alterity, 94–114; Quina Shen, “Deconstructing
Orientalism. DEFA’s Fictions of East Asia,” in Re-imagining DEFA. East
German Cinema in Its National and Transnational Contexts, ed. Séan Al-
lan and Sebastian Heiduschke (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016): 146–67;
 German Cinema, German Hybrid Cinema 21
Quina Shen, “Raising the ‘Bamboo Curtain’: Chinese Films in Divided
Germany,” in Composing Modernist Connections in China and Europe,
ed. Chunjie Zhang (New York: Routledge, 2018), 123–41.
79 Qinna Shen, “Factories on the Magic Carpet: Heimat, Globalization, and
the ‘Yellow Peril’ in Die Chinesen kommen and Losers and Winners,” in
Imagining Germany, Imagining Asia: Essays in Asian-German Studies,
ed. Veronika Fuechtner and Mary Rhiel (Rochester, NY: Camden House,
2013), 64–86.
80 Qinna Shen, “Female Desire, Pop Rock, and the Tiananmen Generation:
The Synergy of Sexual and Political Revolutions in the Banned Chinese-
German Film Summer Palace (2006),” Journal of Cinema and Media Stud-
ies (JCMS) 60, no. 5 (2020–2021): 48–74.
81 Bruce Williams, “Liminal Visions: Cinematic Representations of the Ger-
man and Korean Divides,” in Transnational Encounters between Germany
and Korea. Affnity in Culture and Politics since the 1880s, ed. Joanne
Miyang Cho and Lee M. Roberts (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018),
177–94; Aaron D. Horton, The “Ignorant Other: Popular Stereotypes of
North Koreans in South Korean and East Germans in Unifed Germany,” in
Transnational Encounters between Germany and Korea, 195–221.
82 See Endstation der Sehnsüchte (dir. Sung-Hyung Cho, 2009; 95 minutes);
Seme (dir. Il Kang, 2015; 88 minutes); Steh Auf (dir. Seung-Hyun Chong,
2013, 24 minutes); and Herr Kim und Schwester Lotusblüte (dir. Sou-Yen
Kim and Miriam Rossius, 2015, 45 minutes).
83 Suin Roberts, “Endstation der Sehnsüchte: Home-Making of Return
Gastarbeiter Migrants,” in Transnational Encounters between Germany
and Korea, 259–78.

Bibliography
Alter, Nora M. Projecting History. German Nonfction Cinema, 1967–2000.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2000.
Bergfelder, Tim, Erica Carter, Deniz Göktürk, and Claudia Sandberg, eds. The
German Cinema Book. 2nd ed. London: The British Film Institute, 2020.
Bohnke, Christin. “The Perfect German Woman: Gender and Imperialism in
Arnold Fanck’s Die Tochter des Samurai and Itami Mansaku’s The New
Earth.” Women in German Yearbook 33 (2017): 77–100.
———. “Postcolonial Theory Reconsidered: Discourses of Race, Gender, and
Imperialism in the German-Japanese Realm.” PhD diss., University of To-
ronto, 2007. https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/80744.
Brockmann, Stephen. A Critical History of German Film. Rochester, NY:
Camden House, 2010.
———. A Critical History of German Film. 2nd ed. Rochester, NY: Camden
House, 2020.
Cho, Joanne Miyang, ed. German-East Asian Encounters and Entanglements:
Affnity in Culture and Politics since 1945. New York: Routledge, 2021.
———, ed. Sino-German Encounters and Entanglements: Transnational
Politics and Culture, 1890–1950. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, forth-
coming in 2021.
———, ed. Transnational Encounters between Germany and East Asia since
1900. New York: Routledge, 2018.
22 Joanne Miyang Cho
———, and Lee M. Roberts, eds. Transnational Encounters between Germany
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———. German Cinema since 1945 – Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory.
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Ezra, Elizabeth, and Terry Rowden. “General Introduction. What is Transna-
tional Cinema?” In Transnational Cinema. The Film Reader, edited by Eliza-
beth Ezra and Terry Rowden. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Fisher, Austin, and Iain Robert Smith. “Transnational Cinemas: A Critical
Roundtable.” Frames Cinema Journal. Accessed December 1, 2021. https://
framescinemajournal.com/article/transnational-cinemas-a-critical-roundtable/.
Gueneli, Berna. Fatih Akin’s Cinema and the New Sound of Europe. Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 2019.
Hake, Sabine. German National Cinema. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008.
———, and Barbara Mennel. Turkish German Cinema in the New Millenium.
Sites, Sounds, and Screens. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012.
Halle, Randall. German Film after Germany: Towards a Transnational Aes-
thetic. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
Hansen, Janine. “The New Earth (1936–37) – A German-Japanese Misalliance
in Film.” In Praise of Film Studies. Essay Collection in Honor of Makino
Mamoru, edited by A. Gerow and A. M. Nornes. Yokohama/Ann Arbor, MI:
Kinema Club, 2001.
Haupkamp, Iris. “Early Transcontinental Film Relations: Japan, Germany and
the Compromises of Co-Production, 1926–1933.” Historical Journal of Film,
Radio and Television 37, no. 2 (2017): 174–202.
———. A Foreigner’s Cinematic Dream of Japan: Representational Politics
and Shadows of War in the Japanese-German Coproduction New Earth
(1937). New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.
———. “Fräulein Setsuko Hara: Constructing an International Film in Nation-
alist Contexts.” Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 6, no. 1 (2014):
4–22.
Kapczynski, Jennifer M., and Michael D. Richardson, eds. A New History of
German Cinema. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012.
Koepnick, Lutz. “German Art Cinema Now.” In Sabine Hake and Lutz Koep-
nick, “Forum: German Film Studies.” German Studies Review 36, no. 3 (Oc-
tober. 2013): 643–60.
Kuzniar, Alice A. “Uncanny Doublings and Asian Rituals in Recent Films by
Monika Treut, Doris Dörrie, and Ulrike Ottinger.” Women in German Year-
book 27 (2011): 176–99.
Law, Ricky W. Transnational Nazism. Ideology and Culture in German-
Japanese Relations, 1919–1936. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2019.
Naiboglu, Gozde. Post-Unifcation Turkish German Cinema: Work, Globali-
sation and Politics Beyond Representation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
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Rawl, Steven. Transnational Cinema. An Introduction. London: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2018.
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Schindler, Stephan K., and Lutz Koepnick. “Introduction.” In The Cosmopoli-
tan Screen. German Cinema and the Global Imaginary, 1945 to the Present,
edited by Stephan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick, 1–21. Ann Arbor: Univer-
sity of Michigan Press, 2007.
Shen, Qinna. “Deconstructing Orientalism. DEFA’s Fictions of East Asia.” In
Re-imagining DEFA. East German Cinema in Its National and Transna-
tional Contexts, edited by Séan Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke, 146–67.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2016.
_____. “Factories on the Magic Carpet: Heimat, Globalization, and the ‘Yellow
Peril’ in Die Chinesen kommen and Losers and Winners.” In Imagining Ger-
many, Imagining Asia: Essays in Asian-German Studies, edited by Veronika
Fuechtner and Mary Rhiel, 64–86. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013.
_____. “Female Desire, Pop Rock, and the Tiananmen Generation: The Syn-
ergy of Sexual and Political Revolutions in the Banned Chinese-German Film
Summer Palace (2006).” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS) 60,
no. 5 (2020–21): 48–74.
_____. “Raising the ‘Bamboo Curtain’: Chinese Films in Divided Germany.” In
Composing Modernist Connections in China and Europe, edited by Chunjie
Zhang, 123–41. New York: Routledge, 2018.
_____. “Revisiting the Wound of a Nation: The ‘Good Nazi’ John Rabe and
the Nanking Massacre.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 47, no. 5
(November 2011): 661–80.
———, and Martin Rosenstock, eds. Beyond Alterity: German Encounters
with Modern East Asia. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014.
Part I

Film Adaptations and

Representations of the
East Asian-German
Relationship, 1919–1945
2 Implicating Buddhism in
Madame Butterfy’s Tragedy
Japonisme and Japan-Bashing
in Fritz Lang’s Harakiri (1919)
Qinna Shen

Fritz Lang plunged into his career as a director, making four silent flms
for Decla in 1919: Halbblut (Halfbreed), Die Spinnen: Teil 1—Der
goldene See (The Spiders: Part 1—The Golden Lake), Der Herr der Li-
ebe (The Master of Love), and Harakiri. Of the four flms, only two are
extant: The Golden Lake and Harakiri. In Harakiri, an adaptation of
the popular Madame Butterfy story, Lang dramatizes an exotic form of
death associated with Japan, namely, suicide by self-disembowelment,
and explores Orientalist tropes that were in vogue in the early Weimar
years.1 For many years, Harakiri was thought to be lost, but a version
with Dutch intertitles was discovered in the mid-1980s in the Nether-
lands Film Museum in Amsterdam. The fragile copy was sent to Bo-
logna for restoration and the public was fnally able to see it in May
1987, 68 years after it premiered in December 1919. 2 Film historical
scholarship on Harakiri is meager, perhaps because it is uncharacteristic
of Lang’s later directorial work, lacking the “modernist grandeur” that
was soon to become his signature cinematic style. 3 In “The Hand of
Buddha: Madame Butterfy and the Yellow Peril in Fritz Lang’s Harakiri
(1919),” Daisuke Miyao compares Harakiri with other Butterfy stories
and discusses the threatening image of Buddhism and the Yellow Peril in
Harakiri, but he focuses on visual readings of hands and explains them
as originating from the fear of “reverse colonization” and of fragmented
bodies associated with traumatic memories of WWI.
This chapter focuses on Harakiri’s combination of Orientalist-tinged
adoration for and imperialist-impacted abhorrence toward Japan, a result
of Japonisme in the art-historical and cultural sphere and Japan-bashing
in the sociopolitical arena at the turn of the century. After summariz-
ing the production history of Harakiri, it reviews the flm’s tendentious
presentation of Buddhism, which is a striking departure from the earlier
tradition of Madame Butterfy narratives. The following section weighs
historical and contemporary motives for the flm’s vilifcation of Bud-
dhism. Drawing on contemporary notices and reviews in the trade press,
the chapter discusses the reception of the flm in Germany. It revisits the
tension between Japonisme and Japan-bashing in Harakari and refects
on the gap between the flm as Lang conceived it and the flm as it is
DOI: 10.4324/9781003157540-3
28 Qinna Shen
known today by considering a contemporary account of a lost scene. It
argues that the negative perception of Buddhism, and by extension of
Japan, stands in tension with the flm’s Japonisme as well as Lang’s own
passion for East Asian art. The Orientalist and imperialist ideology that
permeates Harakiri cannot be attributed to Lang alone, however, be-
cause he did not write the script. The reactionary ideology, a faw of the
flm, is counterbalanced to some extent by its exquisite set designs and
costumes. However, the Madame Butterfy story, even with the addition
of the malevolent bonze, did not provide a vehicle for Lang’s preferred
visual style.

The Genesis of Harakiri

Versions of the Madame Butterfy story, in print or on the stage, were in
vogue at the turn of the century. At a moment when German flmmakers
were seeking exotic subjects for feature flms, a romantic tragedy set in
Japan was a natural choice. But Harakiri is not a flm that Lang himself
decided to make. Already in May 1918, Decla had announced its plan to
shoot a flm titled “Madame Butterfy,” based on Puccini’s opera. Prepa-
rations were fnished in August and shooting was scheduled to start in
September 1918 under the direction of Otto Rippert.4 The production
poster depicts the eponymous heroine’s last act in front of a Japanese
shoji as her bi-racial child, dressed in Japanese costume, waves a Euro-
pean fag in the background (Figure 2.1).
The fag is a prop that comes straight out of Puccini’s opera. During
the climactic scene, a stage direction indicates,

Butterfy takes the child, seats him on a stool with his face turned to
the left, gives him the American fag and a doll and urges him to play
with them, while she gently bandages his eyes. Then she seizes the dag-
ger, and with her eyes still fxed on the child, goes behind the screen.5

The Decla poster contains a clue to the original conception of the flm.
The child’s fag is not an American fag, as it is in Madame Butterfy,
or a Scandinavian fag, as one would expect in Harakiri, given the na-
tionality of the naval offcer in the flm (in the restored version, however,
the child is never seen waving a fag). The fag on the poster is the old
German fag used in the days of the North German Confederation and
the German Empire (1867–1918) and at the beginning of the Weimar
Republic (1918–19).6 Hence, Rippert had planned to portray the naval
offcer as a German.
On July 10, 1918, an advertisement on the cover of the trade journal
Der Kinematograph announced the production of Madame Butterfy as
a “notable event” (ein Ereignis), still under the direction of the seasoned
Rippert (Figure 2.2). Puzzlingly, the advertisement features two Japanese
 Implicating Buddhism in Butterfy’s Tragedy 29

Figure 2.1 Production announcement of “Madame Butterfy,” Lichtbild-Bühne

(Berlin), vol. 11, no. 25, June 22, 1918, 64; the advertisement appears
in Brill, “Harakiri.”

in front of a shoji with Japonisme drawings and makes no reference to

the Western dimension of the Butterfy story. If the drawing is intended
to illustrate a moment in the plot, it is depicting a scene in which the rich
30 Qinna Shen

Figure 2.2 “Madame Butterfy,” Der Kinematograph (Düsseldorf), no. 601,

July10,1918.https://archive.org/details/kinematograph-1918-07/page/n75/
mode/2up.

Japanese suitor, Yamadori, pleads with Butterfy to marry him, as in

Puccini’s opera. His outstretched hands suggest his courtship. Butterfy
is shown covering her face with her sleeve and acting coyly. The artist,
Viktor Arnaud, has left his signature on the shoji. This was not Arnaud’s
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