Why is a re-interrogation productive? I asked myself this question when I went back over my 2001 book India: The Seductive and Seduced “Other” of German Orientalism. The need for such reexamination cannot be more forcefully expressed than in the following words by Mani and Segelcke:

In my book, I pursued two main goals within the historic specificity of European colonialism and imperialism. The first was to show how India, like much of the rest of the “Orient,” was perceived as degenerate, passive, and feminized, the object of the not-so-obscure ethnological desire of a predominantly male authorship and masculine mindset. The second was to reveal the complicity of the Germans in the colonialist project, based on my conviction that colonialism operated not only as a form of territorial aggrandizement but also simultaneously as a discourse of domination.

The world tour of German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld stands in the midst of a series of fundamental transitions in the early 1930s: the transition between the world of Weimar Germany and the world of fascism and exile, the transition between the colonial and the postcolonial world, and the transition between sexology and eugenics as dominantly European-based new sciences to globalizing sciences that find their centers and protagonists in non-European societies. In this article I will focus on Hirschfeld's visit to India in 1931, where these transitions play out most visibly. Using Hirschfeld's own account of his world travel, the contemporary Indian press coverage, and other archival materials, I argue that Hirschfeld's account of Indian sexology presents a complicated reaction against the rise of fascism and an implicit rejection of fascist ideas of race and eugenics on the eve of Hirschfeld's exile from Germany. I also explore Hirschfeld's identification with the Indian independence movement and the connection he draws between his liberal-humanist view of sexual autonomy and the anti-colonial fight for political autonomy. In his encounter with India, Hirschfeld also reconceptualizes the science of sexology and his own role within it in complicated and at times contradictory ways. while Hirschfeld presents himself as a “sage from the West” and largely does not engage the main proponents of contemporary Indian sexology, he posits India as the birthplace of sexology and the Kamasutra as its original text.

During the final decades of the nineteenth century, the spiritual and cultural identity of many German intellectuals came under pressure as a new sociocultural paradigm—economic (proletarization and industrial capitalism), political (democratization), and scientific (empirical models of knowledge) replaced older traditions and values. To put it more boldly, the spiritual integrity of the human being seemed for many thinkers to have been relegated to the junk heap of a Darwinian world, in which living beings clashed over resources and struggled for survival. Such tensions resonate frequently in the era's debates over science and human knowledge. The Buddhist advocate Theodor Schultze (1824–98), for instance, rebukes the scientific method as overly attached to organic nature, in which, as he posits, “nicht mehr die ‘Lebenskraft’ wohl aber ‘das Leben,’ ‘der Organismus,’ ‘die Natur’ und dergleichen Subjekte mehr als unmittelbar wirkende Mächte oder Prinzipien auftreten, weil der Verfasser nicht im Stande ist, die Vorgänge des Lebensprozesses bloß aus den Kräften der unorganischen Natur zu erklären.” Paul Dahlke (1865–1928), a medical doctor and another Buddhist devotee, admonishes: “Je weiter der menschliche Geist vorwärts schreitet, um so breiter und entschiedener klafft der Spalt zwischen Glaube und Wissenschaft.” Yet these concerns cannot be relegated to the discordant voices of a few fringe intellectuals. A quick glance through the more mainstream Protestant and Catholic journals published during the Kaiserreich (1871–1918), for instance, also reveals the widespread aversion to “materialism's” predominance and a growing sense of spiritual vacuity among the era's intellectuals.

What Is Asian-German Studies?

This volume presents a collection of essays from the emerging field of Asian-German studies, highlighting analyses of the role of “Asia” in Germany's cultural history from the late eighteenth century to the present. One of the tasks of this volume is to explore the meaning of Asia both as a sign of difference and as a historical place. To that end, scholars represented here undertake critical studies of the history of orientalism, showing regional differences and historical changes to the way Asia is constructed in texts and images. Just as important, scholars here are also creating models for understanding Asian-German transnational spaces, in which philosophical ideas and cultural representations circulate continuously and in which established hierarchies of influence are undermined. One fundamental assumption underlying these essays is that the categories “German” and “Asian” are not understood as homogeneous categories; rather the authors here engage in explorations into the specific production of cultural identities through a variety of representational forms.

Over the last few decades, colonial and postcolonial studies have investigated the important role that the non-European other played in defining “the national” via European metropoles. German studies has slowly followed suit since the early 1990s, first with studies on the role of German colonialism as a historical phenomenon, then with studies on colonialism and orientalism as pervasive ideologies that preceded or outlived the short colonial period of Wilhelminian Germany.

Introduction: China, Imperialism, and Writing

This essay reflects on two travel texts that are located at the cross-roads of travel writing and Germany's imperial interest in China at the turn of the twentieth century. By the end of the nineteenth century China had become the Schauplatz of the conflict between land-grabbing imperialists, among which Germany was seen as an increasingly important player. In 1898, two years before the Boxer Rebellion began, Germany secured its concession in Qingdao (Kiaochow). Even better known than Germany's imperial conquest in China, the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 received extensive media exposure, in part because Germany's ambassador, Clemens von Ketteler, was killed in the fighting. Suzanne Marchand draws attention to the important role that the rebellion played in focusing Germany's interest on China, a place that until then had remained remote and irrelevant to the population as well as to the academy. Now, writes Marchand, in the wake of the media coverage of the rebellion, “events in China seem quite suddenly ‘world-historical.’” The German population had taken little notice of China, and Marchand's research shows that the academy had little interest in the academic study of the Chinese language and culture throughout the nineteenth century. however, other more popular forms of writing on China became an important source for the construction of the Chinese other at the turn of the century, and travel writing was one of these.

A Literary Globalization Gone Wrong

At the end of 2008, just in time for one of the last issues of the year, The Economist devoted an editorial to what it claimed was a special event in Japanese history: Murasaki Shikibu's Genji monogatari, known in the English-speaking world as The Tale of Genji, had turned one thousand. Yet the occasion was also of global significance, the newsmagazine quickly added, because Western scholars had considered the tale to be “the first modern or psychological novel” in the world. In addition to being the Japanese “equivalent of Homer's Iliad,” it claimed the title of the oldest prototype of an international writing system, a literary inspiration for countless commentaries, editions, paintings, transliterations, film adaptations, and manga productions around the globe. An ideal embodiment of Pascale Casanova's “world republic of letters” avant la lettre, Genji exemplified how, for once, the East did not follow the West as the origin of all good things.

Upon closer examination, though, these celebratory claims turned out to be the prolegomena to a Eurocentric worldview in which Genji's “broad appeal” was reduced to two manifestations of provincial nostalgia. First, the editorial read, “right-wing Japanese commentators” read the tale to argue “how much more sophisticated civilization was in Japan in the 11th century compared with Europe at that time”; second, “middle-aged Japanese” were abusing the text to find something “as quintessentially Japanese as flower-arranging or the tea ceremony” (143).

After German reunification, print capitalism played a central role in what Uli Linke has called “the fabrication of a new national imaginary.” Memoirs flooded the book market in the 1990s as dissidents, informers, prisoners, and former agents of the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS, or Stasi) recounted the East German experience in “memory texts” that frequently blurred the line between fact and fiction. A dilemma about the present underwrote these discussions about the past: what would national identity mean in a reunified Germany? From the outset, people of color expressed concern about the potentially exclusionary nature of memory as a basis for post-Wall citizenship. In 1995, Turkish-German author Zafer Şenocak drew attention to the fact that the category of memory implied a national framework and a “community of fate” defined by shared heredity “to which Others have no access.”

The scarcity of memoirs by people of color reinforced the impression that memory work was a racially exclusionary form of nation-building. Anke Pinkert has observed that although racial difference was a common metaphor in memory texts, the actual voices of minorities were vanishingly rare. To cite one example, the book Boat People aus Leipzig (Boat people from Leipzig) used Southeast Asian refugees as metaphors for East Germans rather than as actual subjects. Related tropes cast racial otherness as a category to be escaped, as in the hope that East Germans would “not be treated like the nigger anymore.”

Performed sixty-eight times in Berlin by 1847 and ninety times in Vienna by 1844, August von Kotzebue's Die Indianer in England portrays an exceptional female character: the Indian girl Gurli. The leading journal of German Enlightenment literary criticism, the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, enthusiastically lauded the masterful portrayal of a child of nature:

Through Gurli's naiveté and her Indian origin, certain ideas and feelings could be verbalized that otherwise could not be articulated publicly by European dramatic characters. only a figure with such a combination of age, gender, and ethnicity could have achieved this enormous popularity on stage.

Almost at the same time that Kotzebue's drama premiered in 1789, the German world traveler Georg Forster translated the ancient Sanskrit drama Sakuntala from its English translation into German in 1790. Immediately afterward, German intellectuals such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Wolfgang Goethe highly praised Sakuntala's lyrical values and considered it a prominent document of human origin marked by natural purity.

With its ascent as one of the world's strongest economies, China now appears globally in a variety of representational modes. Since the turn of this century, a great number of works, both fiction and non-fiction, have been published that capture the incessant flow of goods and services between Germany and China. Such transnational activity presents intriguing material, particularly for documentary filmmakers. This essay focuses on two films, a documentary, and a feature film originally meant to be a documentary. They both involve moving a German factory to China but also, through a difference of twenty years, register the different stages in China's development and the German reaction to it. In each case the transplantation of factories takes place in conjunction with the unemployment or early retirement of the factory's former employees, who become “displaced persons” in their own society. The encounter of German and Chinese workers under these circumstances anticipates narratives characterized by anxieties, conflicts, and cultural stereotypes. The little-known comedy by Manfred Stelzer entitled Die Chinesen kommen (The Chinese are coming, 1986) features the disassembly of a factory in a small Bavarian town by a handful of Chinese workers who will then rebuild it in China. Stelzer interestingly labels his work a “Bavarian-Chinese Heimatfilm,” which suggests that he intentionally places his film in the long tradition of the German Heimat genre.

Schopenhauer and the Theoretical Concerns of Cross-Cultural Philosophy

In nineteenth-century German reception of the East, Arthur Schopenhauer is well known for his crucial, influential, and thought-provokingly bold use of Indian thought. Throughout his work he reiterated that Hindu and Buddhist philosophies offered profound ideas that transcended cultural and temporal boundaries and were echoed in great European thinkers such as Plato and Kant. His own philosophical system, he argued, arrived at the same epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical conclusions that Hindu and Buddhist thought presented in a more religious context and metaphoric language. Within the “Hindu” corpus he continually referred to the Vedas, the Upaniṣads, and the Bhagavadgītā, among which he held particularly the Upanisads in high philosophical regard and considered them the comfort and solace of his life and death.

In addition to influencing subsequent thinkers, artists, and writers such as Nietzsche, Wagner, and Hesse, Schopenhauer's understanding of Hindu and Buddhist philosophies proves to have tremendous potential to engage scholars of different disciplines, approaches, and methodologies. His admiration of and affiliation to Vedānta and Buddhist thought inspire a number of “comparative universalists,” from Max Hecker to Dorothea Dauer, who are inclined to find fundamental agreements between Schopenhauer's system and Hindu and Buddhist worldviews. “Comparative relativists” from J. J. Gestering to Richard White examine Schopenhauer with a more critical eye, highlighting the incompatibilities between his thought and Hindu-Buddhist ideas, and exposing his mis-understanding and misappropriation of them.