This book examines the history of the German-Korean relationship from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century, focusing on the nations' varied encounters with each other during the last years of the Yi dynasty, the Japanese occupation of Korea, the Cold War, and the post-Cold War era. With essays from a range of internationally respected scholars, this collection moves between history, diplomacy, politics, education, migration, literature, cinema, and architecture to uncover historical and cultural intersections between Germany and Korea. Each nation has navigated the challenges of modernity in different ways, and yet traditional East-West dichotomies belie the deeper affinities between them. This book points to those affinities, focusing in particular on the past and present internal divisions that perhaps make Germany and Korea as similar as Germany and Japan.

Contrary to the image of Korea as a largely self-contained country until its economy became global during the 1990s, this book shows that transnationalism has firmly been part of modern Korea’s national experience throughout its existence. The volume portrays Korea’s frequent transnational entanglements with other nations in East Asia and the West from the start of its annexation into the Empire of Japan in 1910 to the present day. It explores how modern Korea negotiated its complicated colonial relations with imperial Japan and its political and economic relations with the West in meeting the challenges of the globalized world. Early chapters cover the origins of Korea’s democratic republicanism among Korean immigrants in the United States, the Royal-Dutch oil industry in Korea, and prisons in the Japanese empire. From the latter half of the twentieth century to the present, the book probes Cold War politics between Korea and Europe, transnational Korean communities in China, Japan, the Russian Far East, and the West, and ethnic Korean returnees from the Russian Far East. With contributions from leading international scholars, this collection’s attention to modern Korean history, economy, gender studies, and migration is ideal for upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates.

Literary Nationalism in German and Japanese Germanistik traces the convergence of German and Japanese metaphors for national literary spirit through the academic study of the German language and literature in Germanistik. Early notions of a spiritual link to the national literary tradition allowed speakers of German to imagine their unity before the existence of the modern German state, but the concept for spirit also gained various nuances in the works of such writers as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Brothers Grimm, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Hermann Hesse. Moreover, throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, scholars and thinkers increasingly equated literary spirit with the psychology of the German nation. Against the background of these developments, the slogans of university students who burned books of so-called un-German spirit in 1933 gained a particularly ominous meaning. Interestingly, for Japanese contemplating German literature in the late nineteenth century, the native idea of national literary spirit was one of many concepts that differed from their German counterparts. However, skilled writers and translators like Mori Ogai invested old words with new meanings, and by the 1930s Japanese scholars of Germanistik had not only documented the discourse on German national literary spirit but also deemed it synonymous with the spirit of Japan's own tradition.

German-speaking Europe is an array of images that have emerged from varied discourses about itself and its neighbors, and "Germany and the Imagined East" revolves around the exchange of views on and in the vast construct called "the East." The world has been divided conceptually in countless ways, but the works in this volume treat aspects of Germany as both part of and also separate from any perception of an eastern border. From the former German Democratic Republic,"East Germany," to OEsterreich-whose name loses its eastern association in the English version, Austria,-the East begins within the very world of the German language. But it is also the expanse off to the right of Germany, within which essays in this collection treat such political and cultural distinctions as former Yugoslavia, Romania and Russia in Eastern Europe, or Turkey and Persia in the Near East, spreading through India to China and Japan in the Far East. With a variety of perspectives on literature, film, philosophy, architecture, music and history, these essays comprise a multidisciplinary collage that invites scholars from all departments to explore the wealth of insights German Studies has to offer on East-West relations.