East Asian-German Cinema
The Transnational Screen, 1919 to the Present
Edited by
Joanne Miyang Cho
First published 2022 by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Joanne Miyang Cho; individual chapters, the contributors
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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
of Figures Acknowledgments
1 German Cinema, German Hybrid Cinema, and Organization
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)
3 The Familiar Unfamiliar: Japan in Interwar German Feature Films
4 “A Loving Family” (Ai no ikka , 1941): The Transcultural Film Adaptation of a Classic German Children’s Book in Wartime Japan
5 Documentaries about Jewish Exiles in Shanghai: Witness Testimony and Cross-Cultural Public Memory Formation
PART II
Representations of Gender in the 1950s and 1960s: Asian Femininity and Idealized Masculinity
6 A Façade of Solidarity: East Germany’s Attempted Dialogue with China in The Compass Rose (Die Windrose, 1957)
QINGYANG ZHOU
7 The World(s) of Anna Suh: Race, Migration, and Ornamentalism in Bis zum Ende aller Tage (Until the End of Days, 1961)
ZACH RAMON FITZPATRICK
8 Idealized Masculinity, National Identity, and the Other: The James Bond Archetype in German and Japanese Spy Fiction
PART III Cultural Globalization and the Persistence of the Popular since the 1970s
9 China’s Encounter with Mozart in Two Films: From Musical Modernity to Cultural Globalization
JINSONG CHEN
10 The Persistence of the Popular: The Cinemas of National Division in Germany and Korea
STEVE CHOE
PART IV East Asian-German Entanglements since the 1980s
11 Temporal Structures and Rhythms in Wenders’ Tokyo-Ga (1985) and Ottinger’s The Korean Wedding Chest (2009) SHAMBHAVI PRAKASH
12 My Own Private Tokyo: The Japan Features of Doris Dörrie
13 Claiming Cultural Citizenship: East Asian-German Presence on YouTube and Public Television’s www.funk.net
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)
2.5 Screenshot. O-Take-San kneels before a Buddhist altar before killing herself (1:25:15)
35
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
7. BzEaT, Anna Suh’s room flled with Asian-coded objects that “stand in for greater unknowns” 156
7. BzEaT, Anna Suh and Kuddel in the picturesque Tiger Balm Garden 157
7. BzEaT, Anna Suh feeding Glen after he fails to use chopsticks 161
7. BzEaT, fve children in Hong Kong eating with chopsticks, while pointing and laughing at Kuddel 162
7. BzEaT, Anna Suh eating contently with chopsticks in Olesund 162
7. BzEaT, Anna Suh’s dejected body language, while Glen futilely apologizes 163
7. BzEaT, Glen and Kuddel are transfxed by Anna Suh when she frst appears 165
7. BzEaT, Anna Suh unwillingly wearing the red dress at the pub 166
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 unprecedented 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 become 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, because it was not colonized by a Western power but rather by Japan. German 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 social 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 introduces 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.
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 German 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, gender representations, Cold War divisions, urban space, musical hybridity, 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 approaching German flms from a specifcally national context. He points to “the overwhelming critical consensus” that German cinema is “a ‘national cinema.’” He argues that “The critical study of German flm history 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 history.” He contrasts Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947), which is an “eminently critical history of German cinema,” to Sabine Hake’s “revisionist” 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 globalization, 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 recontextualization of German cinema than Brockmann, albeit to varying degrees. The next three volumes accept the premise of German peculiarity (Sonderweg) with respect to its cinema, but they diverge in favoring 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 exclusively 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 German 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 continues 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 globally. Despite her advocacy for the transnational perspective, her critical view of Hollywood is different from other scholars who support a more Western-oriented context. This stems from her opposition to Hollywood 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 toward 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 diversifying. 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 national context because of its central role “in representing, shaping, and
interpreting German history and culture.” They foreground the flms that were made “within the historical political boundaries of the nation.”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 European project. On the one hand, he explains how “Vergangenheitsbewältigung (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 commemoration of the Holocaust a common project.” During the 1980s and 1990s, several countries in the European Union passed laws criminalizing Holocaust 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 peculiarity and instead analyze German cinema from within its broader Western context (Europe and Hollywood). In German National Cinema (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 Sonderweg (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 hybridization” in relation to other cinemas.17 Yet, her analysis suggests that, with respect to German cinema, the transnational denotes primarily a European or Western framework. She highlights bi-directional infuences among Europeans and between Europe and Hollywood: many foreigners 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 administrative fgure for social experiences of collectivity and belonging.”19 However, 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 narratives 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 “histories 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 editors, 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 “national 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 “particular 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 essentially national. Prior to the 1990s, flm scholars preferred Weimar’s expressionist cinema and the New German Cinema for what it could
reveal about German national peculiarity. After the 1990s, flm scholars 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 “Fatih 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 economic 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, Dominic 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 applicable 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, transnationalism 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 demarcate 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 Globalization 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 comparatively small. Instead, a number of cross-civilizational topics are equally important within East Asian-German cinema. With respect to scholarship, since scholarship on Turkish German cinema began in the mid1990s, 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 survey 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 history” by Bergfelder et al. (2008), Hake (2008), and Brockmann (2010), the works that were discussed in the previous section.45 Describing German cinema as being, from its beginning, “multicultural, accented, hybrid, 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, foreign and native.”47 Due to its involvement on both sides, they reject
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 inadequate in a globalized world.48 Although ethnicity is still a justifable category of investigation, they recommend conceiving it “beyond its reductive, normative, or exclusionary functions.”49
In Post-Unifcation Turkish German Cinema (2018), Gozde Naiboglu examines feature flms, documentaries, and videos on labor migration 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 European 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 Turkish German cinema that focused on “identity-oriented approaches” and “narrative tropes such as integration, entrapment and female victimization through spatial terms.” This scholarship marginalized key topics in Turkish German Cinema, such as “work and labour.” She also highlights the importance of reformulating “issues of ethics, subjectivity, labour 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 homogenous and monolingual nation-states” in Europe through his emphasis on “demographic diversity.”52 She compliments Akin’s cinema for depicting 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 increasingly loud since 9/11. 54 Although Akin is often regarded as a European 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 intertextualities” 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 Elsaesser recommends adopting an open perspective toward Asian cinemas (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 Berlin School flms, he points it out that it was “a common mark of international 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 Berlin School has energized American German flm scholars, he criticizes them as having failed to properly embed the School within broader discussions 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 provide 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 mid1930s.”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 modernity” 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 monograph, A Foreigner’s Cinematic Dream of Japan (2020), which compares 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 oversimplifcation based on national identity, and instead reveals the complex dynamics of this cross-cultural co-production. Christin Bohnke’s dissertation (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 motivated compared to the war years. It is notable that several postwar German 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 analyzes Doris Doerrie’s flm, Cherry Blossom (2008), and two other German flms on East Asia, and argues that they “represent through their Asian setting the journey of self-exploration via the exotic Other.” 71 Erika 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 topics discussed are diverse, despite the limited number of publications. Cynthia 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 received 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 several 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 introduce 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 literature. As discussed in the previous section, there is more existing scholarship 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
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 Butterfy 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 comparing 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 transforming 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 considers 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 described 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 predictably 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 invoking 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 unfamiliar 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.
In Chapter 4, Harald Salomon examines the transcultural flm adaptation 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 prodigy Toyoda Kōji. According to the advertising campaign, director Sunohara 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 Agnes 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 adaptation, 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 contemporary 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 collective memory. This chapter focuses on the cross-cultural interrelationship 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 Jewish experience, and reaching across continents, languages, and Eastern and Western cultural traditions. Focusing on the flms’ respective narrative strategies and depictions of transcultural relationships between European Jews and East Asians, this chapter examines the construction of collective public memory across socio-political, national, and cultural borders. Although each flm documents past experiences encompassing 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 suffering 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
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 Windrose, 1957), a co-produced anthology flm composed of fve distinct stories. It argues that the flm’s format as a travelogue trivializes encounters 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 impersonates 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 misrepresents 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 German 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 portrayal of the immigrant’s plight and interracial romance in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974).
In Chapter 8, Aaron Horton reveals how in the 1960s, the international 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 presented 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 idealized masculinity, via their respective “James Bond” archetypes. This work also explores how German and Japanese spy flms present and defne masculinity, not only as a means of better understanding the flms’ appeal, but also in order to compare German and Japanese constructions of the “ideal man,” a concept often paired with discourses surrounding 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 popular since the 1970s by looking at all three cinemas. In Chapter 9, Jinsong 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 indispensable 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 conceptualizations 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 acceptance, 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 nationhood. 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 driving popular sovereignty within the political sphere. In engaging with these discourses, this chapter critically addresses the ostensible universality of melodrama and the notion of the nation that is associated with it. While discussing individual German and Korean flms, the chapter
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“Why not? What is stirring you up to this? Be reasonable, for heaven’s sake. You’ve waited this long.”
“Not a day longer, my friend. Yes, we’ll say eight days, but not an hour longer. But can’t we rely any longer on—?”
“No names, Kesselmeyer.”
“No names. Good. But doesn’t some one rely any longer on his estimable Herr Pa—”
“No hints, either. My God, don’t be a fool.”
“Very good; no hints, either. But have we no claim any longer on the well-known firm with whom our credit stands and falls, my friend? How much did it lose by the Bremen failure? Fifty thousand? Seventy thousand? A hundred thousand? More? The sparrows on the housetops know that it was involved, heavily involved. Yesterday well, no names. Yesterday the well-known firm was good, and it was unconsciously protecting you against pressure. To-day its stock is flat and B. Grünlich’s stock is the flattest of the flat. Is that clear? Do you grasp it? You are the first man to notice a thing like that. How are people treating you? How do they look at you? Beck and Goudstikker are perfectly agreeable, give you the same terms as usual? And the bank?”
“They will extend.”
“You aren’t lying, are you? Oh, no! I know they gave you a jolt yesterday a very, very stimulating jolt eh? You see? Oh, don’t be embarrassed. It is to your interest, of course, to pull the wool over my eyes, so that the others will be quiet. Hey, my dear friend? Well, you’d better write to the Consul. I’ll wait a week.”
“A part payment, Kesselmeyer!”
“Part payment, rubbish! One accepts part payment to convince oneself for the time of a debtor’s ability to pay. Do I need to make experiments of that kind on you? I am perfectly well-informed about your ability to pay. Ah, ha, ah, ha! Part payment! That’s a very good joke.”
“Moderate your voice, Kesselmeyer. Don’t laugh all the time in that cursed way. My position is so serious—yes, I admit, it is serious. But I have such-and-such business in hand—everything may still come out all right. Listen, wait a minute: Give me an extension and I’ll sign it for twenty per cent.”
“Nothing in it, nothing in it, my friend. Very funny, very amusing. Oh, yes, I’m in favour of selling at the right time. You promised me eight per cent, and I extended. You promised me twelve and sixteen per cent, and I extended, every time. Now, you might offer me forty per cent, and I shouldn’t consider it—not for a moment. Since Brother Westfall in Bremen fell on his nose, everybody is for the moment freeing himself from the well-known firm and getting on a sound basis. As I say, I’m for selling at the right time. I’ve held your signatures as long as Johann Buddenbrook was good—in the meantime I could write up the interest on the capital and increase the per cent. But one only keeps a thing so long as it is rising or at least keeping steady. When it begins to fall, one sells—which is the same as saying I want my capital.”
“Kesselmeyer, you are shameless.”
“Ah, ha, a-ha! Shameless, am I? That’s very charming, very funny. What do you want? You must apply to your father-in-law. The Credit Bank is raging—and you know you are not exactly spotless.”
“No, Kesselmeyer. I adjure you to hear me quietly. I’ll be perfectly frank. I confess that my situation is serious. You and the Credit Bank are not the only ones—there are notes of hand—everything seems to have gone to pieces at once!”
“Of course—naturally. It is certainly a clean-up—a liquidation.”
“No, Kesselmeyer; hear me out. Do take another cigar.”
“This one is not half finished. Leave me alone with your cigars. Pay up.”
“Kesselmeyer, don’t let me smash!—You are a friend of mine—you have eaten at my table.”
“And maybe you haven’t eaten at mine?”
“Yes, yes—but don’t refuse me credit now, Kesselmeyer!”
“Credit? It’s credit, now, is it? Are you in your senses? A new loan?”
“Yes, Kesselmeyer, I swear to you— A little—a trifle. I only need to make a few payments and advances here and there to get on my feet again and restore confidence. Help me and you will be doing a big business. As I said, I have a number of affairs on hand. They may still all come out right. You know how shrewd and resourceful I am.”
“I know what a numbskull you are! A dolt, a nincompoop, my dear friend! Will you have the goodness to tell me what your resourcefulness can accomplish at this stage? Perhaps there is a bank somewhere in the wide world that will lend you a shilling? Or another father-in-law? Ah, no; you have already played your best card. You can’t play it twice. With all due respect, my dear fellow, and my highest regards.”
“Speak lower, devil take you!”
“You are a fool. Shrewd and resourceful, are you? Yes, to the other chap’s advantage. You’re not scrupulous, I’ll say that for you, but much good it’s done you! You have played tricks, and wormed capital out of people by hook or crook, just to pay me my twelve or sixteen per cent. You threw your honour overboard without getting any return. You have a conscience like a butcher’s dog, and yet you are nothing but a ninny, a scapegoat. There are always such people —they are too funny for words. Why is it you are so afraid to apply to the person we mean with the whole story? Isn’t it because there was crooked work four years ago? Perhaps it wasn’t all quite straight what? Are you afraid that certain things—?”
“Very well, Kesselmeyer; I will write. But suppose he refuses? Suppose he lets me down?”
“Oh—ah, ha! Then we will just have a bankruptcy, a highly amusing little bankruptcy. That doesn’t bother me at all. So far as I am
concerned, I have about covered my expenses with the interest you have scratched together, and I have the priority with the assets. Oh, you wait; I shan’t come short. I know everything pretty well, my good friend; I have an inventory already in my pocket. Ah, ha! We shall see that no dressing-gown and no silver bread-basket gets away.”
“Kesselmeyer, you have sat at my table—”
“Oh, be quiet with your table! In eight days I’ll be back for the answer. I shall walk in to town—the fresh air will do me good. Good morning, my friend, good morning!”
And Herr Kesselmeyer seemed to depart—yes, he went. She heard his odd, shuffling walk in the corridor, and imagined him rowing along with his arms....
Herr Grünlich entered the “pensée-room” and saw Tony standing there with the little watering-can in her hand. She looked him in the face.
“What are you looking at? Why are you staring like that?” he said to her. He showed his teeth, and made vague movements in the air with his hands, and wiggled his body from side to side. His rosy face could not become actually pale; but it was spotted red and white like a scarlet-fever patient’s.
CHAPTER VII
CONSUL JOHANN BUDDENBROOK arrived at the villa at two o’clock in the afternoon. He entered the Grünlich salon in a grey travelling-cloak and embraced his daughter with painful intensity. He was pale and seemed older. His small eyes were deep in their sockets, his large pointed nose stuck out between the fallen cheeks, his lips seemed to have grown thinner, and the beard under his chin and jaws halfcovered by his stiff choker and high neck-band,—he had lately ceased to wear the two locks running from the temples half-way down the cheeks—was as grey as the hair on his head.
The Consul had hard, nerve-racking days behind him. Thomas had had a haemorrhage; the Father had learned of the misfortune in a letter from Herr van der Kellen. He had left his business in the careful hands of his clerk and hurried off to Amsterdam. He found nothing immediately dangerous about his son’s illness, but an openair cure was necessary, in the South, in Southern France; and as it fortunately happened that a journey of convalescence had been prescribed for the young son of the head of the firm, the two young men had left for Pau as soon as Thomas was able to travel.
The Consul had scarcely reached home again when he was attacked by a fresh misfortune, which had for the moment shaken his firm to its foundations and by which it had lost eighty thousand marks at one blow. How? Discounted cheques drawn on Westfall Brothers had come back to the firm, liquidation having begun. He had not failed to cover them. The firm had at once showed what it could do, without hesitation or embarrassment. But that could not prevent the Consul from experiencing all the sudden coldness, the reserve, the mistrust at the banks, with “friends,” and among firms abroad, which such an event, such a weakening of working capital, was sure to bring in its train.
Well, he had pulled himself together, and had reviewed the whole situation; had reassured, reinforced, made head. And then, in the
midst of the struggle, among telegrams, letters, and calculations, this last blow broke upon him as well: B. Grünlich, his daughter’s husband, was insolvent. In a long, whining, confused letter he had implored, begged, and prayed for an assistance of a hundred to a hundred and twenty thousand marks. The Consul replied curtly and non-committally that he would come to Hamburg to meet Herr Grünlich and Kesselmeyer the banker, made a brief, soothing explanation to his wife, and started off.
Tony received him in the salon. She was fond of receiving visits in her brown silk salon, and she made no exception now; particularly as she had a very profound impression of the importance of the present occasion, without comprehending in the least what it was about. She looked blooming and yet becomingly serious, in her pale grey frock with its laces at breast and wrists, its bell-shaped sleeves and long train, and little diamond clasp at the throat. “How are you, Papa? At last you have come to see us again. How is Mamma? Is there good news from Tom? Take off your things, Father dear. Will you dress? The guest-room is ready for you. Grünlich is dressing.”
“Don’t call him, my child. I will wait for him here. You know I have come for a talk with your husband—a very, very serious talk, my dear Tony. Is Herr Kesselmeyer here?”
“Yes, he is in the pensée-room looking at the album.”
“Where is Erica?”
“Up in the nursery with Tinka. She is very well. She is bathing her doll—of course, not in real water; I mean—she is a wax-doll, she only—”
“Of course.” The Consul drew a deep breath and went on: “Evidently you have not been informed as to—to the state of affairs with your husband.”
He had sat down in an arm-chair near the large table, and Tony placed herself at his feet on a little seat made of three cushions on top of one another. The finger of her right hand toyed gently with the diamond at her throat.
“No, Papa,” answered Tony. “I must confess I know nothing. Heavens, I am a goose!—I have no understanding at all. I heard Kesselmeyer talking lately to Grünlich—at the end it seemed to me he was just joking again—he always talks so drolly. I heard your name once or twice—”
“You heard my name? In what connection?”
“Oh, I know nothing of the connection, Papa. Grünlich has been insufferably sulky ever since that day, I must say. Until yesterday yesterday he was in a good mood, and asked me a dozen times if I loved him, and if I would put in a good word for him with you if he had something to ask you.”
“Oh!”
“Yes, he told me he had written you and that you were coming here. It is good you have. Everything is so queer. Grünlich had the cardtable put in here. There are a lot of paper and pencils on it—for you to sit at, and hold a council together.”
“Listen, my dear child,” said the Consul, stroking her hair. “I want to ask you something very serious. Tell me: you love your husband with your whole heart, don’t you?”
“Of course, Papa,” said Tony with a face of childlike hypocrisy— precisely the face of the child Tony when she was asked: “You won’t tease the old doll-woman again, Tony?” The Consul was silent a minute.
“You love him so much,” he asked again, “that you could not live without him, under any circumstances, even if by God’s will your situation should alter so that he could no longer surround you with all these things?” And his hand described a quick movement over the furniture and portières, over the gilt clock on the étagère, and finally over her own frock.
“Certainly, Papa,” repeated Tony, in the soothing tone she nearly always used when any one spoke seriously to her. She looked past her father out of the window, where a heavy veil of rain was silently
descending. Her face had the expression children wear when some one tells them a fairy story and then tactlessly introduces a generalization about conduct and duty—a mixture of embarrassment and impatience, piety and boredom.
The Consul looked at her without speaking for a minute. Was he satisfied with her response? He had weighed everything thoroughly, at home and during the journey.
It is comprehensible that Johann Buddenbrook’s first impulse was to refuse his son-in-law any considerable payment. But when he remembered how pressing—to use a mild word—he had been about this marriage; when he looked back into the past, and recalled the words: “Are you satisfied with me?” with which his child had taken leave of him after the wedding, he gave way to a burdensome sense of guilt against her and said to himself that the thing must be decided according to her feelings. He knew perfectly that she had not made the marriage out of love, but he was obliged to reckon with the possibility that these four years of life together and the birth of the child had changed matters; that Tony now felt bound body and soul to her husband and would be driven by considerations both spiritual and worldly to shrink from a separation. In such a case, the Consul argued, he must accommodate himself to the surrender of whatever sum was necessary. Christian duty and wifely feeling did indeed demand that Tony should follow her husband into misfortune; and if she actually took this resolve, he did not feel justified in letting her be deprived of all the ease and comfort to which she had been accustomed since childhood. He would feel himself obliged to avert the catastrophe, and to support B. Grünlich at any price. Yet the final result of his considerations was the desire to take his daughter and her child home with him and let Grünlich go his own way. God forbid that the worst should happen!
In any case, the Consul invoked the pronouncement of the law that a continued inability to provide for wife and children justified a separation. But, before everything, he must find out his daughter’s real feelings.
“I see,” he said, “my dear child, that you are actuated by good and praiseworthy motives. But—I cannot believe that you are seeing the thing as, unhappily, it really is—namely, as actual fact. I have not asked what you would do in this or that case, but what you to-day, now, will do. I do not know how much of the situation you know or suspect. It is my painful duty to tell you that your husband is obliged to call his creditors together; that he cannot carry on his business any longer. I hope you understand me.”
“Grünlich is bankrupt?” Tony asked under her breath, half rising from the cushions and seizing the Consul’s hand quickly.
“Yes, my child,” he said seriously. “You did not know it?”
“My suspicions were not definite,” she stammered. “Then Kesselmeyer was not joking?” she went on, staring before her at the brown carpet. “Oh, my God!” she suddenly uttered, and sank back on her seat.
In that minute all that was involved in the word “bankrupt” rose clearly before her: all the vague and fearful hints which she had heard as a child. “Bankrupt”—that was more dreadful than death, that was catastrophe, ruin, shame, disgrace, misery, despair. “He is bankrupt,” she repeated. She was so cast down and shaken by the fatal word that the idea of escape, of assistance from her father, never occurred to her. He looked at her with raised eyebrows, out of his small deep-set eyes, which were tired and sad and full of an unusual suspense. “I am asking you,” he said gently, “my dear Tony, if you are ready to follow your husband into misery?” He realized at once that he had used the hard word instinctively to frighten her, and he added: “He can work himself up again, of course.”
“Certainly, Papa,” answered she. But it did not prevent her from bursting into tears. She sobbed into her batiste handkerchief, trimmed with lace and with the monogram A. G. She still wept just like a child; quite unaffectedly and without embarrassment. Her upper lip had the most touching expression.
Her father continued to probe her with his eyes. “That is your serious feeling, my child?” he asked. He was as simple as she.
“I must, mustn’t I?” she sobbed. “Don’t I have to—?”
“Certainly not,” he said. But with a guilty feeling he added: “I would not force you to it, my dear Tony. If it should be the case that your feelings did not bind you indissolubly to your husband—”
She looked at him with uncomprehending, tear-streaming eyes. “How, Papa?”
The Consul twisted and turned, and found a compromise. “My dear child, you can understand how painful it would be for me to have to tell you all the hardships and suffering that would come about through the misfortune of your husband, the breaking-up of the business and of your household. I desire to spare you these first unpleasantnesses by taking you and little Erica home with me. You would be glad of that, I think?”
Tony was silent a moment, drying her tears. She carefully breathed on her handkerchief and pressed it against her eyes to heal their inflammation. Then she asked tn a firm tone, without lifting her voice: “Papa, is Grünlich to blame? Is it his folly and lack of uprightness that has brought him to this?”
“Very probably,” said the Consul. “That is—no, I don’t know, my child. The explanation with him and the banker has not taken place yet.”
She seemed not to be listening. She sat crouched on her three silk cushions, her elbow on her knee, her chin in her hand, and with her head bowed looked dreamily into the room.
“Ah, Papa,” she said softly, almost without moving her lips, “wouldn’t it have been better—?”
The Consul could not see her face—but it had the expression it often wore those summer evenings at Travemünde, as she leaned at the window of her little room. One arm rested on her Father’s knee, the hand hanging down limply. This very hand was expressive of a sad
