Transnational Cultures – serie

«After the Imperialist Imagination underscores that imperialism’s hold on Germans’ sense of the global is not yet exhausted, but places greater weight on contestations than its predecessor. I commend the volume for making a noteworthy contribution to a thriving constellation of fields.» (Katrin Sieg, German Studies Review, 45.3, October 2022, pp. 611–613)The precursor to this book, Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop’s now classic volume The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy, initiated an explosion of research on all aspects of relations between Germany and the rest of the world. This scholarship emerged from numerous disciplinary fields, encompassing history, literary studies, and anthropology and utilized a diverse set of methodologies, such as environmentalism, transnationalism, and postcolonial theory. The present collection analyzes scholarship on global Germany since 1998, assessing its impact on German historiography and diaspora studies. It introduces emerging and ongoing research that demonstrates the remarkable breadth of the field today and how scholarly constitutions of German imperialism have expanded beyond the scope of the formal colonial era. In addition, this volume stretches our understanding of German entanglements to the wider world, locating Germans in places that most scholars do not traditionally associate with German imperialism. It reveals that Germany’s colonial presence overseas forged consequential links to landscapes, traditions, and communities beyond Europe that continue to modify the cultural boundaries of Germanness into the present day.

This volume was originally published in German in 2015, commemorating the end of World War II seventy years earlier and acknowledging the contribution of African American soldiers to Germany’s liberation from fascist rule. Using an interdisciplinary approach, it collects the voices of some of the descendants of these World War II heroes. In this volume, Black Germans of this post-war generation relate and analyse their experiences from various perspectives. Historical, political and research essays alongside life writing, interviews and literary texts form a kaleidoscope through which a new perspective on an almost forgotten part of German history and US American–German relationships is conveyed. The collection explores causes and consequences of racism in the past and in the present as well as developing strategies for achieving positive changes.

Hermann Hesse once stated that his Japanese readers understood him best among all his readers worldwide – a little known fact among readers of Hesse in the West. This book examines Hesse’s reception in Japan and of Japan in the context of a transcultural reception process. It traces the different phases of Hesse’s reception in Japan and contextualises this reception in terms of the regional setting of East Asia and the cultural authority of imperial Japan. The role of transcultural mediators as figurative nodes in the world literature system is analysed, with a particular focus on the key role played by Hesse’s «Japanese» cousin, Wilhelm Gundert. Finally, Hesse’s epistolary exchange with his Japanese readers is unfolded to show how deep affinities arise, which result in the creation of a type of «spiritual» capital. This epistolary exchange, together with the translation of the Zen bible Pi Yen Lu by Wilhelm Gundert, inspired Hesse to write a series of three unique Zen-poems as a means of expressing a lifelong search for transcendence.