| Until the Wilhelminian Era Germany's involvement with China was minimal. During this period, however, German foreign policy pursued an increasingly imperialist-expansionist course which Emperor William II termed "deutsche Weltpolitik" in 1896. China consequently became a major object of Germany's search for a "Platz an der Sonne" (Ch. I & II).; Accompanying this unprecedented rise in China's importance were the low esteem and disdain with which Chinese politics and culture were viewed. Chinese culture was recurrently termed "stagnant" and "artificial" and the Chinese "idealless" and "utilitarian". The present study of attitude toward China as reflected in China-related literature of the Wilhelminian period was traced against this historical background (Ch. II & III).; A number of works pertaining to popular or mass literature were examined, including those of Karl May, Elisabeth von Heyking and Alexander Ular (Ch. IV). These works often referred to the actual confrontation between China and the West. Some evidently served propagandist purposes, using the literary form merely as a guise to popularize the author's positions. Texts ranged from adventure, travel, missionary, colonial and military literature to feuilleton series, journalistic poems and caricatures.; The image of China as transmitted in these works seemed to have derived from a rather limited inventory of negatively defined European notions with which China had been stereotyped since mid-eighteenth century. The persistence of these stereotypes was traced in non-literary texts by Herder, Hegel, Ferdinand von Richthofen, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, William II and the others. (Ch. III). While this tradition was shamelessly utilized to justify various causes, like that of the "cultural mission" of colonialist Europe, critical efforts to examine these notions emerged after the 'shock' of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.; Around 1910 the concern for modern China was superseded by a growing interest in a traditional, Confucius- or Laotse-spirited China (Ch. V). Hermann Graf Keyserling, Alfred Doblin and Hugo von Hofmannsthal are a few of the authors discussed here. In as much as the disdainful attitude toward China attested to the self-confidence of the nineteenth century, the open-mindedness toward Ancient China indicated an identity crisis in which the German intelligentsia found itself before and after World War I. |
