Transnational Encounters between Germany and Korea

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.

Joanne Miyang Cho is Professor and Chair of History at William Paterson University in New Jersey, USA. She is co-editor of Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India (2014), Germany and China (2014), Transnational Encounters between Germany and Japan (2016), and Gendered Encounters between Germany and Asia (2016), and co-editor of Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies. Lee M. Roberts is Associate Professor of German at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne and Associate Director of the IPFW Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. His publications include Literary Nationalism in German and Japanese Germanistik (2010) and chapters in Germany and China: Transnational Encounters since the Eighteenth Century (2014) and Transnational Encounters between Germany and Japan (2016). He is co-editor of the Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies.

1. Introduction.- I. An Overview.- 2. 130 Years of German-Korean Relations.- 3. Paul Georg von Möllendorff: A German Reformer in Korea.- 4. Franz Eckert and Richard Wunsch: Two Prussians in Korean Service.- 5. Specters of Schinkel in East Asia: Berlin, Tokyo and Seoul from a Viewpoint of Modernity/Coloniality.- III. A Common Fate in the Cold War Era and Beyond.- 6. Korean-German Relations from the 1950s to the 1980s: Archive-based Approach to Cold War-Era History.- 7. Luise Rinser's Third-World Politics: Isang Yun and North Korea.- 8. Liminal Visions: Cinematic Representations of the German and Korean Divides.- 9. The "Ignorant" Other: Popular Stereotypes of North Koreans in South Korea and East Germans in Unified Germany.- 10. Illusions of Unity: Life Narratives in Eastern German and North Korean Unification Literature.- IV. The Migration of Ideas and People.- 11. Depictions of the Self as Korean in German-language Literature by Mirok Li and Kang Moon Suk.- 12. Endstation der Sehnsüchte: Home-Making of Return Gastarbeiter Migrants.- 13. History as a Mirror: Korea's Appropriation of Germany's Experience in Rectifying the Past.- 14. Goethe's Faust in the South Korean Manhwa "The Tarot Cafe": Sang-Sun Park's Critical Project.