Asian Fusion: New Encounters in the Asian-German Avant-Garde by Caroline Rupprecht (review)

Since its inception at the 2009 GSA conference, Asian German studies has provided a transnational and comparative framework and inspired new directions of research, such as Caroline Rupprecht’s excellent book Asian Fusion: New Encounters in the Asian-German Avant-Garde. In six case studies with a conceptually innovative call-and-response structure, Rupprecht juxtaposes three postwar male German authors/ artists (W.G. Sebald, Peter Weiss, Joseph Beuys) with three female Asian-German authors (Yoko Tawada, Pham Thi Hoài, Anna Kim), creating imaginary but productive intergenerational “dialogues.” Integrating “writing back” (as in The Empire Writes Back) into her approach, Rupprecht allows the voices of these Asian German authors to “respond” or “write back” to the German authors’ “calls” (14–15). She notes that she does not establish a hierarchy between the two groups of authors, unlike other “writing back” projects that construct a dialogue between colonizer and subaltern. It is, however, clear that Rupprecht is primarily critical of the German authors and writes with adoration and admiration for the Asian-German authors, putting the latter in an advantageous subject position. Except for Tawada, Asian German authors have not received much public or scholarly attention. Some of their works are examined in depth for the first time here.

In Part I, Rupprecht demonstrates that Sebald’s and Tawada’s works are similarly interested in architecture and space, particularly empty, liminal, and “in-between” space, both in the physical and linguistic sense. Sebald establishes a comparison between sericulture in the Qing court under the Empress Dowager and the sericulture of Nazi Germany, literally and metaphorically considering the silkworms as an analogue to the human lives destroyed in China and in Nazi Germany. The silkworm cocoons in The Rings of Saturn (1995) resemble the empty Fort Breendonk in Belgium portrayed in Austerlitz (2001), today a Gestapo prison museum, with silkworms as stand-ins for the victims of Auschwitz. Whereas Rupprecht embraces Sebald’s/Austerlitz’s subjective projection of historical memory onto objects, she criticizes Sebald’s extremely negative portrayal of the Empress Dowager Cixi. A similar feminist critique of the traditional characterization of Cixi is offered in Jung Chang’s book Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (2013).

Indirectly, Tawada reinforces the ontological “emptiness” of subjects that Austerlitz senses in himself. For Tawada, the empty, “in-between” space is hieroglyphically embodied in the kanji character for the Zen Buddhist concept ma. She further deconstructs the Kantian philosophy of the “subject” and rationalism by invoking the Japanese words for “I” and “self,” which do not indicate a coherent “subject.” Tawada’s work thus constitutes a “negation of a European ontology” (71). Without a fixed identity, humans become like spirits (60). This transitory and ghostly existence that Tawada conceptualizes finds echoes in other shamanic works discussed throughout the book. The “in-betweenness” is also reflected in the identity of authors such as Tawada, Pham, and Kim. Rupprecht provides her own translation of the uniquely constructed bilingual (German and Japanese) poem “Flight of the Moon” (1998), exemplifying her “insistence on an ‘in-between’ space, where neither place or language is hierarchically privileged” (78).

In Part II, Rupprecht pairs Weiss and Pham, who favor avant-garde techniques such as Brechtian alienation and have a common interest in depicting Vietnam. While both Pham and Weiss are rooted in the avant-garde, they differ in their stance on the Vietnam War. In his avant-garde, minimalist, kinetic documentary theater, Discourse on Vietnam (1967), Weiss depicts “hell” on stage. He takes a typical leftist view of the war, focuses on the sufferings of Vietnamese civilians, and condemns American imperialism. The play failed to garner audience interest. Rupprecht attributes Weiss’s failure to his troubled relationship with place—a somewhat poetic logic to explain Weiss’s inability to depict Vietnam realistically. As a German Jew who escaped Nazi Germany, he was too entrenched in...