Contemporary German–Chinese Cultures in Dialogue

This book provides a unique perspective on contemporary German and Chinese cultural encounters. Moving away from highlighting exchanges between the two countries in terms of colonial connections, religious influences and philosophical impacts, the book instead focuses on the vast array of modern cultural dialogues that have influenced both countries, especially in literature, theatre and film. The book discusses issues of translation, adaptation, and reception to reveal a unique cultural relationship. The editors and contributors examine the existing programs and strategies for cultural interchange, and analyse how these shape or have shaped intercultural dialogue, and what kind of intercultural exchange is encouraged.

This book is of interest to students and researchers of film and media studies, Sinophone studies, transnational studies, cultural studies and social and cultural anthropology.

Introduction.- Part 1. Facilitators.- 1. Individuals as Gatekeepers: The Dissemination of Chinese Films in the German-language Region from the 1970s to the Early 1990s.- 2. Forty Years of Chinese-German Cultural Projects and Diplomacy. Chen Ping in conversation with Anna Stecher.- Part 2. Creators.- 3. Digging Deep into Chinese Reality---An Interview with Li Yang About His Cinematic Trilogy.- 4. Performing Disaster and Trauma: A Cross-cultural Dialogue between Post-socialist China and Munich in the Age of Globalization.- 5. The Invisible Person: Duan Yingmei as Centerpiece of German Chinese Art.- 6. In an Ambush from All Sides. On the Conditions of Feminist Performance Art in the PRC. A Sino-German encounter with feminist performance artist Li Xinmo.- Part 3. Transmission.- 7. The Distribution and Translation of German Films in China (1949–1966).- 8. Impressions of Chinese Opera in 19th Century German Travel Notes.- 9. Cultural Symbols: A Way to Boost Cultural Dialogues between China and Germany.- Part 4. Transformation.- 10. Textual Metamorphosis Along With Poetical Re-Creation: The ‘Nachdichtung’ of Ancient Chinese Poetry in Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der .- 11. When Kafka Rode a Paper Tiger Toward the Peach Blossom Spring. A Conversation on Contemporary Performance with Tian Gebing and Christoph Lepschy.- 12. Martin Heidegger and Daoism in Dialogue.      

Jin Haina is a professor of translation, film and communication studies at the Communication University of China. Her research interests include audiovisual translation, translation history, film history, and translated cinema. She has published a monograph entitled Towards a History of Translating Chinese Silent Films (1905–1949) and is now working on a sequel, which will cover the 110-year history of translating Chinese films into foreign languages. She has guested a special issue on the translation and dissemination of Chinese cinemas for Journal of Chinese Cinemas (Routledge). She is the editor in chief of Journal of Chinese Film Studies (De Grutyer, to be launched in 2021) and an editor for Cogent Arts and Humanities (Routledge) and on the scientific board of Journal of Audiovisual Translation. She is also the translator of Film and Television Culture in China (Paths, 2018) and General History of Chinese Film (Routledge, Forthcoming).

Anna Stecher is a lecturer in Sinology at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany. She works on contemporary Chinese literature and theatre, focusing especially on questions of representation, adaptation and dramaturgy. Her publications include a book-length study on Lin Zhaohua, China’s most important theatre director of the last decades, Im Dialog mit dem chinesischen Schauspieljahrhundert: Studien zum Theater von Lin Zhaohua (2014) as well as an edited volume with six contemporary Chinese dramas in German translation Chinas Schauspiel: Nah am Nerv. Sechs Stückübersetzungen (Gissenwehrer, Stecher 2018).

Rebecca Ehrenwirth is a professor of translation at the International University of Applied Sciences/SDI Munich. Her research interests include Sinophone studies with a special focus on contemporary literature, art and film as well as postcolonial studies. She is the editor of the monograph Zeitgenoessische sinophone Literatur in Thailand (Harrassowitz, 2018) and the co-editor of a biography on Jane Austen, By a Lady: Das Leben der Jane Austen (Lambert Schneider, 2017).