Beyond Alterity, the seventh volume in the Spektrum series published under the auspices of the German Studies Association, focuses on “Asian German Studies,” a new interdisciplinary field that defines itself as a transnational model delineated by geography and not by chronological periodization. Its diverse approaches are reflected in the various lines of inquiry presented in this volume. The focus of the essays is on meaningful political, economic, and cultural engagement between the German-speaking countries of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, on the one hand, and the Asian nations of China and Japan, on the other, and the scope of the book stretches from the imperialist era to the contemporary period. This “larger arc” (4) spanned three centuries that were marked by rapid transformations, a process the editors refer to as “accelerated globalization” (4). The multidisciplinary approach—one that explores the socio-historical and aesthetic representations of these two East Asian countries in the German-speaking world—takes into account various themes that have been on the agenda of recent academic debates about the intellectual and cultural relationship between East Asia and German-speaking countries.

The twelve chapters are grouped into four sections, and the first, “Japan and Germany in the Shadow of National Socialism,” deals with interactions between the two Axis powers in the 1930s and 1940s. It uses cinematic and literary texts to assess transnational relations, analyzes genre conventions, as well as the ambivalent views each country presented about the others in film, and discusses forms of transcultural romanticism—exemplified in the activities of the Deutsch-Japanische Gesellschaft, which, in the spring of 1944, sponsored a little-known essay contest aimed at reinforcing the German-Japanese alliance.

Section two, “From 1920s Leftist Collaboration to Global Capitalism,” looks at a broad spectrum of cultural, political, and economic factors to explore Chinese-German transnational connections in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It highlights the motives of Chinese students who went to the Weimar Republic and of German communists who tried to take advantage of both anti-imperial protests and the civil wars in China from 1927 to 1936 for their own political purposes. East German documentary films about China are examined with an eye to the relationship between ideologically driven politics and the pragmatic interests of the East German government in its relationship to Beijing. Concepts of a European identity set against the backdrop of present-day Western fears about China's increasing global status are investigated in Gerhard Seyfried's 2008 historical novel Yellow Wind about the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.

The third section, “Negotiating Identity in Multicultural Germany,” examines hybrid Asian-German identities in the German-speaking countries from the early decades of the twentieth century to the present. The cultural activities of Asian artists are the main focus in discussions about German films that the Chinese actress Anna May Wong made during the Weimar Republic, and about Yoko Tawada's 1989 novella The Bath, which provides a feminist deconstruction of the bio-political allegory of body and gender images in post-1945 Japan and West Germany. “Trade, Travel, and Ethnographical Narratives,” the fourth and final section, delves into the economic and cultural encounters that shaped Western perceptions of East Asia. In contrast to earlier sections, these chapters deal with more tangible interactions, such as the hairnet manufacturing industries in specific regions in China and Austria-Hungary (later Czechoslovakia), which were interlinked and, to a certain degree, dependent on each other. This case study reveals that globalization caused economic transformations in both regions that led to different consequences for local individuals and families. The final chapter examines the works of Swiss writer Hugo Loetscher, whose texts highlight the attempt to connect East and West as complementary elements of a global culture—not as opposites. This is an overarching theme, in fact, in a number of the contributions to this volume.

All in all, this is an impressive collection that reflects the scholarly achievements Asian German Studies has made in recent years. Focusing on the interactions between the German-speaking world and China and Japan, this new field has begun to catch up with research performed in the English-speaking world, especially by North American Germanists who have demonstrated a keen interest in transnational connections. The broad timeline used in most chapters reveals the far-reaching interaction between Germany and East Asia, while also illustrating the different regime changes that occurred in a nearly simultaneous manner in these countries—changes that had a severe impact on artistic and socioeconomic output. An essay collection presents a scattered picture of past and present realities, of course, and there is clearly a need for more work on this topic, including studies that address the Asian-German relationship from an Asian perspective. Despite an imbalance in terms of coverage—nine chapters deal with literature and film and only three chapters with politics, society, and economy—the volume not only makes an important contribution to our knowledge and understanding of German-East Asian relations, but also suggests that the new subfield of Asian German Studies offers a multitude of topics worthy of further study.