Frank Hoffmann's new book falls somewhat between conventional genres. It is the first volume of a planned three-volume series under the overall editorship of Andreas Schirmer. Volumes 2 and 3, on “Koreans in Central Europe” and “Central Europeans in Korea,” respectively, will be comprised of articles by multiple authors, while this first book in the series is devoted entirely to Hoffmann's research. Meanwhile, Berlin Koreans and Pictured Koreans itself does not take the usual form of a monograph; it is divided into three unequal sections, with the first, entitled “The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s,” by far the longest.

So one gets one's scholarship here in slightly unusual packaging, but what scholarship it is! It is worth beginning with the details, because Hoffmann's ability to reconstruct the biographies of his Berlin Koreans (of which there are twelve in all) from a plethora of published and archival sources is truly impressive, and because many of their stories are so fascinating in their own right. Most arrived as students, and some had ongoing interactions with the German academic world: An Pong-gŭn (a cousin of An Chung-gŭn) worked for the Dresden Ethnological Museum (p. 27), while Kim Chung-se became a significant Oriental studies scholar (pp. 48–49). We meet the artist Pae Un-sŏng, the dancer Kuni Masami (born Pak Yŏng-in), and the composer An Ik-t'ae—the last a particular problem for the “postliberation project of historical purification” (p. 108) insofar as he both composed the South Korean national anthem (the Aegukka) and conducted a 1942 concert celebrating the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. We meet scientists and political operatives. There are several generational logics at play. Berlin Koreans of the 1920s, through the Koryŏ Student Corps in Germany and other mechanisms, organized for independence and socialism; those of the mid-1930s were quite comfortable with the Nazi regime and “no longer distinguish[ed] between Japanese and Korean interests” (p. 106). Nor did German authorities make the distinction, and Koreans struggled with “enemy alien” status during World War I but were accorded “honorary Aryan” status during the Nazi period (pp. 43, 106). Hoffmann thus convincingly argues that colonial space and colonial modernity extend fully into the German capital (p. 153). The section also offers repeated examples of the narrow but significant connections that constituted transnational networks of Korean organization in the early twentieth century.

The shorter second and third sections of the book both deal with material artifacts of exoticist European interest in Korea. In 1904, the Liebig's Extract of Meat Company issued a trading card set of “pictures from Korea” that it included with jars of its meat goo, one of 1,138 such sets that it commissioned over a span of almost seventy years and that came to be avidly collected by children. It is unsurprising that many of the images were derived from “templates” of generic Asian scenes, not necessarily connected to Korea in particular, assembled by the card designers “as if putting together a modular puzzle from preconfigured parts” (p. 185). But what is exceptional is that Hoffmann is able to nail many of the specific sources, with a card of Koreans stilt-walking, for instance, deriving from a 1901 photograph of the practice in China (p. 183). Beyond this tour de force of intermedia analysis, Hoffmann offers a larger point in viewing the “romanticized colonial imagery” of the cards as important for constructing domestic subjects of the colonial enterprise above and apart from the particularities of any particular national colonialism (p. 192). Meanwhile, the final section of the book is devoted to Emil Nolde's 1912 painting The Missionary, which includes an image of a Korean changsŭng village guardian post. In Hoffmann's interpretation, Nolde was an “ultra-right modernist,” whose primitivism and anti-colonialism were but facets of a project to recover an uncorrupted European self (pp. 200, 226). For an Asian studies audience, the significance of this section will probably lie mostly in Hoffmann's elaboration on the meeting grounds of ethnology and German expressionism within which Nolde's Korean imagery was imbedded.

Several other qualities of the book are worthy of mention. Hoffmann can be both funny and topical in a way that I, at least, found refreshing. The text sometimes follows tangents for multiple paragraphs. Mostly this contributes to the overall richness of Berlin Koreans and Pictured Koreans; occasionally, as in the Nolde section, it can distract from the thread of the argument. The book is lavishly illustrated with both color and black-and-white illustrations, many quite arresting, which contribute greatly to its impact. No one who has dealt with image permissions will fail to be amazed. On the other hand, there is no index, an unfortunate omission given the sheer number of names and organizations to which Hoffmann makes reference. Overall, this is an engaging and path-breaking work that introduces a new topic in transnational Korean history to an English-language audience.