Even more than seventy years after the Second World War, German exile literature continues to wait with surprises. This is true in particular for the estates of those writers who fled across less 'privileged' routes to remote places such as Shanghai. Mark Siegelberg (1895–1986) was one of them. The nowadays almost forgotten Austrian Jewish journalist, novelist and playwright set out on the long route to East Asia in 1939, after being released from Buchenwald concentration camp, where he had been interned the previous year. His Shanghai period lasted until the beginning of December 1941, when he was evacuated to Australia. His final destination of exile was Melbourne; there he would live for 27 years before returning to Austria in 1968. Siegelberg deserves distinction as the only German-language author who ever addressed the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7th, 1941 as the topic of a literary work, and, moreover, as one who did so in the immediacy of the historic events on the Pacific Front. The unique result of this commitment is the play Das zweite Gesicht/The Face of Pearl Harbor (1942). The piece, in which Siegelberg displays a complex world political scenario against the backdrop of the militarized city of Shanghai held in check by the Japanese, attests to the author's indignation over the escalation of violence in East Asia during the turbulent phase leading up to the outbreak of the Pacific War. While an English translation of the piece appeared in Australia in 1944, supposedly as an anti-Japanese propaganda initiative, the original text in German is published in this volume for the very first time.

In the past thirty years, the Sino-Jewish encounter in modern China has increasingly garnered scholarly and popular attention. This volume will be the first to focus on the transcultural exchange between Ashkenazic Jewry and China. The essays here investigate how this exchange of texts and translations, images and ideas, has enriched both Jewish and Chinese cultures and prepared for a global, inclusive world literature. The book breaks new ground in the field, covering such new topics as the images of China in Yiddish and German Jewish letters, the intersectionality of the Jewish and Chinese literature in illuminating the implications for a truly global and inclusive world literature, the biographies of prominent figures in Chinese-Jewish connections, the Chabad engagement in contemporary China. Some of the fundamental debates in the current scholarship will also be addressed, with a special emphasis on how many Jewish refugees arrived in Shanghai and how much interaction occurred between the Jewish refugees and the resident Chinese population during the wartime and its aftermath.

This book explores and brings to light untold stories from the margins of Chinese society. It investigates and reveals grassroots and popular cultural beliefs, amusing anecdotes, items of lore, and accounts of the strange and the unusual. It delves into questions of identity formation, considering gender, sexuality, class, generational divides, subcultures, national minorities and online communities. It examines heritage-making practices and the persistence of marginalized memories. Bringing together views from cultural studies, literature, gender studies, cultural heritage, sociology, history and more, the book argues that neither the margins nor the centre can be understood in isolation, and that by focusing on the margins, a fuller picture of Chinese society overall emerges, including new perspectives on spatial and social marginality, on hierarchies of marginality, and on neglected spaces, voices and identities.