Publisher's Synopsis
Text in German. Today, half-timbered houses in the "New Nuremberg style" still stand in the Chinese metropolis of Qingdao. The historic city center, the German colonial city of Tsingtau (1897-1914), tells a colonial founding narrative of German self-representation in the mirror of a racist construction of the Chinese other. Tsingtau was an urban development Self-staging of the German Reich, which heralded bourgeois self-invention and the imperial claim of the "German cultural nation" to its "place in the sun". The colonial founding narrative of the "cleanest and healthiest city on the entire East Asian coast" underpinned not only the national and bourgeoisie Self-representation, but also provided the justification for a racist exclusion and discipline of the Chinese population, who knew how to evade the grip of power in various ways. The book shows how exclusion and discipline of the majority population and the Withdrawal into a gated community brought forth imaginations of a state of siege by "the hostile others" based on colonial interpretations of the world, the self and the alien. Imaginations that we can recognize in our post-colonial patterns of thought and action today.
