The Boxers in Contemporary Chinese and German Fiction: Mo Yan and Gerhard Seyfried

Abstract

Germany’s colonial adventures in China have emerged increasingly over the last decade from a century of silence and neglect by historians, and in the wake of this revival the literary potential of this epoch has once more been exploited. Gerhard Seyfried’s novel Gelber Wind oder Der Aufstand der Boxer (Yellow Wind or The Boxer Uprising, 2008) has 640 pages and is exhaustively researched.1 What is claimed on the dust-jacket, that Seyfried’s work is ‘the first great historical epic in German on the Boxer Uprising’, is simply false. In the years immediately following the defeat of the Boxers in the late autumn of 1900 there was a spate of German fiction on this theme, the most popular of which, Elisabeth vonHeyking’s Briefe, die ihn nicht erreichten (Letters That Did Not Reach Him) was reprinted no less than forty-six times after its publication in 1903.2 While Seyfried avoids all mention of these predecessors in his foreword and wholly omits them from the bibliography at the end of the book, I shall argue later that his novel may be read – in part – as imitating this earlier tradition. In 2001 the eminent Chinese novelist Mo Yan, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012, had already produced a novel of almost equal length entitled Tanxiang xing (The Sandalwood Torture) which is set at the time of the bloody conflicts with Boxers in Shandong Province, focusing on the city of Gaomi.3 In the following I shall examine what guises well-documented events assume in two texts that enjoy all the privileges and freedoms of fiction and the advantages of historical distance, enquiring into the literary enactment of the alien Other. But first some brief preliminary considerations on the genre of historical novels are in order.