(See English below)

Wir laden Sie herzlich zum ersten japanologischen CrossAsia Talk nach der Sommerpause ein: Am 4. September 2025 ab 18 Uhr (Berliner Zeit) wird Frau Prof. Sarah Panzer (Missouri State University) Einblicke in ihre Forschungsarbeit „Documenting the Lives of Germany’s ‘Forgotten’ Prisoners of War (POWs): Photographs in the Bandō-Sammlung“ geben. Die Vortragende war im Frühling diesen Jahres im Rahmen des Stipendienprogramms der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz an der Staatsbibliothek in der Ostasienabteilung zu Gast und hat sich intensiv mit der Bandō-Sammlung beschäftigt.

On 7 November, 1914 the German garrison at Tsingtao (Qingdao), following a brief siege, surrendered to Japanese and British colonial troops. The German servicemen captured at Tsingtao were subsequently interned in Japan for the duration of the First World War. After early temporary arrangements—including barracks dating back to the Russo-Japanese War—proved inadequate, a series of POW camps were constructed across Japan. These camps became a kind of wartime ‘Ersatz Deutschland’ for their occupants, with multiple musical and theatrical ensembles organized within the various camps, as well as teams and training groups for popular sports and leisure activities. The differences between the camps notwithstanding, all variously functioned as sites where German identity was translated, represented, and negotiated within the context of extended internment. This fragile connection back to Germany became all the more important as the POWs began to suspect that their existence—to say nothing of their personal sacrifice as prisoners—had been forgotten.

Like their counterparts in Europe, some of the men interned in Japan during the First World War had access to private cameras, which they either brought with them from China or acquired in Japan. They used their cameras to document life in the camps, as well as to capture images of Japan and the Japanese. The photos produced within the camps, whether as discrete albums or as individual snapshots, provide insight into how POWs made sense of their experience in Japan and their ambivalent position as, on the one hand, emissaries of German Kultur, and, on the other, prisoners subject to the authority of the Japanese Empire. Drawing on the work of historians such as Maiken Umbach, who has argued that photographs are often more “usefully thought of as performative props than as documents of historical reality,” in this presentation I interrogate the photos and photo albums created by the German POWs and archived within the Bandō-Sammlung as a window into their understanding of themselves and their relationship to Germany and to Japan.

Die Vortragssprache ist Englisch. Bei Fragen kontaktieren Sie uns unter: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

Der Vortrag wird darüber hinaus via Webex gestreamt und aufgezeichnet*. Sie können am Vortrag über Ihren Browser ohne Installation einer Software teilnehmen. Klicken Sie dazu unten auf „Zum Vortrag“, folgen dem Link „Über Browser teilnehmen“ und geben Ihren Namen ein.

Alle bislang angekündigten Vorträge finden Sie hier. Die weiteren Termine kündigen wir in unserem Blog und auf unserem X-Account, Mastodon und BlueSky an.

—

We cordially invite you to attend the first japanological CrossAsia Talk after the summer break: On 4 September 2025 from 6 pm (Berlin time), Prof. Sarah Panzer (Missouri State University) will give insights into her research work ‘Documenting the Lives of Germany’s “Forgotten” Prisoners of War (POWs): Photographs in the Bandō Collection’. The lecturer was a guest at the State Library in the East Asia Department in spring 2025 as part of the grant programme of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and worked intensively on the Bandō Collection.

On 7 November, 1914 the German garrison at Tsingtao (Qingdao), following a brief siege, surrendered to Japanese and British colonial troops. The German servicemen captured at Tsingtao were subsequently interned in Japan for the duration of the First World War. After early temporary arrangements—including barracks dating back to the Russo-Japanese War—proved inadequate, a series of POW camps were constructed across Japan. These camps became a kind of wartime ‘Ersatz Deutschland’ for their occupants, with multiple musical and theatrical ensembles organized within the various camps, as well as teams and training groups for popular sports and leisure activities. The differences between the camps notwithstanding, all variously functioned as sites where German identity was translated, represented, and negotiated within the context of extended internment. This fragile connection back to Germany became all the more important as the POWs began to suspect that their existence—to say nothing of their personal sacrifice as prisoners—had been forgotten.

Like their counterparts in Europe, some of the men interned in Japan during the First World War had access to private cameras, which they either brought with them from China or acquired in Japan. They used their cameras to document life in the camps, as well as to capture images of Japan and the Japanese. The photos produced within the camps, whether as discrete albums or as individual snapshots, provide insight into how POWs made sense of their experience in Japan and their ambivalent position as, on the one hand, emissaries of German Kultur, and, on the other, prisoners subject to the authority of the Japanese Empire. Drawing on the work of historians such as Maiken Umbach, who has argued that photographs are often more “usefully thought of as performative props than as documents of historical reality,” in this presentation I interrogate the photos and photo albums created by the German POWs and archived within the Bandō-Sammlung as a window into their understanding of themselves and their relationship to Germany and to Japan.

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

The lecture will also be streamed and recorded via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser” (“über Browser teilnehmen”), and enter your name.

You can find all previously announced lectures here. We will announce further dates in our blog and on X, Mastodon and BlueSky.

*Mit Ihrer Teilnahme an der Veranstaltung räumen Sie der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz und ihren nachgeordneten Einrichtungen kostenlos alle Nutzungsrechte an den Bildern/Videos ein, die während der Veranstaltung von Ihnen angefertigt wurden. Dies schließt auch die kommerzielle Nutzung ein. Diese Einverständniserklärung gilt räumlich und zeitlich unbeschränkt und für die Nutzung in allen Medien, sowohl für analoge als auch für digitale Verwendungen. Sie umfasst auch die Bildbearbeitung sowie die Verwendung der Bilder für Montagen. / By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.

(See English below)

Frau Prof. Elisabeth Kaske (Universität Leipzig) wird uns am 27. März 2025 ab 18 Uhr eines ihrer aktuellen Forschungsthemen unter dem Titel „The plight of expectant officials through the lens of the daily Shenbao“ im Rahmen eines neuen CrossAsia Talk vorstellen. Ihr Vortrag untersucht, wie die Shanghaier Zeitung Shenbao die prekäre Situation der „Erwartungsbeamten der späten Qing-Zeit kommentierte – ihre zunehmende Zahl durch den verkauf von Amtstiteln, ihre oft unsichere Beschäftigung und die wachsende Kritik an diesem System. Diese Analyse stützt Frau Kaske auf die digitale Auswertung der Shenbao-Archive und die damit verbundenen methodischen Herausforderungen.

State bureaucrats became an object of ridicule in many literatures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, think of Gogol or Kafka or Li Boyuan’s Officialdom Exposed. However, they are not normally an object of compassion. This talk explores how the Shanghai daily newspaper Shenbao treated a very specific group of officials, namely the expectant officials of late Qing China.
Their numbers had become inflated by the widespread sale of official rank since the 1850s. Although they sported official titles like “magistrate” or “prefect” or “circuit intendant,” their employment situation was often precarious, with the luckier ones employed in newly established provincial bureaus. By the early 1900s, this system of parallel bureaucracies became increasingly seen as an aberration, as one commentator put it: “Foreigner are telling jokes that talent in China is defined exclusively as ‘expectant circuit intendant’. When I heard this, it makes me sweat.” (Shenbao 1907/02/22)
Wang Juan has argued that ridicule of the officialdom was a product of the tabloid press which only emerged after the failed reform movement of 1898. Before the disaster of defeat in the Sino-Japanese War gave rise to a public sphere in the late 1890s, Shenbao was (almost) the only Chinese language newspaper that commented publicly on government affairs. What was the stance of the newspaper towards the problem of expectant officials? When was it recognized as a problem? What were the solutions? When and how did a problem-solving attitude shift to ridicule and exasperation?
I have used Shenbao to gauge the changing perception of the expectant officials through almost forty years of Shenbao publishing from 1872 to 1911. Shenbao is entirely digitized. CrossAsia currently holds two versions of the Shenbao corpus. In addition, I have used the HistText corpus established by Christian Henriot and his team. However, the use of these corpuses poses methodological problems. The search “expectant official” yields a huge amount of results. Moreover, we need to distinguish journalistic comment from the memorials collected in the reprints of the Peking Gazette and from news items, which in all of these corpuses cannot be entirely mechanized. This exploratory talk from the perspective of a user of these corpuses will discuss the problems, possible solutions and tentative results.

Die Vortragssprache ist Englisch. Bei Fragen kontaktieren Sie uns unter: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

Der Vortrag wird darüber hinaus via Webex gestreamt und aufgezeichnet*. Sie können am Vortrag über Ihren Browser ohne Installation einer Software teilnehmen. Klicken Sie dazu unten auf „Zum Vortrag“, folgen dem Link „Über Browser teilnehmen“ und geben Ihren Namen ein.

Alle bislang angekündigten Vorträge finden Sie hier. Die weiteren Termine kündigen wir in unserem Blog und auf unserem X-Account an.

—

Prof. Elisabeth Kaske (Leipzig University) will present one of her current research topics entitled ‘The plight of expectant officials through the lens of the daily Shenbao’ in a new CrossAsia Talk on 27 March 2025 from 6 pm. Her talk will examine how the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao commented on the precarious situation of the ‘expectant officials of the late Qing period – their increasing numbers through the sale of official titles, their often insecure employment and the growing criticism of this system. Ms Kaske bases this analysis on the digital analysis of the Shenbao archives and the methodological challenges associated with it.

State bureaucrats became an object of ridicule in many literatures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, think of Gogol or Kafka or Li Boyuan’s Officialdom Exposed. However, they are not normally an object of compassion. This talk explores how the Shanghai daily newspaper Shenbao treated a very specific group of officials, namely the expectant officials of late Qing China.
Their numbers had become inflated by the widespread sale of official rank since the 1850s. Although they sported official titles like “magistrate” or “prefect” or “circuit intendant,” their employment situation was often precarious, with the luckier ones employed in newly established provincial bureaus. By the early 1900s, this system of parallel bureaucracies became increasingly seen as an aberration, as one commentator put it: “Foreigner are telling jokes that talent in China is defined exclusively as ‘expectant circuit intendant’. When I heard this, it makes me sweat.” (Shenbao 1907/02/22)
Wang Juan has argued that ridicule of the officialdom was a product of the tabloid press which only emerged after the failed reform movement of 1898. Before the disaster of defeat in the Sino-Japanese War gave rise to a public sphere in the late 1890s, Shenbao was (almost) the only Chinese language newspaper that commented publicly on government affairs. What was the stance of the newspaper towards the problem of expectant officials? When was it recognized as a problem? What were the solutions? When and how did a problem-solving attitude shift to ridicule and exasperation?
I have used Shenbao to gauge the changing perception of the expectant officials through almost forty years of Shenbao publishing from 1872 to 1911. Shenbao is entirely digitized. CrossAsia currently holds two versions of the Shenbao corpus. In addition, I have used the HistText corpus established by Christian Henriot and his team. However, the use of these corpuses poses methodological problems. The search “expectant official” yields a huge amount of results. Moreover, we need to distinguish journalistic comment from the memorials collected in the reprints of the Peking Gazette and from news items, which in all of these corpuses cannot be entirely mechanized. This exploratory talk from the perspective of a user of these corpuses will discuss the problems, possible solutions and tentative results.

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

The lecture will also be streamed and recorded via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser” (“über Browser teilnehmen”), and enter your name.

You can find all previously announced lectures here. We will announce further dates in our blog and on X.

*Mit Ihrer Teilnahme an der Veranstaltung räumen Sie der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz und ihren nachgeordneten Einrichtungen kostenlos alle Nutzungsrechte an den Bildern/Videos ein, die während der Veranstaltung von Ihnen angefertigt wurden. Dies schließt auch die kommerzielle Nutzung ein. Diese Einverständniserklärung gilt räumlich und zeitlich unbeschränkt und für die Nutzung in allen Medien, sowohl für analoge als auch für digitale Verwendungen. Sie umfasst auch die Bildbearbeitung sowie die Verwendung der Bilder für Montagen. / By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.