This book examines the history of the German-Korean relationship from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century, focusing on the nations’ varied encounters with each other during the last years of the Yi dynasty, the Japanese occupation of Korea, the Cold War, and the post-Cold War era. With essays from a range of internationally respected scholars, this collection moves between history, diplomacy, politics, education, migration, literature, cinema, and architecture to uncover historical and cultural intersections between Germany and Korea. Each nation has navigated the challenges of modernity in different ways, and yet traditional East-West dichotomies belie the deeper affinities between them. This book points to those affinities, focusing in particular on the past and present internal divisions that perhaps make Germany and Korea as similar as Germany and Japan.

Joanne Miyang Cho is Professor and Chair of History at William Paterson University in New Jersey, USA. She is co-editor of Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India (2014), Germany and China (2014), Transnational Encounters between Germany and Japan (2016), and Gendered Encounters between Germany and Asia (2016), and co-editor of Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies.