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»China frisst Menschen« Dadaistische Ästhetik und Kolonialismuskritik bei Richard Huelsenbeck.

Richard Huelsenbeck’s 1930 novel China frisst Menschen (China devours People) combines travelogue, avant-garde formal experimentation, and anti-colonial reflection into a text that resists conventional genre classifications. This article shows how Huelsenbeck employs aesthetic strategies to destabil...

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Published in:Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift (KWZ) no. 4; pp. 97 - 120
Main Author: Lü, Yixu
Format: Article
Published: Felix Meiner Verlag GmbH 2025
Subjects:
Dadaism
Imperialism
Authorship
Epistemics
Experimental literature
Travel literature
German literature
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Summary:Richard Huelsenbeck’s 1930 novel China frisst Menschen (China devours People) combines travelogue, avant-garde formal experimentation, and anti-colonial reflection into a text that resists conventional genre classifications. This article shows how Huelsenbeck employs aesthetic strategies to destabilise colonial patterns of perception. The China depicted in the novel appears less as a concrete cultural space than as a projection surface on which the limits of Western epistemic certainty becomes visible. The article calls for a reassessment of this largely neglected novel, highlighting the political potential of avant-garde aesthetics in German literature of the interwar period.