Implicating Buddhism in Madame Butterfly’s Tragedy: Japonisme and Japan-Bashing in Fritz Lang’s Harakiri (1919)

This chapter extensively examines Fritz Lang’s Harakiri (1919), an adaptation of the Madame Butterfly story made by Lang during his first year as a director. It studies the production and reception histories of the film, which was believed to be lost until a print was discovered in the Netherlands. In comparing the restored version of Harakiri with earlier versions of the story, the chapter observes that Lang’s film distinguishes itself by dramatizing the double hara-kiri of O-Take-San and her father and by transforming the Buddhist bonze (monk), who makes only a brief appearance in Puccini’s opera, into Butterfly’s principal antagonist. By portraying the bonze as evil, the film shifts the responsibility for Butterfly’s tragedy to Buddhism and, by extension, to Japanese culture itself. The chapter considers both historical and contemporary reasons for the harsh portrayal of Buddhism in the film, while recognizing that the negative projection of Japan stands in tension with the film’s own Japonisme, a product of Lang’s passion for East Asian art. Furthermore, a spectacular scene described in a contemporary review but missing from the restored version of the film alludes to the fact that Harakiri did not provide a vehicle for Lang’s preferred visual style

Shedding, Witchcraft, and the Romantic Subject: Feminist Appropriation of the Witch in Sarah Kirsch’s Zaubersprüche

Against a background of the feminist appropriation of the witch taking place concurrently in second-wave American, French and West German feminism, the paper examines Sarah Kirsch’s appropriation of the witch as a subversive figure in her poetry cycle Zaubersprüche (Conjurations, 1973). In subverting the traditional image of the witch, Kirsch establishes a new one: that of a feminist witch and a feminist witch-writer. The witch is both the fictive character created by Kirsch, and her own self-designation; in the latter case, writing, especially writing in the experimental fashion, is a form of witchcraft. The paper analyzes the poems using the theoretical concept of magical realism. Although magical realism is mostly associated with post-colonial studies, it proves to be an apposite mode for feminist studies as well. The magical realist modality contradicts the state-sanctioned aesthetic of socialist realism, a fact that makes Kirsch one of the subversive “GDR-Witches.