ABSTRACT
The twentieth century began with an armed confl ict between China and the foreign powers that were engaged there in colonial exploitation or missionary activity, or both. The confl ict began with a series of guerrilla attacks carried out by the “Boxers” (“Fists for Harmony and Righteousness”) against foreigners and the technology they had introduced, but escalated to involve the army of the Qing regime and the siege of the foreign legations in Beijing. After eight weeks, the siege was lifted by an allied force under the British General Gaselee. Subsequently, the reinforced occupation troops were placed under the command of the German Generalfeldmarschall Graf von Waldersee, although no German troops had been involved in freeing the legations.1 While this brief war was soon overshadowed by greater confl icts on the world stage, it was perceived in Germany in 1900 as the most momentous military and political event to have occurred since the foundation of the German Reich. For it was not only the fi rst war in which Germany had been engaged since 1871, but also the fi rst time that Germany, as a new colonial power, had had the chance to assert and strengthen its position, interacting with established colonial nations in a common military undertaking. As a result, the Boxer Uprising became a phenomenon in the German print media that was out of all proportion to the small German role in the actual fi ghting. An important factor that contributed to this process was the technical innovation of reporting by telegraph, which gave distant events an immediacy that journalism had hitherto lacked. The German reading public could thus be engaged emotionally in a confl ict on a faraway continent. Such a mode of reporting bore the stamp of “authenticity” and also served to raise nationalist feeling to extravagantly new levels. As I have shown elsewhere, the dramatic and often fi ctitious way in which the war was reported in fact amounted to a covert re-enactment in print of the foundation myth of the Reich, namely the defeat of France at Sedan.2
