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Anne Marie Scholz’s From Fidelity to History: Film Adaptations as Cultural Events was published by Berghahn Books in April 2013. In what follows, Scholz discusses the experience of touring Vienna and seeing parts of the city made famous by The Third Man.
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The still on the cover of my book—from the 1949 British/U.S. co-production The Third Man–depicts the American Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten). He’s had a few too many drinks, and has just seen his old friend Harry Lime—a friend he believed dead— disappear somewhere on the square “Am Hof” in post-WWII Vienna. He is torn between doubts over his own sanity, unrequited love for Lime’s Czech girlfriend Anna, relief that his friend may still be alive, and near certainty that Harry is mixed up in a vicious black market racket. The darkness and mysterious aura of the Vienna square reinforces the haunted expression on Holly’s face. His predicament—that of an enterprising but unwelcome American pulp fiction writer stumbling through the labyrinth of postwar Europe–is inextricably linked with the city where he finds himself.
Wind over Water grew out of a concern to see East Asia – and East Asian scholars – better represented in the literature on contemporary human migration. Perhaps its most important purpose has been to show the full range and import of migration in East Asia rather than attempt any particular theoretical or policy argument. Thus the volume ranges, as the back cover blurb will tell you, “from Korean bar hostesses in Osaka to African entrepreneurs in Hong Kong, from Vietnamese women seeking husbands across the Chinese border to Pakistani Muslim men marrying women in Japan, from short-term business travelers in China to long-term tourists from Japan who ultimately decide to retire overseas.” While there are limitations to this kind of inclusive approach, it has the decided advantage of forcing a consideration of East Asia migration in its entirety: whether short-term or long-term, whether internal or across national borders, whether for economic or social purposes. Furthermore, it does so for countries that are closely linked politically and culturally but divided quite sharply between those with already rather well-developed economies, like Japan and South Korea, and those with still developing ones, such as China and Vietnam.
Newly released paperbacks from Berghahn:
Hansjörg Dilger is the editor, along with Ute Luig, of 