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

Abstract: 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.