Sino-German Encounters and Entanglements: Transnational Politics and Culture, 1890–1950 (Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies) 3030733904, 9783030733902

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PALGRAVE SERIES IN ASIAN GERMAN STUDIES

Sino-German Encounters and Entanglements Transnational Politics and Culture, 1890–1950 Edited by Joanne Miyang Cho

Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies Series Editors Joanne Miyang Cho Department of History William Paterson University of New Jersey Wayne, NJ, USA Douglas T. McGetchin Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, FL, USA

This series contributes to the emerging field of Asian-German Studies by bringing together cutting-edge scholarship from international scholars in a variety of fields. It encourages the publication of works by specialists globally on the multi-faceted dimensions of ties between the German-­ speaking world (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and German-speaking enclaves in Eastern Europe) and Asian countries over the past two centuries. Rejecting traditional notions of West and East as seeming polar opposites (e.g., colonizer and colonized), the volumes in this series attempt to reconstruct the ways in which Germans and Asians have cooperated and negotiated the challenge of modernity in various fields. The volumes cover a range of topics that combine the perspectives of anthropology, comparative religion, economics, geography, history, human rights, literature, philosophy, politics, and more. For the first time, such publications offer readers a unique look at the role that the German-speaking world and Asia have played in developing what is today a unique relationship between two of the world’s currently most vibrant political and economic regions. ADVISORY BOARD: Prof. Sebastian Conrad, Freie University of Berlin; Prof. Dorothy Figueira, University of Georgia; Prof. Doris Fischer, Würzburg University; Prof. Suzanne Marchand, Lousiana State University; Prof. Lee M. Roberts, Purdue University, Fort Wayne; Prof. Franziska Seraphim, Boston College More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14664

Joanne Miyang Cho Editor

Sino-German Encounters and Entanglements Transnational Politics and Culture, 1890–1950

Editor Joanne Miyang Cho Department of History William Paterson University of New Jersey Wayne, NJ, USA

Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies ISBN 978-3-030-73390-2    ISBN 978-3-030-73391-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73391-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Henrik Juho

Acknowledgments

The editor would like to express her appreciation to Editor Meagan Simpson at Palgrave Macmillan for her generous assistance and accommodation. She is grateful to her fellow Asian German Studies scholars, many of whom are regular participants at the German Studies Association annual conferences, where they present their exciting new research and support each other’s scholarly endeavors. The contributors are especially thankful to Sarah Panzer for her tireless and invaluable assistance in editing the manuscript.

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Contents

1 Sino-German Relations, Historiography, and Organization  1 Joanne Miyang Cho Part I Politics, Business, and Teaching in the Age of German Colonialism, 1890–1914  27 2 Elisabeth von Heyking: China Through the Eyes of a Female Aristocrat 29 Ulrike Brisson 3 A “War for Peace”? German-Speaking Pacifists’ Views on the Boxer Conflict 55 Timothy L. Schroer 4 Investing in “German Hong Kong”: The Building of a Global Economic Presence in Qingdao, 1898–1914 77 Matthew A. Yokell 5 “One Has to Rely Completely on Oneself”: The Challenging Life of German Teachers at German-Chinese Schools, 1898–1914107 Michael Schön

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Part II Knowledge, Pedagogy, and Medical Mission, 1910–1945 131 6 Max Weber and China: Imperial Scholarship, Its Background and Findings133 Jack Barbalet 7 Raising Children, Educating Citizens: Chinese Readings of the German Pedagogue Georg Kerschensteiner157 Henrike Rudolph 8 The Doctor as Patient: The Case of Elisabeth Kehrer and German Medical Missionaries in China189 Albert Wu Part III Music, Film, and Activism in the 1920s and 1930s 209 9 “What Exactly Is China” in Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler’s Die Maßnahme (The Measures Taken)211 John Gabriel 10 Xiao Youmei: Chinese Musical Patriot or Comprador Germanophile?239 Hao Huang 11 Between Imagined Homelands: Florian Gallenberger’s John Rabe265 Bruce Williams

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Part IV Diplomatic Struggles and German-­speaking Jews, 1920–1950 287 12 Illegitimate Representatives: Manchukuo-­German Relations and Diplomatic Struggles in Nazi Germany289 Simon Preker 13 Psychoanalysis in Chinese Exile. A. J. Storfer and His Magazine Project Gelbe Post319 Thomas Pekar Index337

Notes on Contributors

Jack Barbalet  is Professor of Sociology at Australian Catholic University and concurrently Visiting Fellow in the College of Asia and the Pacific at Australian National University. He has previously held university appointments in Papua New Guinea, Australia, England, and Hong Kong. Barbalet is a frequent contributor to academic journals and the author of several books, including Weber, Passion and Profits: ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ in Context (2011) and Confucianism and the Chinese Self: Re-examining Max Weber’s China (Palgrave, 2017). His research is on Max Weber’s theory of politics and also the sociology of China. Ulrike Brisson  received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Penn State and teaches at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) as Associate Teaching Professor of German and Global Studies. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European women’s travel writing as well as on foreign language acquisition. She has also translated travel narratives from English into German such as Ein Jahr unterwegs: Eine Amerikanerin bereist die Alte Welt by Blanche Willis Howard. Her other publications comprise multiple articles, the essay collection Not So Innocent Abroad: The Politics of Travel and Travel Writing, and a biography about Elisabeth von Heyking in Fembio. Joanne  Miyang  Cho is Professor of History at William Paterson University of New Jersey. She has co-edited Transcultural Encounters Between Germany and India (2014), Germany and China (2014), xiii

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Germany and Japan (2016), Gendered Encounters Between Germany and Asia (2016), and Germany and Korea (2018). She edited Transnational Encounters Between Germany and East Asia Since 1900 (2018) and German-East Asian Encounters and Entanglements Since 1945 (forthcoming). Her several book chapters and articles on the politics of civilization in the work of a number of twentieth-century German intellectuals are published. She is a co-editor for Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies. John Gabriel  is Lecturer in Musicology at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on Germanand Czech-speaking Central Europe from the fin-de-siècle to the early Cold War. His work has appeared in the Journal of the Society for American Music, Elephant and Castle: laboratorio dell’immaginario, and several edited volumes, and he is completing a book on the music theater of the New Objectivity movement in Weimar Republic Germany. Hao Huang  is the Bessie and Frankel Endowed Chair in Music at Scripps College. He has served as a four-time United States Information Agency Artistic Ambassador to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Dr. Huang was a Fulbright Scholar in Music and American Studies at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. His scholarship includes articles in refereed journals in Great Britain, Hungary, Greece, Japan, China, and the USA.  His scholarly work has been recognized by The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, and National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.” Thomas  Pekar received his PhD from Freiburg University and his Habilitation from Munich University. He has taught in Germany, Korea, and Japan. Since 2001, he has been a professor for German literature and culture at the Gakushūin University, Tokyo. He is a recipient of several fellowships. Some of his publications include edited/co-edited volumes, such as Wohnen und Unterwegssein (2019), Kulturkontake (2015), Flucht und Rettung (2011). He is the author of Der Japan-­Diskurs im westlichen Kulturkontext (1860–1920) (2003) and Ernst Jünger und der Orient (1999). He has also authored several articles and book chapters dealing with Jewish exiles in Japan and ideological relations between Japan and Nazi Germany. Simon  Preker obtained MA degrees in Japanese Studies at Halle-­ Wittenberg and in Japanese Language at Keio University (Tokyo), with

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funding from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation and the Robert Bosch Foundation. Between 2013 and 2018 he was part of the graduate school “China in Germany, Germany in China” at Universität Hamburg, graduating with a PhD thesis on “Republican Chinese Public Diplomacy in Nazi Germany, 1936–41.” He was a visiting researcher at Fudan University (2014–2015) and a “Taiwan Fellow” visiting scholar at National Taiwan University. Henrike  Rudolph  is an assistant professor at the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Göttingen. She completed her PhD at Hamburg University and Fudan University (Shanghai) in 2017 and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Chair of Contemporary Chinese Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-University in Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU) and an interim professor at the Institute of Chinese Studies at Heidelberg University. In her dissertation, she retraced the Sino-German educational exchange in the first half of the twentieth century. Her research focuses on the academic and political networks of Chinese scientists in the 1940s and 1950s. It combines the study of archival and contemporary sources with theories and digital tools from the field of historical network analysis. Michael  Schön studied Sinology and History at the University of Heidelberg and received his doctorate in Sinology from the University of Tübingen. He is the author of Eine quellenkritische Untersuchung einer Beschreibung der chinesischen Provinzhauptstadt Chengdu aus dem frühen 20. Jahrhundert: Das Chengdu tonglan (2005), a critical analysis of a guidebook to the Chinese provincial capital Chengdu from the early twentieth century. From 1999 to 2002 he was the Managing Editor of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine. Since 2006 he has held full-time positions in the German departments of Chinese Culture University (2006–2015) and Tamkang University (2015 to present) in Taipei/Taiwan. Timothy  L.  Schroer  is Professor of History at the University of West Georgia. His research addresses Western policy toward China during the Boxer uprising. His publications include the essay, “The German Military, Violence, and Culture During the Boxer Conflict,” in Empire, Ideology, Mass Violence: The Long Twentieth Century in Comparative Perspective (2016). His most recent article was published in 2018 by the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in its research paper series under the title “Multinormativity in Western Arguments Regarding

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Punishment of the Boxers and their Patrons, 1900–1901.” He is also the author of Recasting Race After World War II (2007). Bruce  Williams  is Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Languages and Cultures of the William Paterson University of New Jersey. A specialist in film studies, his areas of research focus range from national identity and the cinema to issues of film and language. He is co-­author, with Keumsil Kim-Yoon, of Two Lenses on the Korean Ethos: Key Cultural Concepts and Their Appearance in Cinema. His research focuses on Albanian cinema, with an emphasis on the Kinostudio era, the transition to international coproduction, and women directors. Albert Wu  is Associate Professor of History at the American University of Paris. His first book, From Christ to Confucius: German Missionaries, Chinese Christians, and the Globalization of Christianity, 1860–1950, appeared with Yale University Press in 2016. His second book project treats a history of global health governance written through the lens of European and East Asian interactions. His recent works, among others, include “In the Shadow of Empire” (Journal of Global History, 2018), “The Quest for an ‘Indigenous Church’” (American Historical Review, 2017), and “Forever a Patriot” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2017). Matthew A. Yokell  holds a PhD (2018) in Modern European History from Texas A&M University . His dissertation, “The Eagle and the Dragon: Tsingtau and the German Colonial Experience in China, 1880–1918,” examines the German colony of Qingdao, China, in order to elucidate German ideas about empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He served as a senior historian for the United States Navy, where he co-edited a documentary history of the Navy in World War I, as well as a volume on the War of 1812. He works as an intelligence analyst for the federal government.

CHAPTER 1

Sino-German Relations, Historiography, and Organization Joanne Miyang Cho

This edited volume contributes to both German-East Asian Studies, broadly defined, and Sino-German Studies more specifically. In recent years, an increasing number of publications in these related fields have appeared, which reflects both an increasing research interest in transnational studies and the growing importance of China and East Asia in global economic and political affairs. The present edited volume brings together an outstanding collection of thirteen chapters exploring SinoGerman encounters and entanglements from the 1890s, the decade in which the German lease of Jiaozhou in Shandong province began, to the end of the Republic of China in 1949. Sino-German relations during this era were intense, characterized by a short period of antagonism followed by a long period of cooperation. These chapters explore the two countries’ complex, dynamic, and changing relationships from multiple disciplinary perspectives. They also examine the impact of these relations on the mutual views and images of China and Germany constructed in both

J. M. Cho (*) Department of History, William Paterson University of New Jersey, Wayne, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. M. Cho (ed.), Sino-German Encounters and Entanglements, Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73391-9_1

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countries. Adopting a transnational or global historical approach, the volume de-emphasizes comparison and instead focuses on interactions, cross-­cultural connections, bi-directional cultural flow, entanglements, and hybridity. This introductory chapter addresses the three following topics. The first section provides a brief overview of the history of Sino-German relations between 1890 and 1950 through the opposing frames of antagonism and cooperation. Sino-German relations around 1900 may have been initially antagonistic, but from 1905 their relations steadily improved until World War I ended German colonialism in China. Following the war they established a strong, cooperative relationship premised on equality, which reached its peak in 1928–1938, but the relationship lacked a clear, underlying political logic. The second section examines the historiographical landscape concerning Sino-German relations from 1890 to 1950. It reviews select monographs and edited volumes which have appeared in the last twenty years. While this research still tends to orient its focus on German colonialism, mission, trade, and diplomacy, there is also evidence of growing diversification within the field and the emergence of new topics. The third section explains the structure of this volume and presents the key arguments of the next twelve chapters (Chaps. 2 through 13). The topics addressed are quite diverse, ranging from politics and diplomacy, business, medical mission, pedagogy, and social theory to psychoanalysis, literature, music, and film.

Brief Overview of Sino-German Relations, 1890–1950 The years 1890–1950 produced a series of intense transnational encounters and entanglements between Germany and China. This relationship can most accurately be portrayed as a short period of antagonism followed by a relatively long period of cooperation. Sino-German relations were at their nadir following Germany’s occupation of Jiaozhou Bay in Shandong province in 1897, which occurred within the context of China’s partition by the West, and then again during the harsh suppression of the Boxers by German troops in 1900–1901. Their relationship became more cooperative, however, as German colonial rule in Jiaozhou became more accommodating after 1905, and a strong partnership emerged after World War I.  Their cooperative relationship peaked in 1928–1938  in both military

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and trade matters. Following the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, however, the Nazi state pursued a pro-Japanese policy, which threatened German business interests in China. Yet even as the official Sino-­German relationship ended, another, wholly unexpected form of Sino-German engagement emerged, as 17,000 German-speaking Jewish refugees arrived in Shanghai beginning in 1938. Most of them survived the war, due to a combination of Chinese tolerance and Japanese ambivalence. Although Germany and China were enemies during World War II (1941–1945), the two states never actually engage in any physical fighting, in contrast to World War I (1917–1918).1 Between 1890 and the start of World War I, Sino-German relations evolved in parallel with a transition from harsh colonial relations to a more moderate system of colonial accommodation. German colonial ambitions in China emerged out of a desire to diversify the country’s export markets. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, advocates of German Weltpolitik (world policy) became concerned that domestic consumption was increasingly unable to keep pace with Germany’s expanding industrial capacity. Thus, Germany put “a premium on export markets.”2 After China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1895 exposed its weaknesses, Germany, like other imperial powers, actively sought a colony of its own in China. In 1896 Admiral Alfred Tirpitz inspected Jiaozhou Bay and recommended seizing it from China. Using the murder of two German Catholic missionaries in late 1897 as pretext, Emperor Wilhelm II deployed German troops to Jiaozhou Bay. The 1898 agreement negotiated with the Chinese state permitted Germany to lease the region for 99 years. In reality, however, Germany treated the territory effectively “like a colony.”3 The German colony in Jiaozhou was unique in one respect, because, unlike other German colonies, it was run by the Naval Ministry.4 The navy prioritized Jiaozhou “as a business and trade outpost to China’s interior.”5 It wanted to make the colony “a showcase for the cultural, scientific, and technological achievements of the German empire.”6 It also worked to modernize Qingdao, the administrative center of the colony, by creating new urban infrastructure.7 Yet these policies were accompanied by “the sign of segregation and anti-Chinese hatred.”8 Interaction between the two communities was strictly limited and Germans restricted Chinese residents’ access to the center of town. The Chinese resisted German rule, and a cycle of conflict and repression came to define relations between the German Catholic mission and local leaders, which erupted in violence during the Boxer Rebellion.9 The year 1900 became “the height and at the

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same time the turning point of the colonial and military expansion policy in China.”10 The Boxer Rebellion seriously damaged Sino-German relations. After initially opposing the Boxers, the Empress Dowager Cixi later sided with them, as a result of the Allies’ decision to station additional foreign troops in Beijing in order to protect the city’s legation quarter. Following the Boxers’ assassination of Baron Clemens von Kettler  in June 1900, the German ambassador to the Qing court, Wilhelm II inflamed the situation further with his infamous Sinophobic “Hun speech” in July 1900, during a farewell address to German soldiers being deployed to China. He instructed them to be merciless in battle, evoking the legendary martial spirit of the Huns. He furthermore demanded that Beijing be burned to the ground.11 Moreover, while fighting in the province of Shandong was violently suppressed by its governor Yuan Shikai, the international expeditionary force under the command of German General Alfred von Waldersee committed multiple acts of looting, destruction, and murder in cities and towns across northern China. The resulting Boxer Protocol of 1901 deeply humiliated China, which included a sizable indemnity and a Chinese mission of atonement to Germany and Japan.12 Germany, for its part, was to receive “20 percent of the package.”13 For China, this humiliation resulted in nationalism becoming a central plank of its foreign policy hereafter. There was no punitive expedition in Jiaozhou in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion, in contrast to Germany’s punitive actions in Beijing and other parts of China. Admiral Tirpitz wished to protect “Germany’s long-­ range economic interests in Shandong.” Thus, he and Governor Yuan Shikai agreed to compensate Germans and other residents for their lost or damaged property.14 By 1905, Germany’s colonial policies had visibly moderated. Most scholars view them positively, regarding Jiaozhou a “Musterkolonie” (model colony). Lydia Gerber detects “a return to the Sinophilia that characterized the relationship between China and Europe before the 1850s.”15 Steinmetz similarly observes German policy in Jiaozhou as becoming “less violently expansionist and segregationist.” It was also less intrusive, as Germany chose “a program of cultural rapprochement and exchange with China.”16 According to Mechthild Leutner and Klaus Mühlhahn, this kind of positive assessment can be detected in the work of historians like John Schrecker, Horst Gründer, and Udo Ratenhof, although they clearly also pointed out “the economic interests of German imperialism.” Leutner and Mühlhahn caution against such a uniformly positive assessment by observing that “hardly any of the authors

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includes the ‘Chinese perspective’ or even make it the starting point of the investigation.”17 Sino-German trade was dramatically increased, albeit not without caveats. German imports from China doubled between 1905 and 1910. On the eve of World War I, there was “an equitable trade balance between imports and exports.”18 Jiaozhou thus showed “real signs of success in developing into an international hub of activity, prestige and power.”19 Germans appreciated China’s potential as a trading partner. Despite Germany’s important role in Western trade with China, its primary role was that of logistical middleman for the transport of other countries’ goods to China, as the sale and transport of goods between Germany and China lagged by contrast. For example, in 1913 German shipping companies transported to China “19 percent of the total foreign imports,” but only 7.75 percent originated from Germany.20 Thus, Germany’s actual profits were smaller than they initially appeared. World War I and the loss of its colonies had a devastating impact on German international trade: out of the almost 300 German companies in China in 1913, only 2 firms still existed in 1919.21 As William Kirby observed, imperialist initiatives were “at best irrelevant to the overall development of Sino-German trade.”22 Eventually reaching this same conclusion themselves, German policymakers replaced their previous imperialist approach in China with German cultural policies intended to leave a deeper impression. Despite some success, these policies, like in trade, were not without their limitations. Germany became an important player in education in China in the first decade of the twentieth century. It founded several secondary schools and polytechnics in a number of cities, including Qingdao and Shanghai. These differed from other Western schools in being “decidedly non-religious,” as well as in their joint German-Chinese administration. Their curricula emphasized science education and were “modeled along the lines of German polytechnic institutions.”23 In 1909, the German-Chinese College, “the only tertiary education institution in the German empire,” was created, making Jiaozhou “the most expensive of Germany’s colonial projects.”24 Although Jiaozhou was supposed to showcase German achievements, German cultural expansion was “rather limited in China.”25 The total number of students in all of the German schools was rather low—only 368 in 1913, far smaller than the student population at British- or American-funded facilities.26 Germany lost its colonial holding in Jiaozhou in November, 1914, following the Japanese invasion in September. In 1915, Japan offered

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support to the Entente in exchange for Germany’s colonial possessions in China and the Pacific.27 Three years into the war, China declared war against Germany in August 1917.28 Yet, the Sino-German relationship emerged after the war more solid and cooperative than it had been prior to 1914. Indeed, it was partially the two countries’ respective disappointments during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 that brought them together. The Chinese were upset with the Allies giving Shandong province to Japan rather than returning it to them. This led to the “large anti-­ Japanese, anti-Western and anti-traditionalist protest-action” that was the Chinese May Fourth Movement in 1919, which united the Chinese people to an unprecedented extent in their history.29 For their part, the public disappointment of the Germans in the conference’s outcome, which included an enormous reparation bill and the war guilt clause, is more or less common knowledge. Germany and China signed a separate treaty in 1921. In it, China was treated, for the first time, as an equal partner to a major Western power. Moreover, Germany renounced its privileges associated with the 1901 Boxer Protocol. Although their shared outsider status in the international system enabled the emergence of “important psychological bonds” between their leaders, it is important to note that their postwar relations lacked “substantive political concerns” and were thus susceptible to conflicting strategic interests.30 This new posture of cooperation paved the way for solid Sino-German relations in 1928–1938, beginning with the Nationalist government’s defeat of the warlords and reunification of the country in 1927 and ending in 1938, when Germany shifted to policy in favor of Japan. It was “a decade of German influence in China,” and it was “short-lived but intense.”31 Indeed, China maintained a closer relationship with Germany than with any other country during these years. Germany offered its investment and advice to China at the same time that the other powers were ignoring Chinese pleas for investment. The Chiang administration appreciated this assistance, as it was confronted with both armed domestic enemies and Japanese aggression.32 According to the head of the Hapro office in Nanking, this cooperative relationship with Germany allowed the Chinese to restructure their economy under the guidance of German technicians and scientists, at that time the best in the world. Although William Kirby sees this assessment as somewhat overstated, it nevertheless contained a kernel of truth.33 The Sino-German partnership was most obvious in industrial and military matters. To begin, it was based upon “complementary economic

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interests and, to some degree, on mutual economic dependency.”34 China’s exports to Germany were mostly raw materials, consisting mainly of metal ore, largely tungsten, but also to a lesser degree, “antimony, tin, and cooper.”35 The Chinese exchanged these resources for German goods, such as military equipment and railroad supplies. The two countries thus developed a kind of a barter system in their trade relations. Germany also provided much of China’s foreign credit during the 1930s. China became increasingly important for the German economy as well. With respect to the German export market outside Europe, China was its seventh largest trading partner in 1928 and the third largest by 1937. German investment in China grew from US$87 million in 1931 to US$300 million in 1937, which exceeded the US investment and was only smaller than that of Great Britain and Japan.36 In an attempted continuation of its prewar policies, Germany tried to foster its trade with China through cultural politics. For example, the two countries cooperated very fruitfully in “the fields of education and technical training.”37 In the 1920s and early 1930s, Germany continued to send lecturers to China, supported by the government, as well as universities and private companies.38 The China-Klub der deutschen Industrie (China-­ club of the German industry) was founded in 1934. The number of Sino-­ German cultural organizations increased in the 1930s. In Beijing, the center of traditional Chinese culture, the Institut für deutsche Kultur (Institute for German culture), was founded in 1933, which became the Deutschland Institut (German institute) in 1935.39 The Chinesisch-­ Deutscher Kulturverband (Chinese-German cultural association) in Nanking was a major institution, and it became “a resource center” for Chinese students returning from Germany, as well as German businesses in China. During 1935–1937, numerous Chinese study commissions visited Germany.40 German industry financed “the education of an emergent Chinese managerial elite.” Those returning Chinese students mostly worked at places associated with China’s industrial and military developments.41 Another crucial dimension of the German contribution to the Chiang administration was the military. Chiang Kai-shek particularly wanted German military advisers and German arms in rebuilding the Nationalist Party’s military. These German advisors assisted him with political and economic matters as well. As China became “the world’s greatest arms market,” German arms manufacturers and dealers assumed increasingly important roles.42 Chiang’s German military advisors (1928–1938)

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included Max Bauer (1928–1929), Hans von Seeckt (1934–1935), and Alexander von Falkenhausen (1935–1938).43 One could find “little of the personal and political friction” between them and Chinese leaders.44 The last of these advisors, Falkenhausen, who came to China in 1934, created several new artillery regiments and supported the development of an arms industry in China. Germans also helped to develop aviation in China.45 Falkenhausen’s strategic advice to Chiang to defend Shanghai and Nanking at all costs during the Second Sino-Japanese War was, however, a “costly and tragic mistake.” China’s elite divisions suffered the worst casualty rates, as 10,000 junior officers lost their lives.46 As a result of the Sino-Japanese War, Hitler began to question Germany’s pro-Chinese policy. Japan, which signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Nazi Germany in 1936, expressed its displeasure regarding the close Sino-German relationship and demanded that Germany switch its allegiance to Japan instead. While Hitler was “more sympathetic” to Japan, he initially sided with the pro-China faction in his government.47 In the spring of 1938, however, he ultimately chose Japan over China. In so doing, he encountered considerable opposition from many German business leaders, the German Foreign Office, and the Wehrmacht. These critics included War Minister von Bloomberg, General Georg Thomas, Hans Schippel of the China-Student-Gesellschaft, General von Falkenhausen, and Ambassador Trautmann. The German community in Shanghai also clearly, and for obvious reasons, disagreed with Nazi Germany’s reorientation.48 By contrast, Nazi Party leaders such as Ribbentrop, Goebbels, and Goering supported Germany’s new alliance with Japan. Hitler terminated military and trade ties with China in the fall of 1938, including arms sales. The German military advisers were also recalled to Germany. As a result, their decade of hard work on behalf of the Chiang government vanished. Despite the optimism of the Nazi leaders with respect to the new German-­ Japanese relationship, “the honeymoon was short-lived.”49 Japan did not protect German business interests, contrary to German expectations. Japan banned the export of North China wool to Germany; many expropriated industries in northern China changed their orders from Germany to Japan; and Japan forced many foreign businesses to leave. Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry was helpless “in the face of the Japanese diplomatic hocus-pocus.”50 In fact, Germany “actually suffered proportionally greater losses than any other country in its trade with the region.” The German

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share of North China’s imports decreased “from 18 percent in 1937 to 6 percent in both 1938 and 1939.”51 Sino-German relations became even more strained as a result of some Nazi diplomatic decisions. In May 1938, Nazi Germany recognized Manchukuo as an independent country, despite it being de facto controlled by Japan. In July 1941, it officially recognized a Japanese puppet regime in China, Wang Jingwei’s collaborationist government in Nanjing. That led to the closing of Nationalist China’s embassy in Berlin. This also marked the intensified persecution of Chinese residents in Nazi Germany.52 China and Nazi Germany did finally become adversaries, when China declared war against Germany two days after the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941. However, although their formal relationship ended in 1938, another form of Sino-German engagement emerged in that same year. Some 17,000 German-speaking Jewish refugees arrived in Shanghai, most of whom stayed in Shanghai until after the war had ended. Ironically, Nazi Germany’s ally, Japan, only partially acceded to German pressure on the matter of these refugees, through the construction of a ghetto, but it did not actively persecute Jews. Most of the refugees lived alongside Chinese neighbors, who tolerated their co-existence. Most of the refugees survived the war and left for the West after the end of the war.

A Historiographical Landscape This historiographical review examines several monographs and edited volumes on Sino-German relations, 1890–1950, which have been published since 2000. For many years, there were relatively few works on Sino-German relations, despite its central importance in global history. This is especially noticeable when compared against the large number of publications in German-Japanese studies or German-Indian studies. Sinophilia has had a longer history in Germany than either Indomania or Japonisme. In addition, Germany had a colony in China, but not in India or Japan. As this historiographical review reveals, this lack of scholarship in Sino-German relations has been somewhat addressed in recent years, although more works are still needed for a deeper understanding of this important relationship. These recent monographs still tend to focus on well-established topics, such as missionary activity, colonialism, trade, and diplomatic relations, but some recent edited volumes on German-East Asian Studies and Sino-German Studies have begun to address new topics

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as well. This present volume joins this expansion of the field while also offering new interpretations on more well-established topics. This review will first discuss some monographs that have appeared since 2000. The problem of German colonialism remains the most popular topic by far in recent Sino-German scholarship. Fion Wai Long So’s Germany’s Colony in China examines German colonial practices in Qingdao and Shandong (2019).53 Klaus Mühlhahn’s Herrschaft und Widerstand in der “Musterkolonie” Kiautschou (Rule and resistance in the “model colony” Jiaozhou, 2010) and Annette Biener’s Das deutsche Pachtgebiet Tsingtau in Schantung (The German lease areas Qingdao in Shandong, 2001) examine German colonialism in Jiaozhou and Qingdao.54 In addition, large sections of the following three magisterial works discuss Sino-German relations with respect to colonialism, Orientalism, and/or Weltpolitik—George Steinmetz’s The Devil’s Handwriting (2007), Suzanne L. Marchand’s German Orientalism in the Age of Empire (2009), and Erik Grimmer-Solem’s Learning Empire (2019).55 The following works discuss Germans who went to China, many of whom were missionaries. Lydia Gerber’s Von Voskamps “heidnischem Treiben” und Wilhelms “höherem China” (About Voskamp’s “pagan bustle” and Wilhelm’s “higher China,” 2003) examines two leading missionaries in China.56 Julia Stone’s Chinese Basket Babies studies a German missionary foundling home.57 Albert Wu’s From Confucius to Christ (2016) analyses German missionaries’ reconsideration of Chinese culture and Confucianism.58 Some Germans went to China as technical advisors instead. Susanne Kuss’s Der Völkerbund und China (The League of Nations and China, 2005) examines German technical cooperation and military advisors.59 Shirley Ye’s dissertation, “Business, Water, and  the Global City [1820–1950]” (2013), looks at the roles played by Germans in China’s hydraulic management and economic globalization. Shellen Xiao Wu’s Empires of Coal (2015) examines the influence of German imperialism and engineering in China.60 A number of monographs have specifically focused on the period between 1920 and 1945. Whereas Astrid Freyeisen’s Shanghai und die Politik des Dritten Reiches (Shanghai and the politics of the Third Reich, 2000) looks at Germans in Shanghai,61 Barbara Schmitt-Englert’s Deutsche in China (Germans in China, 2012) examines Germans in Shanghai, Tianjin, and Beijing.62 One major topic for this period is the phenomenon of German-Jewish wartime refugees in China, especially in Shanghai. Guang Pan’s A Study of Jewish Refugees in China (2019) studies the Jewish

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refugees in Shanghai and in other cities, including Qingdao, Tianjin, Harbin, and Dalian.63 Gao Bei’s Shanghai Sanctuary examines Chinese and Japanese policies toward the refugees.64 Irene Eber’s Wartime Shanghai and the Jewish Refugees (2012) and Judith Weissbach’s Exilerinnerungen deutschsprachiger Juden an Shanghai (Exile memories of German-speaking Jews in Shanghai, 2017) provide detailed accounts of the Jewish refugees.65 Finally, Marcia Reynders Ristaino’s Port of Last Resort looks at various Jewish communities in Shanghai (2001).66 Multiple noteworthy edited volumes in Asian German Studies and Sino-German Studies have also appeared in the last twenty years. The topics they treat reflect current research trends in the two related fields. Deutsch-chinesische Beziehungen im 19. Jahrhundert (German-Chinese relations in the nineteenth century, 2005), which has eight chapters, focuses on economic relations and colonialism. Four chapters in Deutsch-­ chinesische Beziehungen (German-Chinese relations, 2000) examine German colonialism, missionary activity, and economic affairs.67 In Gendered Encounters between Germany and Asia (2018), three chapters analyze German missions in China, the education of Chinese girls, and German-Jewish women in wartime Shanghai.68 In Beyond Alterity (2014), four chapters probe Chinese and German left-wing activists in the Weimar Republic, the Boxer Rebellion, Orientalism in Weimar cinema, and hairnet manufacturing in Shandong.69 In Transnational Encounters between Germany and East Asia since 1900 (2018), four chapters treat German missionary mothers and their Chinese daughters, the Weimar Mission and the Boxer catastrophe, representations of Jewish exile and models of memory, and Max Weber in light of recent East Asian developments.70 Finally, this volume will be compared to two similar edited volumes on Sino-German relations that have been published in English since the year 2000—Sino-German Relations Since 1800 (2000) and Germany and China (2014).71 There are several notable differences between these two earlier works and this present volume. Most immediately, the present volume is framed differently chronologically. While the former works cover about 150–200 years, this present volume covers around sixty years. This volume, therefore, is able to provide a more fine-grained analysis of these sixty years. A second major difference is the topics covered in these volumes. The 2000 work, which was edited by two scholars based in Hong Kong, has ten chapters related to the period 1890–1945. Two chapters treat German-Hong Kong relations; five chapters examine intellectual and political topics, such as Nietzsche, Orientalism, Marxism, and fascism; and

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two chapters treat colonialism and missionary activity. The 2014 volume has seven chapters that cover the period 1890–1945. Two chapters provide the history of Sino-German relations; two chapters treat Weltpolitik and German missions in China; and three chapters address intellectual and cultural topics. By contrast, out of the twelve chapters in this present volume, five chapters address politics, diplomacy, mission, business, and education; three chapters examine topics related to literary and intellectual history; and three chapters focus on filmic and musical relations, topics that the other two volumes do not engage. Thus, this present volume presents a more diverse range of topics. Moreover, there is no overlap of contributors between this volume and the 2014 volume, with the exception of the editor of this volume who was co-editor of the 2014 volume. This is a testament to the growing number of scholars working in Sino-­ German Studies.

The Organization of This Volume The following twelve chapters (Chaps. 2 through 13) in this volume present cutting-edge scholarly research on Sino-German relations. They represent truly interdisciplinary perspectives, as they are written by contributors from diverse disciplines—history, Sinology, sociology, literature, music, and film. They also reflect a truly global perspective, as the contributors are affiliated with universities across four continents. The volume is divided into five parts. The topics include a German aristocratic woman’s views of China, German-speaking pacifists’ perspectives on the Boxer Rebellion, German investment in Qingdao, teachers at German-­ Chinese schools, social and pedagogical theories, a medical missionary as patient, Sino-German musical connections, filmic depictions of John Rabe and the Chinese during the Nanjing Massacre, Manchukuo-German diplomacy, and German-speaking Jewish refugees and psychoanalysis. The organization of the book will be explained below and the key arguments of these twelve chapters will be summarized. In Part I, four chapters explore literature, politics, business, and teaching during the era of German colonialism in China. While one can detect the clear influence of German colonialism in each of these various fields, it was expressed in distinctive ways in each. In Chap. 2, Ulrike Brisson argues that it was the German aristocracy, rather than the bourgeoisie, which was the driving force of Germany’s imperial ambitions at the end of the nineteenth century. When the German Kaiser sent the diplomat Edmund von

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Heyking with his wife Elizabeth to China in 1896 to secure a harbor for the German fleet, they turned this mission into a fight for a German colony. Elizabeth played a significant role in this endeavor, as revealed in her journal Tagebücher aus vier Weltteilen (1926). Moreover, both her Tagebücher and her bestselling novel Briefe, die ihn nicht erreichten (1903) reveal a perception of China that was strongly influenced by previous writings, and reflects the multivocality Georg Steinmetz discusses with the concepts Sinophile and Sinophobe. Heyking’s often condescending tone toward the Chinese in her journal not only testifies to Germany’s sense of entitlement with respect to its desired colony in China, but also stems from the traditional sense of entitlement and superiority associated with the aristocracy. In contrast, the softer tone in her novel published after her return can be interpreted as an acquired appreciation for Chinese culture. Altogether, Elisabeth von Heyking’s representation of China reveals a strong aristocratic female voice that represents China in multifaceted, even contradictory, ways. In Chap. 3, Timothy L. Schroer shows that in the spring of 1900, a movement in northern China known in the West as the Boxers sparked a conflict and riveted Europeans’ attention. German-speaking pacifists used the events of 1900 to advance well-settled aims concerned mainly with Europe. They hoped that the emergence of an international coalition to crush the Boxers would foster European transnational unity. The Boxer uprising revealed the limits of German pacifism, as pacifists favored the use of force to suppress it. Their position differed both from the militaristic agenda of the German Right and from the thoroughgoing critique of imperialism articulated by German Social Democrats. Although pacifists worried more about excessive bloodshed than many Westerners, they celebrated signs of solidarity among enlightened European peoples against barbarous enemies, who they believed threatened the advance of international law and civilization. China stood outside the family of civilized nations according to this view. Although pacifists hoped to moderate the violence, they reasoned that European harmony justified the costs of what one pacifist termed a “Friedenskrieg,” a “war for peace.” In Chap. 4, Matthew Yokell examines the Navy and Leasehold government’s attempts to foster industry, trade, and commerce in Qingdao and the Leasehold in order to realize their vision of creating a “German Hong Kong.” This study shows how a group of diverse interests—commercial as well as academic, naval, and diplomatic—worked to transform Qingdao into an international port, cultural center, and axis of power in East Asia.

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By the time the Qingdao experiment ended in 1914, the colony was showing real signs of success in developing into an international hub of activity, prestige, and power. The Imperial Navy’s vision for Qingdao, combined with favorable local conditions and some initial good fortune, seemed to be paying off, providing most, if not all, of the various leadership groups in the colony with the satisfaction that their respective objectives for a colony in China were being met. As a result, the German China lobby achieved initial successes in building the liberal commercial colony it had envisioned: a preeminent naval base in Asia that would also serve as a cultural and commercial center capable of rivaling British Hong Kong and project German identity, economic power, and prestige on a truly global level. In Chap. 5, Michael Schön discusses how, after the occupation and subsequent lease of Jiaozhou Bay by the German Empire in 1898, “German-Chinese schools,” that is, schools that were established and operated by German government agencies or German missionary societies specifically for Chinese students, began to emerge in both this “model colony” and other Chinese cities. By 1914, the system of “German-­ Chinese schools” included elementary schools, middle schools, girls’ schools, and vocational schools, as well as a teachers’ training college, a university in Qingdao, and a medical and engineering school in Shanghai. Although the significance of this education system for the colonial ambitions of the German Empire in China has been the subject of several studies, no research has yet been done on the day-to-day situation in the classrooms of these schools. In order to get a better understanding of the life of German teachers at German-Chinese schools, this chapter analyzes articles, commentaries, and reports in the Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung, a quarterly journal published in Shanghai between 1910 and 1914, with the main focus on the problems these teachers had to face in their classes. This analysis leads to several conclusions about some general shortcomings of the system of German-Chinese schools. In Part II, three chapters examine imperial scholarship, pedagogy and medical missions, 1911–1950, through discussions of Max Weber’s view of China, the reception of Georg Kerschensteiner’s vocational education model in China and a neglected phenomenon—the doctor as patient. In Chap. 6, Jack Barbalet argues that the eminent German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) undertook a study of the history of Chinese society and economy in order to confirm his well-known thesis that capitalism had originated in Europe as a result of a rationalizing tendency inherent in

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early Calvinism. Konfuzianismus und Taoismus was first published in 1915 with an expanded version in 1920, and was translated into English as The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. Weber’s research coincided with significant historical transitions. In 1914, Germany lost its concessions and leases held in China as a result of the outbreak of the World War I, and Germany’s imperial and colonial ambitions were curtailed. In addition, with the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912 and the inauguration of the Republic of China, practically every aspect of Chinese society that Weber had researched was transformed. The chapter provides a summary and assessment of The Religion of China and indicates the ways in which Weber’s interest in China was shaped by the German missionary and imperial exploitation of China, factors not typically indicated in the secondary literature and to which Weber himself does not draw attention. In Chap. 7, Henrike Rudolph reveals that educators from all corners of the world traveled to Germany to inspect schools, universities, and other educational institutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The German educational system’s reputation even spread as far as China. In particular, the German vocational education model and the writings of Georg Kerschensteiner (1854–1932) received considerable attention in China, and continue to exert a great fascination among contemporary Chinese educators. This chapter aims to uncover the roots of the Chinese interest in Kerschensteiner’s theories on civic education, manual work, and his blueprints for institutional reforms. Based on a close reading of previously neglected Chinese, English, and German-language sources, it discusses how the socio-political situation within China, as well as international developments, contributed to the dissemination of his works. Kerschensteiner’s ideas inspired thinkers across the political spectrum who used his writings to support liberal, socialist, authoritarian, and even anarchist reform agendas. This study thus broadens our understanding of international exchange processes in the field of comparative education and education theory. Furthermore, it questions assumptions about 1949 as a watershed date in Chinese education thought. In Chap. 8, Albert Wu explores the case of Elisabeth Kehrer, a German doctor who traveled to China in 1924 to work at a hospital established by the Rhenish Missionary Society. Not long after Kehrer arrived in China, her supervisor diagnosed her as a schizophrenic and sent her back to Germany. The chapter reconstructs the controversy surrounding Kehrer’s diagnosis and how gendered institutional hierarchies were used to silence her. Kehrer’s case challenges an assumption embedded in histories of

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medical missionary work: the dichotomy between European doctor and the indigenous patient. European doctors often became sick abroad— more than two-thirds of nineteenth-century medical missionaries of Asia had to return home because of an illness. How did institutions and knowledge workers respond to the fact that European doctors often suffered from the same diseases as their patients? This chapter thus investigates how medical knowledge could also be mobilized against European medical doctors themselves. In Part III, three chapters explore the Sino-German relationship through the music, film, and political resistance of the 1920s and 1930s. In Chap. 9, John Gabriel argues that the Chinese setting of Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler’s teaching piece Die Maßnahme (The Measures Taken, 1930) has vexed the work’s reception since its premiere. Most modern scholars dismiss the setting as inconsequential, and the work as an allegory that could just as well be set anywhere. Critics of the premiere, however, interpreted the work as concretely set in China, but struggled to reconcile the plot with Communist doctrine. This chapter clarifies this contradictory situation and argues that the work’s Chinese setting is both concrete and an allegory for Germany, by demonstrating how Die Maßnahme follows the Comintern’s strategy in China, as opposed to its strategy in Germany, to teach a lesson not about any specific strategy, but about obedience to orders. Additionally, Eisler’s music is used to explain another puzzling aspect of how to interpret the work’s Chinese setting: the lack of obvious references to Chinese traditional culture in either the text, dramaturgy, or music. Following Communism’s internationalist ambitions, Eisler imagined his music as a new international proletarian music that was meant to be as representative of Chinese Communism as it was of German Communism. Rather than disavowing the Chinese setting, Eisler’s music demonstrates the neocolonial bias in Soviet and European Communist approaches to the colonial world. In Chap. 10, Hao Huang discusses Xiao Youmei (1884–1940), who is often identified by scholars as “the father of modern Chinese music”; he is also known as the “father of contemporary Chinese music education.” As the founding director of both the first Chinese music education institute, the Yinyue Chuanxisuo (Institute for the Promotion and Practice of Music) and later the National College of Music (renamed the Shanghai Conservatory of Music), Xiao occupied a central role in the development of musical education in China at the beginning of the twentieth century. As the first Chinese overseas graduate music student in Germany, Xiao

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regularly attended the concerts of the Gewandhausorchester in Leipzig. His exposure to the music of German classical composers and his participation in German conservatory practicum deeply influenced his musical predilections. Xiao’s compositions written after his return from Germany manifest persistent affinities with the musical idioms of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Notwithstanding his Western music training, Xiao did not abandon the Confucian notion of music as a moral and ethical force. Far from being a colonized subject aspiring toward Western cultural approbation, Xiao Youmei was a champion of a non-­ colonial, neo-Confucian vision of how music and music education could serve to revitalize the nascent modern Chinese nation-state. In Chap. 11, Bruce Williams examines Florian Gallenberger’s John Rabe (2009). It is a German/French/Chinese coproduction foregrounding the eponymous director of a Chinese Siemens plant, a member of the Nazi Party who saved the lives of over 200,000 Chinese during the Rape of Nanjing. Gallenberger’s film is a work that eschews historical accuracy and fidelity to the diaries of the real-life figure to create a protagonist who is psychologically engaging and intriguingly ambiguous. Following a cursory overview of films that have focused on Rabe and/or the Rape of Nanjing, and especially those appearing in the 2000s, this chapter foregrounds production and marketing demands which informed the director’s unique interpretation of Rabe’s transformation into a reluctant, yet irreplaceable hero. It reveals how Gallenberger draws upon Rabe’s diaries, yet employs these as a springboard, providing the semblance of a historical anchor all the while inviting viewers to explore the protagonist’s inner dynamics. Rabe is seen to be a man without a country, caught between a homeland that only exists in his memory—having radically changed during his absence—and a China that he never fully understood. Part IV discusses Manchukuo-German diplomatic relations and German-speaking Jewish refugees’ experiences in Shanghai via A. J. Storfer’s life and his attempts to introduce psychoanalysis to China. In Chap. 12, Simon Prekar discusses the Manchukuo-German relationship, as well as the previously unexamined activities and strategies of Manchukuo agents in Germany. In 1938, acquiescing to Japanese demands, Germany officially recognized Manchukuo diplomatically. Manchukuo represented itself in print and at important trade fairs and a legation in Berlin, as well as a consulate general in Hamburg, which became the hub through which the young state was presented to an international audience. In the fall of 1938, Manchukuo sent a delegation to Europe and the subsequent year it

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hosted a reception for its national holiday. At the same time, the diplomatic personnel tried their best to legitimate their isolated government and to compete against their primary opponent, the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China. In trying to establish a unique national identity, Manchukuo directly competed with China with respect to territory, culture, and diplomacy. Looking at German-language archival material, as well as Chinese huiyilu-memoirs and Japanese reminiscences, this chapter presents a widely overlooked issue and significant point of reference for Sino-German relations. With this, the contribution sheds further light on diplomatic life in Nazi Germany through the agency of an East Asian country which ceased to exist in 1945. In Chap. 13, Thomas Pekar reveals that the European-Jewish exile in Shanghai during World War II also meant an attempt at cultural and intellectual transfer, in the sense that previously unknown or unfamiliar European knowledge systems were brought to China in the luggage of the European emigrants. An example of such an attempted—but ultimately failed—importation of knowledge is psychoanalysis, which the Austrian Jewish Shanghai emigrant A. Josef Storfer (1888–1944), who had received psychoanalytic training with Freud and was active in the psychoanalytic circle in Vienna until his emigration, wanted to popularize in China. Shortly after his arrival in Shanghai in 1939, the energetic Storfer founded a magazine, which he called Gelbe Post (Yellow Mail). Although it was primarily aimed at German-speaking emigrants, since it was published in German, it also showed Storfer’s intention—perhaps it would be better to speak of his dream—to make psychoanalysis known in China. However, the Gelbe Post was not an exclusively psychoanalytical journal, but a multifaceted political, cultural, feuilletonistic, and above all practical medium, which not least tried to make the Chinese culture, from which many emigrants tried to isolate themselves, more familiar. This chapter engages with the complexity of this magazine and its transcultural intentions.

Conclusion Sino-German relations between 1890 and 1950 evolved from antagonism to cooperation, until the Nazi state’s eventual adoption of a pro-Japanese policy. At the end of the nineteenth century, German imperialist policy was clearly sinophobic, as Germany joined other Western and Japanese imperialist powers in exploiting Chinese weakness. Beginning in 1905, however, the German navy attempted to make Jiaozhou a model colony.

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After the World War I, Sino-German relations became stronger based on an equal and mutually beneficial partnership, leading to a particularly intense period of cooperation in 1928–1938. Although Sino-Nazi relations were severed in 1938, a new chapter of the Sino-German relationship began in that same year, with the arrival of German-speaking Jewish refugees in Shanghai. As the following twelve chapters in this volume show, Germany and China have had many intense and varied encounters between 1890 and 1950, and they were deeply entangled in each other’s affairs. Although their initial relationship was marked by the logic of colonialism, interwar Sino-German relations established a cooperative relationship untainted by imperialist politics several decades before the advent of the age of decolonization.

Notes 1. Fu Pao-jen, “From the 1930s Cooperation Model to a New Perspective on Future German-Chinese Relations,” in Deutschland und China. Beiträge des Zweiten Internationalen Symposiums zur Geschichte der deutsch-­ chinesischen Beziehungen, ed. Kuo Heng-yü and Mechthild Leutner (Berlin: K.G. Saur Verlag, 1991), 122. 2. Erik Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire. Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 129–30. 3. Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism. A Short History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 58. 4. Ibid. 5. David M. Crowe, “Sino-German Relations, 1871–1917,” in Germany and China. Transnational Encounters since the Eighteenth Century, ed. Joanne Miyang Cho and David M.  Crowe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 80. 6. Conrad, German Colonialism, 58–59. 7. Ibid., 61. 8. George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting. Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 17. 9. Conrad, German Colonialism, 61–62. 10. Mechthild Leutner and Klaus Mühlhahn, “Interkulturelle Handlungsmuster: Deutsche Wirtschaft und Mission in China in der Spätphase des Imperialismus,” in Deutsch-chinesische Beziehungen im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Mechthild Leutner and Klaus Mühlhahn (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2001), 19.

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11. Joanne Miyang Cho and David M. Crowe, “Introduction,” in Germany and China. Transnational Encounters since the Eighteenth Century, ed. Joanne Miyang Cho and David M. Crowe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 3–4. 12. Conrad, German Colonialism, 82. 13. Crowe, “Sino-German Relations, 1871–1917,” 86. 14. Ibid., 85. 15. Lydia Gerber, “Mediating Medicine. Li Benjing, Richard Wilhelm, and the Politics of Hygiene in the German Leasehold Jiaozhou (1897–1914),” in Germany and China. Transnational Encounters since the Eighteenth Century, ed. Joanne Miyang Cho and David M.  Crowe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 97. 16. Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 18. 17. Mechthild Leutner and Klaus Mühlhahn, “Die ‘Musterkolonie’: Die Perzeption des Schutzgebietes Jiaozhou in Deutschland,” in Deutschland und China. Beiträge des Zweiten Internationalen Symposiums zur Geschichte der deutsch-chinesischen Beziehungen, ed. Kuo Heng-yü and Mechthild Leutner (Berlin: K.G. Saur Verlag, 1991), 401–2. 18. Crowe, “Sino-German Relations, 1871–1917,” 87. 19. Cho and Crowe, “Introduction,” 4. 20. William C. Kirby, Germany and Republican China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1981), 13. 21. Ibid., 16. 22. Ibid., 7. 23. Hans Werner Hess, “German in China: A Case Study in the Utility Value of Foreign Languages,” in Sino-German Relations Since 1800: Multidisciplinary Explorations, ed. Ricardo K. S. Mak and Danny S. L. Paau (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000), 205. 24. Conrad, German Colonialism, 61. 25. R.  G. Tiedmann, “‘Christian Civilization’ or ‘Cultural Expansion’? The German Missionary Enterprise in China, 1882–1919,” in Sino-German Relations Since 1800: Multidisciplinary Explorations, ed. Ricardo K. S. Mak and Danny S. L. Paau (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000), 132. 26. Kirby, Germany and Republic China, 15. 27. Crowe, “Sino-German Relations, 1871–1917,” 89. 28. Ibid., 88–90. 29. Barbara Schmitt-Englert, Deutsche in China, 1920–1950. Alltagsleben und Veränderungen (Gossenberg: Ostasien Verlag, 2012), 43. 30. William Kirby, “Intercultural Contacts and International Relations: China’s Relations with Germany, the Soviet Union and the United States, 1927–1944,” in Deutschland und China. Beiträge des Zweiten Internationalen Symposiums zur Geschichte der deutsch-chinesischen

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Beziehungen, ed. Kuo Heng-yü and Mechthild Leutner (Berlin: K.G. Saur Verlag, 1991), 230–31. 31. Kirby, Germany and Republic China, 6. 32. Ibid., 4. 33. Ibid., 229. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 191–92. 36. Ibid., 190–91. 37. Hess, “German in China,” 205. 38. Ibid. 39. Ding Jianhong and Li Xia, “Das ‘Deutschland-Institut’ und die deutsch-­ chinesischen Kulturbeziehungen,” in Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur: Studien zu den deutsch-chinesischen Beziehungen, ed. Mechthild Leutner and comp. Klaus Mühlhahn (Münster: LIT, 1996), 314–15. 40. Kirby, Germany and Republic China, 204. 41. Ibid., 4. 42. Christine Swanson and David M.  Crowe, “Sino-German Relations, 1918–1941,” in Germany and China. Transnational Encounters since the Eighteenth Century, ed. Joanne Miyang Cho and David M. Crowe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 116. 43. Ibid., 119–25. 44. Kirby, “Intercultural Contacts and International Relations,” 232; Swanson and Crowe, “Sino-German Relations, 1918–1941,” 119–25. 45. Swanson and Crowe, “Sino-German Relations, 1918–1941,” 121. 46. Kirby, Germany and Republic China, 222–23. 47. Swanson and Crowe, “Sino-German Relations, 1918–1941,” 127. 48. Kirby, Germany and Republic China, 235–37. 49. Ibid., 241. 50. Ibid., 240–41. 51. Ibid., 243. 52. Dagmar Yü-Dembski, “Verdrängte Jahre: Einige Fragen der deutsch-­ chinesischen Beziehungen während des Nationalsozialismus,” in Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur: Studien zu den deutsch-chinesischen Beziehungen, ed. Mechthild Leutner and comp. Klaus Mühlhahn (Münster: LIT, 1996), 339. 53. Fion Wai Long So, Germany’s Colony in China—Colonialism, Protectionism, and Development in Qingdao and Shandong, 1898–1914 (New York: Routledge, 2019). 54. Klaus Mühlhahn, Herrschaft und Widerstand in der “Musterkolonie” Kiautschou: Interaktionen zwischen China und Deutschland, 1897–1914 (Oldenbourg: de Gruyter, 2000); Annette Biener, Das deutsche Pachtgebiet Tsingtau in Schantung 1897–1914: Institutioneller Wandel durch Kolonisierung, ed. Wilhelm Matzat (Bonn: Wilhelm Matzat, 2001).

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55. Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting; Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2009); Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire. 56. Gerber, Von Voskamps “heidnischen Treiben” und Wilhelms “höherem China”: Die Berichterstattung deutscher protestantischer Missionare aus dem deutschen Pachtgebiet Kiautschou, 1898–1914 (Hamburg: Hamburger Sinologischer Gesellschaft, 2002), 57. 57. Julia Stone, Chinese Basket Babies: A German Missionary Foundling Home and the Girls It Raised, 1850s–1914 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013). 58. Albert Monshan Wu, From Christ to Confucius. German Missionaries, Chinese Christians, and the Globalization of Christianity, 1860–1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). 59. Shirley Ye, “Business, Water, and the Global City: Germany, Europe, and China, 1820–1950” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2013); Susanne Kuss, Der Völkerbund und China: Technische Kooperation und deutsche Berater, 1928–34 (Münster: LIT, 2005). 60. Shellen Xiao Wu, Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry in the Modern World Order, 1860–1920 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 61. Astrid Freyeisen, Shanghai und die Politik des Dritten Reiches (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2000). 62. Schmitt-Englert, Deutsche in China, 1920–1950. 63. Guang Pan, A Study of Jewish Refugees in China (1933–1945): History, Theories and the Chinese Pattern (Singapore: Springer; Shanghai: Jiao Tong University Press, 2019). 64. Gao Bei, Shanghai Sanctuary. Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 65. Irene Eber, Wartime Shanghai and the Jewish Refugees from Central Europe. Survival, Co-Existence, and Identity in a Multi-Ethnic City (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012); Judith Weissbach, Exilerinnerungen deutschsprachiger Juden an Shanghai, 1938–1949 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2017). 66. Marcia Reynders Ristaino, Port of Last Resort. The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 67. Mechthild Leutner and Klaus Mühlhahn, eds., Deutsch-chinesische Beziehungen im 19. Jahrhundert (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2001); Katja Levy, ed., Deutsch-chinesische Beziehungen (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011). 68. The following three chapters appeared in Joanne Miyang Cho and Douglas T.  McGetchin, eds., Gendered Encounters between Germany and Asia: Transnational Perspectives since 1800 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Julia Stone, “‘Rescuing’ and Raising Basket Babies: Chinese Foundling

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Girls, Female Infantcide, and German Missionary Gender Role Contestation (1850s–1914),” 65–84; Lydia Gerber, “From Submission to Subversion? The Aidaoyuan Boarding School for Chinese Girls in Qingdao, 1904–1914,” 111–32; Joanne Miyang Cho, “German-Jewish Women in Wartime Shanghai and Their Encounters with the Chinese,” 171–91. 69. The following four chapters appeared in Qinna Shen and Martin Rosenstock, Beyond Alterity: German Encounters with Modern East Asia (2014). Weijia Li, “Otherness in Solidarity: Collaboration between Chinese and German Left-Wing Activists in the Weimar Republic,” 73–93; Martin Rosenstock, “China Past, China Present: The Boxer Rebellion in Gerhard Seyfried’s Yellow Wind (2008),” 115–33; Cynthia Walk, “Anna Wong and Weimar Cinema: Orientalism in Postcolonial Germany,” 137–67; Chinyun Lee and Lucie Olivová, “Hairnet Manufacturing in Vysočina and Shandong 1890–1939: An Early Globalizing Home Industry,” 217–39. 70. The following four chapters appeared in Joanne Miyang Cho, ed., Transnational Encounters between Germany and East Asia since 1900 (New York: Routledge, 2018). Julia Stone, “One family, two systems: how German missionary mothers and their Chinese ‘daughters’ challenged the late Qing Confucian family model,” 23–44; Lydia Gerber, “Working with disaster: Weimar Mission response to the Boxer catastrophe (1900–1901),” 45–61; Shambhavi Prakash, “Representations of Jewish exile and models of memory in Shanghai Ghetto and Exil Shanghai,” 62–81; Keumjae Park, “Max Weber and East Asia development,” 145–61. 71. Mak and Paau, Sino-German Relations Since 1800; Cho and Crowe, Germany and China.

Bibliography Bei, Gao. Shanghai Sanctuary. Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Beiner, Annette. Das deutsche Pachtgebiet Tsingtau in Schantung 1897–1914: Institutioneller Wandel durch Kolonisierung. Bonn: Wilhelm Matzat, 2001. Cho, Joanne Miyang, ed. Transnational Encounters between Germany and East Asia since 1900. New York: Routledge, 2018. Cho, Joanne Miyang, and David Crowe, eds. Germany and China: Transnational Encounters since 1800. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014. Cho, Joanne Miyang, and Douglas T.  McGetchin, eds. Gendered Encounters between Germany and Asia: Transnational Perspectives since 1800. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Conrad, Sebastian. German Colonialism. A Short History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

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Eber, Irene. Wartime Shanghai and the Jewish Refugees from Central Europe. Survival, Co-Existence, and Identity in a Multi-Ethnic City. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012. Freyeisen, Astrid. Shanghai und die Politik des Dritten Reiches. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2000. Grimmer-Solem, Erik. Learning Empire. Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875–1919. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Kirby, William C. Germany and Republican China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1981, Kuo, Heng-yü, and Mechthild Leutner, eds. Deutschland und China. Beiträge des Zweiten Internationalen Symposiums zur Geschichte der deutsch-chinesischen Beziehungen (Berlin: K.G. Saur Verlag, 1991). Kuss, Susanne. Der Völkerbund und China: Technische Kooperation und deutsche Berater, 1928–34. Münster: LIT, 2005. Leutner, Mechthild, ed. Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur: Studien zu den deutsch-­ chinesischen Beziehungen, compiled by Klaus Mühlhahn. Münster: LIT, 1996. Leutner, Mechthild, and Klaus Mühlhahn, eds. Deutsch-chinesische Beziehungen im 19. Jahrhundert. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2001. Levy, Katja, ed. Deutsch-chinesische Beziehungen. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011. Mak, Richardo K.  S., and Danny S.  L. Paau, eds. Sino-German Relations Since 1800: Multidisciplinary Explorations. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000. Marchand, Suzanne L. German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race, and Scholarship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2009. Mühlhahn, Klaus. Herrschaft und Widerstand in der “Musterkolonie” Kiautschou: Interaktionen zwischen China und Deutschland, 1897–1914. Oldenbourg: de Gruyter, 2000. Pan, Guang. A Study of Jewish Refugees in China (1933–1945): History, Theories and the Chinese Pattern. Singapore: Springer; Shanghai: Jiao Tong University Press, 2019. Ristaino, Marcia Reynders. Port of Last Resort. The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Schmitt-Englert, Barbara. Deutsche in China, 1920–1950. Alltagsleben und Veränderungen. Gossenberg: Ostasien Verlag, 2012. Shen, Qinna, and Martin Rosenstock, eds. Beyond Alterity: German Encounters with Modern East Asia. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. So, Fion Wai Long. Germany’s Colony in China—Colonialism, Protectionism, and Development in Qingdao and Shandong, 1898–1914. New  York: Routledge, 2019. Steinmetz, George. The Devil’s Handwriting. Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

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Stone, Julia. Chinese Basket Babies: A German Missionary Foundling Home and the Girls It Raised, 1850s–1914. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013. Weissbach, Judith. Exilerinnerungen deutschsprachiger Juden an Shanghai, 1938–1949. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2017. Wu, Albert Monshan. From Christ to Confucius. German Missionaries, Chinese Christians, and the Globalization of Christianity, 1860–1950. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Wu, Shellen Xiao. Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry in the Modern World Order, 1860–1920. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Ye, Shirley. “Business, Water, and the Global City: Germany, Europe, and China, 1820–1950.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2013.

PART I

Politics, Business, and Teaching in the Age of German Colonialism, 1890–1914

CHAPTER 2

Elisabeth von Heyking: China Through the Eyes of a Female Aristocrat Ulrike Brisson

When Elisabeth von Heyking’s husband, the German diplomat Edmund Freiherr von Heyking (1850–1915), was ordered to secure a naval base for the German navy in China in 1896, they both knew that Edmund1 was actually planning to establish an entire colony. Elisabeth von Heyking’s journal Tagebücher aus vier Weltteilen 1886/1904 (1926) (journal from four parts of the world) reveals that she played an unofficial but still important role through her influence over her husband’s political decisions.2 Members of the German aristocracy were pivotal in supporting the acquisition of the bay in China, foremost among them Kaiser Wilhelm II, but also men like Otto von Bismarck (reluctantly at first), Ferdinand von Richthofen, who had traveled China when he accompanied the Prussian East-Asia expedition from 1868 to 1872, and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, who was the state secretary of the national fleet at that time.3 These names indicate the significant interest of the aristocracy in Germany’s imperial ambitions, many of whom were instrumental in Germany’s colonial

U. Brisson (*) Humanities and Arts Department, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. M. Cho (ed.), Sino-German Encounters and Entanglements, Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73391-9_2

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efforts. I thus foreground class—membership within the aristocracy—over gender as the primary discursive element by which Elisabeth (1861–1925) represented China. With this reframing I will demonstrate that, contrary to the widespread belief that the bourgeoisie acted as the primary stakeholder in German colonialism, it was actually the aristocracy, due to the striking parallels between the aristocratic worldview and the colonialist ethos, which was instrumental in generating a colonial discourse and promoting German colonialism. Moreover, by including Elisabeth’s successful novel Briefe, die ihn nicht erreichten (1903) (The Letters Which Never Reached Him) in the analysis,4 I will highlight how her aristocratic tone and perspective distinctly shifts as a result of the different literary genres and the changing historical context at the turn of the century. Elisabeth von Heyking descended from a long line of eminent female writers, including her great-grandmother Sophie von La Roche and her grandmother Bettina von Arnim. She was raised in Karlsruhe and Berlin as a result of her father Albert von Flemming’s appointment as a Prussian diplomat at the court of the grand duke of Baden. Her future husband Edmund was born in Riga, in what is now Latvia, the scion of an old aristocratic family originally from the lower Rhine region. Edmund emigrated to Germany in 1878, where he became a diplomat and befriended other members of the aristocracy, including Stephan zu Putlitz, a professor of National Economics (Nationalökonomie) and Elisabeth, who was then Putlitz’s wife.5 In 1883 Elisabeth became the target of a press scandal because of her husband’s suicide in July.6 To make things worse, Elisabeth and Edmund married before the end of the customary year of mourning, which subsequently affected Edmund’s entire career.7 Elisabeth had traveled extensively prior to her marriage to Putlitz. In 1880 she went on a six-week tour to Italy with her father where they visited Bologna, Florence, Venice, and Pisa, as well as friends and relatives.8 Following her marriage with Edmund, however, these travels were no longer purely voluntary; instead, they were accompanied by the various financial, logistical, and emotional challenges of the itinerant life of a diplomat’s wife. These experiences are vividly recorded in her journal, in which she also described and justified Edmund’s activities in China. Elisabeth’s journal Tagebücher aus vier Weltteilen 1886/1904, edited and published by her longtime friend Grete Litzmann, as well as her successful novel The Letters Which Never Reached Him, represent China specifically through the eyes of a German aristocratic woman. Both texts, the journal and her novel, allow for a more intimate view of China during the

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years before the Boxer uprising than would have been possible from one of her husband’s official documents. It is through her journal, as an unofficial, unfiltered private document, that we can obtain a unique German perspective on China in which the aristocratic worldview and imperial discourse intersect. In this chapter, I will support my argument in detail by discussing three aspects—first, the connection between the German aristocracy and German imperialism and colonialism in China; second, the critical image of China in Elisabeth von Heyking’s journal; and third, the more sympathetic image of China—and more nuanced perspective on Germany’s imperial efforts—which appears in her novel following her return to Germany.

German Aristocracy, Imperialism, and German Colonialism in China Germany’s imperial ambitions in East Asia culminated in the occupation of the Jiaoszhou Bay, situated on the coast of the Yellow Sea between Beijing and Shanghai in 1898.9 This process unfolded quite differently from Germany’s efforts in Africa, because China already had a well-established civilization and cultural history known to Europe since the thirteenth century when the Mongol Empire secured trading routes between Europe and Asia reflected in the publication of Marco Polo’s and Mandeville’s travel journals in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, respectively.10 Dealing with China required diplomatic finesse at the highest level, and Edmund considered himself well-suited for this role. Horst Gründer claims that German colonialism was primarily driven by the radical and liberal bourgeoisie, and Carlton J.H.  Hayes identifies “patriotic intellectuals” as the motor for overseas expansion.11 Yet both overlook the fact that members of the German aristocracy played many of the leading roles in the actual project of German colonial expansion,12 and the occupation of China’s Jiaoszhou Bay was no exception. Likewise, those scholars who have written about Elisabeth von Heyking have so far overlooked how affiliation with a particular class identity gave German imperialism a specific lens through which East Asia was represented.13 This kind of perspective constitutes an important element in the way Germany related to China toward the end of the nineteenth century. Elisabeth’s works reveal, as Mechthild Leutner indicates, that the author’s Eurocentric imperial position toward China was not stable, but instead allowed for

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shifts in perspective, but Leutner does not connect her “Blick von oben” (view from above) to class affiliation.14 This rhetoric of dominance was not new among the aristocracy, and I argue that some of the attitudes and behaviors embedded in aristocratic thinking resurfaced in German colonial discourse because it was the aristocracy, with their central roles as diplomats and higher military officers, that strongly influenced German imperialism.15 Moreover, the colonial idea or, in Susanne Zantop’s words, “latent colonialism” which had been circulating in German minds since the eighteenth century was instrumental in shaping a German national identity.16 In line with Zantop, Jürgen Zimmerer claims that “colonialism is as much about imagination as it is about social practice.” It is both “a system of rule” and “a general relation of power.” He conceptualizes it as an imaginary construct “that capitalises on the construction of social groups (coloniser and colonised)” in absolute, binary, and asymmetric relationships whereby “the coloniser is deemed superior, more civilised, more modern than his counterpart.” Zimmerer views the essence and “the legitimisation for exploitation, forced assimilation and even destruction” in this unequal power relationship, which parallels that between the aristocracy and those perceived as inferior.17 Traditionally, the aristocracy justified their calling to rule by virtue of their birth, civic status, and land ownership.18 They saw themselves as a privileged class that did not have to work for money, but could instead occupy their time with leisure activities such as hunting, botanizing, going to concerts, or attending lavish balls. More so than the bourgeoisie, they could afford to travel and become cultured.19 Norbert Elias considers the German nobility of the Kaiserreich historically as members of a militaristic society with a specific code of honor, according to which the “weak and feeble” were despised and “war and strength” were considered more honorable than “peace and civil contentment.”20 As Elias claims, “conceptual symbols such as courage, obedience, honour and discipline” were the values that ranked highly among aristocratic circles. He also regards their sense of “responsibility and loyalty” as part of a “long family tradition.”21 It was this sense of privilege and obligation that allowed members of the aristocracy to distinguish themselves from the general public, which they often regarded with pity or disdain.22 Although the Heykings may have been disappointed in being posted to China rather than to a European state, it would have been out of the question to disobey the orders of the foreign affairs office or the Kaiser,

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regardless of the personal and financial sacrifices they would have needed to make for their family. This less-than-favorable posting was in part due to the scandal surrounding the couple, related to the suicide of Elisabeth’s first husband and her untimely marriage to Edmund. In addition, with Edmund in the diplomatic service, they could not fall back on the resources derived from the ownership of landed estates, traditionally a defining privilege of the aristocracy. That said, China was seen as the best diplomatic post outside of Europe, especially given the increasing alignment between existing beliefs in aristocratic privilege and a new consensus of European superiority vis-à-vis the Chinese. The Heykings’ deployment to China happened in the aftermath of a shift in German public rhetoric from Sinophilic to Sinophobic.23 Globally, China was increasingly viewed as the “yellow peril” by the end of the nineteenth century.24 Sinophobic sentiments in Germany at that time went hand in hand with an ahistorical representation of China as primitive, weak, and in decay. Its people and culture were perceived as having slipped into barbarism after having already reached its peak as a civilization in previous centuries.25 Thus, the pity and contempt exhibited by the ruling aristocratic elites in Germany toward the masses, owing to their perceived lack of prestige and manners, was paralleled in colonial discourse with respect to China.26 As Rhiel points out, Elisabeth von Heyking went to China during the so-called era of “New Imperialism,”27 which was driven more by commercial interests than by the desire to found new settler colonies.28 Elisabeth’s journal reveals how she, Edmund, and other German officials used racist and colonial sentiments toward China to justify Germany’s ambitions for a commercial colony in China. “The voice of force, and it is only this one they understand,”29 were Edmund’s words after his first visit at the Zongli Yamen, the Chinese government, in the city of Peking, or what is now known as Beijing.30 Aristocratic rule functioned similarly in Othering the non-aristocratic masses. The seventeenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, in Timothy Brennon’s reading of Vico’s work, saw “the disregard of the aristocracy toward the peasantry in terms of a rejection of foreigners and so link[ed] class prejudices with colonialist mentalities.”31 As a result of this asymmetric class-conscious position, the aristocracy felt set apart from the rest of society, and organized their worldview through the binary terms of “them” and “us.” Like colonizers they held hegemonic rule over their subjects and justified their privileges through this belief in their civil

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and cultural superiority.32 In other words, aristocratic attitudes and forms of rule may have helped to model later imperial ambitions and colonial rule. Upon further investigation, the aristocratic worldview and colonial practice reveal further parallels. For both political reasons and in order to protect their personal honor, members of the nobility did not shy away from the use of force. Nonetheless, as Landesherren, their code of honor and civility obliged them to give protection to their dependent subjects in return for their loyalty. Colonialist ideology also justified the use of violence based on the belief that people were not only culturally but genetically inferior; in Edward Said’s words, Europeans believed “people require and beseech domination.”33 At the same time, this system of dominance was veiled behind acts of paternalistic philanthropy and the so-called civilizing mission in order to similarly obtain the loyalty and collaboration of the colonized.34 The aristocrat Ferdinand von Richthofen was instrumental in setting the imperial tone regarding China for Germany. Over four years he traveled to many parts of China (1868–1873) and extensively recorded his observations. His attitude was ambiguous in part due to his social status. As an academic, he appreciated Chinese culture and traditions, but as an aristocrat, he had a very negative attitude about the Chinese as a people, a view he had developed while observing Chinese workers during the gold rush in California.35 He saw Chinese men as lacking manliness and energy; over time he used terms such as “servant,” “worker,” and later even “colonial subjects.”36 He thus viewed the Chinese from a perspective of dominance and superiority.37 British and Russian fleets had already established themselves in Chinese harbors when Edmund von Heyking was dispatched to China to obtain a naval base for the German navy. Pressured by Japan, Russia, England, and France for land concessions, the Chinese were reluctant to grant Germany access to a harbor. During an excursion to visit the German naval ships “Prinz Wilhelm” and “Irene” anchored in the Yellow Sea near Qingdao in October 1897, Elisabeth and her husband stopped at the Jiaoszhou Bay and explored it as a potential future German harbor.38 Elisabeth’s entry of 10 October reflects their colonial ambitions, as she envisions the construction of a “Mole” or dam to create a protected bay.39 Russia had initially been interested in this location as well, but had decided against it in favor of scouting preferable harbors in Korea.40 Edmund needed a pretext to exert pressure on the Zongli Yamen in securing this bay for the German

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navy. One incident happened in October 1897, when Edmund and the crew of the SMS Cormoran had stones thrown at them in Wuchang, but more critical was the murder of two German missionaries in Shandong on 1 November of that year, which the German government, initiated by Heyking, saw as adequate pretense in occupying the Jiaoszhou  Bay two weeks later.41 The Chinese troops retreated without resistance and the German flag was raised, in keeping with the tradition of foreign powers when claiming a colony. Although relieved at having secured a naval base, Edmund’s goal of subsequently acquiring the bay and adjacent land as a German colony was forestalled by Chinese resistance. They did not consider the murder of the missionaries an official action by the state but instead a random act carried out by robbers.42 Edmund’s rather undiplomatic negotiations resulted in China’s agreement to a 99-year lease, which included Qingdao and a 50 km neutral zone for the movement of both German and Chinese troops. Although a lease, Germany regarded this area as a colony and never intended to pay China any money for it.43

The Heykings’ Encounters with Chinese Aristocrats in Elisabeth’s Journals Elisabeth describes these events in two sections of her Tagebücher; the journal also discusses her sojourns in Chile, India, Egypt, and Mexico.44 In the chapter China I, she describes their voyage to China, her difficulties adjusting to life in Beijing, and Edmund’s struggles to fulfill his mission of acquiring a naval base. In China II, she discusses in great detail Edmund’s negotiations with the Chinese government regarding the acquisition of the Jiaoszhou Bay, as well as her visit to the Chinese empress dowager Cixi. She concludes China II with their decision to take a year of vacation before their new and dreaded deployment to Mexico. In general, Elisabeth’s journal reveals her strong identification with her husband’s professional life—the pressure on him affected her economically, socially, and emotionally. She even admits that she cared more deeply about Edmund’s profession than he did, and his difficulties and hopelessness effectively became hers.45 Elisabeth thus primarily experiences China through her position as an aristocratic Diplomatenfrau or ambassador’s wife. Both she and her husband defined themselves by their roles as aristocrats and representatives of German national interests.

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This sense of political and aristocratic status, however, led to intercultural and political conflicts, as Elisabeth’s description of her husband’s visit to the Chinese imperial court reveals. Upon leaving the emperor’s reception for ambassadors, Edmund returned the same way he had come instead of using a smaller side path as protocol demanded. One of the Chinese ministers took him by the sleeve to pull him toward the correct exit. Edmund refused to adhere to this tradition and persisted on his chosen route, whereupon all the other diplomats followed him, thus shattering court custom.46 Edmund, flustered by the Chinese minister’s action, requested a letter of apology from him.47 From the Chinese perspective an apology would have been inappropriate, considering that the minister had merely tried to help Edmund follow proper court protocol. Yet, Elisabeth did not depict this incident as a breach of official protocol, but rather as an infringement of personal boundaries and traditional decorum; no commoner was allowed to touch the person of an aristocrat, except in a strictly prescribed fashion.48 However, as Elisabeth reveals, they knew the Chinese could not offer an apology “because they feared Edmund might use this incident for his advantage.”49 In fact, Edmund wanted to use this incident to obtain the necessary concessions for establishing a German naval base in Chinese waters.50 He was under great pressure from the German foreign office to gain Chinese permission for the base by the spring of 1897, and the incident happened in February of that year. Edmund’s struggles and busy schedule led to loneliness and melancholy for Elisabeth, and these are two prominent modes of aesthetic expression in her journal. These sentiments can also be explained by the tension between the idealized aesthetic and harmonious lifestyle favored by the aristocratic class,51 and the realities of Beijing’s nineteenth-century, “almost medieval” urban environment following the two Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860).52 As a Diplomatenfrau, her social obligations, such as meeting with the wives of other diplomats, meant that she could not avoid Beijing entirely. She describes the city in a manner common to colonial discourse, wherein the other is perceived as “intrinsically inferior.”53 Elisabeth found the streets she traveled en route to her social engagements to be undeveloped, unhygienic, and chaotic. Again and again she writes “about the terrible streets with their dirt and stench” and the “miserable humanity that wallows in this gray and murky filth.”54 She confesses that she can only bear this life because she stays at home as much as she can, and “if I had to go out a lot, I would become depressed because I’m someone who likes to be surrounded by beauty and depends on a

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congenial environment. Here, ugliness burdens me like lead and I feel isolated without end. Oh, this sense of loneliness, how it accompanies us throughout our lives, nevertheless!”55 Both her experience of the city’s ugliness and her own loneliness are colored by aristocratic and colonial values. Elisabeth complains in a letter to the German ambassador in Copenhagen about the unhealthy living conditions in Beijing and the difficulties of interacting with the Chinese. She vents her frustration by degrading the Chinese to the level of barbarians: “Whatever they may formerly have been, today, the Chinese are dirty barbarians, who don’t need European ambassadors, but European masters instead—the sooner the better!”56 Two aspects of colonial practice, as well as aristocratic prejudice, are embedded in this statement: dominance and viewing ordinary people as a de-individualized and debased mass. As Elisabeth’s letter to the ambassador shows, the rhetoric of aristocratic values was applied in service of imperial zeal and used to justify intensified dominance—maintained with force if necessary. Elisabeth articulates this sentiment, with its justification for colonial interventions, quite distinctly during her visit to Shanghai: When you see how in Shanghai the Chinese enjoy the European streets where they can go on a ride; how they try to get into the settlements in order to buy the best houses and gardens, one cannot but say that nothing better could happen to this country than to fall under European control and that the Chinese would soon feel much happier.57

The author contrasts this description of the modern and Westernized section of Shanghai to her first impression of a Chinese village on her way to Beijing as dirty, stinky, and ugly “so that you think all this is like a feverish image or a nightmare,”58 which again supports the idea of urgent colonial action. She thus sets the tone for Germany’s political and economic involvement in China in the interest of “civilizing” the country. Elisabeth echoes Edmund’s contemptuous tone in recording his first impression of the Zongli Yamen: the seven Chinese were old and resembled “frighteningly staring larvae.”59 Edmund considers any serious conversation with them to be pointless. They would, according to him, only understand “the voice of power”—even Prince Kung, their leader, who had succumbed to opium and his harem.60 Considering that Edmund knew relatively little about Chinese cultures and languages, it was his onesided perspective that enabled this dismissive tone. His conversations with

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the Chinese ministers were facilitated by means of a German interpreter, who was not always completely understood by the Chinese,61 because he did not always use the correct intonation, and Edmund had never considered learning the language spoken by the officials. If Edmund had spoken Mandarin, it might have meant placing himself on the same (inferior) level as his Chinese interlocutors. Elisabeth relates these events and Edmund’s assessment of his first encounter with Chinese officials with a sense of curiosity: “Having seen this would have been interesting, after all.”62 In other words, although she shares his high-minded dealings with the Chinese, she also maintains a certain emotional distance. As diplomats, Edmund and Elisabeth were acting as representatives of the German emperor and nation and, like many aristocrats in high military or diplomatic positions, they occupied the status of public figures, as a result of which they were held to a high standard of self-control and exemplary manners. This status is often expressed through clothing to display both “social membership and social distance” from other groups.63 An often elaborate and impractical dress code, particularly for women, demonstrated the freedom from physical work and thus distinguished the nobility from those who had to work for a living.64 This attitude existed in both Europe, where noble women wore tightly fastened corsets and long dresses, and China, where noble Han Chinese (but not Manchu) women during the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) had their feet bound, restricting their mobility.65 As public figures and members of a high social status class, the Heykings were thus expected to display a certain degree of pomp and ostentation as seen, for example, during Edmund’s first official visits at the Chinese court. In her descriptions of the participants, Elisabeth could not have created a more pronounced discrepancy in power and prestige between the Qing emperor and the German delegation. In her words, transcribed from Edmund’s oral account, the German delegation was dressed in “großer Uniform” (resplendent uniform), while the courtyards of the Imperial City through which they traveled seemed dilapidated. The emperor made them wait in a tiny chamber prior to their audience; even the reception hall did not meet the Germans’ expectations of imperial grandeur. In fact, she writes, it was almost too small for the Germans to perform the expected three bows. In her description of the emperor’s appearance, she noted that the German officials did not meet a person of equal status, usually expected among members of the aristocracy. Other than beautiful eyes “he is supposed to look young, sickly and quite dull”66

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caused in part by his hanging lower lip.67 This description gave credence to the claim that China was in need of an experienced and strong leader who would act according to Western aristocratic values, and who would actively support the implementation of Western modernization through colonial occupation. Elisabeth’s tone changes dramatically when she writes about her visit, along with other Western ladies, to the court of the sixty-three-year-old empress Cixi (1835–1908). It was toward the end of the Heykings’ time in China and occurred on December 13, 1898. The English Lady Macdonald, the wife of the British ambassador, had initiated this reception. Elisabeth’s account stretches over six and a half pages, longer than most of her entries, and Elisabeth goes into great detail in describing the Forbidden Palace. This account is significantly not written through the eyes of her husband, and her impressions sound more open to China than do her previous entries. On their way to the reception room, Elisabeth and the other ladies were carried in chairs across a marble bridge past lakes and temples, and it was here, at last, that she felt “that China looked the way one has always imagined it.”68 Images painted on Chinese porcelain depicting rivers, lakes, bridges, trees, and birds were familiar to Europeans and were presumably on Elisabeth’s mind as she crossed the imperial garden. Her more relaxed, at times even humorous, tone reflects how comfortable she felt among equals, despite the fact that she and the other ladies were paying reverence to the most powerful woman in China. She describes the attire of the princesses and that of the empress in great detail and includes their manners and the subjects of conversation conveyed by the interpreters accompanying the European women. Cixi was known to occasionally invite the wives of diplomats to tea as a sign of openness and friendliness toward foreigners, and—contrary to her reputation as cold and cruel—she frequently impressed her guests as a gracious and charming woman.69 Cixi, in Elisabeth’s account, took the liberty of breaking with protocol and kissed her guests on the cheek: “This was a very strange ceremony, which, by the way, contradicted any and all Chinese custom. I felt that the old empress intended to leave an absolutely positive impression on us in order to erase all atrocities of which we have heard during the last two months. By doing so she went a bit overboard.”70 Despite Elisabeth’s more sympathetic tone, she interprets this visit as a political strategy on the empress’s behalf to redirect attention away from the public beheadings of Kang Youwei’s men that had been employed by the Guangxu Emperor during the Hundred Days’ Reforms in 1898.71 The

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efforts of the British and other European governments to increase their control over China during that time had resulted in Cixi placing Guangxu under house arrest and beheading some of his ministers. Rather than seeing the chatty tea afternoon as merely a generous and friendly gesture, Elisabeth understood this visit to be a strategic ruse. Moreover, Elisabeth’s criticism of Cixi’s behavior at the tea—sharing the teacups of her guests, declaring Elisabeth to be her sister, and then kissing her on the cheek—reveals a degree of snobbery, because “she [Cixi] lost some of her sense of proper decorum.”72 Elizabeth judges her according to the European aristocratic norms of behavior that saw “self-­ control and inner equilibrium” as essential for a noble in their role of “‘public person’.”73 Yet, compared to Edmund’s assessment of Cixi, which he expressed in a letter to his father and which is included as a footnote, her disapproval is mild. He calls her “a hideous old empress” and was upset by the London Times’ positive depiction of the empress, as well as the lack of action taken by Britain to prevent “the cruel persecutions.”74 It is possible to assume that Elisabeth’s and Edmund’s sentiments toward Cixi also reflected their frustration about seeing Germany’s imperial aspirations curbed by the empress’s reluctance to support the kind of reform undertaken by Guangxu. Elisabeth’s journal brings to light not only the intersection between colonialism and class, but also that of class and race. Racism developed out of the idea of race (Latin radix: root; ratio: species),75 according to which humanity is divided into different types perceived as unchanging and with specific genetically transmitted exterior features, most notably skin color, combined with inner qualities such as mental disposition and moral behavior. In the wake of Darwinism, Europeans established a hierarchy of races, wherein the white or Aryan race was considered superior in intellect and adaptability, with all other races judged as underdeveloped or primitive by comparison. This binary thinking between civilized and primitive bolstered imperialist ideas and colonial efforts and provided justification for the supposed European civilizing mission abroad.76 If Elisabeth viewed the Chinese as ‘lesser’ as a result of her aristocratic perspective, from a colonialist point of view her writing sometimes lapses into open racism. Elisabeth quotes a Mr. Pattnick, an American, who saw the Chinese as more stubborn and arrogant than ever and “‘only fit to be sliced up by the different powers’”77 or a Mr. Dubail who thought that it was impossible to gain anything from the Chinese, “as if one would threaten them with cannon fire, and it would be a belligerent task to

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threaten the Tsungli [Zongli] with war three times a week.”78 Viewing the Chinese as inferior reveals how open racism had generally become not only an acceptable, but indeed an integral element of European imperial discourse.79 Because China had such a highly sophisticated civilization it was difficult for Europeans to classify them as primitive as they had done with black Africans. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the claims of German philosophers such as Herder, Hegel, Schlegel, and the linguist Adelung that Chinese civilization was in terminal decline had become widely accepted among Germans who supported colonialism with the result that China was frequently described as primitive, weak, and decaying.80 According to Richthofen, China had stagnated at its high level of development.81 From Elisabeth’s point of view, “everything out in the country looked poor, filthy, and neglected.”82 Edmund’s description of the Chinese government, in Elisabeth’s words, was that of an illegitimate government run by eunuchs and women.83 She records him as saying that “the Chinese are stubborn and impertinent,”84 and that the Chinese people are “Chinese plebs.”85 She herself compares a Chinese man with a Jew, because he is wearing a long beard.86 According to Ivan Hannaford, antisemitism was similarly an invention of the nineteenth century and, like race more broadly, became an organizing element for national and nationalist politics.87 Steinmetz similarly mentions that the antisemitic press in Germany had begun comparing the Chinese to Jews as early as 1882.88 Elisabeth thus conflates antisemitic and racist stereotypes in order to degrade the Chinese. It is indisputable that those in leadership positions, such as the Heykings, interacted with the Chinese from a perspective informed by racist prejudice. Moreover, as representatives of the German nation, they also saw their titles and rights confirmed “by a combination of race and class.”89

Sympathy Toward China in Elisabeth’s Epistolary Novel Elisabeth’s attitude toward China and the Chinese in her successful novel The Letters Which Never Reached Him is strikingly different from that of her journal, although melancholy and loneliness are again used as aesthetic forms of expression creating a contemplative and insightful narrator. She expresses more sympathy toward the Chinese people and the Chinese government’s struggle for sovereignty in the novel for two reasons.90 One is

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of a literary nature, while the other is more biographical, although they do overlap. Rhiel interprets Elisabeth’s shift in genre from journal to novel as a way of coping with her crisis of faith in Germany’s colonial enterprise in China, as well as her disappointment in the lack of official acknowledgment for her husband’s achievements by Wilhelm II and Admiral von Tirpitz, who—to add insult to injury—had actually requested credit for the original conception of the Jiaoszhou  Bay treaty (“Urheberschaft für den Kioutschou Vertrag,”).91 Even in some recent historical scholarship, such as Gründer’s work on German colonialism, there is no reference to Edmund von Heyking in this context, only to admiral Alfred von Tirpitz.92 As Rhiel states, Elisabeth’s “shift from colonial travel writing to fiction writing” thus “better accommodated her inability to understand the world via a totalizing colonial vision.”93 In other words, whereas her journal could only permit a recreation of the past, the novel permitted Elisabeth to create a vision of the future as well as a different narrative position of the “I.” It is a perspective that no longer sees China through the eyes of her husband; rather, this is a protagonist speaking from the position of an independent intellectual. The Letters Which Never Reached Him is a collection of letters addressed by an unnamed female protagonist to a German man, who seems to matter deeply to her. They had met in China, but after her departure he had remained in the country in order to continue his scientific work on Buddhism. The book has striking autobiographical parallels to Elisabeth’s own return from China, including the time frame—the period leading up to the Boxer Rebellion in 1900—but extends beyond Elisabeth’s own time in China by including the Boxer uprising, up to the arrival of German troops. The novel is not a purely narrative text describing the protagonist’s return from China; instead, it portrays her often philosophical and emotional reactions to her transition from China to the Western world and to political developments in China. The protagonist’s strong feelings toward the fictional receiver of the letters speak of her love for this man. Both characters die in the end, the letters never reaching the man because she addressed them to Shanghai, where he had planned to receive his mail at the end of his expedition. But he goes instead to Beijing, where he is killed during the Boxer Rebellion, as explained by the woman’s brother in the novel’s epilogue.94 Elisabeth’s sympathy toward the Chinese in the novel is also connected with a shift of perception related to class, although her fundamental belief in colonialism, despite her adoption of a more critical voice, does not

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change significantly. She points to the “artificially reared colonial chancelleries”95 which had to deal with petty and inappropriate regulations.96 By far, her strongest criticism of the West’s domineering behavior and colonial land-grabbing in China can be found in the seventh letter, which the protagonist wrote in September 1899. The Chinese are no longer depicted as pusillanimous or recalcitrant, instead she describes them as victims, “who only seemed to exist to be driven by force into so-called progress” and “by being robbed even more by the others … but at the critical moment the poor Chinese were always left in the lurch.”97 In addition, the author does not grant the Chinese the strength or ability to resist, which further reinforces their victimhood. “It seems as if the poor Chinese, through natural disposition, were incapable of offering any resistance to the charms of money and to the terror of guns, as if the moral and physical backbone were lacking.”98 The protagonist evokes further pity as she portrays the Chinese as puppets of colonial powers, when she imagines them resisting only because a stronger power behind them “has bribed or threatened them even more.”99 Disillusioned by Edmund’s failure to win a true colony for Germany, as well as by the lack of support and recognition given to him by officials in the German foreign office—she does not give any specific names in the letters—the author questions the European concept of superiority as embodied in the image of the Herrenmensch and popularized by Nietzsche. Indeed, it would not be a stretch to see Edmund as a case in point of this critique. She may have sensed the aristocracy’s waning power, considering her protagonist’s observation of the growing influence of capitalism in the United States, where it was not birth but money that provided access to privilege. In the same letter she compares the older diplomats, interpreters, and customs officers, who still maintained a Sinophilic attitude toward China, to the younger generation who “seemed to be seized by a sudden frenzy of self-conscious hyper-greatness, which is rooted in a profound contempt of all things Chinese.”100 In essence, she sees the Western presence in China as simply about seizing land illegally in the name of patriotism and expansion, all while assuming the role of an “Übermensch.”101 Although Elisabeth and Edmund may have played this role themselves in her Tagebücher, fiction now gives her the necessary perspective to lift the veil of deception and call a spade a spade. The Europeans’ attitude of dominance vis-à-vis the “Chinamen,” she writes, would be seriously threatened “if things grow more serious and the Chinamen have some powerful support behind them,” causing the colonial powers to become

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nervous and “their masterful hyper-greatness” to collapse.102 In retrospect, Elisabeth admits through the words of her fictional narrating “I” that all the ostentation, hubris, and contempt that Europeans have displayed in their relationship with the Chinese are a sham: “…but we have not the stuff of which ‘Uebermenschithum’103 is made.”104 Greatness requires belief in oneself “– and who does that nowadays?”105 These are insightful thoughts and might also refer to the author’s role as an aristocratic woman questioning her class in a changing world where the ruled were demanding freedom—reflected in the onset of the Boxer Rebellion— and where the capital of industrialists could buy the rights and privileges formerly exclusively held by the aristocracy.106

Conclusion Altogether this analysis of Elisabeth von Heyking’s works has demonstrated that imperialism and colonialism were as much a matter of class as they were of race. Both the idea and behavior of the Herrenmensch and the use of racist discourse are closely linked to social codes of the aristocracy, with their sense of superiority and entitlement. These texts demonstrate, however, that the aristocratic ethos was not static but evolved over time. The narrating “I” shifts positions between these two works. In Tagebücher the narrating “I” frequently adopts the views of her husband, so that the reader experiences China primarily through his perspective, and the work is therefore informed by an extreme sense of paternalism and prejudice. In Letters, on the other hand, the author speaks through the eyes of a fictional female protagonist who, in contrast to the autobiographical “I,” has developed a longing for her former life in Beijing because there she could feel like “a queen” (“eine Königin”) and had a sense that her life mattered. Back in the Western world, however, she feels like a “poor little banished queen,” surrounded by people indifferent to the fact that she once “wore a small golden crown.”107 She can no longer recapture the feeling of home in Germany, because she had been away for too long. Like many others, she could live a life of high status and privilege under a colonial system in the East Asia where the native population was perceived and treated as inferior. A life in the West does not offer this sense of “god-likeness”108 or divinity. The justification of dominance presented in the Tagebücher is questioned in Letters. True diplomacy becomes impossible, due to a lack of model leadership as embodied in traditional aristocratic rule. America, an

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independent former colony, represents to her the hope for a nation with an aristocracy of money and intellect rather than of birth.109 The death of both characters in Letters can be viewed as a failure of European imperial endeavors in China, whereas the United States represents the best possible outcome of colonialism. She has no vision for a similar success for China but a yearning for an Eastern lifestyle she once hated and later came to love.

Notes 1. Please note: rather than referring to Elisabeth von Heyking as “Heyking” throughout this chapter, I will use “Elisabeth” and “Edmund,” respectively, to distinguish between the two. This means that I do not differentiate between the autobiographical and the biographical narrator in her journal. I do make a distinction in her novel and speak of the protagonist, although there are biographical parallels between Elisabeth and her protagonist. 2. Elisabeth von Heyking, Tagebücher aus vier Weltteilen 1886/1904, ed. Grete Litzmann, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Koehler and Amelang, 1926). Unless otherwise indicated the translations of quotations from Tagebücher are mine. 3. Mechthild Leutner, “Die Entscheidung für die gewaltsame Besetzung der Jiaozhou-Bucht 1896,” in “Musterkolonie Kiautschou”: Die Expansion des Deutschen Reiches in China. Deutsch-chinesische Beziehungen 1897 bis 1914.  Eine Quellensammlung, ed. Mechthild Leutner and comp. Klaus Mühlhahn (Berlin: Akademie, 1997), 64. 4. Elizabeth von Heyking, Briefe, die ihn nicht erreichten (Berlin: Gebr. Paetel, 1904); Heyking, The Letters Which Never Reached Him (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1904). 5. Herward Sieberg, Elisabeth von Heyking. Ein bewegtes Leben (New York: Georg Olms, 2012), 172, 216–17. 6. Ibid., 182. 7. Ibid., 199. 8. Ibid., 161–62. 9. Annette S.  Biener, Das deutsche Pachtgebiet Tsingtau in Schantung, 1897–1914: Institutioneller Wandel durch Kolonialisierung, ed. W. Matztat (Bonn: Selbstverlag, 2001), 29 and Appendix 1–2. 10. Shayne Aaron Legassie, The Medieval Invention of Travel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 19, 23, 52. 11. Horst Gründer, Geschichte der deutschen Kolonien, 7th ed. (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2018), 22; Carlton J. H. Hayes, “Nationalism,” in European

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Empire Building: Nineteenth -Century Imperialism, ed. William B. Cohen (Bloomington: Forum Press, 1980), 43. 12. Gründer, Geschichte der deutschen Kolonien, 19, 22, 24. 13. Mary Rhiel, “Diplomatenfrau between Two Worlds: Elisabeth Heyking’s China Journal,” Monatshefte 100, no. 3 (2008): 369–82; Rhiel, “Traveling through Imperialism: Representational Crisis and Resolution in Elisabeth von Heyking’s and Alfon Paquet’s Travel Writing on China,” in Imagining Germany/Imagining China: Essays in Asian-German Studies, ed. Veronika Fuechtner and Mary Rhiel (Rochester, NY: Camden, 2013), 155–72; Georg Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 389, 427; Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (New York: Cambridge University Press and Washington DC: German Historical Institute, 2009), 370, 373, 434; Mechthild Leutner, “‘Sind wir ehrlich, so haben wir uns doch alle als armselige Blechgötzen erkannt…’: Elisabeth von Heyking’s ambivalente Position zur Kolonialpolitik,” in Frauen in den deutschen Kolonien, ed. Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst and Mechthild Leutner (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2009), 57–65; Ulrike Brisson, “‘Farbiges und Seltsames ist mir in Asien aufgefallen’: Der Ferne Osten aus der Sicht deutscher Aristokratinnen der Wilhelminischen Zeit,” The German Quarterly 91, no. 3 (2018): 286–304. 14. Leutner, “Sind wir ehrlich,” 65. 15. Christophe Charle, “The Specificities of French Elites at the End of the Nineteenth Century: France Compared to Britain and Germany,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 36, no. 3 (2010): 8, 12. 16. Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 2–7. 17. Jürgen Zimmerer, “German Colonialism. Genocide and Germany’s Imperial Century,” in Sources du savoir africain, Quand les anciens parlent…: témoignages africains comme sources d’histoire coloniale: actes du Symposium international de Vienne, 21–22 octobre 2015 (Douala and Vienna: Editions AfricAvenir, 2016), 151–52. First published in “Colonialism and Genocide,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany, ed. Matthew Jefferies (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2015), 433–51. 18. Arthur Ponsonby, The Decline of the Aristocracy (London: J.  Fisher Unwin, 1912), 13.

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19. Ernest K.  Bramstedt, Aristocracy and the Middle Classes in Germany: Social Types in German Literature, 1830–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 28–29. 20. Norbert Elias, The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Michael Schröter, trans. Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 51, 116. 21. Ibid., 180. 22. Bramsted, Aristocracy and the Middle Classes in Germany, 8. 23. Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 362 ff. 24. Sören Urbansky argued that Sinophobic discourses in the USA, Russia, and Singapore, which depicted Chinese migrants as harbingers of the “yellow peril,” emerged in response to the poor and unhealthy living conditions of the Chinese quarters in Vladivostok, Singapore, and San Francisco. Sören Urbansky, “A Chinese Plague: Sinophobic Discourses in Vladivostock, San Francisco, and Singapore,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, no. 64 (Spring 2019): 78. 25. Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 403. 26. Bramstedt, Aristocracy and the Middle Classes in Germany, 8. 27. Imperialism is generally understood as a nation’s ambition for new territory or commercial grounds, whereas the actual implementation of settlements and commercial use of that land and its indigenous people is defined as colonialism. 28. Rhiel, “Diplomatenfrau between Two Worlds,” 381. See also Hayes, “Nationalism,” 43. Admiration for China persisted among some intellectual and academic circles; hence, Sinophilia did not entirely cease even as anti-­ China sentiments spread. See Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 365. 29. “Die Stimme der Macht, aber auch nur diese, verstehen sie.” Heyking, Tagebücher, 191. 30. For the sake of consistency, I refer to the city by its current name of Beijing, except in the case of historical quotations. 31. Timothy Brennon, Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 19. 32. Bramstedt, Aristocracy and the Middle Classes in Germany, 7–8. 33. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 9. 34. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (New York: Routledge, 2000), 47. 35. Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 405. 36. Ibid., 407. 37. Ibid., 412.

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38. The occupation of the Jiaoszhou Bay—transliterated as Kiautschou in German—has been thoroughly documented by scholars such as Mechthild Leutner, “Musterkolonie Kiautschou”; Klaus Mühlhahn, Herrschaft und Widerstand in der “Musterkolonie” Kiautschou: Interaktionen zwischen China und Deutschland (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000); Biener, Das deutsche Pachtgebiet Tsingtau in Schantung, 1897–1914. 39. Heyking, Tagebücher, 227. 40. See Edmund von Heyking’s correspondence with von Hohenlohe on August 22, 1896 and Hohenlohe’s telegraph to Kaiser Wilhelm II on November 11, 1897. Both copies of these letters are in Mechthild Leutner, ed., “Musterkolonie Kiautschou,” 93–95, 102–3. 41. Mechtner Leutner, Preface to Edmund von  Heyking’s Sources, in “Musterkolonie Kiautschou”: Die Expansion des Deutschen Reiches in China. Deutsch-chinesische Beziehungen 1897 bis 1914; eine Quellensammlung, ed. Mechthild Leutner and comp.  Klaus Mühlhahn (Berlin: Akademie, 1997), 106–7, 109. 42. Ibid., 107. 43. Biener, Das deutsche Pachtgebiet Tsingtau, 36. 44. The exact places and time periods of Elisabeth’s journal were: Chile (Valparaiso) July 1886–February 1889 India (Calcutta) June 1889–April 1893 Vacation (Italy, Germany) April 1893–February 1894 Egypt (Cairo) February 1894–April 1896 China 1 & II (Beijing) April 1896–September 1897/July 1899 (pp. 170–296) Vacation (Berlin and Belgium) June 1899–May 1900 Mexiko (Mexico City) May 1900–February 1903 Return to Europe February 1903–June 1904.

45. Heyking, Tagebücher, 209. 46. “Das Incident besteht darin, daß Gérard und Edmund, nachdem sie die Audienzhalle verlassen, wieder den Mittelweg einschlugen, auf welchem sie gekommen, statt einen kleinen Seitenweg, wie es bisher üblich. Ein Minister des Tsungli Yamen, Ching hsin, faßte darauf Edmund am Ärmel und suchte ihn auf die Seitenstiege zu zerren. Nun ging Edmund erst recht den Mittelweg, und mit Ausnahme des Doyen folgten ihm alle übrigen Anwesenden.” Ibid., 207. 47. Ibid. 48. Philip Sopher, “Rules for Touching British Royals,” The Atlantic, December 10, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/ archive/2014/12/the-­rules-­for-­touching-­british-­royals/383616/. 49. “weil sie fürchten, daß Edmund aus der Angelegenheit Vorteile ziehen könnte.” Heyking, Tagebücher, 208. 50. Ibid. 51. Bramsted, Aristocracy and the Middle Classes in Germany, 29.

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52. Justine Lopez, “PHOTOS: Rare Photographs Depict 19th-Century Life in Beijing,” November 9, 2016, http://www.thatsmags.com/china/ post/16254/photographs-­19th-­century-­beijing. 53. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies, 48. 54. “über die entsetzlichen Straßen mit ihrem Schmutz und Gestank” and “armselige Menschheit, die sich darin grau und trübe hinwälzt.” Heyking, Tagebücher, 208–9. 55. “müßte ich viel ausgehen, so würde ich tiefsinnig, denn ich bin jemand, der so sehr vom Schönen lebt und von einer kongenialen Umgebung abhängig ist. Hier lastet das Häßliche wie Blei auf mir und dann fühle ich mich so grenzenlos isoliert. Ach, dieses Gefühl des Alleinseins, wie es uns trotz allem durchs Leben begleitet!” Ibid., 209. 56. “Was sie auch früher gewesen sein mögen, heute sind die Chinesen schmutzige Barbaren, welche keine europäischen Gesandten, wohl aber europäische Herren brauchen – je eher, je besser!” Ibid., 205. 57. “Wenn man in Shanghai sieht, wie sehr die Chinesen europäische Straßen genießen, auf denen sie spazierenfahren können, wie sehr sie sich bemühen, in die Settlements hineinzukommen und dort die besten Häuser und Gärten zu kaufen, so sagt man sich doch unwillkürlich, daß dem Land nichts Besseres passieren könnte, als unter europäische Kontrolle zu kommen, und daß sich die Chinesen dabei sehr bald viel glücklicher fühlen würden.” Ibid., 184–85. 58. “daß man das Ganze für ein Fieberbild und Alpdrücken hält.” Ibid., 190. 59. “abschreckende stiere Larven,” Ibid., 191. 60. “die Stimme der Macht,” Ibid. 61. Grant Hayter-Menzies references this dilemma when he writes about the Chinese empress dowager Cixi’s difficulties with European interpreters. Grant Hayter-Menzies, Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), 147, accessed July 6, 2019, https://muse.jhu.edu/book/5660. 62. “Dies alles gesehen zu haben ist aber doch interessant,” Heyking, Tagebücher, 192. 63. Elias, The Germans, 87. 64. Ponsonby, The Decline of the Aristocracy, 55. 65. See “Chinese Dress in the Qing Dynasty,” accessed on July 6, 2019, http://archive.maas.museum/hsc/evrev/chinese_dress.html. 66. “soll jung, kränklich und ganz hébété aussehen”; hébété means “dull” in French; Heyking, Tagebücher, 196. 67. Ibid. 68. “daß China so aussieht, wie man sich China vorgestellt hat,” Ibid., 277. 69. Ibid., 280–82 and Hayter-Menzies, Imperial Masquerade, 147.

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70. “war dies eine sehr komische Zeremonie, die übrigens gegen allen chinesischen Brauch gehen soll. Ich hatte die Empfindung, daß die alte Kaiserin absolut guten Eindruck auf uns machen wollte, um alle Greueltaten wegzuwischen, die wir während der letzten zwei Monate von ihr gehört haben. Dabei verlor sie etwas Maß.” Heyking, Tagebücher, 281. 71. Hayter-Menzies, Imperial Masquerade, 73–74. 72. Heyking, Tagebücher, 281. 73. Bramstedt, Aristocracy and the Middle Classes in Germany, 30. 74. “Die Times-Darstellung ist eine tendenziöse Schönfärberei der englischen Gesandtschaft, die von ihren Landsleuten angegriffen wurde, weil sie nichts zur Verhütung der grausamen Verfolgung durch die Exregentin getan hat; deshalb sucht sie plötzlich die scheußliche alte Kaiserin als Muster aller Tugenden hinzustellen, deshalb wurde auch die Damenaudienz mit allen Mitteln gefördert, um den Schein der Fremdenfreundlichkeit zu erzeugen.” Edmund von Heyking’s letter to his father (December 21, 1898), quoted in Heyking, Tagebücher, 276. This quote also reflects Germany’s animosity toward England at that time. Grete Litzmann may have added this footnote later. It is not available in the Google books online version. 75. Hannaford lists many other languages to which the word “race” can be related, but I focus on Latin as both terms “root” and “species” relate to the idea of origin and purity which has played an important role in racist thinking. Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 5. 76. Ahscroft, Grifftiths, and Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies, 203–4. 77. Heyking, Tagebücher, 199. 78. “als wenn man ihnen mit Kanonenschießen drohe, und es sei doch eine angreifende Aufgabe, dreimal wöchentlich das Tsungli mit Krieg zu bedrohen!” Ibid., 257. 79. Hannaford, Race, 286–87. 80. Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 403. 81. Mühlhahn, Herrschaft und Widerstand, 63. 82. “Alles an Land sah ärmlich, unreinlich, verlottert aus,” Heyking, Tagebücher, 231. 83. “illegitime Weiber und Eunuchen-Regierung,” Ibid., 284–85. 84. “die Chinesen sind störrisch und frech,” Ibid., 271. 85. “chinesischer Pöbel,” Ibid., 232. 86. Ibid., 231. 87. Hannaford, Race, 323, 326–27. 88. Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 427n303. 89. Hannaford, Race, 327.

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90. It was only toward the end of the Heykings’ stay in Beijing that Elisabeth began to come to terms with China. A few months before leaving China, Elisabeth admits that she had begun to feel comfortable in Beijing: “Ich ertappe mich dagegen manchmal dabei, mich in Peking ganz wohl zu fühlen…,” Heyking, Tagebücher, 287–88. 91. Sieberg, Elisabeth von Heyking, 385. 92. Gründer, Geschichte der deutschen Kolonien, 215, 221. 93. Rhiel, “Diplomatenfrau between Two Worlds,” 370. 94. Heyking, Briefe, 267; Heyking, Letters, 299. 95. “künstlich gezüchteten Kanzlei-Kolonien…,” Heyking, Briefe, 18. The translated version of the novel speaks of “artificially reared colonies.” Heyking, Letters 16, in my translation I remain close to the original. 96. Heyking, Briefe, 18–19; Heyking, Letters, 16. 97. Heyking, Letters, 31; Heyking, Briefe, 32–33. 98. Heyking, Letters 32; Heyking, Briefe, 33. 99. Heyking, Letters, 32; Heyking, Briefe, 33. 100. Heyking, Letters, 33; Heyking, Briefe, 34. 101. Heyking, Briefe, 34. 102. Heyking, Letters, 34; Heyking, Briefe, 34. 103. “Übermenschitum” is a word the translator of this novel made up trying to capture the sense of a “super-humanness.” 104. “zum Übermenschtum fehlt uns das Zeug…” Heyking, Letters, 34; Heyking, Briefe, 34–35. 105. “– und wer tut das heute noch?” Heyking, Letters, 34; Heyking, Briefe, 35. 106. Heyking, Letters, 46–69; Heyking, Briefe, 45–67. 107. Heyking, Letters, 91; Heyking, Briefe, 86. 108. Heyking, Letters, 91; Heyking, Briefe, 85. 109. “Geistesaristokratie,” Heyking, Briefe, 61 and Heyking, Letters, 62.

Bibliography Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Triffin. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. New York: Routledge, 2000. Biener, Annette S. Das deutsche Pachtgebiet Tsingtau in Schantung, 1897–1914: Institutioneller Wandel durch Kolonialisierung, edited by W. Matztat. Bonn: Selbstverlag, 2001. Bramsted, Ernest K. Aristocracy and the Middle Classes in Germany: Social Types in German Literature 1830–1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. Brennon, Timothy. Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014.

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Brisson, Ulrike. “‘Farbiges und Seltsames ist mir in Asien aufgefallen’: Der Ferne Osten aus der Sicht deutscher Aristokratinnen der Wilhelminischen Zeit.” The German Quarterly 91, no. 3 (2018): 286–304. Charle, Christophe. “The Specificities of French Elites at the End of the Nineteenth Century: France Compared to Britain and Germany.” Historical Reflections/ Réflexions Historiques 36, no. 3 (2010): 7–18. Elias, Norbert. The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, edited by Michael Schröter and translated by Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Epstein, Emily Anne. “Before Beijing: A Rare View of China’s Last Dynasty.” The Atlantic. 2016. Accessed July 22, 2020. https://www. theatlantic.com/photo/2016/09/thomas-­c hild-­Q ing-­D ynasty-­P eking­photographs/500987/. Gründer, Horst. Geschichte der deutschen Kolonien. 7th ed. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2018. Hannaford, Ivan. Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Hayes, Carlton J. H. “Nationalism.” In European Empire Building: Nineteenth-­ Century Imperialism, edited by William B.  Cohen, 41–48. Bloomington: Forum Press, 1980.  Hayter-Menzies, Grant. Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008. Accessed July 6, 2019. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/5660. Heyking, Elisabeth von. Tagebücher aus vier Weltteilen 1886/1904, edited by Grete Litzmann. 2nd ed. Leipzig: Koehler and Amelang, 1926. ———. Briefe, die ihn nicht erreichten. Berlin: Gebr. Paetel, 1904a. ———. The Letters Which Never Reached Him. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1904b. Legassie, Shayne Aaron. The Medieval Invention of Travel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Leutner, Mechthild, ed. “Musterkolonie Kiautschou”: Die Expansion des Deutschen Reiches in China. Deutsch-chinesische Beziehungen 1897 bis 1914. Eine Quellensammlung, compiled by Klaus Mühlhahn. Berlin: Akademie, 1997. ———. “‘Sind wir ehrlich, so haben wir uns doch alle als armselige Blechgötzen erkannt…’: Elisabeth von Heykings ambivalente Positionen zur Kolonialpolitik.” In Frauen in den deutschen Kolonien, edited by Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst and Mechthild Leutner. Berlin: Ch. Links, 2009. 57–65. Lonely Planet. “Beijing in Detail. History.” n.d. Accessed July 6, 2019. https:// w w w. l o n e l y p l a n e t . c o m / c h i n a / b e i j i n g / b a c k g r o u n d / h i s t o r y / a / nar/4cba59b5-­c417-­4d4c-­81b8-­754aab6948f3/355905.

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Marchand, Suzanne L. German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship. New York: Cambridge University Press and Washington DC: German Historical Institute, 2009. Mühlhahn, Klaus. Herrschaft und Widerstand in der “Musterkolonie” Kiautschou: Interaktionen zwischen China und Deutschland. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000. Ponsonby, Arthur. The Decline of the Aristocracy. London: J. Fisher Unwin, 1912. Powerhouse Museum. “Chinese Dress in the Qing Dynasty.” n.d. Accessed on July 6, 2019. http://archive.maas.museum/hsc/evrev/chinese_dress.html. Rhiel, Mary. “Diplomatenfrau between Two Worlds: Elisabeth Heyking’s China Journal.” Monatshefte 100, no. 3 (2008): 369–82. ———. “Traveling through Imperialism: Representational Crisis and Resolution in Elisabeth von Heyking’s and Alfon Paquet’s Travel Writing on China.” In Imagining Germany/Imagining China: Essays in Asian-German Studies, edited by Veronika Fuechtner and Mary Rhiel. Rochester, NY: Camden, 2013. 155–72. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Sieberg, Herward. Elisabeth von Heyking. Ein bewegtes Leben. New  York: Georg Olms, 2012. Sopher, Philip. “Rules for Touching British Royals.” The Atlantic, December 10, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/12/the-­rules-­ for-­touching-­british-­royals/383616/. Steinmetz, Georg. The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Urbansky, Sören. “A Chinese Plague: Sinophobic Discourses in Vladivostock, San Francisco, and Singapore.” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, no. 64 (Spring 2019): 75–92. Accessed June 28, 2019. https://legacy.ghi-­dc.org/ fileadmin/user_upload/GHI_Washington/Publications/Bulletin64/75.pdf. Zantop, Susanne. Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Zimmerer, Jürgen. “German Colonialism. Genocide and Germany’s Imperial Century.” In Sources du savoir africain, Quand les anciens parlent…: témoignages africains comme sources d’histoire coloniale: actes du Symposium international de Vienne, 21–22 octobre 2015, 146–68. Douala and Vienna: Editions AfricAvenir, 2016. First published in “Colonialism and Genocide.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany, edited by Matthew Jefferies, 433–51. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2015.

CHAPTER 3

A “War for Peace”? German-Speaking Pacifists’ Views on the Boxer Conflict Timothy L. Schroer

In the spring of 1900, a grassroots peasant movement in northern China known in the West as the Boxers sparked a conflict with foreign powers that threatened the lives of foreigners in China. The Boxer uprising produced international armed intervention and riveted Europeans’ concern

I discovered the journal Die Friedens-Warte in the library of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History when I was a guest there. I am grateful to the staff and fellow guests for fostering a productive environment to do the bulk of the research for this piece. I would like to thank the organizers, presenters, and participants at the 2017 German Studies Association panel out of which this chapter grew, particularly Albert Wu for his comment. My colleague Michael de Nie read an early version of this, and his scholarship on Victorian-era periodicals has served as a model for my work here. I am also pleased to have the chance to thank my daughters Emma and Anneliese Schroer for their comments on a draft of this chapter. Joanne Miyang Cho’s editing improved the finished product. T. L. Schroer (*) Department of Art, History, and Philosophy, University of West Georgia, Carrollton, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. M. Cho (ed.), Sino-German Encounters and Entanglements, Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73391-9_3

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on events in Asia. Kaiser Wilhelm II’s speech on July 27, 1900, to soldiers departing Bremerhaven for China, in which he held up Attila the Hun to them as a model, stands as the most notorious pronouncement in the German language on the Boxer uprising. At the opposite pole of the political spectrum, the Social Democrat August Bebel offered a withering critique of the German Empire’s China policy in his less-familiar addresses in the Reichstag in November of that same year.1 The range of opinions provoked by the convulsion in China stretched a substantial distance, and German-speakers, who divided along so many axes at the end of the nineteenth century, responded in a variety of ways to the Boxer uprising. This chapter will consider the views of a group for whom neither Wilhelm nor Bebel shared great sympathy: German-speaking pacifists. Although German-speaking pacifists never enjoyed much influence over German policy, they offer an illuminating point of contrast to the official line offered by Wilhelm and the perspective of the Social Democrats articulated by Bebel. This chapter will briefly sketch the range of opinion on the Boxer uprising from the political right to the other extreme of the socialist left, in order to contextualize effectively the views of German-speaking pacifists. It examines the following questions: How did German-speaking pacifists understand the Boxer uprising, the Chinese, and Europe? What policies did they advocate regarding China? How did they fit the events of the Boxer uprising into their broader programs? What light does the pacifist commentary on the Boxer conflict shed on the wider field of Sino-German relations at the start of the twentieth century? The existing historiography does not address these questions or seriously explore German-speaking pacifists’ reactions to the Boxers. Roger Chickering’s book on German pacifists, which remains the best work on the movement, does not devote sustained attention to the Boxer uprising. He correctly notes that pacifists never wholly rejected the use of force, as in cases of self-defense, but he characterizes “[t]he recurrence of minor wars in the years before 1914” as a “source of embarrassment to” the German pacifists.2 More recent studies that treat the German-speaking pacifists more sympathetically as forerunners of the European project likewise have not explored the movement’s position on the Boxer uprising.3 Sandi Cooper’s study of international pacifism, which dedicates little space to the German-speaking participants in the movement, discerns a shift over time from initial support for international intervention against the

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Boxers to condemnation of Western battlefield atrocities.4 Works on Germany’s involvement in the Boxer uprising do not focus on the pacifists’ reaction to the event.5 From the perspective of legal history, Gregory S. Gordon has examined an incident in which a German army officer, in cooperation with French and British officers, formed an international tribunal in October 1900 to investigate misdeeds by Chinese officials in the city of Baoding. Although he does not address German-speaking pacifists’ writings, Gordon argues that the decision by Western military officers to conduct a trial in that case, rather than summarily executing Chinese in the town, reflected the growing influence of an international pacifist movement committed to the rule of law.6 Whereas Gordon’s claims for the pacifists’ influence on Western policy in China cannot be supported directly, the Boxer uprising reveals more about pacifism in Germany than historians have yet explored. German-speaking pacifists focused considerable attention on the conflict in China in 1900. They comfortably fit the episode into their existing paradigms and programs, instrumentalizing the events of 1900 in sometimes inventive and rhetorically impressive ways to advance fairly well-­ settled aims concerned mainly with German-speaking lands and Europe. The pacifists hoped that the emergence of an international coalition to subdue the Boxers would advance the reconciliation of European nations and foster European transnational unity. The Boxer uprising revealed the limits of German pacifism, as pacifists favored the rescue of endangered Westerners in China and the suppression of the Boxer movement. The contours of the pacifists’ position stand out in especially stark relief when contrasted with conservatives to their right and the socialists to their left. The pacifists eschewed the bloodthirsty rhetoric of the Kaiser and those on the right, but they did not articulate the sort of more trenchant critique of imperialism articulated at the time by German Social Democrats. Although pacifists worried about excessive bloodshed more than many other Westerners, they celebrated signs of solidarity among enlightened European peoples against barbarous enemies who threatened the advance of international law and civilization. China stood outside the family of civilized nations in their view. Although pacifists did not ignore Chinese losses and hoped to mitigate them, they reasoned that the ultimate prize of European harmony justified the costs of what one pacifist termed a “Friedenskrieg,” a “war for peace.”

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The Boxer Uprising and Reaction on the Right and the Left The peasant adherents of the Boxers saw the growing numbers of foreigners in China as the root cause of a train of troubles. Espousing support for the Qing dynasty and antipathy toward foreign elements, they engaged in sporadic violence against Chinese Christian converts and Europeans in Shandong Province. The unrest spread to Zhili Province surrounding the capital, as well as Shanxi Province to the west, and gathered in intensity through June, arousing anxiety among the Western powers. Anxious about the safety of Europeans in northern China, on June 17 the naval forces of Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia launched an assault on Chinese fortifications at Dagu on the coast. This action encouraged the Chinese Imperial Court to throw its support behind the Boxer movement. On June 20, Baron Clemens von Ketteler, Germany’s envoy to China, was killed in Beijing and the Boxers laid siege to the foreign legations in the Chinese capital. The following day, a Chinese imperial edict recognized the existence of a state of war between all foreign states and China. Alarmed about the fate of foreigners trapped in Beijing, the powers, including the United States, agreed to cooperate in their efforts to crush the uprising and protect their interests in China. Field Marshall Alfred Graf von Waldersee was named commander of a multinational East Asian Expeditionary Force. A relief column from several of the foreign countries arrived in Beijing on August 14 to break the siege of the legations. The foreign forces then sacked and looted the city as the Chinese Imperial Court fled westward. For several months, coalition troops occupied Beijing as negotiations for the final settlement of the conflict made halting progress.7 The dramatic events in China riveted the attention of the press and publics around the world for the second half of 1900. German readers could follow daily reports on events in China in newspapers across the political spectrum. Journalists covering the crisis were undeterred by the fact that accurate information on the fate of the legations cut off in Beijing was difficult to obtain. Rumors of atrocities circulated, as did explanations offered by many who purported to be experts on the situation in China. The liberal Berliner Tageblatt printed a piece on June 30, 1900, from a Captain Henning, who explained that the disturbances reflected a hatred of foreigners in which “the entire Chinese people is steeped.”8 Dire accounts of Chinese cruelty and pessimistic assessments of the roots of

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those atrocities circulated widely among the German-speaking public: the killing of the German envoy to China particularly shocked German opinion, provoking widespread revulsion.9 A front-page piece in the Berliner Tageblatt of July 2 expressed the hope that “the spilled blood of Baron von Ketteler will become a sort of cement that will indissolubly unite the white race against the yellow.”10 The most prevalent interpretation of the Boxers at the time regarded them as backward, barbaric criminals attacking the civilized world.11 The direct attack on the German Empire’s representative to China and the uncertainty of the Boxer conflict brought out the Kaiser’s worst qualities: vanity, instability, insecurity, immoderation, and militarism. When matters looked bleakest for Wilhelm’s subjects in China, he contemplated denying quarter to prisoners and razing Beijing. Foreign Secretary Bernhard von Bülow, although he suffered from many of the same flaws that Wilhelm did, managed to moderate his impulsive sovereign’s pronouncements and policies. Bülow, who was appointed chancellor in October 1900, recognized that the international unity provoked by the common danger was likely to prove fleeting as the powers began to eye long-term interests in Asia. Beijing was sacked and looted, but mostly remained standing. The passage of time and the priorities of allied powers proved important in constraining Germany from engaging in the worst excesses, but it nevertheless attracted opprobrium for the extremity of Wilhelm’s rhetoric and the conduct of German troops in China. Wilhelm, along with the conservative wing in Germany, enthusiastically greeted the possibility that the German army might win battlefield laurels in China. The chances for military glory vanished with the rapid collapse of organized Boxer opposition, but the government reflexively defended the army’s conduct in the campaign against all criticisms.12 Conservatives in the Reichstag supported armed intervention in China, but in some respects, they criticized the Kaiser’s immoderate statements and declined to support unconditionally the government’s actions. Wilhelm von Kardorff, leader of the Free Conservative party, criticized the government’s failure during the summer to call the Reichstag into session to authorize funding of the military expedition to China. In his speech before that body, Kardorff, however, excused reported atrocities committed by the German military in China. Citing the precedent of the German army’s summary execution of French partisans (Franktireurs) in 1870, Kardorff observed that soldiers and officers did not enjoy lining up civilians against the wall and shooting them, but sometimes they had to take

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such actions. As for the general thrust of development, Kardorff argued that the Chinese were powerless against the tide of progress. If the Chinese refused to exploit their coal and iron resources, he stated, then “younger, more powerful, stronger nations [would] come and snatch the profits of such natural resources.” The leader of the Free Conservatives believed that the “course of all of world history” revealed the inevitability of the process of economic globalization.13 At the other end of the political spectrum, skepticism regarding imperialism and suspicion of the military shaped the views of the Social-­ Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the working classes more generally on the Boxer uprising.14 Social Democrats, like liberals, generally shared a belief that history had a direction and that the forces of progress had their home in Europe. Thus, a resolution adopted by the SPD in its meeting in Mainz in 1900 accepted as self-evident the idea that the German Empire ought to seek to bring “modern culture and civilization” to other peoples. The SPD, however, proved less willing to countenance the use of force in that project. The resolution insisted that other countries ought to be brought to enjoy the blessings of civilization through teaching and example rather than brute force.15 German Social Democrats criticized the Reich’s actions in China more trenchantly than any other group in Germany. August Bebel, in speeches in the Reichstag in November 1900, laid out a vigorous defense of the Boxers and China, placing the recent outbreak of anti-Western violence within the context of years of abuse of China and the Chinese by foreign powers. The Boxers, Bebel claimed, saw themselves as “patriots.”16 He argued that Germans, not the Boxers, had initiated the violence in China in 1900. Furthermore, the German and world press had “exaggerated the actions of the Boxers and the Chinese population.”17 Bebel shrugged off the accusation leveled against him that he was “a defender of the Boxers.”18 He mounted a lengthy assault on the government’s policy on multiple fronts, pointing up the unchristian character of German actions defending missionaries in China and calling for the Reichstag to protect its constitutional power of the purse by rejecting Bülow’s request for a retroactive approval of unauthorized expenditures to mount the military expedition to China.19 Bebel agreed with pacifists and other liberals in advocating that Germany pursue a policy of free trade and the Open Door toward China.20 While focusing his critique on the government, Bebel addressed most of his opponents across the political spectrum in his speech. He declined, however, to devote any of his critique to the pacifists, probably regarding

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them as too insignificant to mention. The most prominent Social Democrat in the Reich thus staked out a critical position on the Boxer uprising that defended the Chinese against German critics and rejected the use of force.

The German-Speaking Pacifist Movement Before the Boxer Uprising Examination of German-speaking pacifists should begin with Bertha von Suttner, the leading figure in the German-speaking peace movement. She grew up in a family on the penurious fringe of the aristocracy in Austria. After entering a marriage with a man whose family disapproved of the union, she and her husband struggled in their early years together in Georgia in the Caucasus, earning a meager living by their writings. She embraced liberalism and wholeheartedly accepted prevailing middle-class notions. Henry Thomas Buckle’s History of Civilization in England, a paean to the march of progress, stamped her worldview, along with a Darwinian belief in the power of evolution.21 In 1889 Suttner scored an overnight success with the publication of her antiwar novel, Lay Down Your Arms! The book was a smash, catapulting her to international prominence.22 Among Suttner’s adherents was Alfred Hermann Fried, a Jewish Austrian living in Berlin, who was a founding member of the German Peace Society and served as the editor of the journal Die Friedens-Warte (Peace Watch), which began to appear in 1899 as the most important German-language forum to promote pacifism. Fried proved the driving force behind the journal, which enjoyed a circulation of around 10,000 by the beginning of the First World War.23 The Polish pacifist Ivan Bloch, whose book The Future  of War in its  Technical, Economic, and Political Relations rivalled Suttner’s work for international influence, contributed at times to the journal.24 These prominent members of the movement, like most of its supporters, had a liberal political outlook and embraced the values of the educated middle class, the Bildungsbürgertum. The lead in the new journal’s first edition from July 1, 1899, celebrated the globalization and free trade that Alfred Fried insisted marked the era. The increasing contacts among countries made it vital, according to the peace movement, to establish understanding among “cultured nations” (Kulturvölker). Fried’s thought centered on “modern cultured peoples.” They represented the forces of progress, which he and his collaborators believed ought to lead to a more peaceful world.25

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Although German-speaking pacifists did not devote much attention to China before 1900, their writings suggested that they favored its integration into the larger community of nations, whether the Chinese wanted it or not. China figured as a byword for the dangers of insular stagnation in a brief note from the inaugural edition of Die Friedens-Warte. The journal quoted approvingly the Bulgarian government’s expressed willingness to allow construction of a new rail line through its territory. Bulgaria would reap the benefits of prosperity and progress through its integration with other countries, the journal predicted, as its leaders turned away from an anachronistic policy of seeking “to surround Bulgaria with a Chinese wall.”26 The implication was clear that countries ought to abandon efforts to seal themselves off from commerce or contact with outsiders. A violent effort to do precisely that on the other side of the world the following year captured the attention of the journal’s writers.

Pacifists’ Reaction to the Boxer Uprising The pacifist movement participated vigorously in the international debate concerning the Boxer uprising, its suppression, and the implications of these developments. The pacifists approached the events in China with a worldview that framed history as the story of progress, and they consistently fit the Boxer uprising into that narrative. Bertha von Suttner argued that the tragedy in China represented “a stage in the course of development of culture.”27 Alfred Fried explained that pacifists operated at a more advanced evolutionary stage than did political leaders like German Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow. The pacifists simply embodied a “symptom” of the “natural development” through which humanity increasingly freed itself from old anarchic practices of the past.28 In a December 24 retrospective on the year 1900, Fried concluded that the “Chinese adventure” had accelerated the process by which an emerging system based on European solidarity would replace the old “European anarchy.”29 German-speaking pacifists unanimously endorsed resort to the sword in the face of the Boxer danger. Force, in this case, did not constitute merely a lesser evil than the deaths of Europeans at the hands of Chinese. The pacifists perceived a unique benefit to be obtained by the forging of a coalition to subdue the Boxers. The forming of an international expeditionary force advanced the reconciliation of European nations. Fried hoped that Alfred von Waldersee would transcend a narrow national framework to become “the first European hero, the defender of a European

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fatherland, to whom memorials might be erected in all European capitals.”30 Fried likewise celebrated the emergence of European solidarity in the fight against a common enemy. Citing the precedent of the war against France in 1870, which had produced the unified German Empire from previously divided states, Fried prophesied that the China campaign would bring the reconciliation of all Europeans. He rebutted the allegation frequently leveled by critics on the right that the members of the peace movement were unpatriotic because they were internationalist, citing the German troops participating in the international coalition. Fried quoted a message from Kaiser Wilhelm II that discerned the emergence of unity as Europeans confronted the Chinese with “‘weapon in hand,’” a unity that the Russian Tsar had hoped to achieve in 1899 through convening a peace conference at The Hague. One of the more paradoxical expressions of the benefits to be won for the cause of pacifism from the fighting in China came from Fried’s pen. Expressing confidence in the fulfillment of pacifists’ hopes, he wrote, “Truly out of the rubble of the walls of Peking can be built the house of peace in The Hague.”31 The pacifists argued that violence in response to the Boxer uprising was justified. In a piece from September 24, after Beijing had fallen, Bertha von Suttner expressed support for the use of force to vindicate the interests of international law and civilization in China, while rejecting the most strident Western calls for unrestrained violence, including the destruction of imperial graves in China. The goals were to rescue foreigners, “to punish criminals,” and to restore order in China. She quoted approvingly an assertion by Dr. Trueblood of the American Peace Society that, in response to the Boxer uprising, “‘war or something similar’” was unavoidable in China. The pacifist movement, she explained, expressed not utopianism, but “the self-preservation drive of civilization.”32 Darwinian ideas fit smoothly alongside a conviction that Europe represented the pinnacle of development. Bertha von Suttner and her fellow pacifists saw the Boxer uprising and the Western response to it through the lens of their longstanding campaign. A sense of vindication that the common Chinese enemy had brought former foes together, producing the European solidarity that pacifists long had advocated, permeated the writing in Die Friedens-Warte. Suttner noted that the international coalition that had arisen in response to the Boxer uprising was exactly what her group had been urging for years.33 The pacifists detected a spirit of national reconciliation and solidarity in the formation of an international expeditionary force under the

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leadership of Waldersee.34 When Sedan Day in 1900 passed without Germans engaging in traditional celebrations of France’s humiliation, but instead included the trading of musical salutes in the Suez Canal between a French ship and a German ship carrying Waldersee to China, pacifists praised the burying of the hatchet.35 Pacifists could not resist using the rhetoric surrounding a united front among Europeans in 1900 as a cudgel against detractors who had earlier derided them as softheaded advocates of utopianism. In the summer of 1900, the movement’s erstwhile critics issued their own appeals for cooperation among all Western countries. On July 7, Wilhelm cabled his thanks to US President William McKinley for his condolences after the death of Ketteler. The Kaiser said that he recognized in the message “the shared pulse of interests that unite the civilized nations.”36 Suttner recalled that she had been called naïve or even unpatriotic for suggesting earlier that Europeans should put aside enmity. After Wilhelm publicly praised the international solidarity of the European militaries in the face of the Chinese threat, Alfred Fried observed in Die Friedens-Warte that when he had proposed two years earlier the establishment of a European naval force to be stationed in East Asia, he “was laughed at by various ultra-nationalist publications.” Now who was laughing?37 Pacifists, like many other Germans, were ambivalent on the question of whether China should be counted among the civilized states.38 Pacifists might have been tempted to include China, since a Chinese delegation had attended the 1899 Hague Peace Conference.39 No mention of that fact, however, appeared in Die Friedens-Warte’s coverage of the Boxer uprising. Fried called the Chinese “half-civilized.” Interestingly, he also lumped the Japanese together with the Chinese in that category, even though the Japanese were allied with the Germans against China.40 In the context of the Boxers’ violence against foreigners, the scales tipped toward weighing China among the uncivilized, the unworthy, the un-Western. Pacifists, like most Germans, thus tended to accept as self-evident European superiority over Asians and Africans, a pre-eminence that led them to see imperialism as inevitable.41 The German-speaking pacifists’ views on China’s status as an outsider seemed to coincide with those of others belonging to the international movement. The Tenth Inter-Parliamentary Conference of pacifists adopted a resolution offered by noted French pacifist Paul Henri Benjamin Balluet d‘Estournelles, Baron de Constant in August 1900. The Baron de Constant expressed hope that “the justified suppression of the

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bloodbaths” caused by the Boxers would not heighten the risk of a general war among the powers squabbling for spoils, but instead would produce increased unity among Europeans.42 The delegates who adopted that resolution seemed incapable of contemplating China’s inclusion among the civilized states. The British journalist W. T. Stead signaled his pacifist priorities by dedicating the first item in his recurring section titled “The Progress of the World,” in July 1900 to covering nominees of jurists to the Permanent International Tribunal, rather than to the Boxer uprising. In his following discussion of the unrest in China, Stead, like the German-­ speaking pacifists, discerned positive aspects in the threat to foreigners posed by the Boxers. He celebrated the way the common danger had produced the “practical federation of the West, the like of which has never been seen, even in the days of the Crusades,” while expressing optimism that the international police power would apply force dispassionately in the interest of progress. At the peak of the crisis, he and other pacifists saw China merely as an impediment to be overcome.43 Pacifists nevertheless faced a predicament, because they believed that European depredations against China had provoked the Boxers. Whereas Europeans were not blameless, the pacifists did not go so far as to excuse the Boxers’ actions. They straddled that dilemma in various ways, sometimes inconsistently. In the first mention of the upheaval in China to appear in Die Friedens-Warte, Bertha von Suttner claimed that the Boxers’ call for “death to the foreigners” reflected the same “spirit of barbarity … and hatred” as that which animated French ultranationalists’ contemporary campaign against Germany. “Perhaps the call in China is somewhat more justified,” Suttner wrote, than European nationalists’ animosity, given the threat Westerners posed to the integrity of the Chinese Empire.44 Ivan Bloch, in a piece that appeared in Die Friedens-Warte in August, emphasized that Chinese anti-foreign sentiment stemmed from Western actions, including seizing possessions and the insensitivity of Christian missionaries. He recommended an Open Door policy in China.45 Delegates to the Ninth World Peace Congress held in Paris from September 30 to October 5, after the Boxers had been defeated, diagnosed the cause of the turmoil in inconsistencies in European policies toward China, which had alternately treated the Middle Kingdom as “a fearsome power, then as a seventh-rank Negro state.”46 Convinced of a progressive direction in history, on whose leading edge enlightened Europeans stood, pacifists by no means condemned imperialism full stop. Fried embraced as tightly as anyone European power as a

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force for progress. Even before the Boxer uprising, he contemplated the partition of China so as to neutralize one potential cause of disagreement among the great powers, a scheme that Bertha von Suttner rejected.47 In the summer of 1900, Fried explained that he favored an enlightened imperialism that would eschew naked exploitation of Asians and blood lust, but which would at times be obliged to employ force. In response to the Boxer uprising, force was justified. In an Orwellian turn of phrase, Fried explained that Europeans in China were engaged in a “Friedenskrieg,” a “peace-war” or “war of peace,” or “war for peace.” However translated, the idea was that the conflict would eventually bring about the rule of law.48 Despite atrocities by the foreign forces against the Chinese, on balance the conflict in China represented the “victory of peace.”49 Fried wrote in July that the peace movement did not believe that the time had arrived when no wars would be waged. Rather, the movement insisted that development among the civilized peoples of Europe had reached the stage that war between “civilized” (kulturreifen) peoples was no longer warranted. Barbarians like the Boxers stood outside the community of nations that could resolve disagreements peaceably.50 The pacifists nevertheless proved to be more moderate than most in their recommendations regarding policy toward China. When the Chinese Imperial Court sent conciliatory but equivocal messages to the foreign powers on June 29 and July 17 expressing regret at the outbreak of hostilities and an intention to restore order, most governments and journalists refused to contemplate talks while the legations remained under siege.51 Bertha von Suttner, however, recommended attempting to open negotiations with the Chinese while the relief force continued to advance toward Beijing.52 Her willingness to consider a negotiated settlement at a moment when the foreigners in China faced maximum danger marked her as far more moderate than most Europeans. Die Friedens-Warte also provided a forum for China’s arguments, as it published an August 17 plea from Yang-Yu, China’s envoy to St. Petersburg and Vienna, to Baron von Suttner for moderation in the Western offensive.53 Moreover, the journal aired reports of atrocities committed by German troops in China.54 In a November 19 piece, Ivan Bloch authored the sharpest critique of German actions in China to appear in the publication. He condemned the Kaiser’s Hun speech from July, arguing that civilized states had to refrain from waging war as it had been waged in the past if they wanted to avoid “the disapproval of the civilized world.” Bloch insisted that “the times of Hun and Tartar morals [were] over.”55 The march of progress offered a standard applicable to all.

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Conclusion This exploration of liberal German-speaking pacifists’ stance on the China question at the beginning of the twentieth century may help to illuminate the wider question of German liberalism’s prospects in the Wilhelmine period. The people examined here found themselves between conservatives on the right and socialists on the left. Whereas liberal pacifists shared a belief that Europeans drove progress, reports of atrocities committed by Germans against Chinese victims troubled them more than they did the most ardent proponents of the German military. They proved unwilling, however, to mount the more thoroughgoing attack on Western imperialism that the socialists did. In summary, German-speaking pacifists viewed the Boxer uprising with the same hope that it marked the dawning of a new, more enlightened and peaceful era with which they tended to greet most developments. Their confidence rested on real signs of international cooperation among former enemies, who set aside past grievances to protect Western interests in China and vindicate international law. The Chinese, who served as a common enemy beyond the ambit of the pacifists’ immediate concerns, suffered the brunt of a military campaign waged to achieve such ends. Although the pacifists did not ignore Chinese losses and hoped to mitigate them, they reasoned that the ultimate prize of European harmony justified the costs of a victorious Friedenskrieg.

Notes 1. Wilhelm II: “Hun Speech” (1900), in Wilhelmine Germany and the First World War, 1890–1918, ed. Roger Chickering, with Steven Chase Gummer and Seth Rotramel, vol. 5, German History in Documents and Images, German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, accessed on August 5, 2019, http://ghdi.ghi-­dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=755; Anneliese Beske and Eckhard Müller, eds., August Bebel: Ausgewählte Reden und Schriften, Bd. 7/1, Reden und Schriften, 1899 bis 1905 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1997), 78–109. 2. Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and a World Without War: The Peace Movement and German Society, 1892–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 21 and 105 (for the quotation). 3. Petra Schönemann-Behrens, Alfred H.  Fried: Friedensaktivist  – Nobelpreisträger (Zürich: Römerhof, 2011); Walter Göhring, Frieden ohne Grenzen: zu Alfred Hermann Fried, Friedensnobelpreisträger, 1911 (Vienna:

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Löcker, 2011); Göhring, Verdrängt und Vergessen: Friedensnobelpreisträger Alfred Hermann Fried (Vienna: Kremayr & Scheriau/Orac, 2006). 4. Sandi E.  Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 174–75. 5. Susanne Kuss, German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence, trans. Andrew Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Dietlind Wünsche, Feldpostbriefe aus China: Wahrnehmungs- und Deutungsmuster deutscher Soldaten zur Zeit des Boxeraufstandes, 1900–1901 (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2008); Mechthild Leutner and Klaus Mühlhahn, eds., Kolonialkrieg in China: Die Niederschlagung der Boxerbewegung, 1900–1901 (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2007); Susanne Kuβ and Bernd Martin, eds., Das Deutsche Reich und der Boxeraufstand (Munich: Iudicium, 2002); Sabine Dabringhaus, “An Army on Vacation? The German War in China, 1900–1901,” in Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914, ed. Manfred F.  Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster, 459–76 (Washington, DC: The German Historical Institute and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 6. Gregory S.  Gordon, “International Criminal Law’s ‘Oriental Pre-Birth’: The 1894–1900 Trials of the Siamese, Ottomans and Chinese,” in Historical Origins of International Criminal Law, vol. 3, ed. Morten Bergsmo, Cheah Wui Ling, Song Tianying, and Yi Ping (Brussels: Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, 2015), 178–79, accessed on August 5, 2019. 7. The best short narrative is found in Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 14–56. For a narrative placing events in the longer Sino-­ German context, see David M.  Crowe, “Sino-German Relations, 1871–1917,” in Germany and China: Transnational Encounters since the Eighteenth Century, ed. Joanne Miyang Cho and David M. Crowe, 71–96 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); see also Per Fischer, “Clemens von Ketteler: Ein Lebensbild aus amtlichen und privaten deutschen Quellen,” in Deutschland und China: Beiträge des Zweiten Internationalen Symposiums zur Geschichte der deutsch-chinesischen Beziehungen, Berlin 1991, ed. Kuo Heng-yü and Mechthild Leutner (Munich: Minerva, 1994), 333–57. The fullest account of the conflict’s outbreak is Lanxin Xiang, The Origins of the Boxer War: A Multinational Study (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). For a detailed narrative published soon after the events, see A.  Henry Savage Landor, China and the Allies (New York: Scribner’s, 1901). 8. “Aus einem chinesischen Tagebuche,” Berliner Tageblatt (MorgenAusgabe), 30 June 1900, 1. For rumors printed in the press, see, e.g., “Admiral Seymours Ankunft in Peking?” Berliner Tageblatt (Abend-

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Ausgabe), 21 June 1900, 1, noting the absence of reliable information and reporting rumors that Admiral Edward Seymour’s relief force had reached Peking and that Prince Tuan had murdered the Chinese emperor, both of which turned out to be untrue. 9. See Bernd Martin, “Die Ermordung des deutschen Gesandten Clemens von Ketteler am 20. Juni 1900  in Peking und die Eskalation des ‘Boxerkrieges,’” in Das Deutsche Reich und der Boxeraufstand, ed. Susanne Kuβ and Bernd Martin (Munich: Iudicium, 2002), 77–102. 10. “Die Ermordung des deutschen Gesandten in China,” Berliner Tageblatt (Abend-Ausgabe), 2 July 1900, 1. The report erroneously reported that Ketteler had been killed on June 18. In fact, he was killed on June 20. 11. See Timothy L.  Schroer, “The German Military, Violence, and Culture during the Boxer Conflict,” in Empire, Ideology, Mass Violence: The Long Twentieth Century in Comparative Perspective, ed. Tobias Hof (Munich: Herbert Utz Verlag, 2016), 22–23. 12. See John C.  G. Röhl, Wilhelm II: Into the Abyss of War and Exile, 1900–1941, trans. Sheila de Bellaigue and Roy Bridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 73–85; Bernhard von Bülow, Memoirs of Prince von Bülow, vol. 1, From Secretary of State to Imperial Chancellor, 1897–1903, trans. F.  A. Voigt (Boston: Little, Brown, 1931), 224–27, 417–20, 429–30, and 538; Bernd Sösemann, “Die sog. Hunnenrede Wilhelms II: Textkritische und interpretatorische Bemerkungen zur Ansprache des Kaisers vom 27. Juli 1900  in Bremerhaven,” Historische Zeitschrift 222 (1976): 342–58; Wilhelm to Bülow, 19 June 1900, Die Grosse Politik der Europäischen Kabinette, 1871–1914, Vol. 16, Die Chinawirren und die Mächte, 1900–1902 (Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft für Politik und Geschichte, 1924), 14; Annika Mombauer, “Wilhelm, Waldersee, and the Boxer Rebellion,” in The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm II’s Role in Imperial Germany, ed. Annika Mombauer and Wilhelm Deist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 91–118; Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstags: X. Legislaturperiode. II. Session: 1900/1902 (Berlin, 1901), 1: 1–2, 11–16, 36–39, 61–63. 13. Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstags, 1: 63–65; for the quotation, see p.  65. Albert von Levetzow of the Conservative party questioned the authenticity of reports of German killings of unarmed Chinese. Ibid., 50–52. 14. See John Short, Magic Lantern Empire: Colonialism and Society in Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 134–47. 15. Beske and Müller, August Bebel, 89. For analysis of the SPD’s criticisms of the government’s China policy, see Ute Wielandt and Michael Kaschner, “Die Reichstagsdebatten über den deutschen Kriegseinsatz in China:

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August Bebel und die ‘Hunnenbriefe,’” in Das Deutsche Reich und der Boxeraufstand, ed. Susanne Kuβ and Bernd Martin (Munich: Iudicium, 2002), 183–202; Kuss, German Colonial Wars, 233–47. 16. Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstags, 1: 20–26. For the quotation, p. 26. 17. Beske and Müller, August Bebel, 83 (emphasis original). 18. Ibid., 82. 19. Bebel thus in 1900 made arguments grounded both in legal-political principle and in bourgeois, Christian values. Cf. Jens-Uwe Guettel, “Revolutionary Respectability: The SPD and Political Affairs in the German Empire,” German Studies Review 42, no. 2 (2019): 259–80. Guettel’s article does not examine SPD arguments during the Boxer uprising, which complicate the narrative of a shift over time in SPD rhetorical strategies recounted therein. 20. Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstags, 1: 35. 21. Brigitte Hamann, Bertha von Suttner: A Life for Peace, trans. Ann Dubsky (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 36, 61. 22. Ibid., 72. 23. Göhring, Frieden ohne Grenzen, 92–94; Hamann, 93; Tony Gray, Champions of Peace: The Story of Alfred Nobel, the Peace Prize and the Laureates (Birmingham: Paddington Press, 1976), 111–12; Chickering, 44–47, 80. 24. On Bloch, see Hamann, 138; Chickering, 97–99. 25. [Alfred Fried], “Die Friedens-Warte,” Die Friedens-Warte 1, no. 1 (1 July 1899): 1. 26. Charles Richet, “Aus der Zeit,” Die Friedens-Warte 1, no. 1 (1 July 1899): 6. 27. Bertha von Suttner, “Zeitschau,” Die Friedens-Warte 2, no. 28 (16 July 1900): 109. Suttner’s pacifism thus betrayed the influence of evolutionary thought before 1907, the point at which Chickering dates her shift from moralistic pacifism to a more scientific outlook. Chickering, 104. 28. A.H.F, “Graf Bülow und wir: Ein Beitrag zur Politik der höheren Warte,” Die Friedens-Warte 2, no. 50/51 (24 December 1900): 202. 29. A.H.F., “Die Entwickelung zum Weltfrieden im Jahre 1900,” Die FriedensWarte 2, no. 50/51 (24 December 1900): 202–4. The quotation is from p. 204. 30. A.H.F., “Die Satt der Gewalt,” Die Friedens-Warte 2, no. 29 (23 July 1900): 114. 31. A.H.F., “Die Aufgaben des Europäischen Generalissimus,” Die Friedens-­ Warte 2, no. 32 (27 August 1900): 125–26, p. 125 for the first quotation and p. 126 for the second.

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32. Bertha von Suttner, “In der Brandung,” Die Friedens-Warte 2, no. 37 (24 September 1900): 145, 146, and 147. 33. See “Aus der Zeit,” Die Friedens-Warte 2, no. 27 (9 July 1900): 108. 34. A.H.F., “Das Sedanfest,” Die Friedens-Warte 2, no. 33 (3 September 1900): 129–30. 35. “Aus der Zeit: Zur Sedanfeier,” Die Friedens-Warte 2, no. 34 (10 September 1900): 135–36. 36. Bertha von Suttner, “Zeitschau,” Die Friedens-Warte 2, no. 28 (16 July 1900): 110. 37. A.H.F., “Sollen wir ‘liquidiren’?” Die Friedens-Warte 2, no. 27 (9 July 1900): 106. 38. On Sinophobic and Sinophilic aspects of German readings of China, see George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 361–431. 39. See Wolfgang Heinze, Die Belagerung der Pekinger Gesandtschaften: Eine völkerrechtliche Studie (Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1901), 172–73, 178; Gerrit W.  Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 19. 40. A.H.F., “Die Satt der Gewalt,” Die Friedens-Warte 2, no. 29 (23 July 1900): 113. 41. On prevailing German views, see Mark Hewitson, “Nationalism,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany, ed. Matthew Jefferies (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 134. 42. “Zehnte Interparlamentarische Konferenz,” Die Friedens-Warte 2, no. 32 (27 August 1900): 128. 43. The Review of Reviews, ed. W. T. Stead 22 (July-December 1900): 9–10. The quotation appears on p. 9. 44. Bertha von Suttner, “Zeitschau,” Die Friedens-Warte 2, no. 24 (18 June 1900): 93. 45. Johann von Bloch “Staatsrath v. Bloch über die Ereignisse in China,” Die Friedens-Warte 2, no. 31 (13 August 1900): 122–24. Bertha von Suttner similarly placed blame for Chinese anger on Western actions in China. Bertha von Suttner, “In der Brandung,” Die Friedens-Warte 2, no. 35/36 (17 September 1900): 137–40. 46. “Die Berathungen,” Die Friedens-Warte 2, no. 40/41 (15 October 1900): 162. 47. Hamann, 146–47. 48. Fried, “Und wieder ein Krieg!” Friedens-Warte 2, no. 25 (25 June 1900): 97; see also A.H.F., “Sollen wir ‘liquidiren’?” Die Friedens-Warte 2, no. 27 (9 July 1900): 105–6 (stating force was required to restore order in China).

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49. Fried, “Und wieder ein Krieg!” Die Friedens-Warte 2, no. 25 (25 June 1900): 99. 50. A.H.F., “Sollen wir ‘liquidiren’?” Die Friedens-Warte 2, no. 27 (9 July 1900): 106. 51. China No. 1 (1901): Correspondence Respecting the Disturbances in China (London: Harrison and Sons, 1901), 13 (June 29 communication) and 27 (July 17 edict); “The Instructions of the Chinese Government to Ministers Abroad,” The North-China Herald and Supreme Court & Consular Gazette, 18 July 1900, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chinese Newspapers Collection, p. 138. 52. Bertha von Suttner, “Zeitschau,” Die Friedens-Warte 2, no. 31 (13 August 1900): 121–22. 53. “Eine chinesische Stimme über den ostasiatischen Konflikt,” Die FriedensWarte 2, no. 33 (3 September 1900): 131–32. 54. “Aus der Zeit: Moralisirende Wirkung des Krieges,” Die Friedens-Warte 2, no. 34 (10 September 1900): 136. 55. Johann von Bloch, “Zur gegenwärtigen Lage in China,” Die Friedens-­ Warte 2, no. 45 (19 November 1900): 177–80, quotation at p. 178.

Bibliography Periodicals Berliner Tageblatt Die Friedens-Warte The North-China Herald and Supreme Court & Consular Gazette The Review of Reviews

Other Primary Sources Beske, Anneliese, and Eckhard Müller, eds. August Bebel: Ausgewählte Reden und Schriften. Bd. 7/1, Reden und Schriften, 1899 bis 1905. Munich: K. G. Saur, 1997. Bülow, Bernhard von. Memoirs of Prince von Bülow. Vol. 1, From Secretary of State to Imperial Chancellor, 1897–1903, translated by F.  A. Voigt. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1931. China No. 1 (1901): Correspondence Respecting the Disturbances in China. London: Harrison and Sons, 1901. Die Grosse Politik der Europäischen Kabinette, 1871–1914. Vol. 16, Die Chinawirren und die Mächte, 1900–1902. Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft für Politik und Geschichte, 1924.

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Heinze, Wolfgang. Die Belagerung der Pekinger Gesandtschaften: Eine völkerrechtliche Studie. Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1901. Landor, A. Henry Savage. China and the Allies. New York: Scribner’s, 1901. Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstags: X. Legislaturperiode. II. Session: 1900/1902. Vol. 1. Berlin, 1901. Wilhelm II: “Hun Speech” (1900). Wilhelmine Germany and the First World War, 1890–1918, edited by Roger Chickering, with Steven Chase Gummer and Seth Rotramel, vol. 5, German History in Documents and Images, German Historical Institute, Washington, DC.  Accessed August 5, 2019. http://ghdi.ghi-­dc. org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=755.

Secondary Sources Chickering, Roger. Imperial Germany and a World Without War: The Peace Movement and German Society, 1892–1914. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. Cohen, Paul A. History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Cooper, Sandi E. Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Crowe, David M. “Sino-German Relations, 1871–1917.” In Germany and China: Transnational Encounters since the Eighteenth Century, edited by Joanne Miyang Cho and David M. Crowe, 71–96. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Dabringhaus, Sabine. “An Army on Vacation? The German War in China, 1900–1901.” In Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914, edited by Manfred F. Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster, 459–76. Washington, DC: The German Historical Institute and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Fischer, Per. “Clemens von Ketteler: Ein Lebensbild aus amtlichen und privaten deutschen Quellen.” In Deutschland und China: Beiträge des Zweiten Internationalen Symposiums zur Geschichte der deutsch-chinesischen Beziehungen, Berlin 1991, edited by Kuo Heng-yü and Mechthild Leutner, 333–57. Munich: Minerva, 1994. Göhring, Walter. Frieden ohne Grenzen: zu Alfred Hermann Fried, Friedensnobelpreisträger, 1911. Vienna: Löcker, 2011. ———. Verdrängt und Vergessen: Friedensnobelpreisträger Alfred Hermann Fried. Vienna: Kremayr & Scheriau/Orac, 2006. Gong, Gerrit W. The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Gordon, Gregory S. “International Criminal Law’s ‘Oriental Pre-Birth’: The 1894–1900 Trials of the Siamese, Ottomans and Chinese.” In Historical Origins of International Criminal Law. Vol. 3, edited by Morten Bergsmo,

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Cheah Wui Ling, Song Tianying, and Yi Ping. Brussels: Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, 2015. Gray, Tony. Champions of Peace: The Story of Alfred Nobel, the Peace Prize and the Laureates. Birmingham: Paddington Press, 1976. Guettel, Jens-Uwe. “Revolutionary Respectability: The SPD and Political Affairs in the German Empire.” German Studies Review 42, no. 2 (2019): 259–80. Hamann, Brigitte. Bertha von Suttner: A Life for Peace. Translated by Ann Dubsky. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Hewitson, Mark. “Nationalism.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany, edited by Matthew Jefferies. Surrey: Ashgate, 2015. Kuss, Susanne. German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence, translated by Andrew Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Kuβ, Susanne, and Bernd Martin, eds. Das Deutsche Reich und der Boxeraufstand. Munich: Iudicium, 2002. Leutner, Mechthild, and Klaus Mühlhahn, eds. Kolonialkrieg in China: Die Niederschlagung der Boxerbewegung, 1900–1901. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2007. Martin, Bernd. “Die Ermordung des deutschen Gesandten Clemens von Ketteler am 20. Juni 1900  in Peking und die Eskalation des ‘Boxerkrieges.’” In Das Deutsche Reich und der Boxeraufstand, edited by Susanne Kuβ and Bernd Martin, 77–102. Munich: Iudicium, 2002. Mombauer, Annika. “Wilhelm, Waldersee, and the Boxer Rebellion.” In The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm II’s Role in Imperial Germany, edited by Annika Mombauer and Wilhelm Deist, 91–118. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Röhl, John C. G. Wilhelm II: Into the Abyss of War and Exile, 1900–1941, translated by Sheila de Bellaigue and Roy Bridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Schönemann-Behrens, Petra. Alfred H. Fried: Friedensaktivist – Nobelpreisträger. Zürich: Römerhof, 2011. Schroer, Timothy L. “The German Military, Violence, and Culture during the Boxer Conflict.” In Empire, Ideology, Mass Violence: The Long Twentieth Century in Comparative Perspective, edited by Tobias Hof, 21–44. Munich: Herbert Utz Verlag, 2016. Short, John. Magic Lantern Empire: Colonialism and Society in Germany. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. Sösemann, Bernd. “Die sog. Hunnenrede Wilhelms II: Textkritische und interpretatorische Bemerkungen zur Ansprache des Kaisers vom 27. Juli 1900  in Bremerhaven.” Historische Zeitschrift 222 (1976): 342–58.

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Steinmetz, George. The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Wielandt, Ute, and Michael Kaschner. “Die Reichstagsdebatten über den deutschen Kriegseinsatz in China: August Bebel und die ‘Hunnenbriefe.’” In Das Deutsche Reich und der Boxeraufstand, edited by Susanne Kuβ and Bernd Martin, 183–202. Munich: Iudicium, 2002. Wünsche, Dietlind. Feldpostbriefe aus China: Wahrnehmungs- und Deutungsmuster deutscher Soldaten zur Zeit des Boxeraufstandes, 1900–1901. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2008. Xiang, Lanxin. The Origins of the Boxer War: A Multinational Study. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.

CHAPTER 4

Investing in “German Hong Kong”: The Building of a Global Economic Presence in Qingdao, 1898–1914 Matthew A. Yokell

In 1897, Germany forced China to surrender part of the province of Shantung (Shandong), centered around the fishing village of Tsingtau (Qingdao),1 creating the Kiaochow Leasehold. As a result, Germany had secured the long-standing wishes of a German China interest group that had been calling for an increased presence in order to protect their interests. In demanding a colony in China, the members of this lobby articulated their own unique visions of empire that would not only bring further glory to Germany, but also create the best possible environment to secure their aims and objectives. Although their specific ideas about Qingdao varied greatly, at the heart of these visions was that Germany should embrace a liberal, commercial model of empire: creating a “German Hong Kong.” The members of the German business, naval, and diplomatic leadership in Qingdao all wanted the colony to become a model of colonial

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rule and a major power center in Asia. While colonial leaders embraced the German Hong Kong model, considerable tension existed within that vision. Much of the complexity in laying out policy stemmed from intra-­ elite battles between these colonial leadership groups, each of which had similar goals and competing interests. The story of Qingdao, and the attempt to bring a liberal form of empire to bear, undercuts and confirms our understanding about the intellectual and social history of German colonialism. While scholars of empire have shown an increased desire to look at colonial administration from the perspective of colonists themselves, German colonial practices are still seen as following a trajectory toward certain twentieth-century illiberalisms. Qingdao, and the creation of a German Hong Kong, reaffirms that a strong liberal impulse existed overseas in the Wilhelmine era. This global look at German colonial practices also reframes our understanding of evolving visions of empire and the alternate path this imperial project offered. The China interest group that pushed for a colony saw Hong Kong not just as an objective reality, but also as a model for an international cultural, trade, and military center in which Germans and Chinese shared management of the colony, making it the central axis of influence in East Asia: a port that would rival and surpass the great centers of Asia, as well as a comfortable place to visit and conduct business, a mini-Germany in a foreign land.2 This chapter examines the Navy and Leasehold government’s attempts to foster industry, trade, and commerce in Qingdao and the Leasehold in order to realize their vision of a German Hong Kong. To build up the colonial economy, the naval administration supported the establishment of a corporate system, establishing guidelines and regulations for businesses that would secure the fair competition and good business practices critical for Qingdao’s economic success.3 In pursuing this policy, increasing the involvement of the Chinese was critically important, and so this chapter also discusses the role of the Chinese in the colony’s economic growth. By the time the Qingdao experiment ended in 1914, the colony was showing real signs of success in developing into an international hub of activity, prestige, and power. The Imperial Navy’s vision for Qingdao, combined with good local conditions and some initial good fortune, seemed to be paying off, providing most, if not all, of the various leadership groups in the colony with the satisfaction that their respective objectives for a colony in China were being met.

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Examining the imperial project through the thoughts, actions, and policies pursued by Qingdao’s leadership, whom I call the “Middle Management of Empire,” provides a new lens through which we can view imperial projects inaccessible through other sources. This is largely due to the fact that these men and women on the ground in Qingdao and the Leasehold needed to find practical solutions to enormously complicated problems that could not be easily solved so far from home, surrounded by a state whose population vastly outnumbered the Europeans living and working within the Leasehold. One of the main reasons that colonial, naval, commercial, and diplomatic leaders placed these middle managers in the colony was because they possessed the sort of intellectual flexibility that in turn fueled a desire to find compromise solutions, like that captured in the phrase “German Hong Kong.” While contemporary historians looking back at the German colony might deem this pursuit insignificant because it did not last long enough for this different kind of imperial vision to be fully realized, the colonists and the middle managers believed they were building a sustainable enterprise that would last for generations. That World War I interrupted their pursuits and brought an early end to this project is irrelevant. Rather, by understanding the colony from the perspective of those responsible for this endeavor, we can gain a full picture of the various forms that the German Hong Kong vision of empire took and the ways in which German colonial leaders sought to make this vision a reality. Each section of this chapter studies an element of the colony’s economic development crucial to bringing the German Hong Kong vision to fruition. They focus on major developments in the colony, the problems and challenges encountered in defining what the colony should be, and the progress made in laying the foundation for Qingdao’s further growth. Section one focuses on the first years of the colony and the establishment of trade and customs agreements, as the naval administration sought to carve out Qingdao’s role in the local, regional, and global economy. During this period, the German vision for Qingdao was largely unsettled, as the various leaders in Qingdao jockeyed for a settlement that best protected their own interests. The next section describes the growth of trade and industry following the customs agreement, focusing on both the industries supported and subsidized by the colonial administration, as well as efforts made to encourage Chinese businessmen and traders to invest in Qingdao and establish businesses. The third and final section of this chapter examines the renegotiation and revision of the initial customs

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agreement following a shift in colonial policy and governance in 1905, wherein the objectives of the various colonial leadership groups coalesced into the pursuit of a German Hong Kong. Although this vision remained only broadly defined in the remaining years of the colony, it provided the guiding principles necessary for commerce and industry to grow and flourish, making Qingdao a premiere trading entrepôt in East Asia.

The German Imperial Project in Qingdao: The Customs Agreement Although rights to the port and surrounding area were secured via treaty, the Kiaochow Leasehold was treated as a formal colony under direct European control. Unlike other German colonies, however, the German Navy, led by the Navy Secretary Alfred Tirpitz, administered the Leasehold; the head of the naval squadron stationed in Qingdao also served as its governor. Broadly conceived as both a military base and trading enterpôt like Hong Kong, Tirpitz regarded the development of Qingdao into an important center of trade and industry in East Asia as one of his primary objectives.4 The successful economic development of the colony stood as a direct reflection of the entire colonial project, and thus the Navy’s ability to oversee and run an important facet of Germany’s projection as a global power. In transforming Qingdao into a valuable trading port, not only would the city bring in increased revenue from international trade, but also bolster and promote local and regional trade with China, turning Germany into an economic powerhouse in the region. To accomplish this, however, Germany needed to overcome two major obstacles. First, Tirpitz and the colonial government had to foster an environment in which they could encourage large German trading firms to establish branch offices in the colony. Second, to ensure positive economic development, the Leasehold government needed to foster a strong cooperative relationship with Chinese provincial authorities, especially customs officials. Such a vision, however, conflicted with those of the Foreign Ministry and the commercial community, which preferred the imperial policies and practices Germany and other European powers pursued in Africa and other parts of Asia. In these contexts, Europeans took advantage of their early presence to dictate the terms of economic modernization. Commercial investors derived great profit from the local populace’s desire for European goods, replacing indigenous bartering with cash transactions that clearly favored the seller.5

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Having spent time in East Asia as the Head of the East Asia Squadron (1896–1897), Tirpitz had seen firsthand the challenges and opportunities that a colonial enclave in East Asia could offer. Consequently, the head of the Reichsmarineamt recognized that, for Qingdao to grow and prosper, Germany would need to take a more collaborative approach with the Chinese; it would be important to interact and engage with the native population. Nevertheless, the Navy also considered it Germany’s duty and right to be in China. A right because Germany was one of the leading industrial powers in the world and the possession of colonial territory abroad was an important projection of its power, and a duty because of the critical importance of sharing German capital, culture, and national character. With Qingdao designated an open port under the Leasehold Agreement, the free trade and minimal customs duties that this offered was a major incentive for foreign investors to consider diverting commercial traffic through Qingdao. Furthermore, German trading firms saw Qingdao’s status as a major boon for the growth of their businesses.6 That the Reichsmarineamt would handle the administration of the colony rather than the Kolonialamt or Auswärtiges Amt, however, tempered these high hopes. Many German business managers in the region viewed the gubernatorial leadership of a career naval officer as antithetical to their interests.7 Such was the general situation that Hans Carl Rosendahl, the colony’s first governor, found awaiting him upon reaching the Leasehold on 16 April 1898. Following his arrival, Tirpitz strongly stressed the importance of Qingdao’s commercial growth.8 This pointed emphasis on its economic development laid the foundation for an imperial vision that went beyond simply ensuring that the colony would be self-sustaining. Tirpitz desired a strong colonial economy in order to fulfill two key functions. First, by successfully creating a fully realized “German Hong Kong,” the Imperial Navy could demonstrate its important role in establishing Germany as a multifaceted world power, bolstering the Reichsmarineamt’s prestige at home and abroad.9 Second, Tirpitz regarded a strong economy as the basis for financial profit. Although the Reich would provide Qingdao with the funds necessary to support it initially, this was, to Tirpitz, impractical over the long term. By generating its own revenue, many problems could be resolved, with the bonus of creating a place of national pride, a singularly impressive expression of Germanness (Deutschtum) abroad. In order to foster positive economic growth and establish Qingdao as a base of economic activity in Shandong and beyond, two important

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conditions needed to be established: free trade and a free economy. The former was secured by establishing an appropriate system of tariffs and duties. Qingdao needed to be designated a free port.10 This was a key component of the Navy’s policy in administering Qingdao, not only due to the Navy’s liberal orientation, but also due to the great success Hong Kong was beginning to enjoy as a free port.11 Additionally, naval leaders considered a tariff barrier between the Leasehold and Shandong’s interior a hindrance to trade within the province.12 The challenge, then, was to establish a customs system that would provide overseas trade with easy access to Qingdao, as well as the free movement of goods between the port and the Chinese interior. Tirpitz paid great attention to this policy, desiring a customs agreement that placed Qingdao on equal footing with China.13 He also pursued the establishment of a branch of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service (IMCS) in Qingdao to encourage Chinese merchants to move to, and conduct business in, the Leasehold. Although the IMCS office exercised limited power, its presence in Qingdao represented a significant compromise, as the Navy generally expressed a strong desire to remove any hint of Chinese sovereignty within the colony. The Imperial Navy based its projected system of tariffs on a memorandum drafted by the civilian Commissioner of Kiaochow (Komissar des Schutzgebietes) in early 1898.14 At Tipritz’s instigation, discussions regarding the commissioner’s plan began in earnest between the German Ambassador in China, Edmund von Heyking (1896–1899), and Sir Robert Hart, the Inspector General for the IMCS. By September, Hart and Heyking were able to hammer out the basic principles of an agreement. That the two sides came together so quickly stemmed from Germany’s willingness to afford the IMCS a much larger role in the colony than initially expected.15 The first customs commissioner, Erich Ohlmer, arrived at the new branch office in August 1898, and Qingdao was officially declared “open to the trade of all nations” as part of the Land-Use Ordinance of 2 September 1898.16 Despite this quick and early progress in establishing Qingdao as a free port, Germany and China did not agree to a formal customs treaty until 17 April 1899. Hart negotiated largely independent of the Zongli Yamen (Chinese Foreign Ministry), only presenting it with a finalized treaty to accept or reject.17 Nevertheless, the Zongli Yamen agreed to the terms of the treaty with the provision that Kiaochow would be referred to as a “Leasehold (Pachtgebiet)” rather than a “Protected Area (Schutzgebiet).”18 The agreement established Qingdao as a transit port for goods within the

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province of Shandong, granted it the same status as the other treaty ports in China, and also secured tariff clearance for all goods destined for the Leasehold. That Qingdao also offered greater freedom from standard export procedures provided the port with the opportunity to become a central trade depot for merchandise up and down the Chinese coast and between China, Japan, and European colonial enclaves. The new tariffs preserved free access to the sea and the interior of the province, assuring Qingdao would have “all the advantages of a Chinese treaty port without losing its character as a free port.”19 In doing so, the German government could build upon the model that Hong Kong offered.20 Such trade and customs freedoms created exceptionally favorable economic conditions, providing German and foreign companies with an incentive to invest in the Leasehold and establish new companies there. In a development of the British model in Hong Kong, Qingdao also fulfilled many of the functions of a treaty port. Working with the provincial Chinese government to control goods entering and leaving the mainland, the IMCS branch in Qingdao collected its normal duties at rates common in other treaty ports.21 Furthermore, the colonial government charged no export duties on goods whose final destination was within the Leasehold. The IMCS did, however, levy taxes on imports that crossed through the colony on their way to locations in sovereign Chinese regions as well as on exports from China. Additionally, the customs office charged coastal rates on import and export duties on Chinese goods that originated from other treaty ports in China when those products left the Leasehold. As many of these taxes and duties were usually collected at the customs house in Qingdao, the city became a central hub and axis of trade in the region. Furthermore, German authorities were empowered to combat the smuggling of prohibited or restricted goods, including opium.22 Between the customs house and Qingdao’s nature as a free and treaty port, the colony enjoyed multitudinous advantages that made it equal to, and in many cases better than, Hong Kong. Perhaps the most important benefit that the city offered was that all goods that came from the interior and were consumed within its or the Leasehold’s boundaries were tax-­ free. Furthermore, all produce and manufactures could travel into the interior from Qingdao without having to be unpacked, inspected, and reloaded. A final advantage was that the port could serve as a free depot for products produced within the province—these goods could be sorted, sampled, and finished within the confines of the Leasehold before shipment.

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In negotiating the customs treaty, Heyking scored a major victory by preventing the Chinese from encroaching too greatly on the colony’s autonomy. First and foremost, the Imperial Maritime Customs office in Qingdao was “limited to the raising of customs and lacked administrative control over the harbor and the post office.”23 Furthermore, the customs treaty placed specific limitations on the IMCS, stipulating that it “shall take no part in the collection or administration of tonnage dues, lighthouse dues, or port dues.” The German legation and colonial government also retained considerable power over the customs station and its daily business. According to the agreement, the chief of the customs office and the members of its European staff “shall, as a rule, be of German nationality … [and] the Inspector General will inform the Governor of Kiautschou beforehand about all changes in the staff.” The treaty further specified that “all correspondence between the customs office and German authorities and merchants shall be conducted in the German language.” As a final means of reducing Chinese control over trade, the IMCS was required to assume the functions of the Chinese civil customs official (taotai) in a treaty port, making it responsible for the collection of native and foreign duties.24 Despite the Reichsmarineamt’s belief that Germany had secured a favorable trade agreement, German merchants, particularly those already well-established on the Chinese coast, were less than satisfied. Such disagreement over economic policy had been a constant battle since Rosendahl’s arrival. While the settlers in Qingdao recognized that their dreams of profit and fortune were being channeled into development, the main cargo departing Qingdao’s harbor in the colony’s first year was empty beer bottles.25 The German press at home and in China received a constant barrage of angry letters protesting the customs negotiations, particularly regarding the customs house in Qingdao.26 The opposition of German merchants and traders is captured quite clearly in a report that the German consul in Shanghai, Dr. Wilhelm Knappe, wrote to the Auswärtiges Amt. In his dispatch, Knappe noted that the commercial community in Qingdao combined the more traditional fears of the Chinese with an open hostility toward the native population. These merchants and businessmen had no interest in hearing that Qingdao would possess the advantages of both Hong Kong and the other treaty ports and that, in order to surpass Hong Kong, the colony needed

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to pursue new and different policies. This band of investors prima facie opposed any concessions to Chinese authority, complaining that, due to the Imperial Navy’s policies, “China has obtained all the advantages of an open port complete with customs house without having to contribute anything in the slightest to the cost.”27 Between the growing number of complaints and protests from merchants in Bremen, Hamburg, and other German ports, Rosendahl came under intense scrutiny. With objections to this economic policy showing no signs of abating, Tirpitz recognized he had little choice but to replace Rosendahl with a new governor, Paul Jaeschke.28 Upon his appointment, Tirpitz informed Jaeschke that the economic development of Qingdao and the Leasehold was of primary importance. In order to promote and support the colonial economy, the local administration needed to pursue an active economic policy, including continuing the work of forging a highly favorable customs agreement, securing preferential treatment of businesses in the development of land, and also providing political and military support against Chinese authority.29 In the end, the “victory” that the commercial community felt it had achieved in effecting Rosendahl’s recall proved to be a hollow one. Jaeschke was just as unmoving and forceful and arrived prepared with clear instructions on how to enact the Imperial Navy’s vision for Qingdao while also satisfying the demands of other interest groups. Jaeschke embraced his new role, emphasizing that Qingdao’s “development as a trade-colony and important entrepôt for German merchants in East Asia will be decisive for its future.”30 Despite his intent to assuage the fears of German merchants and their supporters in the press, Jaeschke struggled to mollify his opposition. In a 1904 article about economic conditions in Shandong, Wilhelm Berensmann wrote that “merchants, instead of naval officers, should now occupy the governor’s estate in Tsingtau. This is not, I assure you, a plea directed at the failings of a single individual, but against the system of development espoused by the Naval Government.”31 Nevertheless, Tirpitz and the colonial administration remained committed to fusing the benefits of a treaty port with those of a free port.32 This firm commitment to their German Hong Kong ideal was admirable for its consistency, but it did not come without consequences, as naval leaders often had to devote considerable time and energy to calming flaring tempers in the commercial community.

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The Commercial and Industrial Development of Qingdao With the customs agreement settled and German merchants and traders satisfied that the colonial government was protecting their interests, the commercial development of Qingdao began in earnest. In these early years, however, only modest growth took place, largely due to the lack of harbor facilities and connection to Shandong’s interior via road and rail. In 1899, 205 ships arrived in Qingdao, with nearly half belonging to the steamship firm Diederichsen, Jebsen, and Company.33 Most of these goods were not subject to customs duties, however, so any statistics related to their value or worth are not available.34 Nevertheless, what can be discerned is that certain foreign goods, particularly kerosene and raw and manufactured cotton, made their appearance in Shandong and parts of northern China for the first time.35 Though the overall value of imports in this first year was only 200,000 Taels (619,000 Reichsmarks), the Imperial Navy reassured the Reichstag that this modest sum formed a reasonable base for economic growth, particularly once it established stronger transportation and communication networks in the Leasehold, allowing for better integration with expanding trade networks.36 The freedom of trade established by the customs agreement as well as the early growth in commerce created the economic conditions that provided incentives for German and other foreign companies to invest in Qingdao. Although the difficulties involved with establishing modern industry in China limited the financial success of these enterprises and the overall number of undertakings remained comparatively small, the impact and contributions of these projects were critical to Qingdao’s growth into one of the premiere colonial enclaves in East Asia. Furthermore, in recognizing that Qingdao might never become a “modernized” industrial outpost, the Navy and the colonial administration refocused its “German Hong Kong” vision to create a hybrid industrial plan that emphasized uniquely German goods that could be produced in Qingdao and sold regionally and internationally as well as working with the local Chinese population to develop and grow industries that sold high-quality mass-­ produced goods that would generate profits through trade, tariffs, and other duties. The most valuable industry established in Qingdao was the shipyard, which serviced naval and private vessels. The shipyard began operations in 1901 in a temporary location before moving to the Großhafen between

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1905 and 1907.37 A thoroughly modern establishment, the shipyard was one of the largest and most well-outfitted installations of its kind in East Asia, with over 1100 yards of docks and much of the newest equipment available; indeed, such a site was more likely to be found in Kiel or Newcastle. One of the shipyard’s most prominent features was an extensive floating dock that could hold 16,000 tons, allowing it to serve as a dry dock for multiple ships and one of the largest of its kind. The shipyard also possessed an electric crane that could lift 150 tons, allowing for even the largest ships to receive the services they needed.38 Most of the shipyard’s employees were recruited from the local Chinese population. The Chinese workers participated in a four-year apprenticeship program, where they received training in technical fields as well as an education in German and other related subjects. The shipyard rapidly grew into one of the largest enterprises in the colony, employing nearly 1550 Chinese and 65 Europeans by 1913.39 The shipyard was capable of building and overhauling ships, with much of its business keeping the East Asian Cruiser Squadron operating at top performance. Although the Imperial Navy operated the shipyard throughout the life of the colony, Tirpitz’s original intention was for the shipyard to be in private hands. Not only would this reduce the Navy’s operating budget for the colony, but a successful privately run shipyard would also be an excellent showcase for how lucrative investment in Qingdao could be. The Navy made several attempts to interest investors but was unable to secure an agreement. Tirpitz was particularly desirous that Krupp would operate the shipyard. Nevertheless, despite the Navy’s efforts to play up the nationalistic importance of running the shipyard and promises of considerable business from Germany and China, Krupp would not bite. In refusing the Navy’s request, Krupp stressed that, while it fully understood that “buying the yard was not a matter which touches only on the purely business side of things, but also touches upon political and national issues,” after careful consideration, the company found “the shipyard was simply too large and too valuable for the limited business opportunities available in East Asia.” Despite rejecting the Navy’s offer, Krupp did, however, agree to provide any equipment or materials the Navy might need for the yard at a considerable discount in order to ensure that this enterprise could provide its valuable services.40 Financial aspects aside, the shipyard enjoyed a highly favorable reputation for the quality and efficiency of its work. Furthermore, with trained Chinese artisans, state-of-the-art facilities, and the active support of

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merchant shipping throughout East Asia, the shipyard provided important technical knowledge and practical training for thousands of Chinese. As modern mechanized technology began to become more prevalent throughout the region, the men trained at the shipyard for work in countless industries inside and outside the Leasehold made valuable contributions to the rapid industrial development of Shandong.41 In addition to supporting the shipyard, Krupp provided equipment for the slaughterhouse and sausage works that began operation in 1904, despite again choosing not to operate these industries directly.42 Several other prominent international German companies followed Krupp’s example. Siemens offered considerable material support for the electric company when it was established in 1899. When the private firm that ran this venture, the Dresden-based Kummer Electric Power, failed in 1901, Siemens agreed to buy it out, although it required the Navy purchase and run the electric plant.43 While this may reflect reluctance by multinational firms to invest in Qingdao, these companies fully understood the broader implications of being involved in the colony’s growth and development, even as they sought to minimize their financial risks. The most important private industry in the Leasehold was the Shantung Bergbau Gesellschaft (Shantung Mining Company, or SBG). Although it struggled to turn a sizable profit, its contributions to Qingdao’s economic development cannot be understated. The SBG’s main mining activities took place at coalfields located at Weihsien (Weixian) and Poshan (Boshan), each of which had two main mining shafts and numerous smaller branches. Mining operations began in 1901, with further expansions in 1904 and 1907.44 Like many of the other industries in the colony, the SBG made use of “all the most modern equipment” to make the extraction and transport of minerals as efficient as possible, including an automatic coal washer that cleaned and sorted the coal into four grades.45 Erich Ohlmer found this machinery an “ingenious contrivance…the only one of its kind in the Far East,” and the North China Herald reported that this “unique device [would] give Germany an immense advantage in the coal trade” in China and East Asia.46 The coalfields also housed briquette factories that took excess pieces from the washer and converted them into fuel for a variety of steam-powered engines. Initially, the SBG struggled to recruit laborers to work in the mines, largely because the local population saw the coalfields as merely a place to pick up additional work during the agricultural offseason. By 1905, the SBG recognized that the best way to recruit a steady stream of permanent

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laborers was to improve working conditions.47 Consequently, the SBG worked out an arrangement with Yuan Shikai, the governor of Shandong. In return for the provincial government’s help in recruiting workers, the company would hire laborers only from Shandong, pay them on a higher pay scale, offer better rates for accident insurance, and establish a fund to provide for the coal miners and their families in case of death. In addition, the SBG also built special residential “colonies” near the mines “to get secure hold of the laborers and break the influence of their villages.” By the SBG’s estimation, these colonial villages were well laid-out, rent-free, and provided excellent health facilities.48 Although it is difficult to determine exactly how dramatically conditions improved, the SBG’s efforts did solve their labor problems. By the time both minefields were fully expanded and operational in 1911, the SBG counted 8000 Chinese laborers in its workforce, supervised by 70 Germans.49 Between the two coalfields, the quality of the coal extracted at Boshan was much higher than Weixian’s. Furthermore, the coal from Weixian was difficult to extract, due to constant flooding in the mineshafts. The coal from Boshan, however, was easily mined and was of extremely high quality: suitable for all types of use and even considered by some as a substitute for Cardiff coal.50 In 1901, the first year of full operations for the two fields, the SBG produced 179,083 tons of coal, extracted mostly from Weixian; by 1913, however, that number had increased to 613,000 tons, with nearly two-thirds now coming from Boshan.51 Despite the SBG’s success in developing the two fields and increasing coal production, however, the company struggled to turn a profit. This inability to generate financial success had mostly to do with the high costs of operating the mines and transporting the coal to Qingdao. As a result, the SBG sold its coal at a price too high to compete with coal from Kaiping and Japan. In response to this economic reality, the company tried to redirect its efforts to selling its coal in the interior of Shandong, but such efforts only stemmed their financial losses rather than produce large profits. The SBG had been founded to sell its coal throughout East Asia and to European traders, and the local markets were much smaller and generated less profit. Although it is difficult to ascertain exactly why the SBG struggled to earn large profits, the best explanation may be that the German firm allowed its undertaking to become too large and complicated. While the mines run by local competitors were smaller and simpler in terms of the equipment they used, they were better suited to meeting the economic

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realities of the local marketplace. In its desire to establish a modern enterprise capable of breaking into the international market immediately, the SBG invested heavily in expensive equipment requiring skilled workers that were difficult to train quickly. Nevertheless, the SBG had a considerable impact on the colony, as it helped modernize industry in northern China and provided the necessary fuel for the transportation into and out of the colony critical to Qingdao’s prominence. In addition to the SBG, German investors also tried to compete with well-regarded Chinese industries by establishing the German-Chinese Silk Production Company (Deutsch-Chinesische Seiden Industrie Gesellschaft, or DCSIG). Founded in 1902 with an initial investment of 1.8  million marks, the company aimed to establish a modern facility in Qingdao that could reel, spin, and weave silk from the interior of Shandong and other parts of China.52 Although the administrative offices remained in Berlin, on 26 May 1902, the company moved its official headquarters to a site just north of Qingdao, and the factory itself was fully operational by 1904. Much like other industrial enterprises in the colony, the factory used the most modern equipment available for spinning, throwing, and dyeing silk. The company also built considerable storage and transportation facilities at its production complex, as well as large covered courtyards, showrooms, and European-style living quarters for the supervisory and European personnel. The DCSIG housed its Chinese employees (approximately 1500 in number) in one of two residential colonies: two barracks in which 650 non-married laborers lived, separated by gender, as well as a residential complex with streets and small parks for workers with families.53 In addition to laying out residential complexes that provided for the well-being of its workers, the company’s management also insisted on policies that would fulfill German ideals and ensure that the native population could partner with the Germans in managing the company. The most important of these was providing long-term training and education for its personnel. Future managers and supervisors received instruction in every facet of production as well as on factory management and training. In an effort to attract upper- and middle-class Chinese managers, younger workers and children received an education in subjects including reading and writing Chinese and German, literature, geography, and mathematics, as well as practical training in a variety of technical subjects.54 Erich Ohlmer described such a setup as “a model of its kind that could bear comparison with any in Europe.”55

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The silk and dyed goods that the DCSIG produced were extremely fine products that were in high demand throughout East Asia and Europe. Indeed, the popularity of Qingdao’s silk became an object of considerable concern for American businessmen, who found the German products cutting into the trade monopoly they had so carefully cultivated, particularly in Shanghai. Even World War I and the trade embargoes that followed did little to stem this demand, as German silk manufactures continued to pour into neutral ports, smuggled in under false names.56 Despite this demand, the DCSIG’s profits fell short of its investors’ expectations. This was largely due to high production costs that resulted in prices 40% higher on average than many of its competitors.57 In 1908, Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow proposed the Reichstag provide a subsidy to support the company, but the measure ultimately failed.58 As a result, the DCSIG’s board of directors brought in a consortium of rich Chinese businessmen to save the company, making the DCSIG a combined German-Chinese venture.59 Although two of the largest industrial undertakings in Qingdao were unable to realize the financial success that the colonial leadership had hoped for, many other German industries were highly lucrative. These companies fared much better primarily due to their smaller size and because they catered to markets where the competition was not nearly as fierce. The most important, most profitable, and certainly most significant projection of Germany’s global reach was the brewery, Germania-Brauerei, which would, over time, become the Tsingtao Brewery Corporation, the name by which it is known today. The first European-style brewery in Asia, the company was established in 1904 by treaty-port denizens from multiple nations under the aegis of the Anglo-German Brewery Company, a British-German joint-stock venture based in Hong Kong. The brewery shipped the first cases of “Germania” in 1905, and the beer quickly became popular across East Asia. Germania even achieved a following abroad, with profitable sales in the United States and Europe.60 The company continued to grow steadily throughout the life of the colony, and always generated excellent returns for its investors.61 In addition to the brewery, building trades, including raw material production such as timber, quarries, and brickmaking, were highly successful. Such industries were in particularly high demand in the European section of the city, as well as along the beachfront where numerous hotels and tourist-based businesses were located. German construction firms quickly earned an excellent reputation for the quality of their work and were in high demand—not only in Qingdao but also throughout the Leasehold

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and China—to build German- and European-style buildings. Other successful industries in Qingdao included a privately owned shipyard, salt works, machine shops, an automobile repair shop, print shops, a soap factory, a tannery, a pottery factory, a soda water company, two albumen companies, and the slaughterhouse and sausage works. Straw braid also prospered in Qingdao, particularly as straw hats became increasingly popular in China following the 1911 revolution. Although British and German entrepreneurs established the straw-hat industry, the local Chinese population dominated the production of straw braid, maintaining it as a cottage industry in the Leasehold. Sensing a profitable marketing opportunity, the Singer Sewing Machine Company established a branch factory to produce its machines, emphasizing their ability to produce excellent quality straw braid goods.62 Additionally, in 1912, the Leasehold government supported the establishment of a straw-hat factory under German management, but with joint investment from German businessmen and wealthy Chinese; most of the foreign capital, however, came from two German merchants that manufactured straw hats in Bavaria.63 This shared German-Chinese venture represented the first general manufacturing company in Qingdao with the financial backing of investors from both countries. That it was the only capital venture of this type had more to do with German corporate laws than any problems that such an undertaking might have encountered in establishing a manufacturing plant in Qingdao.64 The late date of the foundation of this company speaks to the consistency of Tirpitz’s vision of a German Hong Kong, as he continued to push the advantages that the colony provided for ventures that specialized in the manufacture of raw materials produced directly within the Leasehold.65 The straw braid industry, as well as silk and glass-making, were the most significant entrepreneurial endeavors on the part of the native population that spurred the colony’s growth.66

Revision of the Customs Agreement and the Realization of German Hong Kong Although Qingdao experienced a steady increase in industrial and commercial activity after 1905, the examples of the SBG and DCSIG reveal that such growth was initially uneven. By 1904, colonial leaders recognized they would not reach the level and type of development they

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expected.67 Private investment failed to take off, and export and import numbers were lower than predicted. Consequently, visions of Qingdao as a prominent trading center began to shift. It was no longer viable to believe Qingdao would achieve financial success through the import and sale of European goods and the export of exotic products and cheap raw materials. Rather, the commercial community and colonial leaders began pushing a policy that Wilhelm Schrameier articulated in 1910 when he looked back at this early period in Kiaochow’s history: The thought of taking advantage of the decay of China is completely against anything Germany desires. Germany must embrace her trade interests. Germany is a power [in China] and has to guard her trade and industrial interests in China, and to develop them further. What we need for this trade is a prosperous, rich China; a country which finds increased prosperity in steady development. We do not need a country which hovers on the brink of ruin…This need then dictates the position of Germany with respect to China: Germany will, and must, be anxious to help the Chinese by all possible means.68

In response to this change in vision, Erich Ohlmer sought, as early as 1903, to revise the 1899 customs agreement. Ohlmer’s aim in doing so was to draw Chinese import and export traffic to Qingdao. According to Ohlmer, the original tariff agreement made it impossible for Chinese traders, save for the largest trading houses, to establish themselves in the colony. Therefore, he proposed restricting the duty-free exemption granted to goods entering the port of Qingdao, a move that would effectively end any special provisions afforded to German trading firms.69 While such a proposal won the favor of Chinese merchants, who believed this would lower the costs of trading in Qingdao, the German companies in the Leasehold strenuously objected.70 Nevertheless, the lack of success of the original plans for economic growth in Qingdao made it necessary for the government to consider new possibilities. After the completion of the Tsinan-Tsingtau Railway in 1904 and the harbor shortly thereafter, the colonial government needed to show some economic results. The support of the German trading houses for Ohlmer’s proposal ultimately won over the Leasehold government.71 As a result, in early 1905, Ohlmer began negotiations to revise the customs treaty. By the end of the year, the colonial administration had agreed to a new customs agreement, whereby Qingdao would no longer be

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designated a free port. In return, Qingdao would receive a 20% share of the duties collected by the customs office.72 This new agreement represented a key shift both in terms of economic policy and in visions for creating a German Hong Kong. After eight years of trying to implement a model focused on supporting solely German endeavors, colonial and business leaders increasingly turned their attention toward cooperating more fully with the native population. As a result of the new customs treaty and the shift in focus toward integrating Qingdao more fully into regional commerce and networks across East Asia, Chinese merchants came to play a far greater role in the Leasehold’s interior. This pleased the Imperial Navy, as it pointed out that “as it has always said, the development of a lively and wealthy Chinese merchant group at Tsingtau will be of a clear benefit to German businessmen as well.”73 As the success of Chinese merchants and traders drew more foreign investment into the colony, the Navy expressed great pride that significant Chinese trading firms had arrived in Qingdao and that “it is a good indication of the growing economic importance of Tsingtau that more and more foreign capital participates in the growing commerce.”74 The colonial government’s efforts to attract more trade to Qingdao paid off handsomely. As a result of the greater involvement of Chinese merchants, commerce and business activity in the city saw spectacular growth. By the end of 1907, Qingdao had collected nearly 935,000 taels in customs duties, making the city the seventh largest port in China.75 Commercial firms were now exporting many locally manufactured goods to the wealthy cities in southern China and East Asia.76 Particularly valuable exports included silk (raw and manufactured), fruit, cabbage, peanut products, and straw braid and related manufactured goods; in 1907, the value of such exports reached over 10.5  million taels. Key imports into Qingdao were cotton, petroleum, sugar, dyes, and matches; domestic imports included wool, paper, and rice, the overall value of which totaled over 16  million taels.77 Trade values continued to increase every year, especially after 1907, which represented a banner year in terms of annual growth.78 By the end of 1910, Qingdao had grown into the fourth most important point in China, ranking behind only Shanghai, Canton (Guangzhou), Amoy (Xiamen), and Hankow (Hankou) in terms of the value and volume of trade passing through its harbor. Due to the increased trade at Qingdao, the colony saw a flood of commercial firms establishing offices there. Initially, the vast majority were Chinese and German, although companies based in France, Britain, the

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United States, Russia, and Japan also set up branches.79 As the Chinese had a near monopoly on trade in Shandong, German companies generally focused on products in high demand within Qingdao and the Leasehold. As it became easier to reach Qingdao via road, rail, and sea, larger firms also came to the colony. In 1906, the United States appointed Wilbur T.  Gracey to lead the first foreign consular office in Qingdao (a major feature of the other treaty ports), with the other powers following soon thereafter. In 1907, the members of the three largest Chinese trading guilds built an impressive joint guild house in Qingdao: the Jiyan Guild, representing merchants from Tientsin (Tianjin) and Shandong, the Sanjiang Guild (merchants from the Lower Yangtze region), and the Gunagdong Guild (merchants based in Guangzhou). Bolstered by the success of the joint guild, in 1909, the guilds formed their own Chamber of Commerce (Handelskammer) based on German and European models.80 In 1913, the Qingdao Chamber of Commerce added to its roster the Changyi and Haiyang guilds, both of which represented Chinese merchants primarily involved in international trade. The Chamber of Commerce maintained an excellent relationship with the provincial government and, as such, exerted considerable influence on trade policy.81 This overall growth of commerce at Qingdao certainly fulfilled the expectations of colonial, business, diplomatic, and naval leaders in China, and represented a special triumph for the Navy, which had prioritized this goal since the colony’s founding. Nevertheless, the German vision for the economic success of Qingdao did have its shortcomings. This was especially true in the case of the number of shares of German products imported into the colony. Generally, accounting for 6 to 8% of all imports into Qingdao, these German wares garnered 3–4% of the market share in the Leasehold proper and Shandong more broadly. In both cases, these values were slightly higher than those for all German goods imported into China.82 Since the Navy’s vision was based primarily on Qingdao’s growth and development, this relatively minor share of the colony’s trade did not represent a major disappointment. Rather, the Reichsmarineamt trumpeted the positive and continual growth in the volume of commerce coming into port.83 The Navy derived such satisfaction in part because it recognized a high volume of business meant that trading firms and shipping companies were realizing great profits. Even more importantly, the continued increase in trade was the ultimate proof and vindication that Qingdao and the Leasehold had indeed become a success and that Navy

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had indeed equaled and even surpassed the British in their ability to develop and run a viable and commercially successful colony. Though the Navy was quite pleased with this success, some leaders in Berlin were decidedly less so. Although they recognized that Qingdao was seeing growth, millions of marks were being invested in the colony, and the empire was seeing a relatively minimal return. This was a point of especial emphasis by members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), whose leaders criticized the developments in China.84 As a result, the SPD and their allies repeatedly called on the government to abandon the colony and return the Leasehold to China.85 Members of the German business community, still smarting from the 1905 revisions to the customs treaty, echoed the SPD’s criticisms. They argued that the colonial government needed to do more to support German merchants and businesses and prevent the Chinese and Japanese from stealing their profits by restoring the privileges they formerly possessed.86 Despite discontent from the commercial sector, Tirpitz deflected their critiques and  continued to secure support for the Navy’s management of the colony. In addressing the Reichstag following a debate on state support for Qingdao, Tirpitz told the assembled representatives, “in my opinion…the economic development of Tsingtau has proceeded much faster than expected. Just yesterday I informed his majesty that, after fifteen years of existence, the British still debated whether they should abandon the island [Hong Kong], while Tsingtau, after only eleven, is now one of the most prominent treaty ports in all China.”87

Conclusion By the time Qingdao and the Leasehold fell to a joint British-Japanese force in late 1914, it had been transformed from a tiny, isolated fishing village into a major port and one of the largest industrial centers in China. Between an efficient administration and modern facilities for transportation, communication, and banking, industry began to flourish. Although many of the Navy’s original plans did not reach fruition, investment in the colony was trending positively, providing a powerful indication of Germany’s global reach and power projection. German goods and services from the colony were some of the finest that could be had worldwide and were in high demand locally and abroad. While not every venture was a financial success, German capital, skills, personnel, equipment, and international connections laid a critically important foundation for Qingdao’s

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development. Germans themselves generated profitable returns in multiple industries, foreign investment and trade were on the rise, and the Chinese population actively participated in areas of commercial and industrial development that grew out of German involvement. Indeed, the city was well on its way to becoming the German Hong Kong of which so many of the leading figures connected to it had dreamed; by 1931, the last regular year before the war with Japan began, Qingdao had grown into the fourth most important port in China.88

Notes 1. As a result of changes in transliteration and translation, Chinese names have several variations. To avoid confusion, I use the older English transliteration, Kiaochow (as opposed to the German Kiautschou or the contemporary Jiaozhou), to refer to the Leasehold proper. When discussing the administrative center of the colony, then known as Tsingtau or Tsingtao, I will use the contemporary/pinyin spelling, Qingdao. When quoting contemporary sources, I retain the original usage. As with this initial appearance of “Tsingtau,” the first instance of locations in the text will utilize the name as it was spelled during the era of German imperialism in China (ca. late nineteenth century), followed by the contemporary romanization in parentheses, where possible; subsequent appearances will then utilize the present-­day name. 2. Terrell Gotschall, By Order of the Kaiser: Otto von Diederichs and the Rise of the Imperial German Navy, 1865–1902 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003); John Schrecker, Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism: Germany in Shantung (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1971); George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 3. Klaus Mühlhahn, “A New Imperial Vision? The Limits of German Colonialism in China,” in German Colonialism in a Global Age, ed. Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 133. 4. Tirpitz communicated this priority to Kaiser Wilhelm II from the very inception of the colony: “Aufzeichnungen des Staatssekretärs des Reichmarineamts Tirpitz,” 16 January 1898, Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv (hereinafter cited as BA-MA), RM 3/6999. 5. Arthur J.  Knoll and Hermann J.  Hiery, eds. The German Colonial Experience: Select Documents on German Rule in Africa, China, and the Pacific, 1884–1918 (New York: University Press of America, 2010), 193–94; Jürgen Osterhammel, Kolonialismus (Munich: C.  H. Beck,

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1995), 1–2ff; Klaus Mühlhahn, Herrschaft und Widerstand in der “Musterkolonie” Kiautschou: Interaktionen zwischen China und Deutschland 1897–1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000), 114–15. 6. Adolf von Hänisch, Jebsen & Co., Hong Kong: Chinahandel im Wechsel der Zeiten, 1895–1945 (Apenrade: n.p., 1969), 52. Both Jebsen and Company and Carlowitz and Company, two of the major German trading houses in China, were particularly excited about their prospects in the German colony. Having performed some preliminary scouting of Shantung as a potential site for a German colony in China for Otto von Diederichs, the leaders of Carlowitz believed they would derive great financial benefit from an early presence in the Leasehold; Diederichs, “Nachlass,” 28 October 1897, BA-MA, N 255/24. The only dissenting voice among the German trade firms came from Nathan Siebs, one of the major partners in Siemssen & Company. Siebs believed that the Age of Imperialism had already passed and that Germany and the other world powers needed to embrace a different model of global engagement, working with the Chinese to help them develop the economic might of their country; Ostasiatischer Verein, 1897. 7. Hänisch, Jebsen & Company, 33–58 provides an excellent example of the early sentiments of the commercial community following the establishment of the Leasehold. See also, “Germany’s First Colony in China,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 100 (March 1900): 577–90. 8. For example, see, Tirpitz, speech before the Reichstag, 31 January 1899, Stenographische Berichte über Verhandlunben des Reichstages, 1899–1900. Also, Werner Stingl, Der Ferne Osten in der deutschen Politik vor dem ersten Weltkrieg, 1902–1914 (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1978), 771ff. 9. Alfred von Tirpitz, My Memories, vol. 1 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1919), 72. See also, Tirpitz, “Kabinettnoten des Staarssekretär des Reichmarineamts Tirpitz,” 16 January 1898, BA-MA, RM 3/6999. 10. This objective was established as early as the 1870s and 1880s, as seen in reports on a potential colony in China as well as Tirpitz’s 1896 report on Kiaochow Bay. See also: Denkschrift Betreffend die Entwicklung des Kiautschou-Gebiets Abgeschlossen Ende Oktober 1898 (Berlin: Reichsdruckerei, 1898), Staatsarchiv-Bremen, R.1.g.no. 5, and Wilhelm Schrameier, Aus Kiautschous Verwaltung (Jena: G. Fischer: 1914), 141ff. 11. Tak-Wing Ngo, Hong Kong’s History: State and Society Under Colonial Rule (London: Routledge, 1999), 205–6; Steve Tsang, A Modern History of Hong Kong (London: I.  B. Tauris, 2004), 24–25; Government and Politics: A Documentary History of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1995). 12. “Denkschrift Betreffend die Entwicklung des Kiautschou-Gebiets abgeschlossen 1899–1900,” Staatsarchiv-Bremen, R.1.g.no. 5, and Schrameier,

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Aus Kiautschous Verwaltung, 154. Denkschrift were produced annually by the colonial government, reporting on the growth and development of Qingdao and the Leasehold, covering the period from 1 October to 30 September. Further instances of these annual reports will hereinafter be cited as “Denkschrift” followed by the year covered in the report (e. g. “Denkschrift, 1899–1900”). 13. Tirpitz to von Bülow, 22 June 1898, Politisches Archiv des Auswärtiges Amts (hereinafter cited as PA-AA), Peking II 1248. 14. Schrameier, Aus Kiautschous Verwaltung, 161–62. 15. Mechtild Leutner and Klaus Mühlhahn, eds. and comp., Musterkolonie Kiautschou: die Expansion des Deutsches Reiches in China: deutsch-­ chinesisches Beziehung 1897 bis 1914: eine Quellensammlung (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), 347. 16. The specific nature of Qingdao’s establishment as a free port in the 1898 agreement is discussed in Rosendahl to Heyking, 2 September 1898, PA-AA, Peking II 1248; also Hart to Zongli Yamen, 10 October 1898, Diguozhuyi yu Jiao haiguan [Imperialism and the customs station in Jiaozhou], Qingdao Municipal Archives (hereinafter cited as QMA), 9. For a copy of the Free Port Declaration, see, “Denkschrift 1898–1899,” Staatsarchiv-Bremen, R.1.g.no. 5. 17. Hart to Zongli Yamen, 17 April 1899, Diguozhuyi yu Jiao haiguan, QMA, 10. For a full copy of the treaty, see, John V. A. MacMurray, ed. Treaties and Agreements with and concerning China, 1894–1919, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1919), 198. 18. Zongli Yamen to Hart, 26 April 1899, Diguozhuyi yu Jiao haiguan, QMA, 11. 19. “Denkschrift 1899–1900,” Staatsarchiv-Bremen, R.1.g.no. 5. 20. Tsang, A Modern History of Hong Kong, 26. 21. Schrecker, Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism, 72. 22. China, Imperial Maritime Customs (hereinafter cited as IMC), Decennial Reports on Trade, Navigation, Industries, etc. of the Ports Open to Foreign Commerce in China…1892–1901, vol. 1 (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1913), 87ff. 23. Schrameier, Aus Kiautschous Verwaltung, 159–60. 24. MacMurray, Treaties and Agreements, 19ff. A circuit intendent or taotai (daotai) was an Imperial Chinese civil servant responsible for overseeing a region’s courts, law enforcement, civil defense, canals, and customs collection. The taotai, whose circuits included a treaty port, could wield considerable influence and power; this was particularly true for the Taotai of Shanghai. 25. Hänisch, Jebsen & Co., 57.

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26. See, for example, North China Herald, 10 January 1899, and Hamburgischer Korrespondent, 31 January 1899. 27. Knappe to Ketteler, 14 July 1899, PA-AA, R18242. 28. Tirpitz to Wilhelm II, 8 October 1898, BA-MA, RM 2/1837. 29. Mühlhahn, Herrschaft and Widerstand, 172–73 and 249–50. 30. “Denkschrift 1898–1899,” Staatsarchiv-Bremen, R.1.g.no. 5. 31. Wilhelm Berensmann, “Wirtschaftgeographie Schantungs unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Kiautschougebietes,” Koloniale Monatsblätter 6 (1904): 660. 32. Tirpitz to Bülow, 22 June 1898, PA-AA, R18242. 33. IMC, Returns of Trade and Trade Reports, 1900 (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs), 61. 34. “Denkschrift, 1899–1900,” Staatsarchiv-Bremen, R.1.g.no. 5. 35. IMC, Returns, 1899, 80. 36. “Denkschrift, 1899–1900,” Staatsarchiv-Bremen, R.1.g.no. 5. The price of the Chinese Tael was equal to between 3.36 Marks (in 1906) and 2.66 Marks (in 1909). Although the price fluctuated, on average, 1 Tael was worth approximately 3 Marks; Leutner and Mühlhahn, Musterkolonie Kiautschou, 379n28. 37. Hans Weicker, Kiautschou: Das deutsche Schutzgebiet in Ostasien (Berlin: A.  Schall, 1908), 53; “Denkschrift, 1907–1908,” Staatsarchiv-Bremen, R.1.g.no. 5. 38. Schrecker, Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism, 225–26. 39. “Denkschrift, 1912–1913,” Staatsarchiv-Bremen, R.1.g.no. 5. 40. Report of Friedrich Krupp, 20 September 1907, and Krupp von Bohlen und Habach to Wilhelm II, 23 September 1907, BA-MA, Archives of the German Imperial Naval Cabinet, Admiralty XXII.c-5. 41. Hermann Bökemann, “Die Stadtanlage von Tsingato,” Koloniale Monatsblätter: Zeitschrift für Kolonialpolitik, Kolonialrecht und Kolonialwirtschaft 15, no. 11 (November 1913): 480. See also, Dirk A.  Seeleman, “The Social and Economic Development of the Kiaochou Leasehold (Shantung, China) under German Administration, 1897–1914” (Ph.D Diss., University of Toronto, 1982), 271–74. 42. “Denkschrift, 1903–1904,” Staatsarchiv-Bremen, R.1.g.no. 5. 43. “Denkschrift, 1899–1900,” and “Denkschrift, 1904–1905,” StaatsarchivBremen, R.1.g.no. 5. See also, Seeleman, Social and Economic Development of the Kiaochou Leasehold, 295–98. 44. IMC, Decennial Reports, 1902–1911, 249. 45. “Denkschrift, 1905–1906,” Staatsarchiv-Bremen, R.1.g.no. 5. 46. IMC, Returns, 1906, 79 and North China Herald, 26 October 1906. 47. Betz to Bülow, 19 October 1905, PA-AA, Peking II 1295. 48. Ibid.

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49. IMC, Decennial Reports, 1902–1911, 250. 50. IMC, Returns, 1908, 133. 51. For a chart showing the yearly production of coal in the Leasehold, see, Tennan Tahara, Ko ̄shuw ̄ an [Kiaochow Bay] (Dairen: Manshū Nichinichi Shinbunsha, 1914), 380–81. 52. Truppel to RMA, 9 July 1904, BA-MA, RM 3/6742. 53. Tsingtau Neueste Nachrichten, 14 March 1906. 54. Weicker, Kiautschou, 139–40. 55. IMC, Returns, 1905, 81. 56. Viceconsul John A.  Bristow to Office of Naval Intelligence, “Consular Report,” 11 February 1917, National Archives, Washington D.C. (hereinafter cited as NARA), RG 45, Entry 520. 57. Schrecker, Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism, 230. 58. German Finance Minister to Auswärtiges Amt, 28 October 1907, Bundesarchiv-Berlin (hereinafter cited as BA), R 85/1214 and Meyer-­ Waldeck to RMA, 31 October 1912, BA-MA, RM 3/6917. 59. Ostasiatischer Lloyd, 17 December 1909. 60. North China Herald, 8 February 1907 and “Denkschrift 1907–1908,” Staatsarchiv-Bremen, R.1.g.no. 5. 61. According to the 1905–1906 Denkschrift, in its first year the brewery generated a 7% dividend. Between 1906 and 1913, dividends fluctuated between 7% and 9%; “Denkschrift 1907–1908,” Staatsarchiv-Bremen, R.1.g.no. 5 and Seeleman, Social and Economic Development of the Kiaochou Leasehold, 292. 62. “Bericht der Handelskammer zu Tsingtau für das Jahr 1911,” BA-MA, RM 3/6732. 63. Bristow to Department of State, “Daily Consular and Trade Reports,” NARA, RG 45, Entry 520, and Meyer-Waldeck to RMA, “Monatliche Bericht – August,” 4 September 1913, BA-MA, RM 3/6747. 64. Seeleman, Social and Economic Development of the Kiaochou Leasehold, 285–94 passim, offers an excellent overview of German laws governing the establishment of industries and their financial investments and the impact such laws had on the industrial development of the Leasehold. 65. Tirpitz to Auswärtiges Amt, 28 September 1906, PA-AA, Peking II 1213. 66. IMC, Decennial Reports, 1892–1901, 94–6 and Decennial Reports, 1902–1911, 250. This list of the various industries and businesses was also generated from the “Adressbuch deutschen Kiautschou-Gebiets, Tsingtau, 1907–1908,” QMA, B0001-09-08-03. 67. The 1903 commercial register for Tsingtau recorded fifty-one private companies, although nearly all these enterprises depended on some level of government subsidy. Of these ventures, six (12%) declared bankruptcy by

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the end of 1903; “Handelsregister von Kiautschou,” 29 December 1903, BA-MA, RM 3/6728. 68. Wilhelm Schrameier, “Reformbestrebungen und deutsche Kultureinflüsse in China,” Dokumente des Fortschritts, International Revue 3 (1910): 808. 69. Ohlmer to Freiherr Conrad von der Goltz, Chargé d’Affaires, 5 May 1903, BA, R 9208/1249. 70. For the support of Chinese merchants, see, “Eingabe chinesischer Kaufleute an die Handelskammer,” June 1904, BA, R 9208/1249. For the response from German companies, see Truppel to the German Ambassador in Peking, Alfons Mumm von Schwartzenstein, 29 December 1903, ibid. 71. “Eingabe europäischer und chinesischer Kaufleute von Tsingtao an das Gouvernerment Kiautschou,” 7 February 1905, BA, R9208/1250. 72. “Abänderung der Übereinkunft über die Errichtung eines Seezollamtes in Tsingtau,” 1 December 1905, in Friedrich Wilhelm Mohr, Handbuch für das Schutzgebiet Kiautschou (Tsingtau: 1911), 309–12. 73. “Denkschrift, 1905–1906,” Staatsarchiv-Bremen, R.1.g.no. 5. 74. “Denkschrift, 1906–1907,” ibid. 75. IMC, Returns, 1907, 4. 76. See, for example, Truppel to RMA, “Monatliche Bericht – März 1909,” 16 April 1909, BA-MA, RM 3/6761. 77. Mohr, Handbuch, 461ff. 78. “Statistik für das Gouvernerment Kiautschou (1897–1913),” in Leutner and Mühlhahn, Musterkolonie Kiautschou, 379–80. 79. IMC, Decennial, 1902–1911, 238. 80. Wilhelm Schrameier, Kiuatschou, seine Entwicklung und Bedeutung (Berlin: K. Curtius, 1915), 51. 81. See, for example, Truppel to Tirpitz, 15 March 1909, BA-MA, RM 3/6761. 82. Schreker, German Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism, 305n95–96. 83. This is perhaps best captured in “Denkschrift 1906–1907,” Staatsarchiv-­ Bremen, R.1.g.no. 5. 84. Stenographische Bericht über die Verhandlungen des Reichstages, 1908–1909, 21 March 1908, 4175. 85. See, for example, August Menge, “Kiautschou,” in Preußische Jahrbücher 128, no 2 (May 1907): 288–95. 86. Ostasiatischer Lloyd, 18 June 1909. 87. Stenographische Bericht über die Verhandlungen des Reichstages, 1909–1910, 27 March 1909, 7776. 88. Schrecker, Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism, 258.

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Bibliography Unpublished Archival Sources Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde R 85/1214 R9208: Akten des Deutsche Botschaft China. 1249–1250: Handelswirtschaft Tsingtaus, 1901–1907. Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg Admiralty XXII.c-5: Archives of the German Imperial Naval Cabinet. N 255 Nachlass Otto von Diederichs. RM 2: Reichs-Marine-Amt, Militärpolitische Angelegenheiten. Volume 1837. RM 3: Reichs-Marine-Amt, Das Gouvernment Tsingtaus. Volumes 6728, 6732, 6742, 6747, 6761, 6917, 6999. National Archives, Washington, DC RG 45, Entry 520, Navy Subject Files. Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts Deutsche Botschaft China, Peking II 1213: Eisenbahnpolitik in Schantung, 1899. 1248: Handelswirtschaft Tsingtaus, 1899. 1295: Die Staats- und Völkerrechtlichen Verhältnisse des Schutzgebiets Kiautschou, 1898–1900. R 18242: China 22 Secr., Kiautschou und die detuschen Interessen in Schantung, 1899. Qingdao Municipal Archives, Qingdao A0066-001-114: Diguozhuyi yu Jiao haiguan [Imperialism and the Customs Station in Jioazhou]. B0001-009-08-03: District Administration in the Jiaozhou Leasehold, 1897–1918. Staatsarchiv-Bremen 3-R.1.g.5: Pachtgebiet Kiautschou, 1899–1920.

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Gotschall, Terrell D. By Order of the Kaiser: Otto von Diedrichs and the Rise of the Imperial German Navy, 1865–1902. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003. Hänisch, Adolf von. Jebsen & Co., Hong Kong: Chinahandel im Wechsel der Zeiten, 1895–1945. Apenrade: n.p., 1969. Hamburger Korrespondent, 1899. Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 1900. Knoll, Arthur J., and Hermann J.  Hiery, eds. The German Colonial Experience: Select Documents on German Rule in Africa, China, and the Pacific, 1884–1918. New York: University Press of America, 2010. Imperial Maritime Customs. Decennial Reports on Trade, Navigation, Industries, etc. of the Ports Open to Foreign Commerce in China…1892–1901. Volume I. Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1913a. ———. Decennial Reports on Trade, Navigation, Industries, etc. of the Ports Open to Foreign Commerce in China…1902–1911, Volume I.  Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1913b. ———. Returns of Trade and Trade Reports, 1899. Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1900. ———. Returns of Trade and Trade Reports, 1900. Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1901. ———. Returns of Trade and Trade Reports, 1905. Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1906. ———. Returns of Trade and Trade Reports, 1906. Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1907. ———. Returns of Trade and Trade Reports, 1907. Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1908. ———. Returns of Trade and Trade Reports, 1908. Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1909. Leutner, Mechtild, and Klaus Mühlhahn, eds. and comps. Musterkolonie Kiautschou: die Expansion des Deutsches Reiches in China: deutsch-chinesisches Beziehung 1897 bis 1914: eine Quellensammlung. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997. MacMurray, John V. A., ed. Treaties and Agreements with and concerning China, 1894–1919, Volume I. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921. Menge, August. “Kiautschou.” Preußische Jahrbücher 128, no. 2 (May 1907): 288–95. Mohr, Friedrich W. Handbuch für das Schutzgebiet Kiautschou. Leipzig: Köhler, 1911. Mühlhahn, Klaus. Herrschaft und Widerstand in der “Musterkolonie” Kiautschou: Interaktionen zwischen China und Deutschland 1897–1914. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000.

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———. “A New Imperial Vision? The Limits of German Colonialism in China.” In German Colonialism in a Global Age, edited by Bradley A.  Naranch and Geoff Eley, 129–47. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Naranch, Bradley A., and Geoff Eley, eds. German Colonialism in a Global Age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Ngo, Tak-Wing. Hong Kong’s History: State and Society Under Colonial Rule. London: Routledge, 1999. North-China Herald and Supreme Court & Consular Gazette, 1899, 1906, 1907. Ostasiatischer Lloyd, 1909. Ostasiatischer Verein, 1897. Osterhammel, Jürgen. Kolonialismus: Geschichte, Formen, Folgen. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995. Reichstag. Stenographische Bericht über die Verhandlungen des Reichstages, 1898–1899. Berlin: Julius Sittenfeld, 1899. ———. Stenographische Bericht über die Verhandlungen des Reichstages, 1908–1909. Berlin: Julius Sittenfeld, 1909. ———. Stenographische Bericht über die Verhandlungen des Reichstages, 1909–1910. Berlin: Julius Sittenfeld, 1910. Schrameier, Wilhelm. Aus Kiautschous Verwaltung. Jena: G. Fischer, 1914. ———. Kiuatschou, seine Entwicklung und Bedeutung. Berlin: K. Curtius, 1915. ———. “Reformbestrebungen in China und deutsche Kultureinflüsse,” Dokumente des Fortschritts 3 (1910): 803–10. Schrecker, John E. Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism: Germany in Shantung. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Seeleman, Dirk A. “The Social and Economic Development of the Kiaochou Leasehold (Shantung, China) under German Administration, 1897–1914.” Ph.D. Diss., University of Toronto, 1982. Steinmetz, George. The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Stingl, Werner. Der Ferne Osten in der deutschen Politik vor dem ersten Weltkrieg, 1902–1914. Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1978. Tahara, Tennan, Kōshuw ̄ an [Kiaochow Bay]. Dairen: Manshū Nichinichi Shinbunsha, 1914. Tsang, Steve. Government and Politics: A Documentary History of Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1995. ———. A Modern History of Hong Kong. London: I. B. Tauris, 2004. Tirpitz, Alfred von. My Memories. 2 volumes. New  York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1919. Tisngtau Neueste Nachrichten, 1906. Weicker, Hans. Kiautschou: das deutsche Schutzgebiet in Ostasien. Berlin: Alfred Schall, 1908.

CHAPTER 5

“One Has to Rely Completely on Oneself”: The Challenging Life of German Teachers at German-Chinese Schools, 1898-1914 Michael Schön

“May I suggest that the German teachers meet this summer, maybe at the beginning of the holidays, in some place in China? … Unity is necessary!” This suggestion for a meeting of the German teachers in China was made by Father Georg M. Stenz, a member of the Catholic Society of the Divine Word, in a letter to the editors of the Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung (East Asiatic Teachers’ Gazette, OALZ) in early 1911.1 The editors published this “highly remarkable” letter in the May 1911 issue, endorsed Stenz’s proposition, and even suggested the city of Qingdao as a suitable meeting place during the hot summer months.2 In response to this proposal, Prof. Georg Keiper, president of the German-Chinese University (Deutsch-­ chinesische Hochschule) in Qingdao, offered to organize an “informal meeting”3 at his university. Only about two months after Stenz’s letter had

M. Schön (*) Department of German, Tamkang University, New Taipei City, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. M. Cho (ed.), Sino-German Encounters and Entanglements, Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73391-9_5

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been published, 19 German teachers attended the first Lehrerkonferenz (teachers’ conference) from 26 to 29 July in Qingdao. Stenz’s idea, the positive feedback from the editors and the president of the university, the swift implementation, and the fact that this Lehrerkonferenz was repeated annually until the beginning of World War I, all suggest that there was a high demand for such “meetings” among the German teachers. These “German teachers” worked at German-Chinese schools in China. The collective term “German-Chinese schools” refers to schools established either by German government agencies or by German missionary societies for Chinese students after the occupation and subsequent lease of the protectorate in Jiaozhou in 1898.4 Although many of these schools were located in the German protectorate and the province of Shandong, they could also be found in other parts of China. By 1914 these German-­ Chinese schools included elementary schools, middle schools, schools for girls, vocational schools, and also the GermanChinese University in Qingdao and a College for Medical Studies and Engineering in Shanghai. This German-Chinese education system for Chinese has already been the subject of a considerable number of publications. However, most studies concentrate on its development, the reasons why these schools were set up, as well as the reasons for and consequences of the involvement of missionary societies in this system. But there has not yet been any research done on the day-to-day situation in the classrooms of German-­ Chinese schools. What teaching materials were used? What methodology did the German teachers use in teaching their Chinese students? What problems did they face in their classes, and how did they try to solve them? And why did Father Stenz have to call for “unity”? Very little information about these issues can be found in the aforementioned publications. Therefore, this article will try to shed some light on the life of German teachers at German-Chinese schools at the beginning of the twentieth century. In exploring the life of German teachers at German-Chinese schools, this chapter will analyze articles, commentaries, and reports in the Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung, a quarterly journal published in Shanghai between 1910 and 1914. This chapter will explore its key themes in the three following parts. The first part will provide some general information about the occupation of Jiaozhou by the German Empire. The second part will then briefly outline the development and goals of the German-­ Chinese schools. The third part will explore some of the problems faced

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by the German teachers as described in the OALZ. Based upon the descriptions of issues regarding the system of German-Chinese schools in general, one can conclude that the teachers were frequently caught between aspiration and reality.

The Historical Background The German Occupation of Jiaozhou At the beginning of the nineteenth century, access to China for Westerners was heavily restricted, and their number was very limited. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the situation had changed dramatically. The island of Hong Kong and the neighboring Kowloon Peninsula had been ceded to Great Britain; the French had leased the area of Guangzhouwan in southern China; and Russia had leased the Liaodong Peninsula in Northeast China. In major cities like Beijing, Shanghai, or Hankou, foreigners even settled in their own concession areas. This strong foreign presence was the result of a series of military confrontations between China and Western powers, as well as Japan, beginning with the first Opium War in 1840 and ending with the Boxer Uprising in 1900, in which China had always been defeated. Among the foreigners in China, there were a great number of missionaries. The first Western missionaries to China had been the Jesuits at the end of the sixteenth century. Their attempts to convert Chinese to Christianity were limited to the upper strata of society, and to facilitate conversions they had allowed Chinese converts to continue practicing traditional Chinese rites such as ancestral worship, a strategy that is commonly referred to as “accommodation.” In 1692 the Kangxi Emperor finally issued an Edict of Tolerance, acknowledging the Roman Catholic Church and officially allowing Catholic missionaries to work in China. However, as a result of the Chinese Rites Controversy, when the Catholic Church forbade Chinese converts from conducting traditional Chinese rites, Christianity was banned in China in 1724 and with few exceptions, all missionaries were expelled.5 This situation changed only in the aftermath of the Second Opium War (1854-1858). Freedom of religion was established in China through the Treaty of Tianjin (1858) and the Convention of Beijing (1860), and Christian missionaries, Catholic and Protestant, were given the right to evangelize throughout China. As a result, Western missionaries returned to China in large numbers. Among them was the Society of the Divine

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Word (Societas Verbi Divini, SVD), a Catholic missionary society founded in 1875 by German priests in the Dutch town of Steyl. In 1882, the first missionaries of the SVD arrived in China and took up their mission work in the southern part of Shandong province. Father Georg Stenz, who many years later proposed the founding of the Lehrerkonferenz, had proselytized Chinese in Shandong since 1893. In 1897 he was stationed in a village in Juye County in the southwestern part of the province when, in the night of November 1, his living quarters were attacked by a group of men, possibly members of the Big Sword Society, a local secret society. At the time Stenz had two visitors, fellow missionaries Franz Xaver Nies and Richard Henle, to whom he had provided his bedroom. The attackers killed Nies and Henle, but did not find Stenz, who survived the attack unharmed. On November 14, the German Empire used this “Juye incident” as a pretext to occupy Qingdao, a fishing port at the entrance to Jiaozhou Bay. Beginning with a Prussian expedition to China in the 1860s, Prussia and later the German Empire had toyed with the idea of establishing a naval base for military and commercial purposes in China. From very early on, Jiaozhou Bay on the southern coast of Shandong province had been among the locations regarded as most suitable for this purpose. When news of the two missionaries’ deaths reached Berlin, Emperor Wilhelm II ordered Rear Admiral Otto von Diederichs, commander of the German East Asia Squadron, to occupy Qingdao. In 1898 a 99-year lease was signed with China and the “Protectorate Jiaozhou” (Schutzgebiet Jiaozhou) was established. Because it was intended to mainly function as a naval base, Jiaozhou came, unlike other German colonial territories, under the administration of the Imperial Navy Office (Reichsmarineamt) and the governor of the protectorate was always a navy captain. One of the first civil projects in the new Schutzgebiet was to establish a school for the German children who lived in Qingdao. This Gouvernementsschule, a Reformrealgymnasium which followed German curricula, also accepted students from other Western countries, but Chinese were not allowed to attend it. In the mid and long term, however, the protectorate needed German-speaking local personnel and workers. German-Chinese Schools and the Intentions Behind Them The Gouvernement, as the protectorate and its navy administration were often referred to, had already initiated the founding of a German school

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for Chinese in 1898, which was supposed to provide its students with German language skills. The school initially operated in cooperation with the Berlin Missionary Society (Berliner Missionsgesellschaft, BM), one of two German Protestant missionary societies that had settled in the protectorate following the lease, but the following year the Gouvernement withdrew from its sponsorship, and the school was subsequently operated solely by the Berlin Mission. Over time, the Gouvernement delegated more and more civil and social tasks to the missionary societies. The Berlin Mission, the General Evangelical Protestant Missionary Society (Allgemeiner Evangelisch-Protestantischer Missionsverein, AEPM), the second German Protestant missionary society active in Jiaozhou, and the SVD continued to found German-Chinese schools in the protectorate. One of them was the German-Chinese Seminary, founded by the AEPM in 1901, which also functioned as a teacher’s seminary, training Chinese teachers to work in German-Chinese schools.6 The Gouvernement itself did not set up or operate any other German-­ Chinese schools prior to 1904, with one exception. The naval base included a shipyard, which required a large number of local workers. Because these workers lacked the necessary craft skills, the Gouvernement established an “apprentice workshop” in 1902 to teach them technical skills and the German language. The founding of this vocational school followed the example of the Shantung Railway Company (Schantung-­ Eisenbahn-­ Gesellschaft), which had been building a railroad between Qingdao and Shandong’s capital Jinan since 1899, and had in cooperation with the SVD set up an apprentice school to train Chinese workers.7 The situation, however, changed in 1904. Prior to the early twentieth century, China had recruited its officials through an education and examination system which had its origins in the seventh century, and which consisted mainly of writing highly formalized essays about the Confucian canon. However, its series of confrontations with the Western powers in the nineteenth century, culminating in the Boxer Uprising, finally convinced the Chinese government of the necessity of reforming the education system. Following the example of Japan, the government decided in 1904 to introduce a three-tiered school system consisting of elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools, to be followed by a university education. It was planned that the traditional system would continue to exist while the new system was gradually set up. During this time the number of graduates in the old system would drop as the number of graduates

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in the new system increased, until eventually the new system completely replaced the old one. However, in 1905 Japan defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. This was the first time that a reformed Asian country had defeated a major European power. The Japanese victory had a catalytic effect in China, with China deciding to altogether abolish the traditional education system in the following year. This decision created a vacuum in the education system because the new system was not yet in place. With the approval of the Chinese government, the foreign powers, which had seen the reform decision of 1904 as an opportunity to influence and shape the emerging new education system according to their own ideas and in their favor,8 used this vacuum to intensify their efforts to set up new schools. As far as Germany was concerned, not only did the Naval Administration in Jiaozhou increase its efforts to expand the existing German-Chinese education system, but the Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt) also pursued the founding of German-Chinese schools outside of the protectorate in major cities like Hankou, Shanghai, Jinan, or Guangzhou.9 Whereas the German-Chinese schools offered the missionaries an opportunity to promote Christianity among students and their families, one of the goals pursued by the government agencies through the establishment of German-Chinese schools, especially in the early stages, was the training of German-speaking personnel. In addition to this practical agenda, sources repeatedly mention the propagation of the German language as well as German culture or Deutschtum in China as one of the main purposes of these schools. German language and culture were regarded as a prerequisite for any economic and political influence in China, and their propagation was supposed to serve several other purposes. One of those was to generate positive sentiment in Chinese society toward Germany, and thus to function as a non-military means of consolidating colonial control. The most important reason, however, was the opening of the Chinese market for the German industry. As Roswitha Rheinbote has noted, the sentence “trade follows the language” (“der Handel folgt der Sprache”) was a common assumption among German colonial ideologists. The Chinese, they argued, would prefer to buy goods from a country whose language they spoke and with whose culture they were familiar.10 This economic function of the German-Chinese schools was confirmed by Richard Wilhelm, the head of the AEPM in China, who once stated that it was the ultimate purpose of the governmental German-Chinese schools

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to “open up new market opportunities for the German industry in China.”11 Similarly, in a memorandum from 1905, the Deputy Governor of Jiaozhou Leo Jacobson summarized the role of the German-Chinese education system as a “counterweight” to the cultural-political activities of the other colonial powers, as well as a means to secure for Germany a fair share of the Chinese market.12 So far, this historical background has recapitulated the major goals of the German-Chinese education system as has been discussed in several studies. Obviously, this system was supposed to play an essential role in fulfilling Germany’s political and economic ambitions in China. In the rest of this chapter, I will explore a relatively neglected topic. Based on analysis of the various problems faced by German teachers at German-Chinese schools, as found in a contemporary quarterly journal, I will examine whether these schools and their teachers were provided with the necessary means and resources to actually achieve these ambitious goals.

Problems of German Teachers at German-Chinese Schools The Source: The “Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung” Only a few sources describing the lessons at the German-Chinese schools are available. In a chapter on the curricula and teaching methods at German-Chinese schools (“Lehrinhalte, Lehrmethoden und Erziehungsziele”), Kim Chun-Shik argues that it is not possible to make any “definite statements” about the lessons at governmental schools in Jiaozhou, because no teaching materials were handed down, the teaching methods were not documented, and even the curricula are mostly no longer available.13 Although Kim is specifically referring to governmental schools here, he does not make any definite statements in the corresponding chapter for missionary schools either. Kim’s assertion is not wrong. There is no comprehensive collection or description of teaching materials or teaching methods that would allow a detailed analysis of the day-to-day circumstances in the classrooms of German-Chinese schools. There are, however, some materials that allow at least a glimpse. These include the articles in the Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. There were altogether 15 issues of this quarterly (1910-1914) published, but none of the issues contains a masthead and the editors only

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referred to themselves as the Schriftleitung (editorial staff). However, the entry for the Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung, as listed in the Directory & Chronicle for China in 1912, names C. Fink as publisher, C. Hering as “editor,” and P. König as “manager.”14 The exact circumstances of the founding of the Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung remain unclear. The preface to the first issue mentions “negotiations” about the launch of the journal in Shanghai, but does not go into detail as to who participated in or even initiated these negotiations. But it does state its purpose very clearly. The Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung was intended to be a forum where German teachers, living and working scattered throughout China and Japan, could share their experiences and seek advice.15 The 15 issues contain altogether 134 contributions by the editors and German teachers in the form of prefaces, minutes from the annual meetings of the Lehrerkonferenz, reports, discussions of teaching materials, descriptions of teachings methods and/or didactic problems, and so on. Some articles refer to the situation in Japan, but the vast majority was written by teachers working in China.16 According to the classificatory system of historical sources by Johann Gustav Droysen and Ernst Bernheim, which classifies historical sources either as “tradition” or as “remains” (Überreste), one can regard these contributions as “remains,” because they were not intended to inform posterity historically but rather to fulfill a present-related purpose. The advantage of such “remains” is that the information they contain can usually be considered reliable, but the drawback is that they are often fragmentary and only provide snapshots without placing the described circumstances or events into a broader context. This also applies to the articles in the OALZ. The descriptions of the German teachers often leave out background information or certain details, because there is the expectation that contemporary readers would have been aware of them. Therefore, the picture of the situation at the German-Chinese schools at the beginning of the twentieth century as drawn by these articles is necessarily incomplete. Nevertheless, the descriptions allow us to draw conclusions about some of the fundamental weaknesses and problems of the German-Chinese education system and to understand why Father Stenz regarded it as necessary to call for “unity.”

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Problems of German Teachers There were at least five major problems that German teachers commonly experienced in China. The first difficulty they experienced was that, as alluded to in the preface of the first issue regarding the purpose of the OALZ, they were scattered all over China and Japan and thus communication between them was difficult. Most current scholarship on German-­ Chinese schools concentrates on the situation in Jiaozhou. This is somewhat problematic because one might get the false impression that German-Chinese schools only existed within the protectorate. German-­ Chinese schools were not, however, limited to Jiaozhou. Another center was Shanghai, where a medical college was founded in 1907, two years before the German-Chinese University in Qingdao. Another Protestant missionary society, the Rhenish Missionary Society (Rheinische Missionsgesellschaft), operated several German-Chinese schools in the southern province of Guangdong. Even in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province in Central China, could one such school be found. So it is entirely accurate that the German teachers were really “scattered” all over China. Because China is such a vast country, communication and the exchange of information in the early twentieth century were thus difficult and tedious. T. Sperlein, a teacher at the German-Chinese school in Chengdu, confirmed the role of the OALZ as a means of sharing information in an article in 1913. Referring to a discussion about the best way to promote the German language in China in Der Ostasiatische Lloyd, Sperlein commented that he was located “too far in the interior” of China to be able to actively partake in such discussions or even to participate in the annual meetings of the teachers. Therefore, he chose “this way,” that is, his article in the OALZ, to reflect on his experience with the local school in Chengdu.17 The second problem that the German teachers faced was their lack of experience. The German teachers who came to China to teach at the German-Chinese schools often had to find out the hard way that the situation in Chinese classrooms was different from what they were used to at home, not only with respect to the language, but also as it touched on traditional Chinese ideas of learning and teaching. Simply put, many of the newcomers were poorly prepared for their work in China. To recruit teachers for the German-Chinese schools, Prussia allowed teachers to take several years’ leave of absence to teach in China. To prepare these teachers for their responsibilities in East Asia, it initially required

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recruits to complete a one-year preparatory course at the Seminary for Oriental Languages (Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen) in Berlin. But because the teachers were needed in China, the course was ultimately shortened to only two months.18 When the newly arrived German teachers finally met their new students, they knew very little about their students’ cultural background, living circumstances, and learning habits, such as their strong preference for memorization and following rules and what was often described by teachers as a “lack of independence” (“Mangel an Selbständigkeit”).19 These “imported” teachers often had to come to terms with the fact that many of the teaching methods they had successfully used in Germany did not work in China. To this point, Richard Wilhelm commented in the OALZ that “even the most proficient teacher will need two or three years before he has made himself at least somewhat at home in China, which is so completely different from his native country, before he has gained the necessary experience, by which he can design his classes in a way that the greatest effect is achieved with the smallest expenditure of efforts.”20 To make things worse, many of these teachers did not stay in China for long and returned to Germany after only a few years, taking with them the teaching experience they had gained. They would then be replaced with new teachers and this vicious circle would begin again. This loss of teaching experience was discussed in the OALZ several times over the years and was regarded as a significant problem by contemporaries.21 It is therefore not surprising that at the second Lehrerkonferenz in 1912 this problem was discussed and the teachers were encouraged to remain in their positions “as long as possible,” with the argument that the first years were “learning years” and that only later would the teachers be able to capitalize on the experience they had gained.22 The reasons for the early return of many of these teachers are difficult to determine. Some may have planned from the beginning to stay for only a short time; others may have returned for personal reasons, for example, family affairs. Another remark by Richard Wilhelm may be of interest here because it points to the third problem faced by German teachers. Wilhelm diagnosed the low income of teachers working at governmental schools as the reason why so many returned early. He argued that the government schools recruited “younger, unmarried” teachers, who, because their salary in China was inadequate to start a family, soon returned to Germany. He compared this situation to the common practice by Protestant

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missions of working to enable their members to find a second home in China by starting a family, thus achieving a high degree of continuity.23 The fourth problem that the teachers had to face was the lack of suitable teaching materials. Already in his call for a meeting of the German teachers, Stenz cited the lack of adequate teaching materials as one of the urgent problems that needed to be discussed, observing that his school had been forced to print its own textbooks.24 In an earlier issue of the OALZ another teacher, Wilhelm Schmidt, had discussed the problem of teaching materials for German language classes. Schmidt forcefully argued that German classes in all German-Chinese schools should use the same “systematic textbook” (systematisches Lehrbuch), but rejected using the textbooks then in use in German schools. Instead, he regarded it as necessary that textbooks should be customized to fit the special conditions in China.25 Examples of the problems caused by relying on imported German teaching materials were illustrated in a short article about textbooks for zoology and botany. The author mentioned two problems: first, the German used in these books was too difficult for the language skills of the Chinese students; the second, and even bigger problem, was that many of the animals and plants discussed in those books simply did not exist in China. Therefore, all the applied comparisons were useless.26 Many teachers tried to solve these problems by modifying existing textbooks or developing their own teaching materials. This had, however, two major disadvantages: all the schools used different materials with different content; this process was more expensive and time-consuming than simply producing or buying books in large numbers. It is therefore not surprising that the second Lehrerkonferenz created a “Commission for Teaching Aids” to develop appropriate teaching materials.27 Just a few months later, one of the members of this commission, Hermann Sander, published an article in the OALZ describing his draft for a reader of German literature (Stufenlesebuch) in four volumes. Soliciting comments and advice from his colleagues, Sander included the preliminary table of contents of the first volume, which he had designed for students in the second year. This draft lists 121 reading texts altogether, divided into the three categories “prose,” “narration,” and “poetry,” including texts by the Grimm brothers, Luther, Uhland, and even Goethe.28 In that same issue of the OALZ, immediately following the announcement of the Stufenlesebuch, the OALZ’s editor Clemens Hering published a comment on the suggested table of contents. In “Remarks about the

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Reader,” he praised Sander and his efforts, but also expressed reservations regarding the selection of many of the readings. In some cases, he pointed out the linguistic difficulties of the selected texts; in other cases, he questioned whether the content would be unduly difficult for Chinese to understand, because they could not relate to them. As examples, he mentioned the fairy tale “Der Zaunkönig und der Bär” by the Grimm Brothers or Friedrich Schiller’s song “Der Schütz,” which he regarded as “dear to us Germans, but to Chinese?” Regarding Ludwig Uhland’s “Die Rache,” he remarked that it would be better to avoid tragic topics in class altogether, because according to his experience they often caused laughter among the students which would offend the teachers. Hering did not merely offer his critique, however; he also suggested possible substitutes for the texts he regarded as unsuitable for one reason or another, and listed some topics that he would have liked to have seen included, like letters, German texts about China, and even excerpts from stories from classical antiquity, like the Iliad and Odyssey.29 The fifth problem that the teachers had to cope with was the language problem. The one-year preparatory course in Berlin had included Chinese language training, but because the course was later reduced to only two months, the Chinese language skills of the new teachers were less than rudimentary. Even if the German teachers did speak English, their Chinese students usually did not, and so teachers and students often had no language in common. Most teachers, therefore, had to rely on the Berlitz Method for teaching German, which Maximilian Berlitz had introduced in the 1880s based on the “Natural Method” introduced a few years earlier by Gottlieb Henness and Lambert Sauveur.30 The Berlitz Method called for the exclusive use of the target language in the classroom and largely avoided grammatical explanations. This method thus met the immediate needs of non-Chinese-speaking German teachers. In the first issue of the OALZ, one of these teachers, Hans Wiethoff, published an article about the use of the Berlitz Method in China. He compared his experiences teaching both European and Chinese students using this method and came to the conclusion that, surprisingly, the Chinese had more or less the same problems as their European counterparts. Indeed, the European students occasionally had, in his view, even more problems, because they were misled by their “feeling for language” (Sprachgefühl), when they compared similar words and structures in their native language and in German. As Wiethoff pointed out, this problem did not exist between Chinese and German, because the languages were

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so different that the students’ feeling for language would not get in their way. He also considered it useful to forego grammar explanations because the students would intuitively understand the grammatical structures as they became more familiar with the new language.31 Other teachers, however, had more negative opinions about this method. In an article published about four years later, Richard Cordes came to a different conclusion. Cordes explained that at his school, the German Medical and Engineering School for Chinese (Deutsche Medizinund Ingenieursschule für Chinesen) in Shanghai, the Berlitz Method had been used exclusively at the basic level. He found, however, that it did not sufficiently develop the students’ “feeling for language” (Sprachgefühl). It would teach a certain amount of expressions and vocabulary so that the student would “float in the air like a tight-rope walker,” but as soon as he encountered an unfamiliar word he would “fall.” In class the students would often only repeat memorized expressions, even when they were supposed to speak freely. He suggested an alternative approach, which he had tried in his classes, consisting of phonetic exercises, grammar training, and language development through reading and speaking exercises, conversation exercises, and so forth.32 Of interest in this context is a resolution adopted at the second Lehrerkonferenz. The participants considered it necessary that the teachers responsible for the general education of Chinese students were familiar with the Chinese vernacular and modern written language. They regarded the same basic knowledge as at least desirable for the specialist subject teachers (Fachlehrer) at the higher levels of German education. Along these lines, it was noted that it would be preferable for new teachers to complete a one-year Chinese language training course in the location of their deployment in China, and that for that year they should be relieved from their teaching obligations. If that was not possible, they could instead undergo their language training in Berlin.33 In sum, Cordes’ description of his teaching experience using the Berlitz Method, as well as the emphasis on the importance of mastery of the Chinese language by the German teachers in the resolution of the Lehrerkonferenz, suggest that language lessons relying on German as the sole language of instruction probably did not work as smoothly as Hans Wiethoff claimed. This indicates that using Chinese to explain German grammar was more effective than trying to explain it in German.

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Flaws of the German-Chinese Education System While some of the problems discussed above, such as the long distances and difficulty of communication within China, were difficult to mitigate, there are others, particularly the lack of appropriate teaching materials, which are surprising. Another surprise is that the curricula were not standardized. The curricula have not been mentioned so far, because they were not among the problems facing the individual teachers, but the OALZ does contain several examples of curricula from different schools, and the Lehrerkonferenz apparently also saw the need to standardize them.34 Even though these two areas are fundamental for an efficient and successful school system, a high degree of inconsistency remained more than a decade after the founding of the first German-Chinese schools. Father Stenz’ call for “unity” certainly makes sense in this context, but it does also raise the question as to why this was the case. An Institutional Deficit and a Lack of Continuity As described earlier, the German-Chinese education system was subdivided into governmental and missionary schools. This distinction may seem clear and straightforward at first, but the situation was much more complicated in practice because the missionaries did not constitute a singular monolithic structure. Instead, the various missionary societies competed with each other. This competition existed not only between Catholics and Protestants, as would be expected, but also occasionally among the Protestant missionary societies. When, for example, the AEPM founded a girls’ school in Qingdao, it had to assure the Berlin Mission that they would not accept any “defectors” from their girls’ school.35 This situation was mirrored on the governmental side. The governmental German-Chinese schools in Jiaozhou were subordinate to the Naval Administration, but the governmental schools outside of the protectorate answered to the Foreign Office. Interestingly, the two government agencies may have administered their subordinate schools in somewhat different ways. At the second Lehrerkonferenz the complaint was raised that the Foreign Office prevented the teachers under its supervision from submitting articles to the OALZ. A representative of the Foreign Office, Vice-Consul Wilhelm Crull, countered that the only purpose of such censorship was to prevent the publication of polemic against the cultural policy of the Empire, but that scientific and didactic discourses

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were not affected. The reference to censorship is itself noteworthy, but it is even more remarkable that it was only associated with the Foreign Office. Although it is hard to believe that the Naval Administration would not have had a similar policy, it seems that at least in the perception of the teachers the two agencies seem to have applied different standards. Moreover, there were divergent priorities between the Imperial Navy Office in Berlin and its representatives in Jiaozhou. The best example of such a conflict of opinion was the founding of the German-Chinese University. The founding of a university in Jiaozhou had been envisioned since 1903, in response to French plans to found a university in China. The Navy Office in Berlin, and in particular its director, State Secretary Admiral von Tirpitz, strongly supported the project. However, the administration in Jiaozhou flatly rejected these plans because it anticipated problems in funding and because—in its opinion—there was no need for university graduates in Jiaozhou. Ultimately, however, Admiral von Tirpitz prevailed and the university was founded in 1909.36 These examples reflect the number of various institutions and organizations involved in the German-Chinese education system in China, all of which pursued their own agendas and even actively competed against each other.37 A major flaw of the system, therefore, was that there was no designated governmental agency or institution in charge of the entire German-Chinese education system to coordinate, unify, and, if needed, customize curricula and teaching materials. But given the situation described above, under whose control should this hypothetical agency or institution have been—the Navy Office, which was responsible for the administration of Jiaozhou, or the Foreign Office, the representative of the German state elsewhere in China? There was an intense rivalry between these two government agencies, as can be seen in an episode that occurred at the second Lehrerkonferenz in 1912.38 When, according to the minutes, the possibility of making Qingdao the permanent venue of the teachers’ conference was broached, Vice-Consul Wilhelm Crull, representing the Foreign Office, objected, arguing that it would not be possible for the teachers from southern and western China to participate regularly in the conferences, if they were always held in Qingdao. This argument makes sense, but Crull continued by claiming that a commitment to Qingdao would turn the Lehrerkonferenz into a mere “provincial conference” and that he would try to provide compensation for travel expenses, if the meeting was instead held at different venues. This implicit threat to withhold financial support if Qingdao became

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the permanent venue could be understood as directly directed against Jiaozhou and the Navy Office.39 Given their rivalry, neither the Navy Office nor the Foreign Office would have accepted a governing institution for the German-Chinese education system that was even indirectly under the purview of the other side. The teachers attempted to fill this institutional vacuum by creating the Lehrerkonferenz. At first glance, this solution may have made sense, since it involved teachers from both governmental and missionary schools, Catholic and Protestant schools, from Jiaozhou and other parts of China, and thus all the major players in the German-Chinese school system were represented. However, although at the meetings of the Lehrerkonferenz several commissions on the subjects of “teaching materials” and even “school administration” were formed,40 in the end they were, as already expressed by President Keiper’s invitation to an “informal meeting,” unofficial bodies. Decisions made at these meetings ultimately had the character of—at best—non-binding recommendations. As the many relevant articles in the OALZ show, there was a broad consensus among German teachers regarding the need for customized teaching materials. When Hermann Sander, a member of the teaching materials commission of the Lehrerkonferenz, presented his draft of the Stufenlesebuch, however, his text selection immediately met with fierce criticism. Regardless of whether this criticism was justified, this episode reveals the extent to which there were different opinions about the difficulty of the German that should or could be used in teaching materials, about content, and about how and whether cultural differences should be taken into account. Obviously, no commonly accepted criteria for such customization existed; rather, most of it was done on the basis of personal experience or preference. Even if the Stufenlesebuch had actually been published, one cannot take for granted that it would have been accepted by all of the teachers. Moreover, it is unclear how representative the composition of participants at the teachers’ conference actually was. The Lehrerkonferenz met only four times, three times in Qingdao and once in Shanghai. These two cities were the two centers of German cultural activity in China and a sizable number of German teachers lived in each. However, as noted previously, there were also German teachers in other parts of China who, like Mr. Sperlein in Chengdu, were unable to attend the conferences and to participate in the discussions taking place there. The second major flaw of the German-Chinese education system was the lack of continuity. The short time that many of these teachers spent in

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China was considered a major problem by their contemporaries, as the repeated references in the OALZ reveal. The rapid turnover of teachers especially affected governmental schools. The mission schools were less affected, as missionaries usually stayed in China long term. In the same article in which he attributed the short tenure of teachers to their low salaries, Richard Wilhelm went so far as to blame this situation for the predominance of the Anglo-American education system in China, because this system consisted mainly of missionary schools. Missionary societies, Wilhelm pointed out, were eager to “keep proficient people for as long as possible,” and their experience served to “steer the school system on a solid footing.” Wilhelm’s claim that inadequate salaries were the cause behind the rapid turnover of German teachers in China cannot be verified at this point, but the constant changes in teaching staff obviously caused significant problems in school operations.

Conclusion: The Teachers Caught Between Aspiration and Reality In 1914, there were 164 German, 1445 English, and 1992 American elementary schools in China, as well as 15 German, 241 English, and 286 American middle and high schools, which were operated by Protestant missions.41 Although these numbers only represent the Protestant schools, they clearly show the numerical advantage of the Anglo-American school systems. The Germans were very much aware of this numerical imbalance. In the same memorandum in which Deputy Governor Jacobson in 1905 demanded that the German-Chinese schools act as a “counterweight” to the Anglo-American cultural influence, he also noted that the quantitative advantage of Anglo-Saxon education in China had to be countered by qualitative superiority.42 In 1911, however, the German-Chinese education system existed as a kind of patchwork, consisting of governmental and missionary schools, Protestant and Catholic schools, schools founded by the Naval Administration, schools established by the Foreign Office, elementary schools, girls’ schools, vocational schools, and even a university. The teachers were sent to China poorly prepared for their work, many seem to have been badly paid, and they could not even hope to rely on tried and tested teaching aids, curricula, and/or didactic methods. As a result of this lack of institutional support, they were finally forced to take things into

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their own hands by founding the Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung and the Lehrerkonferenz. This reality came into sharp contrast against the claims regarding the significance of the German-Chinese education system by Jacobson and colonial theorists in Germany. Despite the high expectations placed on the system, there was no strategy for its realistic implementation and operation. The result was institutional failure, owing to the lack of a governing framework which could have efficiently controlled and managed the system. It is also noteworthy that, although teachers and the Lehrerkonferenz repeatedly complained over the years about the rapid turnover of the teaching staff at governmental schools, nothing seems to have changed. Perhaps there were attempts by the responsible government agencies to solve this problem, but this was not reflected in the OALZ. The victims of these failures were ultimately the teachers, who were more or less left to their own devices. It is therefore not surprising that one of those teachers concluded: “The professional life of a teacher here in the East and especially at German-Chinese schools is not unlike a Robinsonade; one has to rely completely on oneself. This has its charms, but also, like wading in trackless terrain, the great dangers of wasting energy, of fatigue and getting lost.”43

Notes 1. The editors quoted a letter by Father Georg M. Stenz, “Lehrerkonferenz,” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Organ zur Förderung des deutschen Unterrichts in Ostasien 2, no. 1 (1911): 12–13. 2. The editor’s comment, ibid. 3. “Zusammenkunft deutscher Lehrer in Tsingtau,” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Organ zur Förderung des deutschen Unterrichts in Ostasien 2, no. 2 (1911): 1. 4. In this article I will use the Hanyu Pinyin system for the transcription of Chinese terms and place names into the Latin alphabet. Therefore, for example, instead of the German transcriptions “Kiautschou” and “Tsingtau,” the Hanyu Pinyin transcriptions “Jiaozhou” and “Qingdao” will be used. 5. For a comprehensive description of the Jesuit activities in China, see Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).

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6. Kim Ch’un-sik, Deutscher Kulturimperialismus in China: Deutsches Kolonialschulwesen in Kiautschou (China) 1898-1914 (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 2004), 186–95. 7. Ibid., 181. 8. Klaus Mühlhahn, “Qingdao (Tsingtau) - Ein Zentrum deutscher Kultur in China?,” in Tsingtau: Ein Kapitel deutscher Kolonialgeschichte in China 1897-1914, ed. Hans-Martin Hinz and Christoph Lind (Eurasburg: Edition Minerva, 1998), 122. 9. [Wilhelm] Schmidt, “Deutsche Schularbeit in China,” in Aus deutscher Bildungsarbeit im Auslande: Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen in Selbstzeugnissen aus aller Welt, ed. Franz Schmidt and Otto Boelitz (Langensalza: Julius Beltz, 1928), 207–8; Yi Huang, Der deutsche Einfluss auf die Entwicklung des chinesischen Bildungswesens von 1871 bis 1918: Studien zu den kulturellen Aspekten der deutsch-chinesischen Beziehungen in der Ära des deutschen Kaiserreichs (Frankfurt am Main, New York: Lang, 1995), 153–67. 10. Roswitha Reinbothe, Kulturexport und Wirtschaftsmacht: Deutsche Schulen in China vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 1992), 63–70. 11. Kim, Deutscher Kulturimperialismus in China, 195. 12. Leo Jacobson, “Denkschrift des stellvertretenden Gouverneurs von Kiautschou, Jacobson, an das Reichsmarineamt (27.1.1905),” in Musterkolonie Kiautschou: Die Expansion des Deutschen Reiches in China deutsch-chinesische Beziehungen 1897 bis 1914. Eine Quellensammlung, ed. Mechthild Leutner and Klaus Mühlhahn (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), 449. 13. Kim, Deutscher Kulturimperialismus in China, 167. 14. The reference to “C. Fink” is especially noteworthy, because Carl Fink was also the editor of Der Ostasiatische Lloyd, a renowned German weekly newspaper in Shanghai. The Directory and Chronicle entry for Der Ostasiatische Lloyd, which immediately follows the entry for the Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung, mentions, in addition to Fink, a P. König as “business manager.” Moreover the mailing addresses of the two papers were identical. This establishes a close organizational and personal connection between the Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung and Der Ostasiatische Lloyd; The Directory & Chronicle for China, Japan, Corea, Indo-China, Straits Settlements, Malay states, Siam, Netherlands India, Borneo, the Philippines, & c. (Hong Kong: Hongkong Daily Press Office, 1912), 911. 15. “Was wir wollen,” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Organ zur Förderung des deutschen Unterrichts in Ostasien 1, no. 1 (1910): 1. 16. The subtitle of the journal was changed from “Organ zur Förderung des deutschen Unterrichts in Ostasien” to “Vierteljahresschrift der Lehrerschaft in Ostasien” beginning with issue 3/3 (1912). The minutes of the second

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Lehrerkonferenz state that this change had been requested by Clemens Hering, but give no reason for it. “Protokoll über die 2. Konferenz deutscher Lehrer an chinesischen Schulen,” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Vierteljahresschrift der deutschen Lehrerschaft in Ostasien 3, no. 3 (1912): 12. 17. T.  Sperlein, “Gedanken über unsere Schularbeit in China,” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Viertjahresschrift der deutschen Lehrerschaft in Ostasien 4, no. 1 (1913): 20. 18. Reinbothe, Kulturexport und Wirtschaftsmacht, 136-38. 19. [Waldemar] Amann, “Einige Gedanken über allgemeine Unterrichtsgrundsätze in China,” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Organ zur Förderung des deutschen Unterrichts in Ostasien 2, no. 1 (1911): 2–3; [Georg M.] Stenz, “Über die Erziehung der chinesischen Studenten,” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Vierteljahresschrift der deutschen Lehrerschaft in Ostasien 4, no. 2 (1913): 19. 20. [Richard] Wilhelm, “Zur Verbreitung des Deutschtums in China,” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Organ zur Förderung des deutschen Unterrichts in Ostasien 2, no. 3 (1911): 24. 21. Ibid., 24-25; [Richard] Cordes, “Beobachtungen über den deutschen Sprachunterricht,” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Vierteljahresschrift der deutschen Lehrerschaft in Ostasien 4, no. 3 (1914): 40. 22. “Protokoll über die 2. Konferenz deutscher Lehrer an chinesischen Schulen,” 8. 23. Wilhelm, “Zur Verbreitung des Deutschtums in China,” 24–25. 24. “Lehrerkonferenz,” 12. 25. [Wilhelm] Schmidt, “Ideen zu einem deutschen Unterrichtsbuch für deutsch-chinesische Schulen,” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Organ zur Förderung des deutschen Unterrichts in Ostasien 1, no. 4 (1911): 13. 26. A.  K. Schindler, “Lehrbücher für Zoologie und Botanik,” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Organ zur Förderung des deutschen Unterrichts in Ostasien 1, no. 4 (1911): 22–23. 27. “Protokoll über die 2. Konferenz deutscher Lehrer an chinesischen Schulen,” 14. 28. Hermann Sander, “Stufenlesebuch für deutsch-chinesische Schulen,” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Vierteljahresschrift der deutschen Lehrerschaft in Ostasien 4, no. 1 (1913): 2–6. 29. Clemens Hering, “Bemerkungen zum Lesebuch,” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Vierteljahresschrift der deutschen Lehrerschaft in Ostasien 4, no. 1 (1913): 6–16.

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30. A. P. R. Howatt and Richard Smith, “The History of Teaching English as a Foreign Language, from a British and European Perspective,” Language & History 57, no. 1 (2014): 83. 31. H[ans] Wiethoff, “Über die Anwendung der Berlitz-Methode bei Chinesen,” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Organ zur Förderung des deutschen Unterrichts in Ostasien 1, no. 1 (1910): 4–6. 32. Cordes, “Beobachtungen über den deutschen Sprachunterricht,” 40–43. 33. “Protokoll über die 2. Konferenz deutscher Lehrer an chinesischen Schulen,” 8. 34. “Rundschreiben der Kommission für Schulverwaltung an die deutschen Lehrer Ostasiens,” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Vierteljahresschrift der deutschen Lehrerschaft in Ostasien 3, no. 3 (1912): 16; “Protokoll der 3. Versammlung deutscher, an Schulen für Chinesen tätiger Lehrer, abgehalten in Schanghai vom 13.-19. Juli 1913,” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung 4, no. 2 (1913): 4–6. 35. Kim, Deutscher Kulturimperialismus in China, 173. 36. Mühlhahn, “Qingdao (Tsingtau)  - Ein Zentrum deutscher Kultur in China?,” 124–25; Kim, Deutscher Kulturimperialismus in China, 159–62. 37. Another group involved in the German-Chinese education system were the German colonial associations (Kolonialvereine or Auslandsvereine), whose goal was the dissemination of German culture in the colonies. Their involvement was often limited, however, to fund-raising in Germany. An example from Jiaozhou was the Shu-fan girls’ school. The money for the school’s founding was raised by a colonial society in Hamburg, but the school was then operated by the AEPM. Because these associations were not involved in the actual operation of the schools, they do not need to be discussed in this context. For a detailed description of the colonial associations, see Jürgen Kloosterhuis, Friedliche Imperialisten: Deutsche Auslandsvereine und auswärtige Kulturpolitik, 1906-1918 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1994). 38. Thoralf Klein and Stefan Knirsch, “Die deutschen Schulen für Chinesen im Pachtgebiet Qingdao,” in Alltagsleben und Kulturaustausch: Deutsche und Chinesen in Tsingtau 1897-1914, ed. Hermann Hiery and Hans-Martin Hinz (Wolfratshausen: Edition Minerva, 1999), 166. 39. “Protokoll der 3. Versammlung deutscher, an Schulen für Chinesen tätiger Lehrer, abgehalten in Schanghai vom 13.-19. Juli 1913,” 13. 40. “Rundschreiben der Kommission für Schulverwaltung an die deutschen Lehrer Ostasiens,” 15–16. 41. “Ein Vergleich der Zahl der Missionsschulen und ihrer Schüler,” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Vierteljahresschrift der deutschen Lehrerschaft in Ostasien 4, no. 3 (1914): 30.

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42. “Je größer der Vorsprung ist, den andere vor uns gewonnen haben, umso gründlicher muss unsere Arbeit einsetzen.”; Jacobson, “Denkschrift des stellvertretenden Gouverneurs von Kiautschou, Jacobson, an das Reichsmarineamt (27.1.1905),” 450. 43. R[udolf] Mell, “Zoologisch-botanische Bausteine,” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Organ zur Förderung des deutschen Unterrichts in Ostasien 2, no. 3 (1911): 27.

Bibliography Amann, [Waldemar]. “Einige Gedanken über allgemeine Unterrichtsgrundsätze in China.” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Organ zur Förderung des deutschen Unterrichts in Ostasien 2, no. 1 (1911): 2–7. Brockey, Liam M. Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008. Cordes, [Richard]. “Beobachtungen über den deutschen Sprachunterricht.” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Vierteljahresschrift der deutschen Lehrerschaft in Ostasien 4, no. 3 (1914): 40–43. “Ein Vergleich der Zahl der Missionsschulen und ihrer Schüler.” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Vierteljahresschrift der deutschen Lehrerschaft in Ostasien 4, no. 3 (1914): 30–31. Hering, Clemens. “Bemerkungen zum Lesebuch.” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Vierteljahresschrift der deutschen Lehrerschaft in Ostasien 4, no. 1 (1913): 6–16. Howatt, A.  P. R., and Richard Smith. “The History of Teaching English as a Foreign Language, from a British and European Perspective.” Language & History 57, no. 1 (2014): 75–95. Huang, Yi. Der deutsche Einfluss auf die Entwicklung des chinesischen Bildungswesens von 1871 bis 1918: Studien zu den kulturellen Aspekten der deutsch-chinesischen Beziehungen in der Ära des deutschen Kaiserreichs. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1995. Jacobson, Leo. “Denkschrift des stellvertretenden Gouverneurs von Kiautschou, Jacobson, an das Reichsmarineamt (27.1.1905).” In Musterkolonie Kiautschou: Die Expansion des Deutschen Reiches in China deutsch-chinesische Beziehungen 1897 bis 1914. Eine Quellensammlung. Edited by Mechthild Leutner and Klaus Mühlhahn, 444–53. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997. Kim, Ch’un-sik. Deutscher Kulturimperialismus in China: Deutsches Kolonialschulwesen in Kiautschou (China) 1898-1914. Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 2004. Klein, Thoralf, and Stefan Knirsch. “Die deutschen Schulen für Chinesen im Pachtgebiet Qingdao.” In Alltagsleben und Kulturaustausch: Deutsche und Chinesen in Tsingtau 1897-1914. Edited by Hermann Hiery and Hans-Martin Hinz, 161–73. Wolfratshausen: Edition Minerva, 1999.

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Kloosterhuis, Jürgen. Friedliche Imperialisten: Deutsche Auslandsvereine und auswärtige Kulturpolitik, 1906-1918. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1994. “Lehrerkonferenz.” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Organ zur Förderung des deutschen Unterrichts in Ostasien 2, no. 1 (1911): 12–13. Mell, R[udolf]. “Zoologisch-botanische Bausteine.” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Organ zur Förderung des deutschen Unterrichts in Ostasien 2, no. 3 (1911): 27–40. Mühlhahn, Klaus. “Qingdao (Tsingtau)  - Ein Zentrum deutscher Kultur in China?” In Tsingtau: Ein Kapitel deutscher Kolonialgeschichte in China 1897-1914. Edited by Hans-Martin Hinz and Christoph Lind, 121–32. Eurasburg: Edition Minerva, 1998. “Protokoll der 3. Versammlung deutscher, an Schulen für Chinesen tätiger Lehrer, abgehalten in Schanghai vom 13.-19. Juli 1913.” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung 4, no. 2 (1913): 2–16. “Protokoll über die 2. Konferenz deutscher Lehrer an chinesischen Schulen.” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Vierteljahresschrift der deutschen Lehrerschaft in Ostasien 3, no. 3 (1912): 1–15. Reinbothe, Roswitha. Kulturexport und Wirtschaftsmacht: Deutsche Schulen in China vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 1992. “Rundschreiben der Kommission für Schulverwaltung an die deutschen Lehrer Ostasiens.” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Vierteljahresschrift der deutschen Lehrerschaft in Ostasien 3, no. 3 (1912): 15–16. Sander, Hermann. “Stufenlesebuch für deutsch-chinesische Schulen.” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Vierteljahresschrift der deutschen Lehrerschaft in Ostasien 4, no. 1 (1913): 2–6. Schindler, A.  K. “Lehrbücher für Zoologie und Botanik.” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Organ zur Förderung des deutschen Unterrichts in Ostasien 1, no. 4 (1911): 22–23. Schmidt, [Wilhelm]. “Ideen zu einem deutschen Unterrichtsbuch für deutsch-­ chinesische Schulen.” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Organ zur Förderung des deutschen Unterrichts in Ostasien 1, no. 4 (1911): 13–17. Schmidt, [Wilhelm]. “Deutsche Schularbeit in China.” In Aus deutscher Bildungsarbeit im Auslande: Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen in Selbstzeugnissen aus aller Welt. Edited by Franz Schmidt and Otto Boelitz, 204–13. Langensalza: Julius Beltz, 1928. Sperlein, T. “Gedanken über unsere Schularbeit in China.” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Viertjahresschrift der deutschen Lehrerschaft in Ostasien 4, no. 1 (1913): 20–29. Stenz, [Georg M.]. “Über die Erziehung der chinesischen Studenten.” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Vierteljahresschrift der deutschen Lehrerschaft in Ostasien 4, no. 2 (1913): 16–23.

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The Directory & chronicle for China, Japan, Corea, Indo-China, Straits Settlements, Malay states, Siam, Netherlands India, Borneo, the Philippines, & c. Hong Kong: Hongkong Daily Press Office, 1912. “Was wir wollen.” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Organ zur Förderung des deutschen Unterrichts in Ostasien 1, no. 1 (1910): 1–3. Wiethoff, H[ans]. “Über die Anwendung der Berlitz-Methode bei Chinesen.” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Organ zur Förderung des deutschen Unterrichts in Ostasien 1, no. 1 (1910): 4–6. Wilhelm, [Richard]. “Zur Verbreitung des Deutschtums in China.” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Organ zur Förderung des deutschen Unterrichts in Ostasien 2, no. 3 (1911): 23–27. “Zusammenkunft deutscher Lehrer in Tsingtau.” Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung. Organ zur Förderung des deutschen Unterrichts in Ostasien 2, no. 2 (1911): 1–3.

PART II

Knowledge, Pedagogy, and Medical Mission, 1910–1945

CHAPTER 6

Max Weber and China: Imperial Scholarship, Its Background and Findings Jack Barbalet

In order to confirm his argument that capitalism necessarily originated in Europe as a result of a rationalizing tendency inherent only in early Calvinism,1 the eminent German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) undertook a study of the history of Chinese institutions and reflective traditions. The resulting work was first published in 1915 as Konfuzianismus und Taoismus. An expanded version appeared in 1920, translated into English as The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism.2 At the time that Weber commenced his research, Germany held a number of concessions and leases in China, incrementally acquired beginning in 1861; by the time of the work’s publication, however, Germany’s imperial and colonial ambitions—which Weber had enthusiastically supported—were halted through the military defeat in 1918 that ended the First World War. Additionally, the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the inauguration of the Republic of China began a process that undermined practically every aspect of Chinese society discussed in Weber’s monograph.

J. Barbalet (*) Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. M. Cho (ed.), Sino-German Encounters and Entanglements, Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73391-9_6

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The Religion of China attempts to demonstrate that Chinese institutions and the characteristically Chinese thought traditions of Confucianism (Kong jiao) and Daoism (Daojiao) prevented existing commercial and market practices from developing into modern industrial capitalism. At the time of his writing, Weber had access to most of the standard texts of the Chinese classics and large numbers of historical documents and analyses as well as reports written by missionaries, diplomats and travelers. By the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, sinology flourished in a number of German university departments, including in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Leipzig. The historical and social science interest in China among German scholars, including Weber, was informed by both German missionary activity in China and by imperial economic and political interests at home, both of which Weber was associated with. Weber’s study of imperial China raises a number of issues. Three, in particular, are dealt with in the present chapter. The most obvious, and the most neglected, is the question of historical context that informs the background of the work and its reception, which provides the implicit meaning and significance to Weber’s account of China for his contemporary German readers. This is dealt with in the first section, which outlines the links between Weber’s text and Christian missionary and German imperialist activities in China. The second section shows that Weber’s account of Confucianism derives from a missionary construction and that, overall, his representation of inhibiting Confucian values is not convincing. The third section discusses Weber’s institutional argument, which complements his claims regarding the impossibility of an indigenous Chinese capitalism as a result of Confucian values. It is shown in this section that the Chinese familial institutions regarded by Weber as economically irrational actually did meet the standards of rationality as he defined them. The conclusion provides an alternative account to Weber’s concerning the absence of industrial capitalism in imperial China and the basis of its more recent development. The thesis of the chapter is that Weber’s account for the absence of capitalist development in imperial China reflects German missionary and economic imperialist suppositions, and in doing so, his account provides a distorted conceptualization of Chinese thought and society. More positively, the chapter argues that imperial Chinese values and institutions were consistent with petty market capitalism but not with

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industrialization, largely because an economy based on a cheap and mobile labor force does not require labor substitution through industrialization.

Kirche und Reich: Christian Mission and German Imperialist Mentality Prior to Weber’s explorations of the Chinese “mentality” Max Müller (1823–1900), an expatriate German scholar based at the University of Oxford, had outlined a theory of “world religions.” A comparative science of religion was a real prospect for Müller because the necessary “data” was becoming readily available: “The ancient religions of … Confucius and Laotse may now be studied in excellent translations of their sacred books by anyone interested in [these] ancient faiths of mankind.”3 Indeed, by 1879 Müller had launched a series of publications with Oxford University Press, “The Sacred Books of the East,” which at its completion in 1910 comprised fifty volumes. Six volumes, published between 1879 and 1891, related to China; Weber drew upon them extensively for his work. The translator was James Legge (1815–1897), Professor of Chinese at Oxford University since 1876, who had served in China with the London Missionary Society from 1840 until 1873. European incursion into the “East,” to use Müller’s term, required linguistic expertise on the part of the administrators and missionaries who, incidentally, generated the translations that were widely available by the middle of the nineteenth century.4 The vast majority of missionaries in China were British, followed by Americans. German missionaries were the third-largest national group, although with significantly smaller numbers than the others, composing less than ten percent of the total missionary population in China at any given time. The influence of German theology, however, meant that “German missionary ideas often defined the grounds for the debate.”5 While this claim may have some resonance regarding discussions within the missionary community, the theological debates that drew the broadest general attention were conducted by Catholics writing in Latin and English-speaking Protestants, namely the “Chinese Rites Controversy” of the seventeenth and eighteenth century and the “Terms Debate” of the nineteenth century, respectively.6 After its defeat in the Second Opium War of 1856–1860, China signed a treaty that opened its interior to Christian, largely Protestant,

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missionaries. From this time the number of Protestant missionaries in China rose rapidly, from 81 in 1858 to 189 in 1864. By 1874 the number of China missionaries was reported to be 473, and by 1895 over 1000; their numbers peaked in 1925 at over 8000.7 While the rate of growth in these numbers is impressive, it must be remembered that the population of China in 1900 was approximately 400 million. The significance of the missionary presence was clearly not its numerical size but rather its intrusive capability as a proxy for Western imperial military and commercial force, premised on the constant abrasive assertion of Chinese subservience and humiliation. On the home front as well, China missionaries—supported by religious societies, congregations and the broader public—made China a constant presence in Germany and other sending countries through the entanglement of domestic profit and Asian resources; it was not only souls that were to be saved, but also trade commodities, dividends of commerce, and national prestige that could be acquired. Weber’s involvement with Christian organizations and their publications, while not related directly to foreign missionary work, reflects the unavoidable presence of church-­ related activity in German society at the time.8 German and other missionaries contributed to the supply of extensive source material on China and Chinese affairs that scholars such as Weber drew upon. The Boxer (Yihequan, literally “Righteous and Harmonious Fists”) Rebellion, which lasted from 1899 to 1901, was a significant setback for missionary activity in China. Proto-nationalist and anti-foreign, the Boxers directed their hostility against Christian missionaries and Chinese converts, killing 136 Protestant and 47 Catholic missionaries and 32,000 Chinese converts, as well as the German plenipotentiary in Beijing. The response of foreign powers was to form the Eight-Nation Alliance, comprising military detachments from Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, the German Empire, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the United States. The extent of the atrocities committed by the 45,000 foreign troops against Chinese men and women, as well as the looting of Chinese property, was substantial.9 The Boxer eruption and its suppression had the ultimate effect of bringing increased support for Christian missionary activity in China: “the sufferings of missionaries and of Chinese Christians in the Boxer outbreak … focused the attention of the Protestant world on China. The appeal to the heroic, the challenge to carry on the work of the martyrs, seldom failed of a response.”10 For Germany, this surge of missionary

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activity after the suppression of the Boxers was abruptly halted with the onset of war between the major European powers in 1914. While by no means destroyed by wartime hostilities, German Protestant missions were seriously curtailed, largely as a result of strong anti-German feeling by key American and British missionaries. Indeed, the war reflected the national nature of missionary activity in China, as well as German imperial involvement, that is typically ignored in discussions of the historical context of Weber’s The Religion of China. The First World War was not simply between Britain and Germany, but also between their empires, and was fundamentally related to their respective imperial ambitions. European interest in China was inseparable from trade prospects. German trade with China was originally indirect, through purchase of Chinese-sourced items from Dutch and English, as well as Russian, merchants.11 By 1752, however, the Royal Prussian Asian Trading Company, based in the seaport of Emden, had direct commerce with China through Canton (Guangzhou). This ended during the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763), fought between Britain and Prussia and their respective allies. One hundred years later, new opportunities emerged for Germany to once again trade directly with China as a result of yet another war prosecuted by the British, the Second Opium War. Prussia became a signatory to the Treaty of Tientsin (Tianjin) (Tianjin tiaoyue) in 1861, which gave the German Customs Union access to commercial relations with China as well as opportunities for German missionaries to operate in China. During the period immediately after signing the 1861 Treaty, Germany’s diplomatic and commercial presence in China was confined to Tianjin, a major port city just over one hundred kilometers from Beijing. This German enclave proved to be highly profitable and was soon home to a new financial institution, the Deutsche-Asiatische Bank, which quickly established branches in other major Chinese trading cities. Soon after establishing its settlement in Tianjin, Germany occupied another concession in Hankow (Hankou), a town on the Yangtze River approximately 700 kilometers west of Shanghai. But the strongest German presence in China was established in 1898 through the lease of a large area of land from the imperial Chinese government on Kiaochow Bay (Jiaozhou wan). German naval interests had earlier considered this location to be an ideal site for a naval base on the recommendation of Baron von Richthofen, a geologist who traveled extensively in China. Richthofen’s diaries, published in 1907, were recommended by Weber as a “descriptive introduction to modern Chinese conditions.”12

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The opportunity for Germany to acquire Jiaozhou Bay in Shandong arose in 1897 following the murder of two German Catholic missionaries in this location. In response to their deaths, German warships were dispatched to the area and a ninety-nine-year lease on the land surrounding the bay was secured for Germany.13 German development of the area, including the building of railways and mining, was commercially successful and the bay’s naval facilities were of enormous strategic as well as commercial value to Germany.14 Weber’s awareness of and interest in these developments is not explicitly expressed through his writing, but it exists nevertheless. Weber’s appreciation of the intricacies of global capitalism, his understanding of industry and transportation (both rail and shipping), as well as his sympathy for business interests were derived from Weber’s family connections, associations and contacts.15 At the same time, Weber’s endorsement and encouragement of German imperial ambition are expressed in publications which appeared over the span of his adult life. In his inaugural lecture of 1895, “The Nation State and Economic Policy,” Weber describes himself as an “economic nationalist.”16 Two years later, in a lecture given in Mannheim at the end of 1897, just thirty-five years after the first German concessions were established in China and a year before German battleships forcefully acquired the quasi-colony at Jiaozhou Bay, Weber wrote: “With frightening rapidity, we are approaching the point at which the limits of the markets of half-civilized Asiatic peoples will have been reached. Then only power, naked power, will count in the international market.”17 Weber also wrote articles in support of the naval policy of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz,18 a policy which included annexation of Jiaozhou Bay as a base for the German navy.19 In his reflections on “The Economic Foundations of Imperialism,” written between 1911 and 1914 and published in Economy and Society, Weber mentions the “Increasing opportunities for profit abroad [that] emerge again today, especially in territories that are opened up politically and economically.”20 While China is not specifically mentioned here, the description which follows parallels activities that occurred at the time in the German concessions and lease areas in China. Weber goes on to say: “The safest way of monopolizing for the members of one’s own polity profit opportunities which are linked to the public economy of the foreign territory is to occupy it or at least subject the foreign political power in the form of a ‘protectorate’ or some such arrangement … The universal revival of ‘imperialist’ capitalism … and the revival of political drives for

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expansion are thus not accidental. For the predictable future, the prognosis will have to be made in its favor.”21 With the onset of the First World War, just a short time after this passage was written, Germany lost its possessions in China. Weber’s imperial commitments and his vision of strident nationalism as an appropriate strategy for the German state were not diminished by these defeats. Weber’s explicit endorsement of German imperial expansionism leads to a perception of “synchronization between Weber’s text and external imperial ideology.”22 But the claim that this “was not due to any direct support for the German imperial interests in China” is questionable in light of Weber’s support for von Tirpitz’s strategy and his broader commitment to German imperial activity and colonial interests, as mentioned above. At the same time, Weber selected his sources for The Religion of China in order to make the case that Chinese economic development was constrained entirely by internal factors: Weber’s The Religion of China was structured around the premise of Chinese economic stagnation, which he explained in terms of shortcomings of Chinese values or national culture … Weber was ignorant of the growth of Chinese capitalism in the late nineteenth century, including in the region around the future German colony in Shandong Province. He also ignored the fettering impact of Western imperialism on Chinese capitalism and of British opium on the Chinese work ethic.23

Indeed, Weber did not engage with works that offered an assessment of Chinese prospects contrary to his own. His purpose, as stated in the “Introduction” to the series of which The Religion of China is a part, is “not to [provide] complete analyses of cultures” but rather, it is to “quite deliberately emphasize elements in which [China] differs from Western civilization.”24

The Power of Values An underlying assumption of Weber’s account in The Religion of China, and a major tenet of his argument concerning the failure of modern capitalism to develop in China, is the claim that Confucianism supports a form of rationality that is essentially traditional and incapable of encouraging modern capitalism. This representation of Confucianism by Weber is in many ways an invention of European Sinology and betrays the latter’s

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missionary roots. The missionary interest in China, to convert the Chinese to Christianity, required interpretations of Chinese traditions that made the Chinese amenable to conversion, finding “equivalent” Chinese terms for Christian notions and personalities or roles.25 Although Weber does not narrate this history of metamorphosis in The Religion of China, he effectively enacts it when he claims that the “canonization of Confucius is the first certain example of a historical figure becoming a subject of worship.”26 This remark occurs within the context of a discussion of the “functional” deities of the “official Chinese state cult” although the footnote attached to it provides no source for or elaboration of this unlikely claim, but distractingly refers instead to canonization in the Catholic church.27 And yet this is an appropriate indicator, implicitly acknowledging the responsibility of Matteo Ricci, the leader of the sixteenth-century Jesuit mission to Beijing, in this “canonization” rather than Chinese officials as Weber implies. The Jesuit apprehension of Confucian thought was to regard the latter as a native Chinese ethical monotheism which took the form of a “natural religion.” The European Enlightenment notion of natural religion supposed a pagan morality absent of miracle, revelation or sacrament. The Jesuit construction of Confucianism was highly influential in subsequent European thought, especially in the work of Leibniz but also among other Enlightenment thinkers, including Quesnay and Voltaire, who extolled the virtues of moral Confucian China against corrupt aristocratic Europe.28 While the eighteenth-century European vision of China lost its political and popular appeal after the French Revolution, as both Europe and China underwent significant transformations which ultimately led to a more negative image of China as stagnant and uncivilized29—an image borrowed by Weber,30 and explained in terms of bureaucratic ossification31—the missionary and Sinological representations of Confucianism as a native Chinese religion persisted into the nineteenth century and beyond.32 Weber’s interpretation both conforms to this interpretive tradition and also diverges from it. In addition to the supposed canonization of Confucius, he holds that Confucius claimed that the “order of the world … could not be retained without belief [and therefore] the retention of religious belief was politically even more important than was the concern for food.”33 There is no attribution here, but the most likely reference is the Analects Book 12 Chapter 7, although the belief referred to here, according to the Legge translation used by Weber, is not religious but rather the people’s “faith in their rulers”; this latter cannot “be dispensed with” even

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though “military equipment … [and] food” may be “part[ed] with.”34 Despite these contortions, the sacralization of Confucius and Confucianism undertaken by missionaries from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries is not completely accepted by Weber, who insists that Confucianism is not a religion.35 This is largely a consequence of Weber’s rejection of the concept of natural religion and his insistence that religion must instead operate through explicitly God-embracing beliefs and devotional piety. Weber found the missionary-derived Sinological crystallization of a Chinese orthodox “mentality” in Confucianism to be an ideal device through which to prove his claim that the cultural basis of modern capitalism is located exclusively in European history. The contrast drawn between Christianity and Confucianism, their juxtaposition in a common moral universe as distinct but competing ethical discourses, permits Weber’s demonstration that Confucianism has a rational dimension, but that “Confucian rationalism meant rational adjustment to the world.”36 What is necessary for the development of capitalism, however, in Weber’s estimation is “Puritan rationalism [which] meant rational mastery of the world.”37 This view parallels the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European critique of the perceived pacifism and lack of martial courage in Confucian China, in contrast to the European elevation of military power and glory.38 Weber39 not only directs his readers’ attention to this contrast—between Chinese quiescence and European valiance and striving, but he insightfully explains it in terms of the unifying and pacifying consequences of China’s imperial political structures versus the competitiveness and martial conflict between European principalities and states.40 Each formation, he believes, had a commensurate economic dimension, with the European model alone leading to market competition and economic rationality. Weber’s discussion of state forms and relations in The Religion of China introduces an institutional argument for which he is seldom given credit. Indeed, Weber’s interpreters typically ignore this aspect of The Religion of China and almost exclusively focus on his claim regarding the absence of an appropriate religious tradition in explaining China’s failure to develop modern capitalism.41 Weber’s intention, and what unifies his analysis in The Religion of China, is to demonstrate the uniqueness of the West in its institutions and not only in the patterns of its thought and values. This purpose would be successful in its own terms if Weber was content to compare civilizations, but in attempting to explain the formation of modern capitalism in Europe and its absence in China in terms of religious

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beliefs and orientations, the institutional argument and the value argument contradict each other. Much of the scholarship on The Religion of China resolves this contradiction by simply ignoring the institutional argument as the source of an alternative framework to the argument concerning religious traditions. Weber writes that “bourgeois industrial capitalism might have developed from the petty capitalist beginnings” in China but for a number of reasons “mostly related to the structure of the state” it was prevented from doing so.42 After setting out the details of this position, Weber changes direction and argues instead that it was the absence of an appropriate religious tradition that prevented the advent of industrial capitalism in China. Weber’s discussion of Chinese institutions is conducted in a largely historical narrative. In his account of the development of these institutions, a number of important ideal type conceptualizations are presented, especially concerning different forms of bureaucracy and the state. But as a number of commentators have shown,43 Weber’s historical account is seriously flawed, partly because of the limitations of the sources on which he drew but also because of some of his own assumptions.

Economic and Political Institutions The failure of the imperial Chinese economy to achieve modern industrial capitalism cannot be attributed to the absence of a sense of self-control or an inclination for money-making among Chinese merchants.44 Nor can the supposed predominance of Confucian values be held responsible without showing how they inhibited the activities of those who failed to share them much less their supporters. As Weber acknowledges, imperial office permitted the accumulation of varying amounts of wealth.45 Officials from non-mercantile backgrounds typically entrusted their accumulated wealth to merchants who managed their investments.46 At the same time, land-­ holding families and, especially after the seventeenth century, merchant families routinely financed a capable son’s study for the imperial examination. In this sense, then, any “sharp dichotomy between ‘officials’ and ‘merchants,’” according to Elvin, “is therefore misleading.”47 Indeed, conflicts between values and behavior either are most likely to be irrelevant for economic activity or, if effective, will counter-intuitively have a positive rather than an inhibitory effect. In discussing the negative values regarding enterprise within the Russian aristocracy, which are in many ways similar to those of Chinese literati, the

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economic historian Alexander Gershenkron shows that the prevailing pre-­ industrial value system did not prevent industrialization and that a more salient research question might focus, not on how values inhibit entrepreneurial activity, but rather on the propensity of values to change and in response to what factors.48 Gershenkron regards entrepreneurs as “men who by definition … may not be orientated in their action by any discernible set of values” who experience “a far-reaching divorce between their actions and the general value system to which they may still adhere.”49 In this vein it should be remembered that, according to Schumpeter,50 anti-­ capitalist values were rampant during the era in which capitalism emerged in Europe, a point he directs against Weber’s Protestant Ethic argument and its underlying ideal-type methodology.51 In fact, Weber is ambiguous about the factors responsible for the absence of modern capitalism in imperial China as he vacillates between the efficacy of the Chinese mentality and of Chinese institutions. After treating Confucian orthodoxy as the basis of China’s economic traditionalism, he concludes the second Part of The Religion of China with the claim that the Confucian “mentality” was “strongly counteractive to capitalist development” because of its “autonomous laws.”52 Immediately preceding this statement, however, Weber says that this mentality is “deeply co-determined by political and economic destinies.” This ambiguity parallels his conclusion to the first Part of the book, which claims: “Rational entrepreneurial capitalism … has been handicapped” in China “by the lack of a particular mentality” but also “by the lack of a formally guaranteed law, a rational administration and judiciary, and by the ramifications of a system of prebends.”53 Given that both “economic and intellectual factors were at work,”54 it is important to consider what Weber has to say about the former as well as the latter. The Religion of China opens with a discussion of the history of money in China, moves on to an account of the Chinese city and then provides an important discussion of the development of the organization of the imperial state and the Chinese bureaucracy, followed by a treatment of the institutions and organization of rural society, which in turn is followed by a discussion, which concludes the first Part of the book, of the patrilineal kinship clan. The first chapter of the second Part is also occupied with a consideration of a particularly Chinese institution, the literati. This extensive treatment of institutions is comparative insofar as Weber interposes his account of Chinese social institutions with analogous and contrasting cases drawn from the histories of European and ancient civilizations. It is

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not possible here to review Weber’s complete argument and the discussion it has provoked. The following account will be confined to his treatment of the kinship clan, what he calls the “sib,” and its relationship to the prospects of capitalist development. This is because Weber is adamant that the clan is an undisputed inhibitor of capitalist organization; yet, it has been central to the capitalistic transformation of China since the 1980s. Weber points out that kinship, through the clan organization, is the source of not only personalized business dealings but also local or village administration and civic regulation involving the maintenance of ceremonies, education, credit provision, and welfare, as well as public safety and the maintenance of order. As a corporate entity, the clan owned property, the profit from which was distributed to household heads. Weber claims that the property held by the clan was confined to landed property, as the clan was too irrational to engage in capital investment.55 Indeed, Weber’s assessment of the clan, and the business of Chinese individuals in general, is that the solidarity of relations through kinship meant that there was “no rational depersonalization of business” so that for “the economic mentality, the personalist principle was … a barrier to impersonal rationalization.”56 Because the clan supported household self-sufficiency, Weber argues it was responsible for “delimiting market developments.”57 Through kinship relations, the clan supported its members against discrimination and thus “thwarted” the labor discipline characteristic of “modern large enterprise” and the “free market selection of labor” associated with it.58 Finally, the kinship clan was inherently opposed to innovation, and fiscal innovation in particular “met with sharp resistance” from the clan.59 Subsequent historical research has revised many of these claims. Two points in particular relate to those concerning market inhibition and fiscal innovation. The full extent of market development in China was not appreciated by Weber’s sources. It is now known that China experienced significant market-generated growth from the late Song dynasty (960–1279), which lasted until the beginning of the nineteenth century.60 Indeed, Elvin provides much evidence concerning the reach of markets in rural China: “Increased contact with the market made the Chinese peasantry into a class of adaptable, rational, profit-orientated, petty-­ entrepreneurs” and “in the course of the seventeenth century the number of market towns … began to multiply at a rate exceeding that of the population increase.”61 It is by no means clear, therefore, that the lineage clan delimited market development. Indeed, the clan operated as a market actor and, against Weber’s assessment, there is evidence that innovative

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financial devices were developed by clan managers. Lineage trusts operated from the beginning of the seventeenth century with an express purpose “to amass and incorporate business property and protect it from the predations of household division.”62 The clan trust was a device for the rational protection of investment portfolios and it operated to overcome fiscal limitations: While lineage trusts themselves remained closed corporations whose membership was determined by birth, trusts behaved like individuals in the market place, buying and selling salt manufacturing shares and developing portfolios that included both wholly owned family firms and shares in a variety of non-kin ventures … By the Qing [dynasty], the institution of the lineage trust … had become a popular device for the protection of investable assets. By creating a trust a successful merchant could keep his company intact, allowing each of his sons to succeed not to bits and pieces of the firm, but to equal shares in an undivided pool of assets that could likewise be passed on to their heirs.63

The problem of the clan claimed by Weber,64 regarding the dissipation of capital stock through a “democratic” inheritance regime, was overcome by a rational innovation unnoticed by his sources. Conceptually, Weber’s understanding of the family as an inherently traditional form of organization interferes with his appreciation of its role in enhancing economic prospects, not only in China. The idea is stated in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that through kinship obligation the family is a source of traditional constraint. Weber writes that the Protestant calling generates emotional detachment and depersonalizes family relations, so that early modern European entrepreneurs were unconstrained by family ties and traditional obligations.65 And yet the unit of enterprise and the major proximate sources of entrepreneurial attainment in early modern Europe was not the individual entrepreneur, free of family responsibility and commitment, but individuals who were economically enriched by kinship networks and marital alliances, and who thereby had immediate access to reputation, credit and uniquely reliable associates.66 This pattern of familial capitalism has a continuing presence.67 Weber excludes any consideration of these possibilities by hypothesis. In The Religion of China, he writes that “the ascetic sects of Protestantism … established the superior community of faith and a common ethical way of life in opposition to the community of blood, even in a large extent in

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opposition to the family.”68 Weber is correct in saying that while the clan was “completely preserved” in China, “in the occidental Middle Ages it was practically extinct.”69 It was the Catholic Church, however, not Protestantism, that discouraged adoption, concubinage, marriages without the woman’s consent and similar practices that sustain kinship organization. By the ninth century in Europe, the nuclear family predominated over the joint or extended family.70 Weber’s misapprehension of the role of the family in capitalist prospects and his treatment of the particularism of kinship as necessarily opposed to rationality of enterprise has a further, methodological dimension in his conflation of formalism with rationalization. The economically rational contribution of clan lineage to present-day Chinese capitalist development suggests that Weber erroneously assumes that without formalism, rationalization is not possible; in fact, informal and personalist dispositions may contribute to rational economic activities.71 Kinship lineage may function to rationalize and protect property rights, to facilitate transactions and reduce transaction costs and to provide network benefits, including bridging ties.72 Weber’s claim, that the “personalist principle was … a barrier to impersonal rationalization,”73 was effectively criticized by Selznick whose pioneering observations regarding the supportive interplay of “informal associations” and “the formal system” led him to argue that to “recognize the sociological relevance of formal structures is not, however, to have constructed a theory of organization.”74 Organization theorists have continued to point to the non-­ contradictory and possibly facilitating relations between informal and rational organizational elements, against Weber’s insistence on the necessary and exclusive association of only formal and rational elements.

Conclusion In The Religion of China, Weber directs his attention to the question of why modern industrial capitalism did not emerge in China. His analysis of the supposed inability of Confucianism to provide an ethic supportive of a capitalist ethos does not properly address this question, but relates rather to market or commercial capitalism, which Weber acknowledges in different ways did indeed operate in imperial China. The advent of industrial capitalism in China since the 1980s, because it operates with “personalist” social forms both familial and political that Weber dismissed as irrational and therefore non-capitalistic, cannot satisfy Weber’s claim that the

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Chinese “would be quite capable … of assimilating capitalism which has technically and economically been fully developed in the modern cultural area.”75 The question of the absence of modern industrialization in imperial China requires consideration of the conditions for the application of advanced technology to production. Elvin has shown that resourcefulness associated with innovation was present throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties, and that entrepreneurship was well developed; there was, however, an absence of technologically driven production in late imperial China.76 This was because “a rational strategy for peasant and merchant alike tended in the direction not so much of labor-saving machinery as of economizing on resources and fixed capital … This situation might be described as a ‘high-level equilibrium trap’. In the context of a civilization with a strong sense of economic rationality, with an appreciation of invention … it is probably a sufficient explanation of the retardation of technological advance.”77 This does not explain an associated issue, however, namely the economic decline of China in the late Qing. This latter phenomenon was no doubt due to institutional factors as well as certain political issues that Weber discusses, especially those connected with government capacities. The weakness of the Qing court in dealing with foreign debt, especially following the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century and China’s defeat by Japan in 1895, reflected only the most visible limitation of the Chinese regime. Population surplus, which rendered labor-saving innovation and therefore industrialization unnecessary, eventually led to a disruption of both cultivation and commerce. The autonomy of provincial administration seriously undermined the central government’s ability to implement any reforms it initiated.78 The collapse of the last imperial dynasty with the 1911 Republican revolution bequeathed these institutional problems facing the Qing to its successors.79 From the middle of the twentieth century, the command economy and population control devised by the Communist Party sufficiently overcame these and associated problems to permit capitalist development from the 1980s. In this sense Weber’s dismissal of the prospects for Chinese capitalism was simply premature. That part of Weber’s argument which is useful for understanding the institutional limitations on the historic trajectory of modern capitalist development in China is typically ignored or under-emphasized by his readers. Weber’s argument concerning the inability of the Chinese

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mentality to develop a capitalistic orientation, even if not positively misleading, seems to offer little by way of understanding China’s path to the 1980s. But then again the purpose of Weber’s analysis in The Religion of China is ultimately to demonstrate the validity of his arguments concerning the uniqueness of the West and the singular power of Protestant asceticism in developing modern capitalism. In this endeavor, imperial China is simply used as a negative case. Weber’s image of China as backward and dominated by traditional or non-rational thought systems is consistent with the missionary and German imperialist mentality discussed at the beginning of this chapter, although it surpasses them in endeavoring to find support for his thesis concerning the cultural basis of modern capitalism in Europe.

Notes 1. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Harper Collins, 1991). 2. Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, trans. and ed. Hans H. Gerth (New York: Free Press, 1964). 3. Max Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion: Four Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution with Two Essays on False Analogies, and the Philosophy of Mythology (London: Longmans, Green, 1873), 25. 4. See Man Kong Wong, “Nineteenth Century Missionary-Scholars at Work: A Critical Review of English Translations of the Daodejing by John Chalmers and James Legge,” Monumenta Serica: Journal of Oriental Studies 63, no. 1 (2015). 5. Albert Monshan Wu, From Christ to Confucius: German Missionaries, Chinese Christians, and the Globalization of Christianity, 1860–1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 10. 6. Sangkeun Kim, Strange Names of God: The Missionary Translation of the Divine Name and the Chinese Responses to Matteo Ricci’s “Shangti” in Late Ming China, 1583–1644 (New York: Peter Lang, 2005); Norman J.  Girardot, The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge’s Oriental Pilgrimage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 7. Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in China (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009), 405–7. 8. Rita Aldenhoff, “Max Weber and the Evangelical-Social Congress,” in Max Weber and His Contemporaries, ed. Wolfgang J.  Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (London: Routledge, 2010); Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of

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Chicago Press, 1990), 19–20, 32, 123–27; William H. Swatos and Peter Kivisto, “Max Weber as ‘Christian Sociologist,’” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 30, no. 4 (1991); Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: John Wiley, 1975), 31–37, 188–89, 234–35. 9. Robert A. Bickers and R. G. Tiedemann, eds., The Boxers, China, and the World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Paul A.  Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 10. Latourette, History of Christian Missions in China, 569. 11. Ronald Findley and Kevin H.  O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 295–303. 12. Weber, Religion of China, 252; see Shellen Xiao Wu, “The Search for Coal in the Age of Empires: Ferdinand von Richthofen’s Odyssey in China, 1860–1920,” American Historical Review 119, no. 2 (2014). 13. John E.  Schrecker, Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism: Germany in Shantung (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 19–40; see also Terrell D. Gottschall, By Order of the Kaiser: Otto von Diederichs and the Rise of the Imperial German Navy, 1865–1902 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003). 14. Schrecker, Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism, 210–46; Wu, From Christ to Confucius, 83–84. 15. Guenther Roth, “Global Capitalism and Multi-ethnicity: Max Weber Then and Now,” in The Cambridge Companion to Max Weber, ed. Stephen Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 16. Max Weber, “The Nation State and Economic Policy (Inaugural lecture),” in Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 20. 17. Quoted in Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 77. 18. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 137, 139. 19. Gottschall, By Order of the Kaiser; Schrecker, Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism. 20. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 918. 21. Ibid., 919. 22. George Steinmetz, “Imperial Entanglements of Sociology and the Problem of Scientific Autonomy in Germany, France and the United States,” in Transnationale Vergesellschaftingen, ed. Hans-Georg Soeffner (Berlin: Springer, 2012), 866.

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23. George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 416. 24. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 27–28. 25. Man Kong Wong, “The Use of Sinology in the Nineteenth Century,” in Colonial Hong Kong and Modern China: Interaction and Reintegration, ed. Lee Pui Tak (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005). 26. Weber, Religion of China, 174. 27. Ibid., 290n3. 28. G.F.  Hudson, Europe and China: A Survey of their Relations from the Earliest Times to 1800 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 319–25; Longxi Zhang, Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 99–101. 29. Hudson, Europe and China, 326–28. 30. Weber, Religion of China, 55. 31. Ibid., 60, 151–52. 32. See Jan Jakob Marie de Groot, The Religion of the Chinese (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 89–131; Ernst Faber, China in the Light of History (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1897), 34–38, 57–66; James Legge, Confucianism in Relation to Christianity (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1877); James Legge, The Religions of China: Confucianism and Taoism Described and Compared with Christianity (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1880), 1–58. 33. Weber, Religion of China, 143. 34. Confucius, Confucian Analects, The Great Learning & The Doctrine of the Mean, trans. James Legge (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), 254. 35. Weber, Religion of China, 146, 156. 36. Ibid., 248. 37. Ibid. 38. Hudson, Europe and China, 320–21. 39. Weber, Religion of China, 114–15, 169. 40. Ibid., 61–62; see also 103. 41. Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 177–78; Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, vol. 2 (New York: Free Press, 1968), 541–42, 577; Wolfgang Schluchter, Rationalism, Religion and Domination: A Weberian Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 103–11. 42. Weber, Religion of China, 100. 43. Randall Collins, Weberian Sociological Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 58–73; Herrlee G.  Creel, “The Beginnings of Bureaucracy in China: The Origin of the Hsien,” in his What is Taoism?

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And Other Studies in Chinese Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); David Faure, “Commercial Institutions and Practices in Imperial China as Seen by Weber and in Terms of More Recent Research,” Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies 10, no. 2 (2013); Gary G. Hamilton, “Patriarchalism in Imperial China and Western Europe: A Revision of Weber’s Sociology of Domination,” Theory and Society 13, no. 3 (1984); Otto B. van der Sprenkel, “Max Weber on China,” in Studies in the Philosophy of History: Selected Essays from History and Theory, ed. George H. Nadel (New York: Harper, 1965); C.K. Yang, “Introduction,” in Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (New York: Free Press, 1964). 44. See Richard John Lufrano, Honorable Merchants: Commerce and Self-­ Cultivation in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997). 45. Weber, Religion of China, 85–86. 46. Mark Elvin, The Patterns of the Chinese Past (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973), 291–92. 47. Ibid., 292. 48. Alexander Gershenkron, “Social Attitudes, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development,” in his Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 68. 49. Ibid., 68–69. 50. Joseph A.  Schumpeter, “Capitalism,” in his Essays: On Entrepreneurs, Innovations, Business Cycles, and the Evolution of Capitalism, ed. Richard V. Clemence with an Introduction by Richard Swedberg (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 2008), 190. 51. Ibid., 191. 52. Weber, Religion of China, 249. 53. Ibid., 104. 54. Ibid., 55. 55. Ibid., 89, 103. 56. Ibid., 85, 236. 57. Ibid., 90. 58. Ibid., 95; see also 97. 59. Ibid., 95–96. 60. Elvin, Patterns of the Chinese Past; Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 61. Elvin, Patterns of the Chinese Past, 167, 268. 62. Madeleine Zelin, “The Firm in Early China,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 71, no. 3 (2009): 623–37, 627. 63. Ibid., 627.

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64. Weber, Religion of China, 82–83. 65. Ibid., 70, 107–8. 66. Richard Grassby, Kinship and Capitalism: Marriage, Family and Business in the English-Speaking World, 1580–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 67. Roy Church, “The Family Firm in Industrial Capitalism: International Perspectives on Hypothesis and History,” Business History 35, no. 4 (1993); Harold James, Family Capitalism: Wendels, Haniels, Falcks, and the Continental European Model (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes and Andrei Shleifer, “Corporate Ownership around the World,” Journal of Finance 54, no. 2 (1999); Maurice Zeitlin, “Corporate Ownership and Control: The Large Corporation and the Capitalist Class,” American Journal of Sociology 79, no. 5 (1974). 68. Weber, Religion of China, 237. 69. Ibid., 86. 70. Avner Greif and Guido Tabellini, “Cultural and Institutional Bifurcation: China and Europe Compared,” American Economic Review 100, no. 2 (2010): 137. 71. Yusheng Peng, “Lineage Networks, Rural Entrepreneurs, and Max Weber,” Research in the Sociology of Work 15 (2005): 347–49. 72. Ibid., 338–39. 73. Weber, Religion of China, 236. 74. Philip Selznick, “Foundations of the Theory of Organization,” American Sociological Review 13, no. 1 (1948): 26–28. 75. Weber, Religion of China, 248. 76. Elvin, Patterns of the Chinese Past, 298–99. 77. Ibid., 314–15. 78. See Weber, Religion of China, 47–50. 79. Marie-Claire Bergère, “On the Historical Origins of Chinese Underdevelopment,” Theory and Society 13, no. 3 (1984).

Bibliography Aldenhoff, Rita. “Max Weber and the Evangelical-Social Congress.” In Max Weber and His Contemporaries, edited by Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel, 193–202. London: Routledge, 2010. Bergère, Marie-Claire. “On the Historical Origins of Chinese Underdevelopment.” Theory and Society 13, no. 3 (1984): 327–37. Bickers, Robert A., and R. G. Tiedemann, eds. The Boxers, China, and the World. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.

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Church, Roy. “The Family Firm in Industrial Capitalism: International Perspectives on Hypothesis and History.” Business History 35, no. 4 (1993): 17–43. Cohen, Paul A. History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Collins, Randall. Weberian Sociological Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Confucius. Confucian Analects, The Great Learning & The Doctrine of the Mean, translated by James Legge. New York: Dover Publications, 1971. Creel, Herrlee G. “The Beginnings of Bureaucracy in China: The Origin of the Hsien.” In What is Taoism? And Other Studies in Chinese Cultural History, 121–59. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. de Groot, Jan Jakob Marie. The Religion of the Chinese. New York: Macmillan, 1910. Elvin, Mark. The Patterns of the Chinese Past. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973. Faber, Ernst. China in the Light of History. Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1897. Faure, David. “Commercial Institutions and Practices in Imperial China as Seen by Weber and in Terms of More Recent Research.” Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies 10, no. 2 (2013): 71–98. Findley, Ronald, and Kevin H. O’Rourke. Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World Economy in the Second Millennium. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Gershenkron, Alexander. “Social Attitudes, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development.” In his Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, 52–71. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Giddens, Anthony. Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Girardot, Norman J. The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge’s Oriental Pilgrimage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Gottschall, Terrell D. By Order of the Kaiser: Otto von Diederichs and the Rise of the Imperial German Navy, 1865–1902. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003. Grassby, Richard. Kinship and Capitalism: Marriage, Family and Business in the English-Speaking World, 1580–1740. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Greif, Avner, and Guido Tabellini. “Cultural and Institutional Bifurcation: China and Europe Compared.” American Economic Review 100, no. 2 (2010): 135–40. Hamilton, Gary G. “Patriarchalism in Imperial China and Western Europe: A Revision of Weber’s Sociology of Domination.” Theory and Society 13, no. 3 (1984): 393–425. Hudson, G.F. Europe and China: A Survey of their Relations from the Earliest Times to 1800. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961.

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James, Harold. Family Capitalism: Wendels, Haniels, Falcks, and the Continental European Model. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Kim, Sangkeun. Strange Names of God: The Missionary Translation of the Divine Name and the Chinese Responses to Matteo Ricci’s “Shangti” in Late Ming China, 1583–1644. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. La Porta, Rafael, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes and Andrei Shleifer. “Corporate Ownership around the World.” Journal of Finance 54, no. 2 (1999): 471–517. Latourette, Kenneth Scott. A History of Christian Missions in China. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009. Legge, James. Confucianism in Relation to Christianity. Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1877. ———. The Religions of China: Confucianism and Taoism Described and Compared with Christianity. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1880. Lufrano, Richard John. Honorable Merchants: Commerce and Self-Cultivation in Late Imperial China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997. Mommsen, Wolfgang J. Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Müller, Max. Introduction to the Science of Religion: Four Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution with Two Essays on False Analogies, and the Philosophy of Mythology. London: Longmans, Green, 1873. Parsons, Talcott. The Structure of Social Action. Vol. 2. New  York: The Free Press, 1968. Peng, Yusheng. “Lineage Networks, Rural Entrepreneurs, and Max Weber.” Research in the Sociology of Work 15 (2005): 327–55. Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Roth, Guenther. “Global Capitalism and Multi-ethnicity: Max Weber Then and Now.” In The Cambridge Companion to Max Weber, edited by Stephen Turner, 117–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Schluchter, Wolfgang. Rationalism, Religion and Domination: A Weberian Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Schrecker, John E. Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism: Germany in Shantung. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Schumpeter, Joseph A. “Capitalism.” In Essays: On Entrepreneurs, Innovations, Business Cycles, and the Evolution of Capitalism, edited by Richard V. Clemence with an Introduction by Richard Swedberg, 189–210. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 2008. Selznick, Philip. “Foundations of the Theory of Organization.” American Sociological Review 13, no. 1 (1948): 25–35. Steinmetz, George. The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

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———. “Imperial Entanglements of Sociology and the Problem of Scientific Autonomy in Germany, France and the United States.” In Transnationale Vergesellschaftingen, edited by Hans-Georg Soeffner, 857–71. Berlin: Springer, 2012. Swatos, William H., and Peter Kivisto. “Max Weber as ‘Christian Sociologist.’” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 30, no. 4 (1991): 347–62. van der Sprenkel, Otto B. “Max Weber on China.” In Studies in the Philosophy of History: Selected Essays from History and Theory, edited by George H. Nadel, 198–220. New York: Harper, 1965. Weber, Marianne. Max Weber: A Biography, translated by Harry Zohn. New York: John Wiley, 1975. Weber, Max. The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth. New York: The Free Press, 1964. ———. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. ———. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons. London: Harper Collins, 1991. ———. “The Nation State and Economic Policy.” In Weber: Political Writings, edited by Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, 1–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Wong, Man Kong. “The Use of Sinology in the Nineteenth Century.” In Colonial Hong Kong and Modern China: Interaction and Reintegration, edited by Lee Pui Tak, 135–54. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005. ———. “Nineteenth Century Missionary-Scholars at Work: A Critical Review of English Translations of the Daodejing by John Chalmers and James Legge.” Monumenta Serica: Journal of Oriental Studies 63, no. 1 (2015): 124–49. Wu, Albert Monshan. From Christ to Confucius: German Missionaries, Chinese Christians, and the Globalization of Christianity, 1860–1950. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Wu, Shellen Xiao. “The Search for Coal in the Age of Empires: Ferdinand von Richthofen’s Odyssey in China, 1860–1920.” American Historical Review 119, no. 2 (2014): 339–63. Yang, C.K. “Introduction.” In Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth, xiii–xliii. New York: The Free Press, 1964. Zeitlin, Maurice. “Corporate Ownership and Control: The Large Corporation and the Capitalist Class.” American Journal of Sociology 79, no. 5 (1974): 1073–119. Zelin, Madeleine. “The Firm in Early China.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 71, no. 3 (2009): 623–37. Zhang, Longxi. Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

CHAPTER 7

Raising Children, Educating Citizens: Chinese Readings of the German Pedagogue Georg Kerschensteiner Henrike Rudolph

“‘The twentieth century is the era of the child.’ In China’s case, this saying seems to be too far from reality,”1 lamented the educator Tang Shouqian in 1936  in referring to the title of Ellen Key’s (1849–1926) book. In 1900, Key had promised a dawning “century of the child.”2 In China, however, political instability and economic volatility undermined most efforts to implement educational reforms on a national scale  until the Communist Party established a more stable regime in 1949. Nonetheless, intellectuals like Tang succeeded—if not in practice then at least in theory—in turning the late Qing and Republican period into a golden half-­ century of Chinese pedagogical thought. Chinese educators studied foreign pedagogical models, tested them under local conditions, and reworked them to match their own understanding of childhood, learning, teaching, and knowledge.

H. Rudolph (*) Department of East Asian Studies, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. M. Cho (ed.), Sino-German Encounters and Entanglements, Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73391-9_7

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The progressive education movement and the writings of its visionaries, among them Ellen Key, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), Friedrich Fröbel (1782–1852), John Dewey (1859–1952), and Maria Montessori (1870–1952), left an especially deep impression on Chinese educational thought in the first half of the twentieth century. Georg Kerschensteiner (1854–1932) belongs on this list of internationally influential educators, yet his works are largely forgotten today by European and American historians. In China, Kerschensteiner is still revered as a leading voice in the international progressive education movement. Even during the Maoist period, when his theories came under attack, the historical relevance of his work remained unchallenged. And since the 1980s, the Chinese interest in Kerschensteiner is on the rise again. By drawing on previously neglected Chinese primary sources as well as German, Anglophone, and Chinese scholarship, this chapter explores Kerschensteiner’s popularity in twentieth-century China as the product of converging national and international intellectual currents. The first section explores the central aspects and theories of his work, as well as existing scholarship on him. The second section analyzes how his proposals for vocational education reform spread across the globe and were positively received in China. The convergence of his proposals for labor education and the rise of Communist and anarchist thought are  discussed in the third section. The fourth section investigates the shifting attitudes toward Kerschensteiner in Chinese educational discourses since 1949. I will conclude by arguing that Kerschensteiner continues to enjoy a high reputation in China, not despite but because of the repeated setbacks in establishing an effective system of vocational education. As long as Chinese educators struggle to raise public recognition for vocational schooling, his arguments remain relevant.

Kerschensteiner’s Work and Its International Reception Georg Kerschensteiner was born in 1854 in modest surroundings.3 After graduating from the teacher’s seminar in Munich, his first experiences as a teacher left him frustrated. He felt that neither his training nor his working conditions allowed him to do his job adequately. He decided to give up his teaching position and to pursue further studies, supporting himself through private tutoring. In 1877, he graduated from the Gymnasium

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(higher secondary school) and went on to study mathematics and physics in Munich. After finishing his doctorate, he returned to teaching at the Gymnasium and attended further university courses. It was only in 1895 that he was able to begin implementing the reforms he had envisioned after being instated as Munich’s school inspector. With the new powers granted to him by this office, he began to execute reforms but soon faced conservative opposition. Finally, an award he received from the Academy of Sciences in Erfurt in an essay competition for the text “The Civic Education of the German Youth” (“Die staatsbügerliche Erziehung der deutschen Jugend”) secured him the public recognition necessary to implement his vision for vocational education. Kerschensteiner argued that young people who left primary school were still too young to grasp the full meaning of citizenship and were thus prone to radical thought. Through the expansion of schooling in the form of continuation classes, apprentices and young workers could attend public school at least part-time. Thus, the social dangers of unqualified middle school graduates or unemployed youth prone to rioting could be avoided.4 In specialized classes, students could acquire practical knowledge for their particular profession. He acknowledged that any attempt to foster altruism in students had to tap into their egoistical self-interest and professional ambitions. For example, in agricultural schools, students could learn about grain pricing by combining information on labor costs with information on the relevance of grain prices within the national economy.5 The professional or vocational components of the curricula should be tied to questions about the strength of the nation. In short, Kerschensteiner was convinced that the individual’s selfish joy in work would lead to both personal diligence and, ultimately, through love for the community to love for the nation.6 In Munich, he hence transformed the continuation schools into specialized vocational schools that simultaneously served the industries’ interest in qualified personnel, the students’ interest in self-improvement, and the public’s interest in diligent and responsible citizens. These reforms soon caught the attention of foreign educators. Following an invitation by the Commercial Club of Chicago, he lectured in the United States in 1910. There he met John Dewey, another leading figure in the progressive education movement. Kerschensteiner was an admirer of Dewey and contributed to his popularization in Europe.7 In the following years, Kerschensteiner’s speeches, as well as translations of his other works, spread rapidly among Anglophone educators.

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His international influence waned over the course of the First World War. In Germany, however, Kerschensteiner continued his work as a school inspector as well as his political career as a liberal delegate to the Reichstag. Until his death in 1932, he lectured as an honorary professor for pedagogy at the University of Munich. Throughout his life, he seized every opportunity to translate his pedagogical thought into action. He was, however, neither the first nor the most radical proponent of a pedagogy of manual labor and a reform of the vocational education system. What then made Kerschensteiner’s ideas so attractive that, as a local school inspector, he gained an international reputation? Two points are essential in understanding the influence of his work. First, he addressed a variety of practical and theoretical concerns and covered a wide educational field from the training of teachers and the reform of primary school curricula, to the connection between psychology and children’s drawings.8 Herrmann Röhrs offers a concise summary of his versatility: [Kerschensteiner’s] achievement rests on three major—and interdependent—concerns: the establishment of vocational education and the inculcation of civic responsibility as the mainstays of general education; deriving from this, the development of a concept of education that stressed the links between education and life; and the attempt to anchor his system of education in the broader context of a philosophy of culture.9

A second crucial factor was his own practical experience. As an administrator and politician himself, he was acutely aware of party-political and financial hurdles to school reforms. It was his pragmatism that was central to Kerschensteiner’s appeal to Chinese educators. Furthermore, the broad scope of his work addressed many of the main strands of Republican China’s education discourse such as civic education (gongmin jiaoyu), continued education (buxi jiaoyu) and compulsory education (qiangzhi jiaoyu or yiwu jiaoyu), vocational education (zhiye jiaoyu), as well as labor education (laozuo jiaoyu). The existing literature contains only sporadic references to Kerschensteiner’s popularity in Republican China. Chinese researchers have focused on general biographical studies as well as on certain aspects of his works but have neglected the historical legacy of his writings in China and its transnational entanglements.10 German scholars like Philipp Gonon and Markus Krebs, on the other hand, paid particular attention to the historical and global significance of his thought.11 However, primarily

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due to language barriers, German and Chinese scholars have remained mutually ignorant of each other’s work, while many Anglophone historians of Chinese education have overlooked the role of Kerschensteiner altogether. Marianne Bastid and Paul J. Bailey are a rare exception in this regard. Bastid, however, merely comments on how frequently Chinese education journals of the Republican period discussed Kerschensteiner. Bailey contextualized rather than analyzed him as one among many foreign educators who contributed to a “globalization of Chinese education” in the early twentieth century.12 The influx of foreign writings left its mark on all of Republican China’s cultural and political spheres, as the abundant research on the May Fourth Movement, the New Life Movement, and the rural and vocational education movement demonstrates.13 It is this merging of national and international influences that makes the educational discourses of the era such a worthwhile subject of study. Furthermore, when educators exchanged their arguments within and across different publication platforms they often published under a pseudonym or anonymously, and more often than not omitted explicit references to their sources. As a result, many facets of Republican education thought still remain unexplored.14 Beyond the influence of Kerschensteiner, the dissemination and influence of more prominent progressive educators like Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Maria Montessori, and Eduard Spranger (1882–1963) in China also awaits further analysis.15 By comparison, the American progressive educator John Dewey has received considerable attention from historians.16 Yet, as Jessica Ching-Sze Wang notes, there is an obvious discrepancy between present-day interest in Dewey’s visit to China and the number of contemporary Chinese publications: Judging from the wide circulation and the immense popularity of Dewey’s lectures in China, one would expect to find many commentaries about Dewey in the hundreds of publications that emerged during the May Fourth period. However, secondary literature on Dewey comprises only a few newspaper commentaries and journal articles. The reasons for this lack of scholarly interest in Dewey are manifold. Some may have been so overwhelmed by ‘the Dewey fad’ that they became merely receptive rather than reflective. Some may have refrained from criticizing Dewey while he was still a guest in the country. Others may have had too limited an understanding of Dewey to write about him. Many people may have referred to Dewey without direct

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attribution. However, a thorough investigation into these references lies beyond the scope of this book and may not yield important results.17

In contrast to the “lack of scholarly interest in Dewey,” Chinese educators had commented extensively on Kerschensteiner’s work in at least 50 publications (both books and journal articles) by 1949. So why has Dewey received so much attention in Anglophone scholarship on Chinese education history while the name Kerschensteiner remains unknown? Three reasons might explain this disparity. First, Kerschensteiner’s popularity waned in Germany, the United States, Great Britain, and Russia after his death (for reasons to be discussed later), while Dewey’s philosophy continued to be held in high esteem. Second, Dewey visited China in person, and many of his Chinese students, who became influential intellectual leaders in the 1920s and 1930s, perpetuated his fame. Additionally, upon his return to the United States, Dewey published extensively on his stay in China.18 Unlike Dewey, Kerschensteiner had no personal connections to Chinese educators and might not even have been aware of his popularity in China. His Chinese reception thus went unnoticed by many foreign educators and historians. Third, because of the lack of personal connections to Chinese educators, historians have struggled in determining by which channels Kerschensteiner’s educational theories, as well as his reform proposals, reached China. Markus Krebs’ attempts to reconstruct the international distribution of translations of his writings have proven to be difficult because translations into East Asian languages were often commissioned without official concessions from German publishers.19 Krebs thus widely underestimated the number of translations published in Chinese.20 The diversity of foreign language sources on Kerschensteiner translated and edited for a Chinese audience further complicates matters. More than a dozen different renderings of Kerschensteiner’s name in Chinese were in use until a consensus formed around Kaixingsitaina after 1949. Furthermore, he appealed to very different groups of Chinese reformers, and they frequently combined his ideas and terminologies with other national or international strands of the educational discourse. In comparison to Russia, where reformers formed distinct competing factions,21 Chinese educators were more eclectic in their studies. We find references to Kerschensteiner in the writings of Chinese conservatives, anarchists, and communists alike. In many cases, we cannot even identify the political

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stance of the authors or translators because the use of pseudonyms and anonymous publications complicates the attribution of texts. Therefore, instead of focusing on factional divisions within Chinese education thought, for example, between radical and moderate approaches, it is more helpful to concentrate on the commonalities and to pursue the question of what made Kerschensteiner’s work so appealing across the political and social spectrum up to the present day.

Civic Education, Continuation Schools, and Vocational Education In nineteenth-century Germany, the ways of understanding the relationship between the rulers and the ruled had changed dramatically, and the side effects of industrialization further escalated social conflicts. Continuation schools (Fortbildungsschulen), which had been established prior to the 1870s,22 transformed by the turn of the century into an important instrument meant to strengthen social cohesion. They helped to bridge the “gap in ‘secondary socialization’”23 that left working youths without public guidance upon leaving primary school. Chinese intellectuals grappled with similar questions at the turn of the twentieth century: How could solidarity and national unity be constructed out of the ruins of a shattered imperial system? The weakness of the Chinese state was—at least partially—blamed on China’s low educational standards. Throughout the Republican period, criticism about a lack of concern for the public interest united Chinese intellectuals across the political spectrum, from moderate reformers to radical revolutionaries.24 In other words, at the turn of the twentieth century, in both China and Germany, the most pressing issue was how to turn a system for educating subjects into a system capable of educating citizens. When Kerschensteiner began to restructure Munich’s continuation schools in the early 1900s, Germany had already become recognized as a pioneer in continued education in East Asia. Chinese translations of Japanese texts encouraged educators to follow the German model.25 They stressed that German educators had once faced the same obstacles as China in establishing a system of universal public education (guomin jiaoyu puji), but that they had made considerable progress within a single decade.26 More than ten years passed, however, between Kerschensteiner’s first reform efforts and the publication of the first comprehensive Chinese

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account of his role in this reform process. In 1914, in three consecutive articles amounting to over 40 pages published in the influential Jiaoyu zazhi (Educational Review), an author using the pseudonym Zhihou offered a summary of Der Begriff der staatsbürgerlichen Erziehung (Education for Citizenship) and Grundfragen der Schulorganisation (The Schools and the Nation).27 Both books had been published in Germany in 1907 and were translated into English in 1911 and 1914, respectively.28 It is likely, however, that he based his articles on the German originals, supplemented by additional sources. Zhihou offered very detailed descriptions of German educational discourses, and his translation of the second volume “Xuexiao zhidulun” (“On the theory of the school system”) is much closer to the German original title than to its English translation. In a second series “Xiandai jiaoyu sichao” (“Current education thought”), in the same journal, Zhihou further expounded upon Kerschensteiner’s thought in comparison to other European and American pedagogues. His reading of Kerschensteiner was, however, somewhat critical. Zhihou noted, for example, that Kerschensteiner could hardly be called the initiator of the labor education movement (as other Chinese authors had referred to him). Nevertheless, he praised his views on education as essential for good citizenship.29 Apart from Zhihou, another author under the pen-name Tianmin was also instrumental in promoting Kerschensteiner in China.30 Tianmin’s description of foreign theories of civic education in the tenth issue (1915) of the Jiaoyu zazhi (Educational Review), the same issue that contained Zhihou’s first article on Kerschensteiner, featured Kerschensteiner prominently.31 Tianmin’s and Zhihou’s publications illustrate the relevance of his ideas for international educational trends and connect them specifically to Chinese social and political questions. In the following years, prominent Chinese educators like Gu Shusen (1886–1967) and Jiang Menglin (1886–1964) contributed to Kerschensteiner’s growing fame.32 Already by 1916, only two years after the first article on his work in the Jiaoyu zazhi (Educational Review), the prestigious Shangwu yinshuguan (Commercial Press) released the volume Kaishansitainai shi jiaoyushuo (Kerschensteiner’s education thought), edited by Fan Bingqing (1876–1929) and Zhu Yuanshan.33 We can thus conclude that Chinese educators first encountered the German model of public secondary vocational schools through Japanese writings. Nonetheless, it was American and British appraisals that brought Kerschensteiner’s work to the attention of Chinese educators. As I argue

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later, the popularity of Kerschensteiner and Dewey in Republican China was closely linked. The two authors’ writing reached China nearly simultaneously, as Dewey’s writings were first published in China in 1912.34 This parallel reception of these two pragmatic reformers is not unique to China, as studies on the Turkish and Yugoslav reception of their writings show.35 It is thus worth revisiting the connection between Kerschensteiner, Dewey, and the latter’s Chinese students. When Kerschensteiner visited Dewey at Columbia University in 1910, he was at the height of his career and his international popularity.36 At that time Columbia University had become a prominent destination for the study of pedagogy among Chinese students, including Hu Shi (1891–1962), Jiang Menglin, Tao Xingzhi (1891–1964), and Guo Bingwen (1880–1969). It is therefore very likely that their American colleagues brought Kerschensteiner to the attention of these Chinese educators. For example, Wang Wenpei, a student of Dewey’s at Columbia University in 1918, published the translated minutes of one of Kerschensteiner’s speeches in the United States in the journal Jiaoyu yu zhiye (Education and vocation), a publication of the Chinese Association for Vocational Education (CAVE).37 Another American supporter of Kerschensteiner was Edwin G.  Cooley,38 an advisor to the Commercial Club of Chicago. Excerpts from his work Vocational Education in Europe were translated into Chinese in 1915.39 The founder of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Paul Henry Hanus (1855–1941), a German émigré, was also among Kerschensteiner’s admirers.40 Hanus’ description of the Technical Continuation Schools of Munich was translated into Chinese in 1917. This text praises Kerschensteiner as a visionary and especially commends the efficacy and practicality of the new continuation school system.41 Apart from the international infatuation with his works that was absorbed by Chinese publications, we should also consider the reasons for his influence on the national level. In an analysis of the spread of foreign civic education thought in the early Republican period, Tian Haiyang has identified two reasons for Kerschensteiner’s popularity in China. First, although his civic education model addressed questions of individual freedom and economic necessity, his preference for the public interest corresponded to the prevailing opinion that civic education should first and foremost strengthen the Chinese nation. Second, Kerschensteiner’s emphasis on ethics and virtues resonated with Chinese educational traditions that stressed moral refinement.42

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After the German defeat in the First World War, Chinese educators grew disillusioned with the German education system and increasingly favored American models.43 At the same time, Kerschensteiner’s view that civic education was a panacea to rampant individualism undermining the unity of the modern nation-state received growing criticism in both Germany and the United States. While some US states passed legislation in emulation of the Munich model, others warned of a “Prussification” (Verpreußung) of the education system. Even Dewey, whom Kerschensteiner had revered, argued that the introduction of continuation schools would result in a two-tiered education system further aggravating social divisions.44 In 1919, the year in which the May Fourth Movement further politicized China’s intellectuals, and when Dewey arrived in China for an extended stay, these critical voices reached a Chinese audience. Wang Wenpei, who just one year earlier had published the article on the organization of vocational schools in Munich mentioned above, now presented Dewey’s reservations against Kerschensteiner’s thought.45 Thus, under the influence of national and international developments, Chinese educators came to question “the potential elitist consequences of a [German-­ style] dual-track system at the primary level.”46 For these reasons, the number of Chinese publications mentioning Kerschensteiner dwindled after 1919. Furthermore, the new school system introduced in 1922 consisted of an American-style division with six years of primary school, three years of junior school, and three years of senior secondary school.47 At closer inspection, however, the story is more complicated. The decreasing visibility of Kerschensteiner’s proposals for civic education in Chinese sources might be less a question of rejection than of osmosis. For example, in an article, which is claimed to be representative of the critiques informing the pro-American reforms of 1922,48 Gu Shusen argued that the existing system was not adaptive enough to local disparities and that it was too rigidly modeled after the Japanese system. He further claimed that it did not adequately prepare young graduates to find work and that it did not instill youths with a “spirit of civic republicanism” (gongheguo guomin zhi jingshen).49 Simultaneously, he called for increased efforts to establish more continuation schools and vocational schools in which the working youth could improve their theoretical and practical knowledge. In all school settings, the curricula should include civic education (gongmin jiaoyu).50 In his conclusions, Gu combined Dewey’s principles of democratic schooling with Kerschensteiner’s belief that continuation schools could be used to further both the vocational and the civic education of

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working youth. Gu’s use of the Chinese terms for “citizens,” guomin as well as gongmin, further illustrates this point. As Culp has noted: Guomin emphasized national membership and the individual’s identification with a national community. Gongmin stressed the individual’s participation in the public life of his or her community, participation that could be formalized in political institutions or expressed through social action or cultural expression in the public sphere.51

Gu promoted a Deweyan “mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience,”52 in which each individual’s identification with the nation, as well as their active contribution to society, was equally important. This goal was to be achieved through civic education in vocational schools. In short, Dewey’s civic education thought was merged with the organizational aspects of Kerschensteiner’s school reforms. During the following years, references to the name Kerschensteiner and his reformed continuation schools decreased, yet his vision of an expansion of schooling as a tool to train and morally guide the working youth remained influential throughout the 1920s.53 Jiang Menglin, for example, promoted Kerschensteiner’s notion of “useful citizens” (youyong de guomin),54 and the Chinese Association for Vocational Education specifically identified vocational training as a means to educate productive citizens.55 There were practical concerns, as well, which led to a critical reevaluation of the Munich model in the 1920s. Efforts to combine part-time work with part-time schooling failed to meet expectations in China. In Munich, Kerschensteiner had sought the support of local guilds, craftsmen, and industrialists as advisors to school boards or as instructors in the classroom. In China, the newly established continuation schools received neither the required political and industrial support nor the recognition of parents and students, leading to a growing disenchantment with this model.56 Overall, while many Chinese educators retained their belief in the connection between civic education and vocational schooling, they struggled to emulate the systemic and practical aspects of Kerschensteiner’s reform proposals. Nonetheless, during the early Republican period he became an undeniable influence within Chinese education thought. In the 1930s, Jinxiu yueban (Continued education monthly) featured his biography alongside biographical sketches of the most influential European

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pedagogues like Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Kant. However, Kerschensteiner was not, as one would expect, portrayed as the founding father of the reform of German continuation schools or as a representative of civic education thought, but rather as a proponent of the labor school (donglao xuexiao).57 This brings us to the second aspect of the reception of Kerschensteiner’s thought in China: His proposition of introducing labor into the school curricula.

The Labor Education Movement Before the 1920s, most Chinese educators regarded Kerschensteiner as a proponent of work as a pedagogical tool in the service of civic education. With the publication of a Chinese summary of his speech commemorating the anniversary of Pestalozzi’s birthday in 1908, this image began to change.58 What he proposed under the slogan of Arbeitsschule (labor school)59 was physical as well as mental engagement in all school subjects making “manual activity a systematic tool for the training of the will and the sharpening of the judgement.”60 Consequently, Kerschensteiner came to be regarded in China as an heir to Pestalozzi’s thought and as a leader in the movement for labor education (laodong jiaoyu), which was juxtaposed against the old Buchschule (book school).61 At the time, the principle of physical activity that Kerschensteiner emphasized was on the rise around the world, from Dewey’s experimental school at the University of Chicago, Rabindranath Tagore’s (1861–1941) boy school in India, to Tao Xingzhi’s (1891–1946) Xiaozhuang shifan xuexiao (Xiaozhuang normal school) in China.62 Together with Yan Yangchu (James Yen, 1893–1990), Tao Xingzhi attempted to shift the attention of education reformers from the urban centers to rural communities in the late 1920s.63 Much like Kerschensteiner, he promoted an education that would foster both the physical and the mental aspects of labor, as well as diligence through practical activities.64 Despite the parallels that can be drawn between the progressive pedagogy of Tao, Dewey, and Kerschensteiner, Hubert Brown rightfully cautions us that Tao Xingzhi’s “actual career illustrates how very much Progressivism in China was a Chinese phenomenon, phrased and shaped in categories of Chinese culture and understanding, whatever the original sources of inspiration.”65 Hence, turning back from the international to the national level in search of the causes for the growing popularity of the labor school movement, we can attribute it, at least in part, to the spread of anarchist thought

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in the early Republican period, which brought a political dimension to the question of labor: “Chinese anarchists, keenly aware that the distinction between mental and manual labor had for centuries served to distinguish the rulers from the ruled, perceived in labor the means not only of creating a ‘whole person’ but of bridging the gap between rulers and ruled and thus abolishing classes in society.”66 While some educators celebrated the revolutionary spirit of Kerschensteiner’s conception of Arbeitsschule, more moderate forces appreciated its stabilizing potential: “Chinese educators were impressed with the moral focus of the Arbeitsschule given the fact that they often warned of the potential dangers of an over-emphasis on vocational training for individual self-betterment and prosperity that might lead to rampant individualism threatening the collective interest.”67 Overall, Kerschensteiner seemed to represent an educator who had battled the adverse effects of individualism but who cared deeply about the wellbeing of the working class and the free development of the child’s character. His popularity thus stemmed from a seemingly irreconcilable ambiguity which enabled various readings of his works, not just in China. As Gonon noted, although Kerschensteiner revised his writings constantly in order to give them more clarity, the Arbeitsschule and “work within the school solely survived as metaphors.”68 Herrmann Röhrs went even further in his conclusion that “ever since Kerschensteiner coined the term Arbeitsschule, it has been one of the most frequently quoted and frequently misunderstood elements in the vocabulary of the educational reform movement.”69 In China, however, his work on labor education was a source of inspiration rather than a blueprint, and so this ambiguity facilitated rather than constrained its dissemination. In the meantime, the October Revolution resulted in a Russian reevaluation of Kerschensteiner. Given the growing importance of leftist education thought in China in the 1930s, we should take a slight detour to explore how Kerschensteiner’s teachings were received in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union before we return to the situation in China. According to Mchitarjan, “no other German or even European pedagogue had such a strong reception in Russia before 1917 as Kerschensteiner. Kerschensteiner was clearly the most popular western pedagogue in pre-Soviet Russia.”70 Just like in China, his conception of the labor school and his reform plans for vocational schooling appealed to two different groups of Russian educators. Those who were mostly concerned with improving the skills of workers and maintaining social stability through strengthening the economy and national cohesion turned to his writings on civic education and

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the vocational school system. Adherents of a more progressive pedagogy that placed the child in the center of all pedagogical concerns instead studied his texts on the Arbeitsschule.71 Among Soviet Socialist educators, however, Kerschensteiner was not held in high regard. Pavel Blonski (1884–1941), for one, was among his most fervent critics and pilloried him for having a chauvinist perspective on workers. He found fault with Kerschensteiner’s understanding of vocational education centered on an apprenticeship system, which Blonski regarded as obsolete in industrializing societies.72 Until the Communist victory in 1949, many Chinese educators nonetheless dismissed these Soviet attacks, and some even explicitly favored Kerschensteiner’s thought on labor education over that of Dewey or Blonski.73 Thus, although he gradually lost his influence in other countries, Kerschensteiner continued to enjoy enormous popularity in China throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The international reception of his work Die Seele des Erziehers und das Problem der Lehrerbildung (The soul of the educator and the problem of teacher training), published in 1921, illustrates this phenomenon. The first Japanese translation appeared only in 1957, and no English or Russian version has yet appeared.74 In China, however, the Shangwu yinshuguan (Commercial Press) finished a translation into Chinese in 1926. The topic of teacher education, contrary to expectations, did not resonate as well with contemporary Chinese educational concerns. However, when the Commercial Press commissioned a full translation of Kerschensteiner’s work on the Arbeitsschule from the German original in 1935—two decades after Chinese education journals had first discussed it—the book was again a success.75 A contemporary book review concluded: “Many aspects of [this book] can guide us Chinese educators, who are hesitantly facing a crossroad, like a compass.”76

Reevaluations Under Communist Rule Toward the end of the civil war, many proponents for Kerschensteiner’s ideas who had held positions in the national educational administration followed the Nationalists (Guomindang) to Taiwan, such as Gu Zhaolin, who had worked as a school inspector and was an outspoken critic of Communism.77 In mainland China, Soviet models and Marxist polytechnical education took the lead in educational thought and thereby stifled engagement with Kerschensteiner’s work. Similarly, American and

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European educators critically reexamined the pedagogical reform movement after the Second World War: In the 1960s, the German tradition of vocational pedagogy and especially Kerschensteiner’s approach was sharply criticized as being obsolete, backward, apologetic, and as legitimising the current capitalistic regime. Furthermore, the historical exponents of vocational education were known to be politically right-wing, tending towards nationalism and later even National Socialism.78

Although the international study of Kerschensteiner lost momentum, in China, his writings remained visible within the discourse on the history of education.79 The Cihai (Cihai encyclopedia) listed him as one of the most famous foreign educators in 1961,80 and in 1964 the journal Renmin jiaoyu (People’s education) devoted several pages to quotes from his The Soul of the Educator, even if only to refute his views.81 The continued presence of Kerschensteiner’s ideas as part of a pre-­ revolutionary pedagogical legacy does not fully explain why Chinese scholars suddenly took a renewed interest in his work in the 1980s. This resurgence was, yet again, not a linear process: Some scholars continued to defame Kerschensteiner as bourgeois and tried, for example, to disentangle Tao Xingzhi’s and Kerschensteiner’s respective contributions to the Chinese labor school movement.82 Other scholars became infatuated with Republican history in order to reflect on current social issues.83 In the reform period of the 1980s, too many students still left primary and secondary schools without solid vocational training or the possibility to supplement their education through part-time schooling.84 Ultimately, Kerschensteiner’s works reemerged as part of the search for a realistic reform proposal that would not only strengthen the state’s control over the working youth but also meet the vocational as well as social needs of the students. During this time, researchers still relied on translations from the Republican era or, if no Chinese translation was available, on English translations from the early twentieth century.85 In 2003, the Renmin jiaoyu chubanshe (People’s Education Press) published a collection of Kerschensteiner’s newly translated writings on labor schools, teacher’s education, civic education, as well as an introduction to his life and work.86 Included are his texts on the Arbeitsschule, the spirit of the teacher, and civic education. These three topics have received the most scholarly

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attention in recent years. Kerschensteiner’s contributions to the dual system of vocational education—once scolded by socialist reformers for cementing social divisions—are now especially praised as one of the factors explaining contemporary Germany’s high industrial standard and low unemployment rates. Present-day discussions continue to revolve around the same problems as at the turn of the twentieth century: Can and should China try to emulate a foreign education system that developed out of different social and cultural contexts, and if so, which aspects could prove useful for China?87 Despite Chinese educators’ ongoing reexamination of Kerschensteiner, the problems facing the Chinese education system today are not identical to those of the Republican period. They thus need to reconceptualize his thought in the face of current social and educational challenges.

Conclusion Kerschensteiner’s proposals for a reevaluation of the importance of practical work and experimental learning appealed to educators across the political spectrum. His critics, however, recoiled against the idea of forging “useful citizens” in service to the needs of the state, rather than those of the individual, and feared the loss of personal liberty. Ehrenhard Skiera has discussed the connection between the demand for the subordination of the individual to collective interests, which was likewise promoted by other progressive pedagogues like Ellen Key, Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), and Maria Montessori, and the rise of totalitarian rule. Indeed, he concluded, under Bolshevist and Fascist regimes, these “pedagogical imperatives” later “served as ideological weapons for the legitimization and legalization of physical and psychological violence.”88 These imperatives were also upheld in Maoist China, where education was meant to serve the construction of the Socialist state. Until the 1980s, Kerschensteiner’s Chinese critics were less opposed to his advocacy of a strong state but were concerned more with his rejection of socialism. With the beginning of the reform era, however, when ideology lost its grip over education, Kerschensteiner’s pragmatism was reexamined and the bourgeois label vanished. Kerschensteiner is now considered an educational reformer who speaks to the problems of present-day China. In contrast, in Russia, the United States, Japan, and Germany, most scholars regard Kerschensteiner as little more than a historical footnote in early twentieth-­ century education thought whose teachings bear little relevance for today.

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As he himself admitted, “ideas only become alive when they have been tested as to the possibility of their realization, by thinking them out logically to their consequences, and by suiting them to the forms of our present-­day existence.”89 Thus, although the international progressive education movement mediated the discovery of his writings in Republican China, the Chinese reevaluation of his works has since become an independent field of educational research. As the example of Kerschensteiner illustrates, the study of Republican Chinese education thought requires us to revisit primary sources across languages and world regions. It forces us to reflect upon the local specifics of educational discourses without losing sight of common themes and connections. Progressive education thus emerges as a transcultural movement in which even categories such as “German” and “Chinese” can be deconstructed into a plurality of voices and perspectives. Like in a very cumbersome jigsaw puzzle, a picture emerges as more strands of Chinese education debates are uncovered from the multitude of Republican era publications. The puzzle will, however, always remain incomplete due to lost sources and hidden paths of exchange. Such a Sisyphean task rewards us, nonetheless, with new approaches to contemporary Chinese education thought.

Notes 1. Tang Shouqian, “Xie zai ‘Ertongnian yanlun teji’ zhiqian” [Preface to the “Special issue on discourses on childhood”], Fujian jiaoyu 2, no. 8 (1936):1. 2. Ellen Key, The Century of the Child (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909). For a critical discussion of Key’s pedagogical thinking see Sonja Sandomeer, Ellen Key: Anwältin des Kindes? Kritische Analyse ihres Werkes “Das Jahrhundert des Kindes” (Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 2006). The Chinese reception of Key’s education thought remains under-examined, but for Chinese reactions to her thoughts on love and marriage see Lynn Pan, When True Love Came to China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), 154–69. 3. This biographical account is based on Marie Kerschensteiner, Georg Kerschensteiner: Der Lebensweg eines Schulreformers (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1939); Diane Simons, Georg Kerschensteiner: His Thought and Its Relevance Today (London: Routledge, 2018); Markus Krebs, Georg Kerschensteiner im internationalen pädagogischen Diskurs zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt, 2004), 11–17.

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4. Georg Kerschensteiner, Staatsbürgerliche Erziehung der deutschen Jugend (Erfurt: Karl Villaret, 1901), 8–9. 5. Ibid., 50. 6. Georg Kerschensteiner, Grundfragen der Schulorganisation (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1912), 14–20. 7. Georg Kerschensteiner, “Die Volksschule der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika,” Süddeutsche Monatshefte, no. 1 (1911): 477–88. 8. Kerschensteiner’s study of more than 300,000 children’s drawings from Munich’s primary and secondary schools was regarded as so impressive in scope and methodology that he was invited to lecture on his findings in London. His visit contributed to the growing recognition of his work in the field of vocational education in Great Britain. Krebs, Georg Kerschensteiner, 23; Georg Kerschensteiner, Die Entwicklung der zeichnerischen Begabung (Munich: Carl Gerber, 1905). 9. Herrmann Röhrs, “Georg Kerschensteiner (1852–1932),” Prospects: The Quarterly Review of Comparative Education 23, nos. 3/4 (1993): 807. 10. Chen Qiuling, “Kaixingsitaina zhiye jiaoyu sixiang yanjiu zongshu” [Comprehensive survey of research on Kerschensteiner’s education thought], Xin kecheng, no. 10 (2012): 173. 11. Philipp Gonon, The Quest for Modern Vocational Education: Georg Kerschensteiner Between Dewey, Weber and Simmel (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009); Philipp Gonon, Arbeitsschule und Qualifikation: Arbeit und Schule im 19. Jahrhundert, Kerschensteiner und die heutigen Debatten zur beruflichen Qualifikation (Bern: Peter Lang, 1992); Philipp Gonon, “Berufsbildung und Globalisierung: Vom Kerschensteiner- zum Kompetenz-Modus,” in Berufsbildung zwischen Tradition und Moderne. Internationale Berufsbildungsforschung, ed. Matthias Pilz (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2019), 283–95; Krebs, Georg Kerschensteiner. 12. Marianne Bastid, Educational Reform in Early Twentieth-Century China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), ix; Paul Bailey, “Globalization and Chinese Education in the Early 20th Century,” Frontiers of Education in China 8, no. 3 (2018): 389–419; Paul J. Bailey, Reform the People: Changing Attitudes Towards Popular Education in Early Twentieth-­Century China (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 211–12. 13. Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Federica Ferlanti, “The New Life Movement in Jiangxi Province, 1934–1938,” Modern Asian Studies 44, no. 5 (2010): 961–1000; Kate Merkel-Hess, The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Barbara Schulte, “Unwelcome Stranger to the System: Vocational Education in

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Early Twentieth-Century China,” Comparative Education 49, no. 2 (2013): 226–41. 14. See also Ruth Hayhoe and Marianne Bastid, eds., China’s Education and the Industrialized World (New York: Sharpe, 1987). The contributions to this volume showcase how more in-depth analysis of certain aspects of Chinese educational thought can provide new impetus to the field. 15. A brief introduction to the translation of Pestalozzi’s works into Chinese has been given by Xiao Lang, “Peisitailuoqi zai jindai Zhongguo—Yi qi jiaoyu zhuzuo he sixiang de yijie wei zhongxin de kaocha” [Pestalozzi in modern China—A study on the translation and introduction of his main educational works and thought], Jiaoyu xuebao 6, no. 1 (2010): 82–92. For Montessori see Tian Jingzheng, Wan Xinjue, and Deng Yanhua, “Mengtaosuoli jiaoxuefa ji qi zai Zhongguo de chuanbo” [Montessori teaching methods and their spread in China],” Jiaoke. Jiaocai. Jiaofa 34, no. 6 (2014): 91–96. 16. Jessica Ching-Sze Wang, John Dewey in China (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007); Barry Keenan, The Dewey Experiment in China: Educational Reform and Political Power in the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); Su Zhixin, “A Critical Evaluation of John Dewey’s Influence on Chinese Education,” American Journal of Education 103, no. 3 (1995): 302–25. 17. Wang, John Dewey in China, 41. 18. Ibid., 83–86. 19. Gerhard Wehle, ed., Bibliographie Georg Kerschensteiner: Im Druck erschienene Schriften, Reden und Manuskripte, vol. 1 (Wiesbaden: Springer, 1987), 300. 20. Krebs, Georg Kerschensteiner, 97–109. 21. Irina Mchitarjan, Der russische Blick auf die deutsche Reformpädagogik: Zur Rezeption deutscher Schulreformideen in Russland zwischen 1900 und 1917 (Hamburg: Dr. Kovac, 1998), 110–38. 22. Klaus Harney, Die preußische Fortbildungsschule (Weinheim: Beltz, 1980), 70–71; Klaus Harney, “Fortbildungsschulen,” in Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte, 1800–1870, ed. Karl-Ernst Jeismann and Peter Lundgreen, vol. 3 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1987), 281–92. 23. Wolf-Dietrich Greinert, “The German Philosophy of Vocational Education,” in Vocational Education: International Approaches, Developments and Systems, ed. Linda Clark and Christopher Wynch (Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2012), 51. 24. Chan Ming and Arif Dirlik, Schools into Fields and Factories: Anarchists, the Guomindang and the National Labor University in Shanghai, 1927–1932 (Durham, NC: Duke University, 1991), 24.

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25. The earliest reports in Chinese can be traced back to the translations of Akashi Takaichiro’s writings. Akashi Takaichiro, “Shiye buxi jiaoyulun” [On realia and continued education, part 1], Jiaoyu shijie, no. 79 (1904): 1–24; Akashi Takaichiro, “Shiye buxi jiaoyulun” [part 2], Jiaoyu shijie, no. 83 (1904): 25–42; Akashi Takaichiro, “Shiye buxi jiaoyulun” [part 3],” Jiaoyu shijie, no. 87 (1904): 43–56. I translated shiye jiaoyu here as “realia education,” as the text discusses the German Realschulen that combined practical and theoretical instruction. 26. “Deguo buxi jiaoyu zhidu” [The German continuation school system], Jiaoyu shijie, no. 117 (1906): 1–26. 27. Zhihou, “Kaishanxitainai zhi jiaoyushuo” [Kerschensteiner’s education thought, part 1], Jiaoyu zazhi 5, no. 10 (1914): 71–84; Zhihou, “Kaishanxitainai zhi jiaoyushuo” [part 2], Jiaoyu zazhi 5, no. 11 (1914): 85–96; Zhihou, “Kaishanxitainai zhi jiaoyushuo” [part 3], Jiaoyu zazhi 5, no. 12 (1914): 97–111. 28. Krebs, Georg Kerschensteiner, 98. 29. Zhihou, “Kaishanxitainai zhi jiaoyushuo” [part 3], 110; Zhihou, “Xiandai jiaoyu sichou” [Current education thought], Jiaoyu zazhi 7, no. 11 (1915): 75–76. 30. Zhihou and Tianmin might be given either names or a pseudonym so that the identity of the authors could not be determined. 31. Tianmin, “Gongmin jiaoyu wenti” [The question of civic education], Jiaoyu zazhi 5, no. 10 (1914): 115–22. 32. Gu Shusen, “Deguo Minghengshi shiye buxi xuexiao zhi gaikuang” [Survey on vocational continuation schools in Munich, Germany], Zhonghua jiaoyujie 6, no. 2 (1917): 1–6; Jiang Menglin, “Peisitailuoqi shengchen Kaishanxitainai gongye jiaoyu zhi yanshuo” [Kerschensteiner’s speech on labor schools commemorating Pestalozzi’s birthday], Jiaoyu yu zhiye, no. 3 (1918): 1–5. 33. Fan Bingqing and Zhu Yuanshan, Kaishansitainai shi jiaoyushuo [Kerschensteiner’s education thought] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1916). The dates of Zhu Yuanshan’s birth and death are unknown. 34. Jie Qi, “A History of the Present: Chinese Intellectuals, Confucianism and Pragmatism,” in Inventing the Modern Self, ed. Thomas S.  Popkewitz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 256. 35. See the contributions by Sabiha Bilgi, Seckin Özsoy, and Noah W. Sobe in Thomas S.  Popkewitz, ed., Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey: Modernities and the Traveling of Pragmatism in Education (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 36. Krebs, Georg Kerschensteiner, 93. 37. Wang Wenpei, “Minxiangshi buxi xuexiao zhi zuzhifa—Kaishansitainai yanshuoci” [The organizational structure of Munich’s continuation

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schools—Speech by Kerschensteiner], Jiaoyu yu zhiye, no. 10 (1918): 1–13. The English original was published as Georg Kerschensteiner, “The Organization of the Continuation School in Munich,” in Three Lectures on Vocational Training (Chicago: The Commercial Club of Chicago, 1911), 17–29. 38. The dates of Cooley’s birth and death are unknown. 39. Edwin G. Cooley, “Zhiye jiaoyulun” [On Vocational Education, part 1], Jiaoyu zazhi 7, no. 2 (1915): 9–20; Edwin G. Cooley, “Zhiye jiaoyulun” [Part 2], Jiaoyu zazhi 7, no. 3 (1915): 21–30; Edwin G.  Cooley, Zhiye jiaoyulun [On Vocational Education], trans. Zhu Jingkuan (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1916). 40. Harvard Graduate School of Education, “Paul Henry Hanus, 1855–1941,” accessed March 12, 2020, https://www.gse.harvard.edu/about/history/ deans/hanus. 41. Paul Henry Hanus, “Technical Continuation Schools of Munich,” The School Review 13, no. 9 (1905): 678–83; Han Nashi [Paul H.  Hanus], “Menxincheng zhi shiye jixu xuexiao” [Munich’s vocational continuation schools),” trans. Gu Zhaolin, Jingshi jiaoyubao, no. 41 (1917): 9–17. 42. Tian Haiyang, “Min chu gongmin jiaoyu xingqi ji sixiang de duanru yu chuanbo” [The rise of civic education and its introduction and dissemination in the early Republican period),” Qiusuo, no. 10 (2011): 233–34. 43. Suzanne Pepper, Radicalism and Education Reform in 20th Century China: The Search for an Ideal Development Model (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 61. 44. Michael Knoll, “Dewey versus Kerschensteiner: Der Streit um die Einführung der Fortbildungsschule in den USA 1910–1917,” Pädagogische Rundschau 47, no. 2 (1993): 131–45. 45. Wang Wenpei, “Duwei boshi duiyu shiye jiaoyu zhi yijian” [Dr. Dewey’s views on vocational education], Jiaoyu congkan, no. 1 (1919): 1–4. 46. Bailey, “Globalization and Chinese Education,” 413. 47. Barry Keenan, “Educational Reform and Politics in Early Republican China,” Journal of Asian Studies 33, no. 2 (1974): 225. For the education reforms of 1922 see also Margo S. Gewurtz, “Social Reality and Educational Reform: The Case of the Chinese Vocational Education Association 1917–1927,” Modern China 4, no. 2 (1978): 162–63. 48. Li Huaxing, Minguo jiaoyushi [The history of education of the Republican period] (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 1997), 133. 49. Gu Shusen, “Duiyu gaige xianxing xuezhi zhi yijian” [Views on reforming the current education system], Jiaoyu zazhi 12, no. 9 (1920): 1–3. I adopted the term “civic republicanism” from Culp, which I believe to be more fitting than Barry Keenan’s “spirit of democratic education.” Robert Culp, “Synthesizing Citizenship in Modern China,” History Compass, no.

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5/6 (2007): 1838; Keenan, “Educational Reform and Politics,” 225. Chinese sources only refer to republican (gongheguo), not “democratic” (such as minzhu) principles. Hence it is difficult to infer the authors’ understanding of democracy. 50. Gu Shusen, “Duiyu gaige xianxing xuezhi,” 4–7. 51. Culp, “Synthesizing Citizenship,” 1837; Robert Culp, Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in South-Eastern China, 1912–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 4. 52. John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), 101. 53. See, for example, Daozhi, “Deguo zhi buxi jiaoyu” [German continuation education], Jiaoyu zazhi 15, no. 5 (1922): 7–9. 54. Jiang Menglin, “Peisitailuoqi shengchen,” 1–5; He Zhifang, “Jiang Menglin zaoqi zhiye jiaoyu sixiang yanjiu” [Study on Jiang Menglin’s early vocational education thought], Cizhi, no. 11 (2016): 16–17. 55. Bailey, Reform the People, 208. 56. A summary of the criticism continuation schools and vocational schools faced can be found in: Xiong Zhugao, “Shishi zhiye jiaoyu shi suode de ji ge shibai yuanyin he lixiang de gaige fangfa” [Several reasons for the failure of implementing vocational education and ideal reform measures], Jiaoyu zazhi 17, no. 1 (1925): 1–6. 57. Jin Xueyan, “Jindai jiaoyu mingren shenghuo shi: (Jiu) Kaixinsitainai Korrchensteiner [sic]” [Biographies of modern educators: Nine, Kerschensteiner], Jinxiu banyuekan 1, no. 10 (1932): 19–20. 58. Kaishanxitainai [Kerschensteiner], “Weilai zhi xuexiao” [The school of the future), ed. and trans. Yu Zhen, Jiaoyu zazhi 12, no. 2 (1920): 1–12. 59. There are a number of English terms that have been used to translate the German term Arbeitsschule, including activity school, labor school, and industrial school. In Chinese, the terminological variety within the labor education movement was even broader, ranging from qinlao jiaoyu, laozuo jiaoyu, and laodong jiaoyu to gongzuo jiaoyu. A thorough discussion of the different conceptualizations of Kerschensteiner’s conception of Arbeitsschule, as reflected in this differing terminology, would be fruitful but goes beyond the scope of this study. 60. Georg Kerschensteiner, The Idea of the Industrial School, trans. Rudolf Pintner (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913), 56; Ralf Koerrenz, Annika Blichmann, and Sebastian Engelmann, “Georg Kerschensteiner and the Industrial School,” in Alternative Schooling and New Education: European Concepts and Theories, ed. Ralf Koerrenz, Annika Blichmann, and Sebastian Engelmann (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 40. 61. See, for example, Tianmin, “Qinlao jiaoyulun” [The theory of labor education], Jiaoyu zazhi 7, no. 1 (1915): 8; Jiang Jingsan, “Laodong jiaoyu

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xuezhe Kaishansitaila de sixiang” [The thought of labor education scholar Kerschensteiner], Jiaoyu zazhi 22, no. 1 (1930): 21–33; Chen Biao, “Kaishansitaila de laodong jiaoyuguan” [Kerschensteiner’s labor education thought], Guoli laodong daxue sanrikan, no. 5 (1930): 2–3; Jin Rongxuan, “Zuijin Deguo de laodong jiaoyu xueshuo yu laodong xuexiao zuzhi” [Recent German theories on labor education and the organization of labor schools], Jiaoyu zazhi 23, no. 2 (1931): 61–72. 62. Kumkum Bhattacharya, Rabindranath Tagore: Adventure of Ideas and Innovative Practices in Education (Cham: Springer, 2014), 51. 63. Merkel-Hess, The Rural Modern, 55–79. 64. Tao Zhixing [Tao Xingzhi], “Zhongguo jiaoyu de gaizao” [Chinese education reform], Pudong zhongxue qikan, no. 2 (1929): 34. 65. Hubert O.  Brown, “Tao Xingzhi: Progressive Educator in Republican China,” Biography 13, no. 1 (1990): 22. 66. Chan Ming and Dirlik, Schools into Fields and Factories, 16. 67. Bailey, “Globalization and Chinese Education,” 409–10. 68. Gonon, The Quest for Modern Vocational Education, 92. 69. Röhrs, “Georg Kerschensteiner,” 814. 70. Mchitarjan, Der russische Blick, 111. See also Irina Mchitarjan, “John Dewey and the Development of Education in Russia before 1920—Report on a Forgotten Reception,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 19 (2000): 112–13. 71. Mchitarjan, Der russische Blick, 110–38. 72. Pawel Blonski, “Was ist die ‘Arbeitsschule’? (1919),” in Transformation und Tradition in Ost und West, ed. Artur Meier, Ursula Rabe-Kleberg, and Klaus Rodax (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1997), 166–67. 73. Li Huafang, “Laozuo jiaoyu yu Zhongguo” [Labor education and China], Hebei liu Dong niankan, no. 1 (1934): 119–20. 74. Krebs, Georg Kerschensteiner, 101–2. Krebs falsely assumed that the work was first translated into Chinese in 1930. 75. Qixiangsitaiyin [Kerschensteiner], Jiaoyujia de jingshen [The soul of the teacher] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1926). 76. Zaitian, “‘Gongzuo xuexiao yaoyi’ ji qi zuozhe” [“The concept of labor schools” and its author], Xin beichen 2, no. 4 (1936): 390. 77. Gu Zhaolin, “Jiaoyubu duxue Gu Zhaolin xiansheng zai ben yuan jiang ruhe fuxing Zhonghua minzu” [The ministry of education’s school inspector Gu Zhaolin gave a talk at this school on how to revitalize the Chinese people], Bingzhou xueyuan yuekan 1, no. 7 (23). 78. Gonon, The Quest for Modern Vocational Education, 20. In a letter from 1927, Kerschensteiner explicitly criticized the fascist Italian regime, yet because he died the year before Hitler seized power in Germany, we can only speculate about the attitude Kerschensteiner would have  adopted

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towards Nazi rule. Georg Kerschensteiner, June 20, 1927, Document 5, Universitätsarchiv Innsbruck, https://www.uibk.ac.at/universitaetsarchiv/politische-­dokumente-­aus-­dem-­universitaetsarchiv/. 79. Yang Rongchun, “Ziben zhuyi jiaoyu lilun tixi tansuo” [An exploration of the theoretical system of capitalist education], Xueshu yanjiu, no. 4 (1926): 75–84. 80. Zhonghua shuju cihai bianjisuo, ed., “Kaixingsitaina” [Kerschensteiner], in Cihai shixingben—Wenhua jiaoyu [Cihai trial version, culture and education), vol. 7 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1961), 40; Zhonghua shuju cihai bianjisuo, ed., “Laodong jiaoyu” [Labor education], in Cihai shixingben— Wenhua jiaoyu, vol. 7 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1961), 3. 81. Ling Xicheng, “Women he zichan jieji fan’ai jiaoyu sixiangde fenqi” [The difference between our and the bourgeois education of love], Renmin jiaoyu, no. 3 (1964): 29–37; “Zichan jieji jiaoyujie yanlun zhailu” [Excerpts from bourgeois educators’ statements, part 1], Renmin jiaoyu, no. 3 (1964): 37–39; “Zichan jieji jiaoyujie yanlun zhailu” [Part 2], Renmin jiaoyu, no. 4 (1964): 20–22. Whether by oversight or intentionally, Kerschensteiner’s quotes are listed without further comment and hence are more of a stimulating reading rather than a textual criticism. 82. Mao Weiran, Zhongguo jindai ge pai jiaoyu sixiang yu jiaoxue fangfa jianshi [A brief history of the different schools of education thought and teaching methods in modern China] (Chengdu: Sichuan jiaoyu chubanshe, 1987), 90. 83. Min Jie, “20 shiji 80 niandai yilai de Zhongguo jindai shehuishi yanjiu” [Chinese research on modern Social History since the 1980s], Jindaishi yanjiu, no. 2 (2004): 211–12; Xu Yipeng, “Guanyu dangqian jiaoyuxue yanjiu zhong de ji ge wenti” [Several questions concerning recent research in pedagogy], Dongbei shifan daxuebao—Zhexue shehui kexueban, no. 2 (1984): 75. 84. Zhao Weiping, “Kaixingsitaina de jixu jiaoyu lilun chushen” [Exploring Kerschensteiner’s theory of continued education], Hangzhou daxue xuebao—Zhexue shehui kexueban 18, no. 3 (1988): 136. 85. See, for example, Liu Jie, “Kaixingsitaina de zhiye jiaoyu sixiang shuping” [Review of Kerschensteiner’s vocational education thought], Jiaoyu pinglun, no. 3 (1992): 56–58. 86. Kaixingsitaina [Kerschensteiner], Kaixingsitaina jiaoyu lunzhuxuan [Kerschensteiner’s selected educational works], ed. Zheng Huiqing (Beijing: Renmin jiaoyu chubanshe, 2003). This translation deviates in several respects from earlier translations, for example, by translating “staatsbürgerliche Erziehung” (civic education) as guomin jiaoyu, not gongmin jiaoyu, as was the general convention during the Republican period.

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87. Wei Xiaofeng, Zhang Minzhu, and Gu Yueqi, “Deguo ‘shuangyuanzhi’ zhiye jiaoyu moshi de tedian ji qishi” [Characteristics and lessons of the German vocational education model of a ‘dual track system’], Guojia jiaoyu xingzheng xueyuan xuebao, no. 1 (2010): 83, 92–95. 88. Ehrenhard Skiera, Erziehung und Kontrolle: Über das totalitäre Erbe in der Pädagogik im “Jahrhundert des Kindes” (Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt, 2018), 16–17. 89. Kerschensteiner, The Idea of the Industrial School, x.

Bibliography Akashi Takaichiro. “Shiye buxi jiaoyulun” [On realia and continued education, part 1]. Jiaoyu shijie, no. 79 (1904): 1–24. ———. “Shiye buxi jiaoyulun” [part 2]. Jiaoyu shijie, no. 83 (1904): 25–42. ———. “Shiye buxi jiaoyulun” [part 3]. Jiaoyu shijie, no. 87 (1904): 43–56. Bailey, Paul. “Globalization and Chinese Education in the Early 20th Century.” Frontiers of Education in China 8, no. 3 (2018): 389–419. Bailey, Paul J. Reform the People: Changing Attitudes Towards Popular Education in Early Twentieth-Century China. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990. Bastid, Marianne. Educational Reform in Early Twentieth-Century China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988. Bhattacharya, Kumkum. Rabindranath Tagore: Adventure of Ideas and Innovative Practices in Education. Cham: Springer, 2014. Blonski, Pawel. “Was ist die ‘Arbeitsschule’? (1919).” In Transformation und Tradition in Ost und West, edited by Artur Meier, Ursula Rabe-Kleberg, and Klaus Rodax, 162–72. Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1997. Brown, Hubert O. “Tao Xingzhi: Progressive Educator in Republican China.” Biography 13, no. 1 (1990): 21–42. Chan Ming, and Arif Dirlik. Schools into Fields and Factories: Anarchists, the Guomindang and the National Labor University in Shanghai, 1927–1932. Durham, NC: Duke University, 1991. Chen Biao. “Kaishansitaila de laodong jiaoyuguan” [Kerschensteiner’s labor education thought]. Guoli laodong daxue sanrikan, no. 5 (1930): 2–3. Chen Qiuling. “Kaixingsitaina zhiye jiaoyu sixiang yanjiu zongshu” [Comprehensive survey of research on Kerschensteiner’s education thought]. Xin kecheng, no. 10 (2012): 173. Cooley, Edwin G. Zhiye jiaoyulun [On vocational education], translated by Zhu Jingkuan. Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1916. ———. “Zhiye jiaoyulun” [On vocational education, part 1].” Jiaoyu zazhi 7, no. 2 (1915a): 9–20. ———. “Zhiye jiaoyulun” [part 2]. Jiaoyu zazhi 7, no. 3 (1915b): 21–30.

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Culp, Robert. Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in South-Eastern China, 1912–1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. ———. “Synthesizing Citizenship in Modern China.” History Compass, nos. 5/6 (2007): 1833–61. Daozhi. “Deguo zhi buxi jiaoyu” [German continuation education]. Jiaoyu zazhi 15, no. 5 (1922): 7–9. “Deguo buxi jiaoyu zhidu” [The German continuation school system]. Jiaoyu shijie, no. 117 (1906): 1–26. Dewey, John. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: Macmillan, 1916. Fan Bingqing, and Zhu Yuanshan. Kaishansitainai shi jiaoyushuo [Kerschensteiner’s education thought]. Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1916. Ferlanti, Federica. “The New Life Movement in Jiangxi Province, 1934–1938.” Modern Asian Studies 44, no. 5 (2010): 961–1000. Gewurtz, Margo S. “Social Reality and Educational Reform: The Case of the Chinese Vocational Education Association 1917–1927.” Modern China 4, no. 2 (1978): 157–80. Gonon, Philipp. Arbeitsschule und Qualifikation: Arbeit und Schule im 19. Jahrhundert, Kerschensteiner und die heutigen Debatten zur beruflichen Qualifikation. Bern: Peter Lang, 1992. ———. “Berufsbildung und Globalisierung: Vom Kerschensteiner- zum Kompetenz-Modus.” In Berufsbildung zwischen Tradition und Moderne. Internationale Berufsbildungsforschung, edited by Matthias Pilz, 283–95. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2019. ———. The Quest for Modern Vocational Education: Georg Kerschensteiner Between Dewey, Weber and Simmel. Bern: Peter Lang, 2009. Greinert, Wolf-Dietrich. “The German Philosophy of Vocational Education.” In Vocational Education: International Approaches, Developments and Systems, edited by Linda Clark and Christopher Wynch, 49–61. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2012. Gu Shusen. “Deguo Minghengshi shiye buxi xuexiao zhi gaikuang” [Survey on vocational continuation schools in Munich, Germany]. Zhonghua jiaoyujie 6, no. 2 (1917): 1–6. ———. “Duiyu gaige xianxing xuezhi zhi yijian” [Views on reforming the current education system]. Jiaoyu zazhi 12, no. 9 (1920): 1–3. Gu Zhaolin. “Jiaoyubu duxue Gu Zhaolin xiansheng zai ben yuan jiang ruhe fuxing Zhonghua minzu” [The Ministry of Education’s school inspector Gu Zhaolin gave a talk at this school on how to revitalize the Chinese people]. Bingzhou xueyuan yuekan 1, no. 7 (1934): 21–26.

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———. “Die Volksschule der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika.” Süddeutsche Monatshefte, no. 1 (1911a): 477–88. ———. Grundfragen der Schulorganisation. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1912. ———. Staatsbürgerliche Erziehung der deutschen Jugend. Erfurt: Karl Villaret, 1901. ———. The Idea of the Industrial School. Translated by Rudolf Pintner. New York: Macmillan, 1913. ———. “The Organization of the Continuation School in Munich.” In Three Lectures on Vocational Training, 17–29. Chicago: The Commercial Club of Chicago, 1911. ———, June 20, 1927. Document 5. Universitätsarchiv Innsbruck. https:// www.uibk.ac.at/universitaetsarchiv/politische-­d okumente-­a us-­d em-­ universitaetsarchiv/. Kerschensteiner, Marie. Georg Kerschensteiner: Der Lebensweg eines Schulreformers. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1939. Key, Ellen. The Century of the Child. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909. Knoll, Michael. “Dewey versus Kerschensteiner: Der Streit um die Einführung der Fortbildungsschule in den USA 1910–1917.” Pädagogische Rundschau 47, no. 2 (1993): 131–45. Koerrenz, Ralf, Annika Blichmann, and Sebastian Engelmann. “Georg Kerschensteiner and the Industrial School.” In Alternative Schooling and New Education: European Concepts and Theories, edited by Ralf Koerrenz, Annika Blichmann, and Sebastian Engelmann, 33–48. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Krebs, Markus. Georg Kerschensteiner im internationalen pädagogischen Diskurs zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt, 2004. Li Huafang. “Laozuo jiaoyu yu Zhongguo” [Labor education and China]. Hebei liu Dong niankan, no. 1 (1934): 117–28. Li Huaxing. Minguo jiaoyushi [The history of education of the Republican period]. Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 1997. Ling Xicheng. “Women he zichan jieji fan’ai jiaoyu sixiang de fenqi” [The difference between our and the bourgeois education of love]. Renmin jiaoyu, no. 3 (1964): 29–37. Liu Jie. “Kaixingsitaina de zhiye jiaoyu sixiang shuping” [Review of Kerschensteiner’s vocational education thought]. Jiaoyu pinglun, no. 3 (1992): 56–58. Mao Weiran. Zhongguo jindai ge pai jiaoyu sixiang yu jiaoxue fangfa jianshi [A brief history of the different schools of education thought and teaching methods in modern China]. Chengdu: Sichuan jiaoyu chubanshe, 1987. Mchitarjan, Irina. Der russische Blick auf die deutsche Reformpädagogik: Zur Rezeption deutscher Schulreformideen in Russland zwischen 1900 und 1917. Hamburg: Dr. Kovac, 1998.

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———. “John Dewey and the Development of Education in Russia before 1920— Report on a Forgotten Reception.” Studies in Philosophy and Education 19 (2000): 109–31. Merkel-Hess, Kate. The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Min Jie. “20 shiji 80 niandai yilai de Zhongguo jindai shehuishi yanjiu” [Chinese research on modern social history since the 1980s]. Jindaishi yanjiu, no. 2 (2004): 208–57. Pan, Lynn. When True Love Came to China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015. Pepper, Suzanne. Radicalism and Education Reform in 20th Century China: The Search for an Ideal Development Model. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Popkewitz, Thomas S., ed. Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey: Modernities and the Traveling of Pragmatism in Education. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Qixiangsitaiyin [Kerschensteiner]. Jiaoyujia de jingshen [The soul of the teacher]. Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1926. Röhrs, Herrmann. “Georg Kerschensteiner (1852–1932).” Prospects: The Quarterly Review of Comparative Education 23, nos. 3/4 (1993): 807–22. Sandomeer, Sonja. Ellen Key: Anwältin des Kindes? Kritische Analyse ihres Werkes ‘Das Jahrhundert des Kindes.’ Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 2006. Schulte, Barbara. “Unwelcome Stranger to the System: Vocational Education in Early Twentieth-Century China.” Comparative Education 49, no. 2 (2013): 226–41. Schwarcz, Vera. The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Simons, Diane. Georg Kerschensteiner: His Thought and Its Relevance Today. London: Routledge, 2018. Skiera, Ehrenhard. Erziehung und Kontrolle: Über das totalitäre Erbe in der Pädagogik im “Jahrhundert des Kindes.” Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt, 2018. Su Zhixin. “A Critical Evaluation of John Dewey’s Influence on Chinese Education.” American Journal of Education 103, no. 3 (1995): 302–25. Tang Shouqian. “Xie zai ‘Ertongnian yanlun teji’ zhiqian” [Preface to the ‘Special issue on discourses on childhood’]. Fujian jiaoyu 2, no. 8 (1936): 1–2. Tao Zhixing [Tao Xingzhi]. “Zhongguo jiaoyu de gaizao” [Chinese education reform]. Pudong zhongxue qikan, no. 2 (1929): 31–36. Tian Haiyang. “Min chu gongmin jiaoyu xingqi ji sixiang de duanru yu chuanbo” [The rise of civic education and its introduction and dissemination in the early Republican period]. Qiusuo, no. 10 (2011): 231–34.

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Tian Jingzheng, Wan Xinjue, and Deng Yanhua. “Mengtaosuoli jiaoxuefa ji qi zai Zhongguo de chuanbo” [Montessori teaching methods and their spread in China]. Jiaoke. Jiaocai. Jiaofa 34, no. 6 (2014): 91–96. Tianmin. “Gongmin jiaoyu wenti” [The question of civic education]. Jiaoyu zazhi 5, no. 10 (1914): 115–22. ———. “Qinlao jiaoyulun” [The theory of labor education]. Jiaoyu zazhi 7, no. 1 (1915): 8. Wang, Jessica Ching-Sze. John Dewey in China. New  York: State University of New York Press, 2007. Wang Wenpei. “Minxiangshi buxi xuexiao zhi zuzhifa—Kaishansitainai yanshuoci” [The organizational structure of Munich’s continuation schools—Speech by Kerschensteiner]. Jiaoyu yu zhiye, no. 10 (1918): 1–13. Wehle, Gerhard, ed. Bibliographie Georg Kerschensteiner: Im Druck erschienene Schriften, Reden und Manuskripte. Vol. 1. Wiesbaden: Springer, 1987. Wei Xiaofeng, Zhang Minzhu, and Gu Yueqi. “Deguo ‘shuangyuanzhi’ zhiye jiaoyu moshi de tedian ji qishi” [Characteristics and lessons of the German vocational education model of a “dual track system”]. Guojia jiaoyu xingzheng xueyuan xuebao, no. 1 (2010): 83, 92–95. Xiao Lang. “Peisitailuoqi zai jindai Zhongguo—Yi qi jiaoyu zhuzuo he sixiang de yijie wei zhongxin de kaocha” [Pestalozzi in modern China—A study on the translation and introduction of his main educational works and thought]. Jiaoyu xuebao 6, no. 1 (2010): 82–92. Xiong Zhugao. “Shishi zhiye jiaoyu shi suode de ji ge shibai yuanyin he lixiang de gaige fangfa” [Several reasons for the failure of implementing vocational education and ideal reform measures]. Jiaoyu zazhi 17, no. 1 (1925): 1–6. Xu Yipeng. “Guanyu dangqian jiaoyuxue yanjiu zhong de ji ge wenti” [Several questions concerning recent research in pedagogy]. Dongbei shifan daxuebao— Zhexue shehui kexueban, no. 2 (1984): 67–75. Yang Rongchun. “Ziben zhuyi jiaoyu lilun tixi tansuo” [An exploration of the theoretical system of capitalist education]. Xueshu yanjiu, no. 4 (1926): 75–84. Zaitian. “‘Gongzuo xuexiao yaoyi’ ji qi zuozhe” [“The concept of labor schools” and its author]. Xin beichen 2, no. 4 (1936): 385–90. Zhao Weiping. “Kaixingsitaina de jixu jiaoyu lilun chushen” [Exploring Kerschensteiner’s theory of continued education]. Hangzhou daxue xuebao— Zhexue shehui kexueban 18, no. 3 (1988): 128–36. Zhihou. “Kaishanxitainai zhi jiaoyushuo” [Kerschensteiner’s education thought, part 1]. Jiaoyu zazhi 5, no. 10 (1914): 71–84. ———. “Kaishanxitainai zhi jiaoyushuo” [part 2]. Jiaoyu zazhi 5, no. 11 (1914): 85–96.

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———. “Kaishanxitainai zhi jiaoyushuo” [part 3]. Jiaoyu zazhi 5, no. 12 (1914): 97–111. ———. “Xiandai jiaoyu sichou” [Current education thought]. Jiaoyu zazhi 7, no. 11 (1915): 75–80. Zhonghua shuju cihai bianjisuo, ed. “Kaixingsitaina” [Kerschensteiner]. In Cihai shixingben—Wenhua jiaoyu [Cihai preliminary version, culture and education], 7:40. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1961. ———, ed. “Laodong jiaoyu” [Labor education].” In Cihai shixingben—Wenhua jiaoyu, 7:3. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1961. “Zichan jieji jiaoyujie yanlun zhailu” [Excerpts from bourgeois educators’ statements, part 1]. Renmin jiaoyu, no. 3 (1964): 37–39. “Zichan jieji jiaoyujie yanlun zhailu” [part 2]. Renmin jiaoyu, no. 4 (1964): 20–22.

CHAPTER 8

The Doctor as Patient: The Case of Elisabeth Kehrer and German Medical Missionaries in China Albert Wu

It was on the boat ride to China that the two missionary sisters began to notice “strange behavior” from Elisabeth Kehrer, a newly minted medical missionary for the Rhenish Missionary Society. The three were traveling on the Ostasiatisches Lloyd to take up their post at the society’s hospital in Dongguan, southern China. From the beginning of their trip, the two sisters noted that Kehrer was “a quite peculiar person.” On the Lloyd, they gave her the nickname “the hamster” and “the hoarder,” because she stocked her dresser cabinets with food, even though they had access to regular meals. Often they found her throwing moldy bread overboard.1 When they arrived in China in the summer of 1926, Kehrer’s behavior got worse. She was overcome by the heat, and a malignant skin rash plagued her.2 Then came the epidemic—in 1926, typhus hit the area. “Understandably,” wrote the sisters, Kehrer was “overwhelmed.” She

A. Wu (*) Department of History and Politics, American University of Paris, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. M. Cho (ed.), Sino-German Encounters and Entanglements, Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73391-9_8

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began to miss her appointments at clinic; when she did see patients, her “nervousness” accelerated to a “morbid haste.”3 Soon, Kehrer stopped leaving her room, “barricading herself in her house,” covering the doors and windows with blankets so nobody could see inside. She hardly ate the meals that the young sisters prepared. “An indescribable anxiety gripped us,” the sisters confessed, “Perhaps we had a sick woman before us.” But, as “lay people,” it was “not always possible for us to determine how sick she was.”4 Soon, the accusations grew even more serious. Two children in the hospital died, and Kehrer’s supervisor, Otto Hueck, attributed their deaths to Kehrer’s negligent behavior.5 By January 1927, a little less than a year after Kehrer first left for China, Hueck diagnosed Kehrer as a schizophrenic and ordered her to return to Germany. Kehrer belongs to a group of people understudied within the historical literature: missionary doctors. While we have a rich historiographical literature on European doctors who sought to extend their influence from Europe into colonial spaces, missionary doctors have largely been ignored. But as scholars such as David Hardiman and Megan Vaughan have shown, medical missionaries played a significant part in shaping the broader public imagination of the non-European world in the nineteenth century.6 David Livingstone, for instance, was a household name, and Henry Stanley’s search party for him was followed widely by the American and European public.7 The nineteenth-century fascination with the medical missionary is often not reflected within the historiographical literature, in spite of the rich archival materials that missionaries left behind. Moreover, when we think of the nineteenth-century medical missionary, the image of the heroic male doctor—Livingstone, Peter Parker, Hudson Taylor—is often the first to come to mind. Yet the mid-to-late nineteenth century was a moment when women emerged as a major force within the mission field.8 By 1890 in China, English Protestant women outnumbered men in the mission field, and around 50 percent of the missionaries were single women, rather than missionary wives.9 German women traveled abroad in increasing numbers. As Julia Stone has shown, German Pietist missionary societies drew upon a dense network of women created through the German deaconess movement (Frauendiakonie) and women’s associations to mobilize women for missionary work.10 Kehrer’s deployment to China reflected the increasing attention that German missionary societies paid both to the place of women and to medicine in their overseas missions.

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By focusing on Kehrer’s case, I seek to draw attention toward another aspect that has largely been neglected in the historical literature: the moment when the medical gaze is turned on the Western missionary or doctor, when the overseas European community themselves were labeled as sick. When medical missionaries have entered the historiography of colonialism and public health in East Asia, they appear as handmaidens of European colonialism, carrying with them a broader set of culturally chauvinistic assumptions. Scholars have focused on how Western medical missionary notions of the body clashed with Chinese ones.11 As the medical missionary gaze was trained on the Chinese body, traditional Chinese medicine was written off as superstition and quackery. Yet what happens in cases when European doctors, like Elisabeth Kehrer, were labeled as ill? What happens when the doctor becomes the patient?12 Kehrer’s case was not an outlier. Ever since the nineteenth century, mental breakdowns were common among missionaries, who suffered from loneliness and homesickness. Physical and psychological stress led to particularly high attrition rates up until the 1860s. The scholar Jessie Lutz estimates that among Protestant missionaries, well over half of the men and close to two-thirds of the women spent less than ten years in China, either dying in the field or returning to Europe because of illness.13 Commenting on the difficult lives that Catholic missionaries led, the Jesuit Bertram Wolferstan remarked in 1909: these poor men submit to many privations and dangers for the cause they have espoused…European customs, habits, and luxuries, are all abandoned from the moment they put their feet on the shores of China; parents, friends, home, in many instances are heard of no more; before them lies a land of strangers, cold and unconcerned about the religion for which they have sacrificed everything; and they know that their graves will be far away from the land of their birth and the home of their early years.14

The situation did not improve much by the early twentieth century. Mental breakdowns were continually cited as one of the leading reasons for why European and American missionaries could not continue their work. As Wang Wen-ji has shown, even by the 1920s, “The most common tropical diseases among Westerners in India, Ceylon, China and Japan were neurasthenia and mental disorders.”15 Thanks to the work of historians like Lutz and Wang, we have a good picture of how missionaries rationalized and analyzed breakdowns of

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missionaries in the field, and how neurasthenia fit into the new discursive and intellectual developments related to psychiatry in China. We know less, however, of what happened to the missionaries upon their return to Europe. How did they understand their breakdown after their return to Europe? How did they face their colleagues? How did they understand their experiences in China? These are some of the questions that I pose and seek to examine through Kehrer’s case. To answer these questions, this chapter proceeds in three parts. First, I offer a brief history of German women medical missions in China. Then, I explore Kehrer’s life and her time in China. Finally, I examine in detail Kehrer’s attempt to appeal the decision to send her back to Germany and the subsequent legal battle that she waged against the Rhenish Missionary Society. Finally, my conclusion considers the broader implications of Kehrer’s case for the Sino-German encounter.

Women and German Medical Missionaries in China In the late nineteenth century, medical missionaries often complained of the limited reach that their work had among women in China. Due to the separation of sexes that was enforced in late Imperial China, women had restricted opportunities to gain access to male—and moreover, Western— doctors.16 Thus medical missionary organizations started to send women into the field, as a way to attract more Chinese women as patients. In 1873, the Methodist Lucinda Combs arrived in Beijing and established the first hospital for women and children. Soon, more missionary societies began founding hospitals for women. Besides treating patients for illnesses, they also created programs for Chinese women, training them as doctors, nurses, or midwives.17 While British and American missionary societies had been sending doctors as part of their missionary teams ever since Peter Parker went to China in 1834, German missionary societies delayed training medical missionaries, as debates were waged over whether medical work detracted from the evangelical aims of the missions. By the late nineteenth century, however, the consensus among German missionary societies was that they needed more medical expertise within the field. Acknowledging that Germans lagged behind the Anglo-American missionaries in their commitment to medical missions, Paul Lechler, a committed Christian and wealthy industrialist, helped found the German Institute for Medical Mission (Deutsche Institut für ärztliche Mission, Difäm) in Tübingen in 1906.18 Fourteen

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missionary societies jointly funded the venture, and it received sponsorship and official recognition from the state of Württemberg. The Institute’s aim was to centralize and provide the most cutting-edge training for medical missionaries across Germany. It established a care home for missionaries who had returned to Germany to recover from their maladies. From its inception, the Institute admitted women into their classes. In 1910, they offered independent courses to train missionary sisters, focusing specifically on courses in midwifery.19 They also built a dormitory to house the missionary sisters. While the medical missionary courses were open to women, the number of women admitted into the courses remained low before the First World War. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, the medical profession expanded rapidly—in 1919, certifications had risen to double the prewar numbers. Women helped to fuel this broader expansion. As Charles McClelland has noted, by the early 1930s, almost a fifth of the newly certified doctors in Germany were women.20 The growth of women within the broader medical profession was reflected in enrollment statistics for Difäm as well. In 1919, out of a class of thirty, four women were admitted into the medical training program. By 1939, around one-third of the doctors trained by the Institute were women.21

Elisabeth Kehrer and the Rhenish Missionary Society Elisabeth Kehrer belonged to an early cohort of women medical missionaries trained during the First World War. She was born in Calicut, now Kozhikode, where her father Georg Kehrer managed the Basel Missionary Society’s Mercantile Missions, established to encourage the creation of new industries in the region.22 Kehrer’s mother, Susanne Naab, arrived in India in 1894, and a year later Kehrer was born.23 In 1896, in order to “recruit their health,” Georg and Susanne returned to Europe, taking their daughter with them.24 In Germany, her father began to work for the Inner Mission, serving as an accountant for the Bethel Deaconess House “Sarepta.” Unlike many other missionary children, Kehrer remarked later in her personal testimony, she grew up with her parents and thus formed a close relationship with them.25 “Even as a child,” she wrote: I understood that my parents had given me in service to the Kingdom of God. I began my schooling with the thought that I would learn something for foreign missions. In my inner-most encounters with God, I had the experience that he had personally called me into service. Many wonderful and friendly mentors confirmed this path for me.26

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At the Cecilien Gymnasium for girls in Bielefeld, Kehrer met a teacher who inspired her to consider medical missionary work, and she decided to study medicine. After graduating from gymnasium, Kehrer entered the German Institute for Medical Mission in 1915.27 In total, Kehrer spent four semesters at the Institute, living with the missionary sisters. She found her time there “particularly valuable” because she found “other women studying and training for charitable work. They opened my eyes and warmed my heart for the duties of mission work every day.”28 The Mission Institute offered to women like Kehrer a source of stability during the uncertain period of the war and its aftermath. The Institute sent Kehrer to Munich to study further and work in a clinic there. Yet the “revolutionary unrest” of 1918 and 1919 forced her to return to Tübingen, where she studied tropical medicine and hygiene with Gottlieb Olpp. “It was very valuable to me,” Kehrer wrote, “that the Institute gave me professional opportunities as it became harder to find employment at universities.”29 For her internship year, Kehrer found a post at a city hospital in Bremen. There she practiced in the internal medicine section for men and the tuberculosis section for women. She found particularly meaningful and useful her time in the maternity ward.30 The sisters and midwives made a deep impression on her, as she learned “from the ground up” how to be a medical caretaker from them.31 For the final leg of her internship, Kehrer returned to Tübingen, where she worked in the surgery department, gaining valuable experience in the operation room. She took further courses alongside the missionary sisters at the Institute for Medical Missions. Particularly fascinating was a course that taught her different indigenous birth practices.32 At the end of her internship, the Director of the Institute, Gottlieb Olpp, declared Kehrer as “fit for the tropics” (tropentauglich) in September 1920. In 1921, she passed the state medical examination and obtained her license (Approbation) to practice medicine the following year. At the same time, she applied to the Rhenish Missionary Society and was accepted into the society in January 1922. Kehrer’s interest in the mission field was sparked not only by her parents. In the summer of 1920, the Rhenish missionary Heinrich Vedder, who had been deported from German Southwest Africa and was waiting in Germany for his return, gave a course on missionary work in Tübingen. “For the first time,” Kehrer wrote, “I felt an immediate call to get closer to the mission field.”33 Other connections pushed Kehrer to choose the Rhenish Missionary Society—at the Cecilien

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Gymnasium in Bielefeld, Kehrer was the student of Marie Kriele, the sister of the director of the Rhenish Missionary Society, Eduard Kriele. In a strong letter of recommendation for Kehrer’s application, Kriele wrote that Kehrer’s personality brought her “nothing but joy.”34 Founded in 1828, the Rhenish Missionary Society was one of the oldest and most influential Protestant missionary societies in Germany, a product of the Pietist revivals of the early nineteenth century. Its earliest mission field was South Africa, but it soon expanded its global reach. In 1847 it sent its first missionaries to China. By the early twentieth century, the Rhenish Mission had expanded its influence into Southeast Asia. Its largest mission stations were located in Papua New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies. Starting in 1867, Rhenish missionaries became involved in medical missionary work, assisting in John Glasgow Kerr’s missionary hospital in Guangzhou. In 1888, the Rhenish Missionary Society established its own hospital in Dongguan. It had twenty-five beds and was led by a Chinese doctor who had studied with Kerr.35 Gottlieb Olpp arrived to direct the hospital in Dongguan in 1898, and within three years, the hospital had expanded its capacity to seventy beds and was seeing more than 750 patients a year. Patients were not charged any money for visiting the hospital; donations garnered in China and Germany funded the work.36 During the war, the mission society was unable to send more people abroad, but with the war over, they assigned Otto Hueck to lead the hospital work. In the wake of the war, the mission society wanted to create a separate women’s hospital to expand its reach. The society had originally hired another doctor to oversee the women’s clinic within the hospital, but she was engaged right before being sent to China and decided to withdraw from the missions.37 In 1921, the mission director Kriele asked Kehrer if she would be willing to be deployed to China to take charge of the hospital. From the beginning, Kehrer did not conceal her disappointment at the plan. Citing the difficulty of learning Chinese and Cantonese, she claimed that she needed more training before she could be “useful” in the field. “I had a great fear of being sent to China,” she wrote to the mission director.38 She had wanted to serve in a different location, in either Sumatra or Nias, in the Dutch East Indies. Yet she tempered her displeasure. “I am sure that since God has sent me there,” Kehrer wrote, “I will learn to love it there.”39 In further correspondence, Kehrer expressed interest in applying to become a ship’s surgeon, to avoid an eventual deployment to China.

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Kehrer’s advisor, Gustav Olpp, scoffed at the idea: “The idea of a position as a naval surgeon is utopian. I have never heard of a female naval surgeon.”40 Kehrer’s trip to China was also delayed because of social and political turmoil in China. A report from China in July 1924 indicated that because of strikes and unrest, many people had left Dongguan, leading to a decline in the number of patients visiting the hospital. In July 1924, the women’s hospital only had six patients, and the first half of the year had seen half of the demand that it had previously. The same held true for the men’s section of the hospital. The missionary inspector in China wrote, “we beseech our dear Ms. Kehrer to have patience one more time and keep herself available. We will call her into the field once the situation in China improves.”41 Besides feeling anxious about leaving for the field soon, Kehrer felt further frustrated by the fact that she had heard talk of being passed over by the missionary society for her male colleagues. While the society had pointed to financial difficulties as the primary reason for her delay in being sent abroad, at the same time it had sent out Otto Schwend to establish a mercantile mission in southern China. In a sharp letter to the missionary director, Kehrer lamented, “My heart bled when I heard of the news.”42 A year later, Kehrer was still waiting, and by this point, she was impatient. She once again wrote to the missionary director Kriele, asking if there was somewhere else she could serve. “China is not the only missionary field where the Rhenish Mission is active,” Kehrer noted. “I would therefore like to ask the question once more: is there another place where I can be sent? I am ready for any country.”43 A week later, a letter to Kriele included even stronger wording. She felt “no more enthusiasm for China” and was convinced that “God no longer desires to send us to China.” She asked once more: “can we not be sent to Nias?”44 Kriele, the director, issued a sharp-worded rebuke: “I cannot hide the fact … your previous letter caused me extraordinary pain.” He was “bitterly disappointed” that Kehrer continued to have an “internal rejection of China.”45 He stressed the many difficulties German missionaries faced in the Dutch East Indies. For one, the Dutch government was restricting the number of German missionaries in the region. The other issue concerned incompatible certifications—to practice in the Dutch Netherlands one had to pass its state examinations.46 Finally, in December 1925, Kehrer received authorization to travel to China, and in January 1926, she headed for Hong Kong. According to

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reports from the accompanying missionary sisters, Kehrer came into conflict with them the moment the boat set sail for China. I already recounted the “peculiar behavior” that the missionary sisters complained. What particularly angered the sisters was Kehrer’s indiscretion. From the moment that Kehrer arrived in China, she regularly wrote to her parents and friends, documenting her concerns. In one letter, Kehrer confided to her parents that one of the missionary sisters in the field had “suicidal thoughts.”47 She also criticized the missionary sisters as “envious” and “jealous” people. Making matters worse, her parents, concerned for Kehrer’s health, forwarded the letters to the Rhenish missionary inspector in China, Immanuel Genähr. Genähr was infuriated. In a letter from November 1926, Genähr warned Kehrer that her letters could “wreak havoc” (Unheil anrichten) by containing such detailed personal issues in her letters. Genähr admonished her to stop writing letters.48 In a letter to the missionary director Kriele a month later, Genähr reported that he feared for Kehrer’s “future” in the missions in China. He, and others around him, were afraid that she was about to “crack up” (überschnappen). In a short period of time, Kehrer had lost the trust of all of those around her. Genähr added, “often we ask ourselves: how can this situation continue? Such an egocentric person—I must say not an egotistical person—I have never met such an egocentric person in my life.”49 It was clear that Genähr thought that the Kehrer’s stay in China was no longer tenable. The missionary society tried to find justifications for sending Kehrer home. At first, Otto Hueck, the director of the hospital in Dongguan, suspected that Kehrer was suffering from neurasthenia. He thought that the stress of being in a new situation had gotten to her. However, by January 1927, Hueck pronounced a new diagnosis for Kehrer: hebephrenia. Hebephrenia, as Abdullah Kraam and Paula Phillips have shown, was a concept rooted within degeneration theory of the late nineteenth century.50 By 1886, hebephrenia was established as “a form of adolescent insanity,” even though psychologists remained split over whether the disease could be inherited or it could be developed independent of heredity.51 The symptoms connected to hebephrenia encompassed a broad panoply, including homesickness, depression, apprehension, as well as manic depression. In late January 22, 1927, Hueck pronounced, “unfortunately, it is necessary to send Kehrer home.”52 According to Genähr’s reports, Kehrer was furious with the decision to send her home. She believed that it was not necessary for her to go back,

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as she was feeling better after the initial shock of moving to China. “It is of little worth,” Kehrer wrote of Hueck’s diagnosis, “since Hueck is not trained in psychiatry. His judgment is entirely false.”53 As she was about to depart, she threatened, “Woe to the Rhenish Mission when I return home!”54 In his letter to the missionary director reporting on Kehrer’s departure, Genähr expressed fears of the damage that Kehrer would do to the mission society. “We all believe that she is not a harmless sick person,” Genähr wrote in an ominous tone.55 In late February 1927, a little over a year after she had arrived in China, Kehrer boarded a ship headed back to Germany. And indeed, when Kehrer arrived back in Germany, she demanded answers from the missionary society. She argued that she had suffered a “gross injustice.” In China, even though Hueck had explained to her that she was being sent home because of a breakdown of body and nerves, she had not been given a detailed diagnosis. While she did not deny suffering from a breakdown in China, she argued that the situation had been prompted by the “natural fatigue and exhaustion of a transient physician.” When she initially arrived in China, she had “overexerted herself” and did not eat enough. She could have been restored with “proper rest, sleep, and food,” and did not believe that she had any other underlying disease. She blamed Hueck for overprescribing medications. His “sleeping remedy” had worsened her recovery.56 She pushed the missionary society to give her a full report. Her parents, who were also dissatisfied, wrote to the missionary society for further clarifications and documentation on her diagnosis.57 Pushed by Kehrer and her family, the newly appointed missionary director Rudolf Schmidt asked Hueck whether they should release the medical reports. Hueck strongly objected. “The Rhenish Mission has,” Hueck wrote, “clear interests to prevent the letters and reports from being released to the public.” Kehrer’s feelings of being treated unjustly reflected “her lack of insight into the severity of her illness.”58 He advised keeping the doctor’s reports confidential and not allowing the family to see it. Schmidt agreed and rejected Kehrer’s requests. Kehrer did not let the matter slide. In 1929, she once again wrote a letter to the missionary society asking for the diagnosis. By this time, Kehrer had already left the missionary society and started a private practice. With the private practice, she reasoned, she no longer had any desire to be involved in missionary work. Since the reports would have no practical purposes anymore, she asked to see them. Kehrer also saw it as an

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opportune time to make the request, as an interim missionary director, Karl Schomburg, had just been appointed. But Schomburg rejected her request, citing the confidential nature of the report.59 Unrelenting, Kehrer responded that she had a “right as both a human and as a doctor” to see the “truth of the situation.”60 Yet the mission continued to reject her claim. Schomburg appealed to Kehrer’s magnanimity, writing, “Dear Miss Doctor, would it not be best if we just let bygones be bygones?” He admitted that he did not know all of the details of the case other than as an outsider. He wrote: if you believe that you have been wronged, can you not put your feelings in the light of divine forgiveness and forgetting? The peace of God should reign. May I make a suggestion? I will put the envelope in question in an envelope and seal it, so you or anyone else will probably never see the papers again. We have done this in certain cases and the papers are as good as destroyed.61

Schomburg made it clear that he would not release the reports.

The Legal Battle Eventually, Kehrer got her wish to see the documents through a legal proceeding. In 1943, she involved the Rhenish Mission in a lawsuit, when she sued her insurance company, Concordia Life Insurance. After she returned to Germany, Kehrer had applied for life insurance in 1929. In 1939, Kehrer suffered a mental breakdown and was sent to a psychiatric ward in Bethel, where she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic. In 1940, further tragedy befell her: she was struck down by a stroke, rendering her left hand and foot paralyzed. Unable to work, she applied for disability insurance, expecting to receive payment since she had dutifully paid her premiums since 1929. But the insurance company rejected her claim, arguing that Kehrer had lied when she enrolled in the insurance policy in 1929. In the section on mental health diseases, she had failed to note any pre-existing conditions. To a question asking whether she had a history of mental disorders, Kehrer had marked no. But the insurance company charged that it had obtained evidence of her lying. Information from the missionary society indicated that Kehrer had suffered from a bout of schizophrenia while working in China. The company thus charged Kehrer with willfully concealing history

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of mental health from it. Concordia denied her application and refused to pay her. In her lawsuit against Concordia, Kehrer argued that she had not known about the exact terms of her diagnosis. She admitted that she had been sent home early from China for health reasons. But the reasons that Hueck and her missionary supervisors provided were her difficulty to adjust to the differences in food, and her poor reaction to a strong barbiturate that he had prescribed to her to help with her nervousness and her difficulties sleeping. She had understood her breakdown in China as an unfortunate response to the climate. Once she had gotten on the boat on the way back to China, “she felt better than she ever had before.”62 In fact, Kehrer claimed, she had always assumed she would return to China one day. She had not lied in her application for disability insurance in 1929— the diagnosis of “schizophrenia” had been concealed from her. The crux of the case hinged on the question of Kehrer’s knowledge of Hueck’s original diagnosis. Did she know that Hueck and the missionary society had diagnosed her as a schizophrenic? The judges of the Landesgericht asked the missionary society to provide the original documents related to the case. At first, Hueck and the missionary society refused, citing patient-doctor confidentiality. But the judges were dissatisfied with their reasoning. They demanded that the Rhenish Missionary Society turn over the original diagnosis and correspondence related to Kehrer’s case. After much reluctance, the missionary director forwarded the documents over to the judges. It turns out that Hueck had good reasons to want to keep things quiet. In his initial correspondence with then-missionary director Rudolf Schmidt, Hueck had suggested that Kehrer was schizophrenic. But he admitted that he was not an “expert” in psychological illnesses, and he was not confident of his diagnosis. He thought that she was suffering from anxiety and sleep deprivation and had prescribed two barbiturates, Veronal and Bromicide. Kehrer had refused to take them initially. Citing her own medical expertise, she called the “medicines” as “poisonous.” Later, in her testimony to the court, Kehrer claimed that Hueck had, “against her will,” forced her to take the medicines.63 There were other reasons that Hueck wanted to keep his initial diagnosis of schizophrenia secret. After Kehrer’s return to Germany in 1927, the Rhenish Mission had asked her to meet with the society’s house physician,

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Julius Schreiber. Schreiber gave Kehrer a clean bill of health. After observing her for ten days, he could not come to any definite conclusions on the questions of hebephrenia and other psychiatric issues. But he did not recommend sending her immediately back to the tropics. He suggested that Kehrer stay in Europe for the time being.64 Kehrer interpreted Schreiber’s report as further proof that Hueck had erred in his judgments. It was here when Kehrer’s parents intervened. They had also not noticed any noticeable change in their daughter, and it seemed that physically, “she seemed better than ever.” They approached the director Schmidt to lodge a formal complaint against Hueck. Kehrer had told her parents that Hueck had forced her to take these “poisonous” medicines, and they believed that “Dr. Hueck had simply lost his mind.” Since Kehrer was fully healthy upon her return to Germany, the parents were further convinced that Kehrer had been a victim of “gross injustice.”65 It was only then that Hueck and the missionary society revealed to Kehrer’s parents that Hueck had diagnosed Kehrer as a schizophrenic. They shared with Hueck the reports of the other missionary sisters in the field, which testified to the various odd behaviors that Kehrer had exhibited during her stay in China. Hueck and the missionary director threatened to make these reports public. More menacingly, they suggested that Kehrer was responsible for the death of two Chinese babies—such a revelation would be devastating to her reputation and future work not only in the missionary society but as a medical professional. Clear that their daughter had no future in the missionary society, Kehrer’s parents backed down. Neither her parents nor the missionary society told Kehrer of Hueck’s diagnosis of schizophrenia. In their testimonies to the court, both parties agreed that Kehrer had been left in the dark. The judges agreed that she indeed had no knowledge of Hueck’s initial diagnosis. They found “no willful deception” on Kehrer’s part. Concordia had to pay.

Conclusion How can we read Kehrer’s case and, more broadly, medical missionary claims of mental illness within the context of Sino-German relations? The historian Wang Wen-ji has argued that medical missionary discussions about neurasthenia reflected “an ambivalent concern about the presence of Western elements and the fear of corroding white identity in an ancient civilization.”66 Neurasthenia, Wang has noted, became increasingly

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understood not as a result of physical discomfort or dislocation. Instead, missionaries began to employ a “psychodynamic model,” in which “relocation became perilous not because of the physical collision between white bodies and ‘the tropics’, but because of the psychical conflicts within the agents of Western expansion.”67 Neurasthenia was thus consciously or subconsciously linked to the Western imperial project and Western anxieties about their cultural and intellectual superiority in relation to the Chinese. Kehrer’s case certainly reflected such anxieties. In their testimonies, the missionary sisters listed as one of their main complaints that because of Kehrer’s breakdown, the Chinese resorted to traditional Chinese medical treatments. The sisters’ comments point to the precarity of the medical missionary endeavor in China. For one, medical missionaries were forced to compete with traditional Chinese medical practitioners who distrusted certain fundamental tenets of Western medicine. Building trust with the local Chinese community was an uphill battle. Furthermore, medical missionaries often worked in remote, rural areas. The missions were constantly understaffed and underfunded. The doctors themselves were overwhelmed by an unfamiliar and difficult environment. They faced devastating public health crises, such as the typhus epidemic that Kehrer witnessed. Neurasthenia reflected psychic anxieties, but also real pressures and difficulties in the mission field. Kehrer’s case points us to a different facet, often unremarked upon in the literature on neurasthenia: neurasthenia represented not just a psychic conflict between “East” and “West,” but also conflict within the missionary societies themselves about the rapidly developing medical knowledge that was coming from the West. There was a high likelihood Hueck’s judgment of “schizophrenia” was a complete misdiagnosis. The missionary society admitted as much, as they wrote in their letters that both sides had faults, and they constantly sought to keep things quiet. Kehrer, even a decade after her stint in China, maintained that her discomfort was solely physical. She maintained that her “odd” behavior in China could be traced back to side effects from the sleeping remedies that Hueck had prescribed to her. Even in the testimonies of the missionary sisters, they never suggested that she had a medical problem. It is possible that eccentricity was her sole “transgression.” The point here is not to try to “diagnose” Kehrer correctly but to suggest that the emergence of neurasthenia as a common illness among medical missionaries also suggests a body of practice that was in flux. Why was

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Hueck so willing to designate Kehrer as mentally ill, even though he himself admitted that he had “little expertise” when it came to psychological training? Hueck had been trained as a “traditional” medical missionary— primarily in surgery and other tropical medicine. Is it possible that Hueck felt threatened by Kehrer, a young female doctor, newly minted in the field, and needed to assert his professional and medical authority over her? Kehrer, on the other hand, in her testimonies, repeatedly suggested that she never saw Hueck as a personal physician, but rather as a colleague and supervisor. Perhaps, then, what we are seeing here is a conflict between expectations about what a doctor should be, and the relationship between the doctor and the patient. The traditional medical missionary was trained to wear many hats—they were supposed to be simultaneously anthropologist, doctor, confessor, supervisor, among other roles. Kehrer, on the other hand, was emerging from a milieu of increasing professional specialization. She had just finished courses and rotations in tropical medicine; she had been introduced to a different set of disciplinary training and knowledge. Whereas she thought that her meetings with Hueck were in the form of a collegial chat, Hueck was monitoring and evaluating her in a medical capacity. These expectations further clashed when her case was brought in front of a third-party observer, namely the insurance company in Germany, who assumed that Kehrer and Hueck had met under the pretext of a patient-doctor relationship. Certainly, the source of Kehrer’s “neurasthenia” was shaped by the “psychical discomfort” of living in East Asia, and in Kehrer’s case, China. From the beginning, Kehrer had resisted the appointment to China. She was afraid of an inability to master the language; she had her heart set on the Dutch East Indies instead of China. It was clear from both her letters and other reports that her initial adjustment to the Chinese landscape had been difficult. But equally important shaping Kehrer’s early exit was the power relations inside of the missionary society itself. In the case of Kehrer, we see a clash in gender, a clash in generations, and a clash in expectations between the missionaries in the field and the newly trained missionary doctors. Through Kehrer’s case, we see that neurasthenia resulted as much from the “shifting paradigms” that were internal to the missionary society as they were from the external tensions that fostered the encounter between medical doctors and patients in China. And one could say the same about the broader Sino-German encounter. Rather than seeing the encounter as being shaped by an essential conflict between “East” and

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“West,” it is just as important to understand the internal contradictions and tensions within Germany and China that shaped and forged Sino-­ German encounters. “East” and “West” were not monolithic nor were they unchanging. Just as the encounters themselves were fluid and dynamic, so too were the entities that were coming into contact with each other.

Notes 1. Letter from Bertha Kergen and Magdalene Beysiegel to Immanuel Genähr, 31 January, 1927, RMG 2.231 Kehrer, Archiv der Vereinte Evangelische Mission, Wuppertal, Germany (hereafter cited as RMG 2.231). 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. See David Hardiman, “Introduction,” in Healing Bodies, Saving Souls: Medical Missions in Asia and Africa, ed. David Hardiman (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2006), 5; Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 1-2. 7. Clare Pettitt, Dr. Livingstone, I Presume? Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers, and Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 95-96. 8. Hardiman, “Introduction,” 29-33. 9. Delia Davin, “British Women Missionaries in Nineteenth-Century China,” Women’s History Review 1, no. 2 (1992): 261. 10. Julia Stone, Chinese Basket Babies: A German Missionary Foundling Home and the Girls It Raised (1850s-1914) (Leipzig: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013), 13-18. 11. For this interpretation of missionary medicine serving as the precursor to later forms of Chinese public health, see Sean Hsiang-Lin Lei, Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China’s Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 12. See Hardiman, “Introduction,” 5-6. 13. Jessie G.  Lutz, “Attrition Among Protestant Missionaries in China, 1807-1890,” International Bulletin of Mission Research 36, no. 1 (2012): 25. 14. Bertram Wolferstan, The Catholic Church in China from 1860 to 1907 (London: Sands & Company, 1909), 284. 15. See Wang Wen-ji, “Tropical Neurasthenia or Oriental Nerves,” in Psychiatry and Chinese History, ed. Howard Chiang (London: Pickering & Chatto,

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2014), 111-28. Wang writes that the highest level of neurasthenia appeared in Japan—81.25% of “white invalids” were diagnosed with tropical neurasthenia. 16. For more on the separation of sexes, see Susan Mann, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 27-50. 17. Tina Phillips Johnson and Yi-Li Wu, “Maternal and Child Health in Nineteenth to Twenty-first century China,” in Medical Transitions in Twentieth-Century China, ed. Bridie Andrews and Mary Brown Bullock (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 53-54. 18. For an overview of where the German Institute for Medical Mission fit into the broader medical missionary landscape, see Wolfgang Eckart, Medizin und Kolonialimperialismus: Deutschland 1884-1945 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh, 1997), 91-112. The most comprehensive work on the Institute is Karin Engel, “Medizin und Mission: Das Deutsche Institut für ärztliche Mission in Tübingen – Ärztliches Engagement in deutschen evangelischen Missionen vom Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs” (PhD Diss., University of Heidelberg, 2018). 19. Engel, “Medizin und Mission,” 126-28. 20. Ibid., 149. 21. Ibid., 150. 22. The yearly report of the Basel Missionary Society lists Georg Kehrer’s date of arrival in India as 1888. See Jahresbericht der Evangelischen Missionsgesellschaft zu Basel, volume 28 (Basel: Missionsbuchhandlung, 1893), X.  For more on the industrial mission, see Gustav Wanner, Die Basler Handels-Gesellschaft A.  G., 1859-1959 (Basel: Basel Handels-­ Gesellschaft, 1959). 23. See The Fifty-fifth Report of the Basel German Evangelical Mission in SouthWestern India (Mangalore: Basel Mission Press, 1895), 20. 24. See Ibid., 22. 25. Elisabeth Kehrer, “Lebenslauf, Elisabeth Kehrer,” 11 December 1921, RMG 2.231. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Kehrer, “Lebenslauf.” 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Letter from Marie Kriele to Rhenish Missionary Society, n.d., RMG 2.231.

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35. Otto Hueck, “Die Anfangsjahre 1888 bis 1938,” in 50 Jahre Deutsche Aerztliche Mission in Tungkun Kwangtung Provinz China, 1888-1938 (Dongguan: Krankenhaus der Rhein. Missionsgesellschaft, 1938), 9. 36. Ibid.,13 37. Letter from Eduard Kriele to Kehrer, 3 December 1921, RMG 2.231. 38. Letter from Kehrer to Edward Kriele, 21 January 1922, RMG 2.231. 39. Ibid. 40. Letter from Gottlieb Olpp to Edward Kriele, 31 March 1922, RMG 2.231. 41. Letter from Otto Schwend to Elisabeth Kehrer, 15 July 1924, RMG 2.231. 42. Letter from Elisabeth Kehrer to Eduard Kriele, 2 August 1924, RMG 2.231. 43. Ibid., 14 August 1925, RMG 2.231. 44. Ibid., 20 August 1925, RMG 2.231. 45. Letter from Eduard Kriele to Elisabeth Kehrer, 21 September 1925, RMG 2.231. 46. Ibid. 47. Letter from Immanuel Genähr to Elisabeth Kehrer, 10 November 1926, RMG 2.231. 48. Ibid. 49. Letter from Immanuel Genähr to Elisabeth Kriele, 18 January 1927, RMG 2.231. 50. Abdullah Kraam and Paula Phillips, “Hebephrenia: A Conceptual History,” History of Psychiatry 23, no. 4 (2012): 388-89. 51. Ibid.,393. 52. Letter from Otto Hueck to Kriele, 22 January 1927, RMG 2.231. 53. Letter from Immanuel Genähr to Kriele, 3 February 1927, RMG 2.231. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Letter from Rudolf Schmidt to Dr. Schreiber, 23 April, 1927, RMG 2.231. 57. Letter from Georg Kehrer to Rudolf Schmidt, 21 April 1927, RMG 2.231. 58. Letter from Otto Hueck to Rudolf Schmidt, 7 March 1927, RMG 2.231. 59. Letter from Karl Schomburg to Elisabeth Kehrer, 7 December 1929, RMG 2.231. 60. Letter from Elisabeth Kehrer to Karl Schomburg, 8 December 1929, RMG 2.231. 61. Letter from Karl Schomburg to Elisabeth Kehrer, 10 December 1929, RMG. 2.231. 62. “Abschrift,” 21 April 1943, RMG 2.231. 63. Ibid. 64. Julius Schreiber to Schmidt, 13 May 1927, RMG 2.231. 65. “Abschrift,” RMG 2.231. 66. Wang, “Tropical Neurasthenia,” 126. 67. Ibid., 124.

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Bibliography Archival Materials Kehrer, Dr. Elisabeth (1895-1959). RMG 2.231. Archives of the Rhenish Missionary Society. Archiv der Vereinte Evangelische Mission, Wuppertal, Germany.

Published Sources Davin, Delia. “British Women Missionaries in Nineteenth-Century China.” Women’s History Review 1, no. 2 (1992): 257-271. Eckart, Wolfgang. Medizin und Kolonialimperialismus: Deutschland 1884-1945. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh, 1997. Engel, Karin. “Medizin und Mission: Das Deutsche Institut für ärztliche Mission in Tübingen – Ärztliches Engagement in deutschen evangelischen Missionen vom Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs.” PhD Diss. University of Heidelberg, 2018. The Fifty-fifth Report of the Basel German Evangelical Mission in South-Western India. Mangalore: Basel Mission Press, 1895. Hardiman, David. “Introduction.” In Healing Bodies, Saving Souls: Medical Missions in Asia and Africa, edited by David Hardiman, 5-57. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2006. Hueck, Otto. “Die Anfangsjahre 1888 bis 1938.” In 50 Jahre Deutsche Aerztliche Mission in Tungkun Kwangtung Provinz China, 1888–1938, 8–14. Dongguan: Krankenhaus der Rhein. Missionsgesellschaft, 1938. Jahresbericht der Evangelischen Missionsgesellschaft zu Basel 28. Basel: Missionsbuchhandlung, 1893. Johnson, Tina Phillips, and Yi-Li Wu. “Maternal and Child Health in Nineteenth to Twenty-first century China.” In Medical Transitions in Twentieth-Century China, edited by Bridie Andrews and Mary Brown Bullock, 51-68. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Kraam, Abdullah, and Paula Phillips, “Hebephrenia: A Conceptual History,” History of Psychiatry 23, no. 4 (2012): 388-89. Lei, Sean Hsiang-Lin. Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China’s Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Lutz, Jessie G. “Attrition Among Protestant Missionaries in China, 1807-1890.” International Bulletin of Mission Research 36, no. 1 (2012): 22-27. Mann, Susan. Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

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Pettitt, Clare. Dr. Livingstone, I Presume? Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers and Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Stone, Julia. Chinese Basket Babies: A German Missionary Foundling Home and the Girls It Raised (1850s-1914). Leipzig: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013. Vaughan, Megan. Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Wang, Wen-ji. “Tropical Neurasthenia or Oriental Nerves.” In Psychiatry and Chinese History, edited by Howard Chiang, 111-128. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014. Wanner, Gustav. Die Basler Handels-Gesellschaft A.  G., 1859-1959. Basel: Basel Handels-Gesellschaft, 1959. Wolferstan, Bertram. The Catholic Church in China from 1860 to 1907. London: Sands & Company, 1909.

PART III

Music, Film, and Activism in the 1920s and 1930s

CHAPTER 9

“What Exactly Is China” in Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler’s Die Maßnahme (The Measures Taken) John Gabriel

What exactly is rice? ... What exactly is cotton? ... What exactly is a person? – The Young Comrade, Die Maßnahme, Scene V1

Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler’s theatrical collaboration Die Maßnahme (The Measures Taken, 1930) opens with four Communist agitators returning to Moscow from a mission to China. They appear before a “Control Chorus,” an allusion to the International Control Commission (ICC) of

J. Gabriel (*) Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. M. Cho (ed.), Sino-German Encounters and Entanglements, Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73391-9_9

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the Communist International (Comintern).2 While in China, they found it necessary to kill a fifth agitator, and they ask the Control Chorus to evaluate whether this action was correct. They then reenact scenes from their mission that led to their comrade’s death, each followed by discussion. In some scenes, the Chorus participates as the background masses and also sings several numbers directed at the audience. The first scene shows the four surviving agitators crossing into China. At the border, they are joined by the Young Comrade, and all five agree to the conditions of their mission, including strict obedience and the total secrecy of their identities. The agitators disguise themselves as Chinese workers, and the next four scenes portray their work in China. The Young Comrade is repeatedly overwhelmed by his sympathy for the Chinese workers and acts to alleviate their immediate suffering rather than following his orders to organize a Communist revolution, which will ostensibly eliminate the root causes of their suffering. In the final scene, he prematurely initiates an unsuccessful uprising, during which he reveals himself to be a foreign agent. This puts him, his fellow agitators, and even the Soviet Union at risk. For should he be captured, it would prove the Soviets were supporting Communist subversion abroad. To protect them all, he agrees to be shot and have his body dissolved in a lime pit so that it cannot be identified. The Control Chorus concludes that these actions were correct. Die Maßnahme was the fourth of Brecht’s Lehrstücke, or teaching pieces, and the first with music by Eisler. As with Der Jasager (He Who Says Yes), on which Die Maßnahme is based, Brecht’s collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann also contributed to the text. While there is compelling evidence that Hauptmann wrote almost all of the text of Der Jasager, her specific contributions to Die Maßnahme are more difficult to determine.3 The Lehrstück was a didactic genre, structured around a Lehre, or lesson.4 In addition to the “moral of the story,” the form of the Lehrstück is itself didactic, intended not just to passively instruct but also to stimulate discussion. As Joy Calico has argued, music was essential to the Brechtian Lehrstück, and Die Maßnahme was arguably the closest Brecht came to realizing his theories about the genre in practice.5 Die Maßnahme is typical of the way Brecht and his collaborators combined his ideas about epic theater with a musical-dramatic form reminiscent of an oratorio, and Die Maßnahme is sometimes labeled an oratorio or dramatic cantata.6 The question of how to understand Die Maßnahme’s Chinese setting has vexed the work’s reception since its premiere. Given the work’s didacticism, an obvious conclusion has been that China allegorizes Germany. As

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a police report in 1932 concluded: “The choral work is to all appearances disguised. It supposedly takes place in China. The content, however, shows that one need only insert the word ‘Germany’ in place of the word ‘China,’ and that the entire choral work could be applied to the German situation.”7 The specific role China plays in this allegory—that is, why the work is set in China and not somewhere else—has been less clear. To adapt the Young Comrade’s questions in Scene V quoted at the opening of this chapter, “what exactly is China” in Die Maßnahme? Early reviews demonstrate that Die Maßnahme was initially understood as both concretely set in China and an allegory of Germany. Critics struggled, however, to align the allegory with the then-current party line. After World War II, reception split. The dominant position has been, in the words of Waleria Nasarowa, that the Chinese setting “could just as well be exchanged for any other arbitrarily chosen land.”8 This position, however, disavows the contextual knowledge of recent events in China that Die Maßnahme’s creators and audiences brought to the work. A minority of scholars have argued instead that Die Maßnahme is directly inspired by specific events in China and reconstructs them with varying degrees of accuracy.9 However, these scholars downplay Die Maßnahme’s undeniable allegory. By mapping events in the work onto specific events in China, they reduce the lesson of Die Maßnahme to international solidarity or the “correct” interpretation of recent events in China. Its applicability to the German situation is scant. A recurring argument against the relevance of the Chinese setting of Die Maßnahme has been the lack of references to China beyond statements by the characters that they are or were in China. Unlike other works, Brecht does not integrate elements of (his understanding of) traditional Chinese theater, poetry, or philosophy. Similarly, Eisler does not imitate Chinese music or include exoticist markers of China in his score. Eisler’s writings about his music, however, explain why he and also Brecht eschewed traditional Chinese influences. In this chapter, I argue that Die Maßnahme specifically draws on the then-current political situation in China but abstracts it so that the setting can be understood allegorically. The former demonstrates the urgency and relevance of the lesson, and the latter evidences its applicability to German workers’ situation. My position closely resembles that of Die Maßnahme’s early critics, but I clarify the difficulty early critics had reconciling Die Maßnahme with the party line, which I contend was due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the lesson of the work. In order to teach a lesson

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about obedience, Die Maßnahme followed the Comintern’s strategy in China, which differed from its strategy in Germany. These differences led to critical confusion: Many critics interpreted the strategy—and not obedience to it—as the lesson of the piece, leading them to question the work’s applicability to the German situation. Further, I argue that the lack of exoticist markers of China and references to traditional Chinese literature, philosophy, or music is explained through the work’s setting in (the German imagination of) modern China. This mode of portrayal facilitated the allegory of the piece and was consistent with the internationalist aspirations of Communism at the time. It also typified the quasi-neocolonial approach taken by Soviet and European Communists to Communist movements in the colonial world.

Political Inspirations and Lessons Post-World War II debate over the setting of Die Maßnahme is politically charged. Six years after the composition of Die Maßnahme, Stalin accelerated purges of political opposition in the Communist Party with show trials in which defendants were made to confess to fake charges and accept punishments including execution and exile to Siberia. Many leading figures associated with the Comintern’s China policy in the late 1920s were among those tried, executed without trial, or simply disappeared.10 After World War II, Eisler’s Communist, but anti-Stalinist sister Ruth Fisher linked Die Maßnahme to the show trials, and the work played a central role in Brecht and Eisler’s hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee.11 Brecht and Eisler returned to East Germany and prohibited any future performance of the work. In a 1958 radio interview, Eisler explained that the ban would last until “we [are able to] see a parable as a parable and not as a naturalistic plot.”12 Many scholars have cited this interview as evidence that the setting of Die Maßnahme has no relation to the real China. Jürgen Schebera claims: “[Brecht] certainly did not want to (nor could he) write a piece about the Chinese Revolution. … For Brecht, the events in the far eastern land are only a frame for the … parable.”13 Antony Tatlow, meanwhile, writes that “we can accept the plot as parable, as fiction, not as a description of the Silesian, Manchurian, Canton or any other concrete revolutionary situation.”14 The context of Eisler’s statement, however, complicates his intentions. Eisler was discussing a proposed production of the work in the United Kingdom and was worried the press would use the show-trial

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interpretation not only against the work, but against the Communist cause more broadly.15 The specificity of the Chinese setting was peripheral. Eisler’s use of the word “parable” more likely referred to how audiences should understand the death of the Young Comrade. In fact, “parable” was used in this way in the program of a 1936 production of Die Maßnahme in England.16 Within the Eastern Bloc, Brecht and Eisler would likely have also wanted to downplay any specific political references.17 Neither Brecht nor Eisler’s position in East Germany was as secure as their official positions and accolades may suggest, and Brecht specifically was suspect for his openness to non-doctrinaire Marxists like Trotsky and Karl Korsch and for his sympathies toward the Chinese Communist Party.18 As we will see, connecting Die Maßnahme to specific events in China draws the work into the machinations of Stalin’s power struggle with Trotsky and the rise of Mao Zedong. The former was subject to continual reinterpretation and played a prominent role in purges from the late 1920s to the show trials of the late 1930s. Even after the post-Stalin Thaw, Brecht and Eisler had good reason to discourage critics from associating Die Maßnahme with historical events. In East Germany especially, Stalin’s legacy and the Thaw were highly contested. Ralph Ley captures the perils of the ever-shifting political landscape when he notes that just as Ruth Fisher used Die Maßnahme as evidence of Brecht’s Stalinism in the West, East German literary scholar Hans Mayer used Die Maßnahme to criticize Brecht’s insufficient Stalinism in the 1960s.19 Meanwhile, given potential connections to the rise of Mao, it is notable that Brecht and Eisler’s decision to prohibit future productions of the work and Eisler’s interview coincide with the Sino-Soviet split. Such political considerations also impacted postwar scholars. Those in the Eastern Bloc likely shared Brecht and Eisler’s concerns, regarding both Die Maßnahme and their own scholarship. Those in the West confronted bias against both Communist and any explicitly political art, regardless of its orientation. As Graham Bartram and Anthony White note, Die Maßnahme was one of Brecht’s works that were often “dismissed as tediously didactic idealizations of Communist Party ideology and discipline.”20 Western scholars who did take Die Maßnahme seriously often wrote to advocate the value of Brecht and Eisler’s work and were thus inclined toward interpretations that dissociated it from Stalin’s atrocities and instead emphasized its politics in a broader, philosophical sense.21

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Nevertheless, it is clear that viewers at the time interpreted Die Maßnahme as concretely set in China and inspired by events there. German Communist critic Alfred Kurella argued: We must identify the plot of the work and the entire selected milieu (Chinese Revolution, revolutionary mass movement, coolie organization, anti-­ imperially inclined Chinese capitalists, Chinese Communist Party, Bolshevist Party of the Soviet Union, etc.) with reality. … We cannot proceed from the assumption that the authors planned to use this entire background as ­circumstantial, only as a ‘maneuvering ground,’ which could just as well have been chosen differently. … The authors created their work not for the desk drawer, but for a concrete audience, that is for concrete portions of the workers’ organizations (the Workers’ Choral Movement) for whom the basic facts of the Chinese Revolution and the other circumstances portrayed are known, so that they form concrete associations with them. Indeed, these associations must be made, if the Lehrstück is to make any sense at all.22

Kurella’s stance was typical of Communist critics and is understandable given the context in which Die Maßnahme was written and premiered. Representations of current events in China were widespread. While the success of the Russian Revolution and the failure of the German Revolution were old hat, the ongoing Chinese Revolution captivated the imagination of Communists and other Leftists.23 Most Communist and leftist portrayals of the Chinese Revolution aimed for near-documentary accuracy. As Gregor Streim has shown, leftist literary works about China took the form of journalistic travel writing.24 Agitprop revues, like “Alarm Hamburg-Schanghai” (Alarm Hamburg-­ Shanghai) or “Hände Weg von China” (Hands off China), both from 1927, were presented as Living Newspapers in which stories from the news were acted out and interpreted politically with explicit statements, leading rhetorical questions, caricature, and so on.25 Radio works like Otto Zoff’s “Revolution in China” (1930) also pulled their material directly from news reports.26 On the traditional stage, Sergei Tretiakov’s Brülle China! (Roar China!, original: Рычи, Китай) produced in Frankfurt in 1929 and Berlin in 1930, and Friedrich Wolf’s Tai yang erwacht (Tai yang awakes) premiered in Berlin in 1931, purported to reconstruct real events.27 Brecht and Eisler had many connections to this context, and thus the decision to eschew such techniques in Die Maßnahme is striking. The agitprop revue “Hände Weg von China” was performed by the Rote Sprachrohr

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(Red Megaphone), a troupe Eisler joined as music director in 1927. Brecht was close with leftist travel writer Karl Wittfogel (one of the authors Streim discusses) and Sergei Tretiakov. Wittfogel led post-performance discussions about Die Maßnahme with audience members, and Die Maßnahme contains oblique references to Roar China! Brecht likely also drew on Tretiakov’s first-hand experience in China and then-unpublished novel, Chinese Testament.28 This context partially explains why critics in the 1930s interpreted the work as concretely set in China and why they also, as we will see, criticized the work for not being realistic enough. It also helps explain why a minority of modern scholars read Die Maßnahme as “an imaginative rendering of events that occurred in China” and seek to identify specific uprisings that inspired it.29 Promising proposals include the Canton Commune of 1927 and the Sino-Soviet conflict of 1929, but none fully aligns with the action or politics of Die Maßnahme.30 As Kurella noted in 1931, if one tries to align the action of Die Maßnahme with the events of the Canton Commune, the Young Comrade actually follows the Comintern’s orders, while the other agitators advocate the “right opportunism” blamed for the uprising’s failure.31 The politics of the Canton Commune were especially treacherous, as it played a key role in Stalin’s conflict with Trotsky. However, Stalin’s positions shifted several times, meaning that regardless of which side one supported, one could always be denounced as a Trotskyist. Efforts to connect Die Maßnahme to a specific uprising also falter on the degree of abstraction through which the events are portrayed. The setting is not constructed with documentary accuracy nor is the central conflict of any scene necessarily Chinese. Manually hauling barges along rivers, for example, was a widespread practice.32 Furthermore, the Chinese setting is always mediated by the Moscow setting. The reenactments of events in China are not staged as flashbacks, nor do they have substantial scenery, props, or costumes (besides masks, discussed later). Rather, the audience witnesses the agitators reenacting scenes in their Moscow attire inside a Moscow committee chamber. While the audience understands the events being reenacted to have taken place in China, they are constantly aware that the reenactments themselves are taking place in Moscow. This abstraction of events was central to the didactic function of Die Maßnahme because it enabled audiences to understand the Chinese setting as an allegorical stand-in for Germany. It raises the question of what lesson the audience was supposed to apply to their situation in Germany.

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The literature on this issue is substantial, but much of it revolves around two issues. The first relates to the necessity of killing the Young Comrade, which is only tangential to the question of the Chinese setting. The second, however, is highly relevant: How should a Communist act in a revolutionary situation? Communist critics at the time largely condemned Die Maßnahme for advocating a false strategy, which they believed Brecht and Eisler arrived at because their approach was too “idealistic.” Critic Durus, for example, claimed that Die Maßnahme was “not a powerful work full of lived experience, because it artificially constructed the Chinese revolution in a laboratory and did not reconstruct it from the reality of the proletarian revolution.”33 Kurella, meanwhile, sought to discredit the allegorical lesson of Die Maßnahme by reproducing Brecht’s text but changing the characters’ names to those of the leaders of the unsuccessful Communist uprisings in Saxony in 1923.34 As with the Canton Commune example, Die Maßnahme again seems to advocate “right opportunism.” This is where the specificity of the Chinese setting becomes important. Critics like Kurella and Durus focus on Germany and overlook the differences in Comintern strategy in China. In Communism’s teleological model of historical development, Germany was an industrialized, bourgeois-­dominated country, and thus primed for socialist revolution. China was a semicolonial, semi-feudal country only beginning to industrialize. Its path to socialism was less clear. Shelia Delaney has demonstrated that the four older agitators in Die Maßnahme follow Comintern’s strategy for China: a multi-class, united front.35 The proletariat was to ally with the peasantry, the bourgeoisie, and even the old feudal upper classes to overthrow the foreign colonial powers. Then, the proletariat, peasantry, and lower bourgeoisie would turn on the wealthy bourgeoisie and feudal upper class, and so forth, until the proletariat (and/or peasantry) came to power. This strategy aligns well with Die Maßnahme, where the Young Comrade is faulted for failing to revolutionize the peasantry (Scene III) and for refusing to work with the wealthy bourgeoisie (Scene V). As Delaney describes, the details of this strategy shifted substantially throughout the 1920s and 1930s (and were a key front in the Stalin-Trotsky conflict), but the overall approach endured from the early 1920s into the Cold War. This strategy in China was in the front of the German consciousness while Die Maßnahme was being written and premiered in mid to late 1930 because of the conflict surrounding the Li Lisan Line.36 Li Lisan led the Chinese Communist Party from 1928 to 1931. His power base was the

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urban, industrial proletariat, but this demographic had been largely eliminated in the bloody split with the Nationalist Party in 1927.37 As a result, power was shifting to agrarian leaders, most notably Mao Zedong.38 When a border conflict broke out between the Soviet Union and China in 1929, the Comintern ordered a new military campaign combined with workers’ uprisings in China. While the Soviets quickly prevailed and signed a treaty, the Chinese Communists’ campaign faltered and uprisings failed to materialize. Nevertheless, Li continued the campaign, at least in part to consolidate his hold on power. The Comintern now claimed that Li was acting against their orders, and its agents spent the second half of 1930 maneuvering to remove him from power, which they finally did in early 1931. Brecht, Eisler, and their audiences would have been familiar with these events thanks to prominent coverage in both mainstream and Communist journalism. As Weijia Li notes, the leading Communist newspaper, Die rote Fahne, “published at least one article per week” on the conflict in China between 1929 and 1931, with seventeen reports “in July 1929 alone.”39 It is tantalizing to speculate that Brecht and Eisler also received first-hand information from Eisler’s brother Gerhart, who was stationed in Shanghai as an agent of the Comintern during the events of the Li Lisan line.40 While Gerhart’s duties are unclear, it was the Shanghai Comintern office that wrested control away from Li. Given the secret nature of Gerhart’s mission, it is unclear how much direct information Brecht and Eisler received from him. At the very least, they would have been extra motivated to follow news coverage of China. Several of the controversies surrounding the Li Lisan Line align well with the events of Die Maßnahme. Like the Young Comrade, Li was blamed for beginning a campaign before the necessary support was in place (Scene VI), not working with the peasantry (Scene III), and failing to (re)build an adequate base in the cities (Scenes IV and VI). Li was faulted for leftist deviation and putschism, which helps explain why Die Maßnahme presents the rightist approach of the other agitators as correct and not, as some German critics thought, as faulty right opportunism. This is not to argue that these scenes were based on specific events, but rather that the dramatic action was invented to illustrate general strategies. The setting lends the lesson of the work relevance and urgency and also aligns with agitprop practices on which Brecht and Eisler claim to have drawn.41 Although Die Maßnahme does not reenact scenes from the news, it does resemble a Living Newspaper in that the lesson presented on stage reinforces what one has been reading in the press.

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What critics at the time missed, however, was that the lesson of the work is not a specific strategy, but the importance of following orders or, as most modern scholars put it, of subsuming one’s subjectivity to the collective.42 Setting the work in a different country makes this lesson even clearer. Like German audiences, the Young Comrade approaches the events in Die Maßnahme from a different revolutionary context. Like him, German audiences’ first response to these situations might not align with the directions of the Comintern. However, as the chorus “Lob der Partei” (Praise of the Party) makes clear, the party (and by extension, the Comintern) knows better than the individual. At the beginning of Die Maßnahme, the Young Comrade agreed to suppress his individualism and follow orders, and the work shows the consequences of his failure to do so. In order to appreciate this message and the role the Chinese setting plays in conveying it, it is important to go beyond Brecht’s text. For example, one likely reason critics at the time—who saw the work performed— more frequently understood Die Maßnahme as concretely set in China than post-World War II scholars—who approach the work primarily as a text—was the use of masks. Before entering China, the agitators don masks that will supposedly enable them to pass as ethnically Chinese.43 The racial specificity of the masks in early productions served as a constant reminder that the events are taking place in China. According to first-hand accounts of the premiere, “the four agitators … wore yellow half-masks with slanted Chinese eye-holes.”44 However, as Yasco Horsman and other contemporary scholars who take the masks into account have argued, the act of masking also represents the suppression of individual subjectivity and submission to the will of the collective, which is the main lesson of Die Maßnahme.45 Another key component of Die Maßnahme was Hanns Eisler’s music. Eisler neither imitated Chinese music nor incorporated exoticist markers of China. This may seem to demonstrate that the Chinese setting was inconsequential. He did, for example, make use of recorded Chinese music in his soundtrack to the 1939 documentary about the Japanese invasion of China, The 400 Million.46 A similar argument is often made of Brecht’s text. Unlike many of his other works, in Die Maßnahme, Brecht does not include references to traditional Chinese theater, poetry, or philosophy, or create specifically Chinese characters or settings.47 Eisler’s explanation clarifies this feature of Brecht’s text: He sought to portray modern China as already well advanced in Marxism’s teleological vision of history. Just as feudal and capitalist social structures were fated to disappear with the rise

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of socialism, so too national culture with the rise of an international proletarian culture. (Die Maßnahme predates the rehabilitation of national folk cultures under Socialist Realism.) Eisler claimed his music was international, but in many ways it was distinctly German. In this, Eisler shared an ideological blind spot with other Communists of the time. European and Soviet Communists claimed to support anti-colonial struggles, but their support was conditional and a means of quasi-neocolonial control. Financial, material, and military aid only flowed when anti-colonial organizations followed orders from the Comintern or European and Soviet “advisors,” while efforts to establish organizational structures independent of the Comintern were sabotaged and suppressed.

Kampfmusik and International Proletarian Culture With two notable exceptions, Eisler’s music for Die Maßnahme conforms to his unique idiom of Communist propaganda music, or Kampfmusik, whose internationalist ambitions explain his decision not to include musical markers of China. Eisler sought to create a new proletarian music that would sweep away existing folk and bourgeois music (Western classical and jazz). It would not be just the music of the German workers’ movement, but of every nation’s workers’ movement. Class-consciousness would supersede differences of language, culture, or tradition. Like the agitators in Die Maßnahme, individual nations and national cultures lack the perspective and wisdom to achieve revolutionary change, and therefore need to suppress their individuality and submit to the will of the collective of international Communism. Despite Eisler’s ambitions, his Kampfmusik remained distinctly German. It achieved substantial popularity abroad but was generally recognized as Eisler’s unique style, not as a model for imitation. Instead, national Communist movements tended to pursue their own nationally inflected approaches.48 Additionally, Eisler’s Kampfmusik incorporated distinctly German musical influences, like Lutheran chorales, J. S. Bach, military marches, and interwar Germany’s idiosyncratic approach to jazz. From the perspective of effective propaganda for German audiences, there is a clear logic to the German-ness of Eisler’s music. From a global perspective, however, Eisler’s agenda is symptomatic of residual (neo)colonialist ways of thinking in European and Soviet Communism. Eisler’s internationalist ambitions and his use of musical styles in Die Maßnahme follow the Marxist view of music history articulated in his

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writings. Citing the economist and armchair anthropologist Karl Bücher, Eisler claimed that music originated in the work songs used to maintain the rhythms of communal labor in early human societies.49 In one of the two exceptions to the use of the Kampfmusik style in Die Maßnahme, Eisler composes a work song, the “Gesang der Reiskahnschlepper” (Song of the Rice Barge Haulers). In this scene, the Young Comrade observes laborers pulling a barge up river, but they keep slipping on the flat river bottom. Rather than organizing them, he succumbs to sympathy and lays down rocks to improve their traction and temporarily ease their labor. As the song is diegetic, we might expect to hear Chinese-sounding music.50 Instead, Eisler’s music alternates between two styles, the first of which is of interest here. A slow tempo, open octave harmonies, and minor/modal melodies imitate a folk work song. One critic compared it to the Volga Boat Song.51 Where the use of recognizably Chinese-influenced music would have reinforced the Otherness of the Chinese setting, Eisler kept the music ambiguous, facilitating an allegorical understanding of the scene. Jumping ahead in Eisler’s Marxist conception of music history, the final stage of bourgeois musical culture was jazz, whose international spread served to liquidate previous, local forms of entertainment and art music, paving the way for a new international proletarian musical culture. As he wrote in 1932: Light bourgeois music has transformed … into an international, industrialized intoxicant. One hears the same jazz music in the bars of Berlin, Shanghai, or Chicago. … At the same time, the death of folk music is completed: in the industrialized nations, there is no more folk music, the farmer in Germany, in Scotland, … in North America, the Negro in South Carolina listens to the same international popular music on the radio.52

Eisler parodies jazz in the music for a rich merchant in Scene V of Die Maßnahme. This is another quasi-diegetic song by a Chinese character and thus somewhere where we might expect Chinese-influenced music.53 However, the merchant also represents the nascent capitalist developments in China that served a similar historical-materialist function of sweeping away the feudal order and preparing the way for socialism. Thus, jazz both fits the historical function of bourgeois capitalism represented by the Merchant and expresses the negative associations these held for Eisler. As he and Brecht explained in their “Notes on Die Maßnahme”: “The music of Part 5 … is an imitation of a music that reflects the fundamental

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attitude of the merchant: of jazz. The brutality, idiocy, self-assurance, and self-contempt of this type of person could be ‘represented’ in no other musical form.”54 Beyond these two moments, Eisler’s music is in the style of his Kampfmusik. These sections provide all of the work’s non-diegetic music as well as diegetic music in proletarian contexts, like the factory workers’ strike in Scene IV. This use of Kampfmusik matched Eisler’s ambition to replace folk and other national idioms with a new international proletarian culture. Folk songs originating in pre-industrial labor were inappropriate to the modern worker: Folk songs arise under primitive economic conditions, especially in agrarian economies. Modern capitalism is unsuitable ground for the growth of folk songs. … But we have something else—the mass song. The mass song is the fighting song of the modern working class and is to a certain degree, folk song at a higher stage that before, because it is international.55

Or as he wrote elsewhere: “The Kampflied is the true folk song of the proletariat.”56 From this perspective, Eisler’s use of his Kampfmusik idiom for diegetic music in the modern China is understandable. For example, the “Strike Song” in Scene IV is sung by striking Chinese workers. Eisler was famous for composing such songs for German workers, and audiences would recognize it as such, with its relatively easy to sing, unison melody; steady beat with occasional syncopations; and triadic harmony with pungent added dissonances. Similarly, the choral numbers sung by the Control Chorus draw on Eisler’s music for the German Worker-Singer Federation (Deutsche Arbeiter-Sänger Bund) and Fighting Organization of Worker-­ Singers (Kampfgemeinschaft der Arbeitersänger). The “Lob der USSR” (In Praise of the USSR), for example, begins with an imitation of traditional counterpoint and moves to a homophonic chorale texture. The harmony, as in other numbers, is minor with modal inflections and occasional added dissonances. Techniques like counterpoint were chosen for their didactic applicability; Eisler believed that contrapuntal repetition of text served to reinforce the meaning of the words.57 Eisler’s use of such traditional techniques brings us back to the residual (neo)colonialism in the way his internationalist ambitions failed to recognize his explicitly German sources. Following his Marxist approach to music history, Eisler believed it was possible to refunction musical

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materials. Eisler described this procedure in 1934: “We will apply our critical methods, separate craft from [ideological] content, purify craft from the influence of content, and then out of this new technique we will bring something new into development by giving it other uses and content.”58 For Eisler, refunctioning musical techniques stripped them of problematic associations, like the feudal associations of early religious music, and allowed them to be applied to revolutionary ends, like the contrapuntal techniques we have just seen. Eisler’s sources, however, were overwhelmingly German, including Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert.59 Other sources were exclusively European, like the old church modes.60Although Eisler argued that these sources had been stripped of ideological content, there can be little doubt that audiences—especially those familiar with the German choral tradition via the German Worker-Singer Federation—recognized the German sources that grounded Eisler’s Kampfmusik. His assumption that German traditions could be the foundation for an international, intercultural music is not far removed from the ideology surrounding many of his nineteenth-­ century models that German music was somehow universal, while other national music traditions remained merely national. That Eisler’s ambition encompassed cultures outside of Europe was made clear by Brecht, who approvingly claimed in 1938 that Eisler’s mass songs had become the shared heritage of “millions of workers of white, black, and yellow race.”61 Eisler understood his music to be part of the international Communist movement and was likely oblivious to the (neo)colonialist implications not just of his approach, but of the Communist movement generally. Despite the fact that the Chinese Revolution was progressing while the German Revolution had stalled out, Germans pictured themselves traveling to China to serve as leaders, while Chinese Communists who came to Germany were exclusively students seeking a German education.62 This dynamic is reproduced in Die Maßnahme. One agitator is identified as coming from Berlin, while the Chinese workers are an anonymous, leaderless mass who passively receive instruction from the agitators. The Young Comrade is even faulted for beginning the uprising in Scene VI based on the input of the unemployed workers he has been organizing. This bias went all the way to the top. While the Comintern included representatives from around the world and occasionally drew on the insight of those with local knowledge, final decisions largely rested on Russian representatives.63 As in the case of Li Lisan, independently minded local leaders were undermined and replaced with Soviet/European

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representatives or de facto puppets. Any paternalistic claims to justify this approach are discredited by the way anti-colonial activists were regularly reduced to pawns in the internal Soviet power struggles, as in the case of the Canton Commune of 1927, when Stalin cynically ordered Chinese Communists to launch a hopeless uprising as part of his efforts to expel Trotsky from the party.

Conclusion Understanding Die Maßnahme as both concretely set in modern China and as an allegory for modern Germany helps to clarify the meaning of the work and its reception history. It also reveals contradictions in the portrayal of China that contributed to the initial confusion. Brecht and Eisler recognize the differences in the ways that the Comintern approached Germany and China. Germany was an industrialized, bourgeois-­dominated country ready for class-against-class social struggle, while China was semicolonial, semi-feudal, and only beginning to industrialize, calling for a united front strategy. While the lesson of Die Maßnahme was the importance of following orders, the orders the agitators were given only made sense in the context of a united front struggle. Thus, when German critics assumed the lesson of Die Maßnahme was the specific strategy followed by the agitators, they found the work at fault for right opportunism. But why did German critics so quickly assume that Die Maßnahme was teaching a specific strategy to apply in Germany? I contend that this was, at least in part, because Brecht and Eisler eschewed markers of traditional Chinese culture, and the supposedly international Communist culture with which they replaced it was recognizably German. Without the distancing and Other-ing effects of exoticist tropes or imitations of traditional Chinese drama and music, Brecht and Eisler obscured the line between what elements of the work were distinct to the Chinese setting and what elements could be applied to Germany. In some ways, this may suggest a progressive reconfiguration of the usual practice of representing China or the Orient. In both older exoticist works and more recent Yellow Peril/Yellow Hope works, China is presented as radically Other to Germany, and German cultural identity is defined by China’s difference, or Otherness.64 Brecht and Eisler reconfigure this paradigm. In Die Maßnahme, China is presented as both Other and radically similar to Germany: Other in that it recognizes the Comintern’s different strategies in each country, and similar in that

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Brecht’s dramaturgy and Eisler’s musical style assume that both countries are modern, industrial states united under the banner of international Communist revolution and a corresponding international proletarian culture. It is this sameness of China and Germany that allows China to allegorize Germany. As we have seen, however, the progressive potential of portraying China and Germany as radically similar is undermined by the way that it is achieved: China’s unique cultural identity is erased by modern German culture, disguised as international and universal. The contradiction between recognition and erasure of China’s difference to Germany likely left critics unsure how to interpret the work. What aspects of the portrayal of China were they to understand as representing China as Other to Germany, and what aspects as representing China as similar to Germany? We can also think of post-World War II reception as modern critics trying to sort out this confusion by reading Die Maßnahme through one of the more familiar frameworks of China as Other. For those who interpret the work as a parable that could just as easily be set anywhere else, Die Maßnahme reproduces the interchangeability of exotic locales in Orientalist works, in which differences between Persia, India, China, or other Asian lands were less important than that they were an exotic Other onto which Western fantasies could be projected. Some Brecht scholars have explicitly recognized this.65 For those who read Die Maßnahme as a dramatic reconstruction of a specific uprising or event in China, the work becomes another representative of the Yellow Hope (or depending on one’s political perspective, a Communist Yellow Peril). The essential otherness of China in such a portrayal allows it to serve as inspiration to Germans, to reinforce the need for revolution, or to build international solidary, but not to allegorize Germany itself. As a lesson, China could at best serve as a case study. In some ways, my argument places the portrayal of China in Die Maßnahme between these two positions: China does allegorize Germany, but the work is also very specifically set in modern-day China. While it does not seek to reconstruct recent events, it does assume familiarity with them. However, thinking about whether China is portrayed as an Other demonstrates how far my argument is from those two positions: While they both assume that China is being presented as radically Other to Germany, I show how Brecht and Eisler reconfigured portrayals of China. It is at once Other and similar. The potential for confusion opened up by this contradiction was only exacerbated by the way in which the similarity of Germany and China was presented. For in seeking to subsume national

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differences to a new internationalist class-consciousness, Brecht and Eisler were also asserting their own national culture as the basis of the new, “universal” international culture, thus confusing which elements of China in the work were to be understood as Other and which as similar.

Notes 1. All Translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 2. On the ICC, see Bernhard H. Bayerlein, “Vorzeichen des Terrors und der Moskauer Prozesse: die Internationale Kontrollkommission, die Disziplinierung und Kriminalisierung der Komintern und des Internationalen Kommunismus,” in Centenaire Jules Humbert-Droz. Colloque sur l’Internationale Communiste, Actes, ed. André Lasserre (La Chaux-de-­Fonds: Fondation Jules Humbert-Droz, 1992). 3. Paula Hanssen, Elisabeth Hauptmann: Brecht’s Silent Collaborator (Berlin: Peter Lang, 1995), 69–70; John Fuegi, Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics and the Making of the Modern Drama (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 245–47. 4. On the Brechtian Lehrstück, see Roswitha Mueller, “Learning for a New Society: the Lehrstück,” in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, ed. Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 5. Joy Calico, Brecht at the Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 17 and 26–27. 6. Ibid., 32 and 188n60. 7. “Auszugsweise Abschrift I AN 2162 e/21.12 aus den vom Polizeipräsidenten, Landeskriminalpolizeiamts Berlin—I2 e 3330/P 13,” in Bertolt Brecht, Die Maßnahme. Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Reiner Steinweg (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 410. 8. Waleria Nasarowa, “Gedanken zur Maßnahme,” in Hanns Eisler Heute. Berichte—Probleme—Beobachtungen, ed. Manfred Grabs (Berlin: Akademie der Künste der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1974), 58. 9. For example, Weijia Li, “Otherness in Solidarity: Collaboration between Chinese and German Left-Wing Activists in the Weimar Republic,” in Beyond Alterity: German Encounters with Modern East Asia, ed. Qinna Shen and Martin Rosenstock (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 85. 10. Alexander V. Pantsov, “Comintern Activists in China: Spies or Theorists?” in Foreigners and Foreign Institutions in Republican China, ed. AnneMarie Brady and Douglas Brown (New York: Routledge, 2013), 99–100, 103.

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11. Ruth Fisher, Stalin and German Communism: A Study in the Origins of the State Party (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 618. 12. Nathan Notowicz, Wir reden hier nicht von Napoleon. Wir reden von Ihnen. Gespräche mit Hanns Eisler und Gerhart Eisler (Berlin: Verlag Neue Musik, 1971), 193. 13. Jürgen Schebera, “Die Maßnahme—‘Gescheidigkeitsübung für gute Dialektiker?,’” in Brecht 83. Inge Jahn-Gellert, ed., Brecht und Marxismus (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1983), 97. 14. Antony Tatlow, The Mask of Evil: Brecht’s Response to the Poetry, Theatre and Thought of China and Japan. A Comparative and Critical Evaluation (Bern: Peter Lang, 1977), 200. 15. See Klaus-Dieter Krabiel, “Die Maßnahme,” in Brecht Handbuch, vol. 1, Stücke, ed. Jan Knopf (Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2001), 264. 16. Charles Ringrose, “Bush and the W.M.A.—The Early Years,” in Alan Bush: An 80th Birthday Symposium, ed. Ronald Stevenson (Kidderminster: Bravura Publications, 1981), 80–81. The program misdates the work, and Ringrose’s volume misdates the English performance. 17. Even before World War II, portraying recent events in China was a balancing act for Soviet artists. See, for example, Nicholas J.  Cull and Arthur Waldron, “Shanghai Document—‘Shankhaiskii Dokument’ (1928): Soviet film propaganda and the Shanghai rising of 1927,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 16, no. 3 (1996). 18. Fuegi, Brecht, 504–5. 19. Ralph Ley, Brecht as Thinker: Studies in Literary Marxism and Existentialism (Ann Arbor, MI: Applied Literature Press, 1979), 18. 20. Graham Bartram and Anthony White, “Introduction,” in Brecht in Perspective, ed. Graham Bartram and Anthony White (Burnt Mill: Longman Group, 1982), ix. 21. For example, Ralph Ley has criticized Western scholars for overemphasizing Karl Korsch’s influence on Brecht in order to dissociate Brecht from Stalinism. Ley, Brecht, 20–28. 22. Alfred Kurella, “Ein Versuch mit nicht ganz tauglichen Mitteln” (1931), in Die Massanhme. Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Reiner Steinweg (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 380. 23. See Renata Berg-Pan, Bertolt Brecht and China (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1979), 16–24. 24. Gregor Streim, “Das Erwachen des Kulis. China in den Reisereportagen der Weimarer Republik (Richard Huelsenbeck—Arthur Holitscher—Egon Erwin Kisch),” in Deutsch-Chinesische Annäherungen. Kultureller Austausch und gegenseitige Wahrnehmung in der Zwischenzeit, ed. Almut Hille, Gregor Streim, and Pan Lu (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2011).

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25. “Hände weg von China” was a Communist slogan at the time. See Werner Fuhr, Proletarische Musik in Deutschland 1928–1933 (Göppingen: Verlag Alfred Kümmerle, 1977); W.  L. Guttsman, Workers’ Culture in Weimar Germany: Between Tradition and Commitment (New York: Berg, 1990). Richard Bodek notes that the Living Newspaper took hold in Germany after a tour by a Soviet troupe whose performances included “a sketch about conditions in China.” Richard Bodek, Proletarian Performance in Weimar Berlin: Agitprop, Chorus, and Brecht (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1997), 101. 26. On Zoff’s piece, see “Die neue Woche. Szene aus Revolution in China. Lehrstück für den Rundfunk von Otto Zoff,” Der deutsche Rundfunk 8, no. 20 (16 May 1930). 27. See Sergei Tretiakov, “Author’s Note,” in Roar China (London: Martin Lawrence, 1931); Mark Gamsa, “Sergei Tret’iakov’s Roar, China! between Moscow and China,” Itinerario 36, no. 2 (2012); Friedrich Wolf, “Weshalb schrieb ich Tai Yang erwacht?” (1949/50), in Friedrich Wolf, Gesammelte Werke in sechzehn Bände, vol. 16, Aufsätze 1945–1953 (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1968). 28. Sheila Delany, “The Politics of the Signified in Bertolt Brecht’s The Measures Taken,” CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 16, no. 1 (1986), 77; Berg-Pan, Brecht, 276–77. 29. Delany, “Politics,” 70. 30. See, for example, Li, “Otherness,” 85. On the Canton Commune, the 1929 Sino-Soviet Border conflict, and related contextual history, see Bruce A.  Elleman, Moscow and the Emergence of Communist Power in China, 1925–30: The Nanchang Uprising and the Birth of the Red Army (London: Routledge, 2009); Richard Thornton, The Comintern and the Chinese Communists, 1928–1931 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969). 31. Kurella, “Ein Versuch,” 383. 32. Pace Tatlow, Mask, 261. As we will see, critics linked this scene to the Russian “Volga Boat Song.” 33. Durus [pseud. Alfred Kemény], “Die Maßnahme, ein Lehrstück” (1931), in Die Maßnahme. Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Reiner Steinweg (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 374. 34. Kurella, “Ein Versuch,” 381–82. On these uprisings and Weimar-era analysis of them, see Aleksandr Vatlin, “The Testing-ground of World Revolution: Germany in the 1920s,” in International Communism and the Communist International 1919–43, ed. Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). 35. Delany, “Politics.” This was opposed to the Comintern’s “class against class” strategy in Germany. Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe, “Introduction,” in International Communism and the Communist International 1919–43,

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ed. Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 4–5. The “United Front” initially referred to the Communist-­ Nationalist alliance. After the Communist-Nationalist split, the language of the “United Front” was maintained. It was claimed that the revolution had passed into the next phase where the United Front came into conflict with the bourgeois Nationalists. Elleman, Moscow, 122–24. 36. Delany’s discussion of events in China extends only through the 1927 Communist-Nationalist split and does not take into account those events immediately before and concurrent with the composition of Die Maßnahme. On the Li Lisan line, see Elleman, Moscow, 203–5 and Thornton, Comintern, 103–217. The historiography of the Li Lisan Line is politically complicated. Questions remain over the behind-the-scenes machinations of Li, Mao, other Chinese Communists, and the Comintern. For an alternative perspective, see A. M. Grigoriev, “The Comintern and the Revolutionary Movement in China under the Slogan of the Soviets (1927–1931),” in The Comintern and the East: The Struggle for the Leninist Strategy and Tactics in National Liberation Movements, ed. R. A. Ulyanovsky (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979). 37. Michael Weiner, “Comintern in East Asia, 1919–39,” in The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin, ed. Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew (Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1996), 181. 38. While Thornton emphasizes the role of the Li Lisan Line in the rise of Mao, it was also a short-term setback for Mao, as it led to the short-lived leadership of the so-called 28 Bolsheviks, a group of Chinese students trained in Moscow and deeply loyal to Stalin. 39. Li, “Otherness,” 81. 40. Gerhart was in China from 1929 to 1931. Pantsov, “Comintern activists,” 104; Notowicz, Wir reden, 231. Pace John Willett, Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches (London: Methuen, 1984), 162; Delany, “The Politics,” 76, there is no evidence that Gerhart was present at the Canton Commune in 1927. 41. Hanns Eisler, “[Geschichte der deutschen Arbeitermusikbewegung seit 1848]” (undated, ca. 1934), in Gesammelte Schriften 1921–1935, ed. Tobias Fasshauer and Günter Mayer (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf und Härtel, 2007), 201–2. 42. See, among others, Yasco Horsman, Theaters of Justice: Judging, Staging, and Working Through in Ardent, Brecht, and Delbo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); Erich Speidel, “The Individual and Society,” in Brecht in Perspective, ed. Graham Bartram and Anthony White (Burnt Mill: Longman Group, 1982), 52. 43. The text identifies the agitators as German, Russian, and Tatar. As John Fuegi notes, Comintern agitators did not actually try to disguise their eth-

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nicities. European agitators in East Asia posed as Western businessmen, military advisors, teachers, and so on. Fuegi, Brecht, 650n5. 44. Sergej Tretjakow, “Hanns Eisler” (1935), in Sinn und Form. Beiträge zur Literatur. Sonderheft Hanns Eisler 1964 (Berlin: Ratten und Leoning, 1964), 123. See also Krabiel, “Die Maßnahme,” 258. Several photographs of the premiere survive, but the quality is too low to make out what the masks looked like. Pace Berg-Pan’s discussion of Brecht’s practice of using colored masks and similar descriptors to portray different races, they almost certainly also served as racist caricature. Berg-Pan, Brecht, 62–63, 69, 191–92. 45. Horsman, Theaters, 91–132, esp. 103 and 112. 46. William Brooks, “A Child Went Forth: Hanns Eisler, American Progressives, and Folk Song,” in Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900–2000, ed. Felix Meyer, Carol J. Oja, Wolfgang Rathert, and Anne C. Shreffler (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), 261–62. 47. For a detailed overview of these in Brecht’s other work, see Berg-­ Pan, Brecht. 48. For example, on the short-lived and marginal influence of Eisler on the American Composers Collective, see Howard Pollack, Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 103. 49. Hanns Eisler, “Die Kunst als Lehrmeisterin im Klassenkampf” (undated, ca. 1931), in Gesammelte Schriften, 1921–1935, ed. Tobias Fasshauer and Günter Mayer (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf und Härtel, 2007), 124. 50. The use of diegetic songs with Chinese-sounding music was common in other Communist theatrical productions, including of Tretiakov’s Roar China! Edward Tyerman, “Productive Rhythms: The Sounds of China through Soviet Ears,” Ulbandus Review 16 (2014): 148. 51. Fechter, “Bert Brecht: ‘Die Maßnahme. Philharmonie’” (1930), in Die Maßnahme. Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Reiner Steinweg (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 332. Fechter also referred to Chinese elements in the music, but did not specify what these might be, nor was this observation shared by any other critics. Likely, he was referring to modernist elements of Eisler’s music, like the driving rhythmic pulse or dissonant harmonic language. Critics often struggle to distinguish such modernist features from exoticism. See, for example, Nancy Rao, “From Chinatown Opera to The First Emperor: Racial Imagination, the Trope of ‘Chinese Opera,’ and New Hybridity,” in Opera in a Multicultural World: Coloniality, Culture, Performance, ed. Mary Ingraham, Joseph So, and Roy Moodley (New York: Routledge, 2016), 59. The only other critic to make a similar observation was Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, who merely likened the song to “a lamentation of oriental-psalmic character.” Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Politische Musik zu Brecht-Eislers Maßnahme” (1931), in Die Maßnahme.

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Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Reiner Steinweg (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 347. 52. Hanns Eisler, “Die Aufgaben der Musikkonferenz des MRTO” (1932), in Gesammelte Schriften, 1921–1935, ed. Tobias Fasshauer and Günter Mayer (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf und Härtel, 2007), 159. 53. Reiner Steinweg, ed., Brechts Modell der Lehrstücke. Zeugnisse, Diskussion, Erfahrungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), 98. I say quasi-diegetic because the song is a moment of magic realism: The character announces he is going to sing a song, and then does. It is not realistic action, but we assume the song to be taking place in the diegesis of the work. 54. Hanns Eisler, “Anmerkung [zu Die Massnahme]” (1931), in Gesammelte Schriften, 1921–1935, ed. Tobias Fasshauer and Günter Mayer (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf und Härtel, 2007), 118. 55. Hanns Eisler, “Problems of Working Class Music. Interview with Hanns Eisler” (1935), in A Rebel in Music, ed. Manfred Grabs (Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1978), 99. 56. Hanns Eisler, “Das revolutionäre Lied. Einiges über die Aufgaben der Arbeiter-Gesangvereine” (1934), in Gesammelte Schriften, 1921–1935, ed. Tobias Fasshauer and Günter Mayer (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf und Härtel, 2007), 224–25. 57. Hanns Eisler, “Die Erbauer einer neuen Musikkultur” (1931), in Gesammelte Schriften, 1921–1935, ed. Tobias Fasshauer and Günter Mayer (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf und Härtel, 2007), 138. 58. Eisler, “Das revolutionäre Lied,” 229. 59. On Bach, see Calico, Brecht, 32 and 188n60. On Schubert, see Thomas Phelps, “Die Kunst zu erben oder Was haben Hanns Eislers ‘Wiegenlieder’ mit Franz Schubert zu tun?” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 149, no. 11 (1988). 60. See, for example, Dietrich Stern, “Soziale Bestimmtheit des musikalischen Materials. Hanns Eislers Balladen für Gesang und kleines Orchester und ihre Beziehung zur Musik Kurt Weills,” in Angewandte Musik der 20er Jahre. Exemplarische Versuch gesellschaftsbezogener musikalischer Arbeit für Theater, Film, Radio, Massenveranstaltung, ed. Dietrich Stern (Berlin: Argument Verlag, 1977). 61. Brecht, “Kleine Berichtigung” (1938), in Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Werner Hecht, et al., vol. 22 (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 402. 62. Li, “Otherness.” 63. This dynamic is central to scholarship on the Chinese Revolution cited throughout this chapter. See also Wendy Singer, “Peasants and the Peoples of the East: Indians and the Rhetoric of the Comintern,” in International Communism and the Communist International 1919–43, ed. Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Roy

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Hofheinz, Jr., The Broken Wave: The Chinese Communist: Peasant Movement, 1922–1928 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); Robert North and Xenia Eudin, M.N.  Roy’s Mission to China: The Communist-­Koumintang Split of 1927 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963). Nor was this tension limited to Asia; on Latin America, see Marc Becker, “Mariátegui, the Comintern, and the Indigenous Question in Latin America,” Science & Society 70, no. 4 (Oct. 2006). 64. On the “Yellow Hope,” see Dagmar Yu-Dembski, “Traum und Wirklichkeit. Rezeption und Darstellung Chinas in der Weimarer Republik,” in Exotik und Wirklichkeit. China in Reisbeschreibungen vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Mechthild Leutner and Dagmar Yu-Dembski (Munich: Minerva, 1999); and Streim, “Erwachen,” 157. 65. See, for example, Tatlow, Mask, 261.

Bibliography No Author. “Die neue Woche. Szene aus Revolution in China. Lehrstück für den Rundfunk von Otto Zoff.” Der deutsche Rundfunk 8, no. 20 (16 May 1930): 12. Bartram, Graham and Anthony White. “Introduction.” In Brecht in Perspective, edited by Graham Bartram and Anthony White, viii–xii. Burnt Mill: Longman Group, 1982. Bayerlein, Bernhard H. “Vorzeichen des Terrors und der Moskauer Prozesse: die Internationale Kontrollkommission, die Disziplinierung und Kriminalisierung der Komintern und des Internationalen Kommunismus.” In Centenaire Jules Humbert-Droz. Colloque sur l’Internationale Communiste, Actes, edited by André Lasserre, 531–56. La Chaux-de-Fonds: Fondation Jules Humbert-­ Droz, 1992. Becker, Marc. “Mariátegui, the Comintern, and the Indigenous Question in Latin America.” Science & Society 70, no. 4 (October 2006): 450–79. Berg-Pan, Renata. Bertolt Brecht and China. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1979. Bodek, Richard. Proletarian Performance in Weimar Berlin: Agitprop, Chorus, and Brecht. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1997. Brecht, Bertolt. Die Maßnahme. Kritische Ausgabe. Edited by Reiner Steinweg. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972. Brecht, Bertolt. “Kleine Berichtigung” (1938). In Bertolt Brecht Werke. Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, vol. 22, 402–3. Edited by Werner Hecht, et al. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, and Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993. Brooks, William. “A Child Went Forth: Hanns Eisler, American Progressives, and Folk Song.” In Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900–2000, edited by Felix Meyer, Carol J. Oja, Wolfgang Rathert, and Anne C. Shreffler, 259–74. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014.

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Calico, Joy. Brecht at the Opera. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Cull, Nicholas J. and Arthur Waldron. “Shanghai Document—‘Shankhaiskii Dokument’ (1928): Soviet film propaganda and the Shanghai rising of 1927.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 16, no. 3 (1996): 309–31. Delany, Sheila. “The Politics of the Signified in Bertolt Brecht’s The Measures Taken.” CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 16, no. 1 (1986): 67–80. Durus [Alfred Kemény]. “Die Massnahme, ein Lehrstück.” In Bertolt Brecht, Die Maßnahme. Kritische Ausgabe, edited by Reiner Steinweg, 371–75. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972. Originally published Arbeiterbühne und Film 18, no. 2 (February 1931): 15–16. Eisler, Hanns. Gesammelte Schriften 1921–1935. Edited by Tobias Faßhauer and Günter Mayer. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2007. Eisler, Hanns. A Rebel in Music. Edited by Manfred Grams. Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1978. Eisler, Hanns and Bertolt Brecht. Die Massnahme. Klavierauszug. Piano reduction by Erwin Ratz. Vienna: Universal Edition, 1930. Elleman, Bruce A. Moscow and the Emergence of Communist Power in China, 1925–30: The Nanchang Uprising and the Birth of the Red Army. London: Routledge, 2009. Fechter. “Bert Brecht: ‘Die Massnahme. Philharmonie.’” In Bertolt Brecht, Die Maßnahme. Kritische Ausgabe, edited by Reiner Steinweg, 330–32. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972. Originally published Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 15 February 1930. Fisher, Ruth. Stalin and German Communism: A Study in the Origins of the State Party. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948. Fuegi, John. Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics and the Making of the Modern Drama. New York: Grove Press, 1994. Fuhr, Werner. Proletarische Musik in Deutschland 1928–1933. Göppingen: Verlag Alfred Kümmerle, 1977. Gamsa, Mark. “Sergei Tret’iakov’s Roar, China! between Moscow and China.” Itinerario 36, no. 2 (2012): 91–108. Grigoriev, A.  M. “The Comintern and the Revolutionary Movement in China under the Slogan of the Soviets (1927–1931).” In The Comintern and the East: The Struggle for the Leninist Strategy and Tactics in National Liberation Movements, edited by R. A. Ulyanovsky, translated by David Fidlon, 345–88. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979. Guttsman, W.L. Workers’ Culture in Weimar Germany: Between Tradition and Commitment. New York: Berg, 1990. Hanssen, Paula. Elisabeth Hauptmann: Brecht’s Silent Collaborator. Berlin: Peter Lang, 1995.

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Hofheinz, Roy, Jr. The Broken Wave: The Chinese Communist: Peasant Movement, 1922–1928. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. Horsman, Yasco. Theaters of Justice: Judging, Staging, and Working Through in Ardent, Brecht, and Delbo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Krabiel, Klaus-Dieter. “Die Maßnahme.” In Brecht Handbuch, vol. 1, Stücke, edited by Jan Knopf, 253–66. Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2001. Kurella, Alfred. “Ein Versuch mit nicht ganz tauglichen Mitteln.” In Bertolt Brecht, Die Maßnahme. Kritische Ausgabe, edited by Reiner Steinweg, 378–93. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972. Originally published Literatur der Weltrevolution no. 4 (1931): 100–109. Ley, Ralph. Brecht as Thinker: Studies in Literary Marxism and Existentialism. Ann Arbor, MI: Applied Literature Press, 1979. Li, Weijia. “Otherness in Solidarity: Collaboration between Chinese and German Left-Wing Activists in the Weimar Republic.” In Beyond Alterity: German Encounters with Modern East Asia, edited by Qinna Shen, Martin Rosenstock, 73–93. New York: Berghahn, 2014. Mueller, Roswitha. “Learning for a new society: the Lehrstück.” In The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, edited by Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks, 101–17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Nasarowa, Waleria. “Gedanken zur Massnahme.” In Hanns Eisler Heute. Berichte—Probleme—Beobachtungen, edited by Manfred Grabs, 54–60. Berlin: Akademie der Künste der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1974. North, Robert, and Xenia Eudin. M.N. Roy’s Mission to China: The Communist-­ Koumintang Split of 1927. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. Notowicz, Nathan. Wir reden hier nicht von Napoleon. Wir reden von Ihnen. Gespräche mit Hanns Eisler und Gerhart Eisler. Transcribed and edited by Jürgen Elsner. Berlin: Verlag Neue Musik, 1971. Pantsov, Alexander V. “Comintern activists in China: spies or theorists?” In Foreigners and Foreign Institutions in Republican China, edited by Anne-Marie Brady and Douglas Brown, 93–108. New York: Routledge, 2013. Phelps, Thomas. “Die Kunst zu erben oder Was haben Hanns Eislers ‘Wiegenlieder’ mit Franz Schubert zu tun?” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 149, no. 11 (1988): 9–13. Pollack, Howard. Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World. New  York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Rao, Nancy. “From Chinatown Opera to The First Emperor: Racial Imagination, the Trope of ‘Chinese Opera,’ and New Hybridity.” In Opera in a Multicultural World: Coloniality, Culture, Performance, edited by Mary Ingraham, Joseph So, and Roy Moodley, 50–67. New York: Routledge, 2016.

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Rees, Tim, and Andrew Thorpe. “Introduction.” In International Communism and the Communist International 1919–43, edited by Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe, 1–11. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Ringrose, Charles. “Bush and the W.M.A.—The Early Years.” In Alan Bush: An 80th Birthday Symposium, edited by Ronald Stevenson, 80–81. Kidderminster: Bravura Publications, 1981. Schebera, Jürgen. “Die Massnahme—‘Gescheidigkeitsübung für gute Dialektiker?’” In Brecht 83. Brecht und Marxismus, edited by Inge Jahn-Gellert, 91–100. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1983. Singer, Wendy. “Peasants and the Peoples of the East: Indians and the Rhetoric of the Comintern.” In International Communism and the Communist International 1919–43, edited by Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe, 271–84. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Speidel, Erich. “The Individual and Society.” In Brecht in Perspective, edited by Graham Bartram and Anthony White, 45–62. Burnt Mill: Longman Group, 1982. Steinweg, Reiner, ed. Brechts Modell der Lehrstücke. Zeugnisse, Diskussion, Erfahrungen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976. Stern, Dietrich. “Soziale Bestimmtheit des musikalischen Materials. Hanns Eislers Balladen für Gesang und kleines Orchester und ihre Beziehung zur Musik Kurt Weills.” In Angewandte Musik der 20er Jahre. Exemplarische Versuch gesellschaftsbezogener musikalischer Arbeit für Theater, Film, Radio, Massenveranstaltung, edited by Dietrich Stern, 101–12. Berlin: Argument Verlag, 1977. Streim, Gregor. “Das Erwachen des Kulis. China in den Reisereportagen der Weimarer Republik (Richard Huelsenbeck—Arthur Holitscher—Egon Erwin Kisch).” In Deutsch-Chinesische Annäherungen. Kultureller Austausch und gegenseitige Wahrnehmung in der Zwischenzeit, edited by Almut Hille, Gregor Streim, and Pan Lu, 155–71. Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2011. Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz. “Politische Musik zu Brecht-Eislers Massnahme.” In Bertolt Brecht, Die Maßnahme. Kritische Ausgabe, edited by Reiner Steinweg, 343–48. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972. Originally published Anbruch 13, no. 1 (1931): 5–8. Tatlow, Antony. The Mask of Evil: Brecht’s Response to the Poetry, Theatre and Thought of China and Japan. A Comparative and Critical Evaluation. Bern: Peter Lang, 1977. Thornton, Richard. The Comintern and the Chinese Communists, 1928–1931. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969. Tretiakov, Sergei. “Author’s Note.” In Sergei Tretiakov, Roar China, translated by F. Polianovska and Barbara Nixon, 5–6. London: Martin Lawrence, 1931. Tretjakow, Sergej. “Hanns Eisler (1935).” Translated by Irina Belokonewa and Stephan Hermlin. Sinn und Form, Sonderheft Hanns Eisler (1964): 110–27.

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Tyerman, Edward. “Productive Rhythms: The Sounds of China through Soviet Ears.” Ulbandus Review 16 (2014): 134–55. Vatlin, Aleksandr. “The Testing-ground of World Revolution: Germany in the 1920s.” In International Communism and the Communist International 1919–43, edited by Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe, 117–126. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Weiner, Michael. “The Comintern in East Asia, 1919–39.” In Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin, 158–90. Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1996. Willett, John. Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches. London: Methuen, 1984. Wolf, Friedrich. “Weshalb schrieb ich Tai Yang erwacht?” In Friedrich Wolf, Gesammelte Werke in sechzehn Bände, vol. 16, Aufsätze 1945–1953, 329–33. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1968. Originally published Das Stichwort. Dramaturgische Blätter des Stadttheaters Cottbus anläßlich der Aufführung von Tai Yang erwacht (1949/50). Yu-Dembski, Dagmar. “Traum und Wirklichkeit. Rezeption und Darstellung Chinas in der Weimarer Republik.” In Exotik und Wirklichkeit. China in Reisebeschreibungen vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, edited by Mechthild Leutner and Dagmar Yu-Dembski, 53–65. Munich: Minerva Publikation, 1999.

CHAPTER 10

Xiao Youmei: Chinese Musical Patriot or Comprador Germanophile? Hao Huang

Xiao Youmei (1884–1940) is identified by several Chinese scholars as “the father of modern Chinese music”1; he is also known as the “father of contemporary Chinese music education.”2 As the founding director of both the first Chinese music education institute—the Yinyue Chuanxisuo (Institute for the Promotion and Practice of Music)—and later the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Xiao played a central role in the development of musical education in China at the beginning of the twentieth century. Ju Qihong (2012) acknowledges Xiao Youmei as “the strategic designer and pioneer of Chinese New Music,”3 who introduced Western ideas and practices to Chinese music education in hopes of creating a new and better China and linking it with the rest of the world.4 As the first Chinese music student to earn a doctorate in Germany, Xiao regularly attended concerts at the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig. His exposure to German classical musical and his participation in the German conservatory practicum deeply affected him. According to Xiao’s niece

H. Huang (*) Department of Music, Scripps College, Claremont, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. M. Cho (ed.), Sino-German Encounters and Entanglements, Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73391-9_10

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Xiao Shuxian, while living in Beijing in the early 1920s Xiao decorated his study with portraits and busts of Johann Sebastian Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert.5 Xiao’s compositions written after his return from Germany manifest persistent affinities with the musical idioms of those composers, as well as with Haydn. Despite spending nearly half of his life abroad (in Macau, Japan, and Germany), Xiao maintained very traditional Chinese notions about the purpose of music. Notwithstanding his Western music training, Xiao did not abandon the Confucian precept that music education offers both jiaohua (ethical instruction) for individuals—cultivating virtue—and zhengdun minzu (national rectification); he believed in the Confucian ideal that music could “teach the people to distinguish good from evil, and to return to the correct way of man.”6 Despite his passion for German classical “absolute” music, Xiao was no follower of art for art’s sake. He saw the value of music in its power to influence people’s behavior. Xiao Youmei is noteworthy for his steadfast dedication to music education, his indifference to wealth and fame, and his rejection of a lucrative government career. In 1912, he could have easily capitalized on his personal connection with Sun Yatsen in pursuing high-ranking ministerial positions; he elected instead to go abroad for advanced studies in education and music. In 1927, after Liu Zhe abolished the music departments in all educational institutions in Beijing and closed down the Peking University Institute of Music, Xiao, as a person with an overseas PhD, could have forsaken music for a secure government job. Instead he chose to head south in order to found the Shanghai National Conservatory. When the Japanese army occupied Shanghai in 1937, at great personal risk he refused to cooperate with the Japanese and carried on with his work in music. Poverty stricken and debilitated, he devoted himself fully to his mission of regenerating China through music education. The first chapter section discusses the pioneering efforts in the early twentieth century of the Chinese intellectuals who preceded Xiao Youmei on behalf of music education. The second section covers the developmental years Xiao spent in Japan, where he established his allegiance to German classical music tradition. Next follows an examination of Xiao’s formative period in Germany; this section focuses on his immediate experiences with German music “at the source,” his PhD dissertation on traditional Chinese music, and the compositions he wrote there. The fourth section discusses Xiao’s years in Beijing and his involvement with the Peking Music Conservatory and its orchestra. This is succeeded by an investigation of

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Xiao’s new start in Shanghai after the collapse of the Peking Music Conservatory, when he founded the Shanghai Music Conservatory, still the preeminent music education institution in China. The chapter concludes with a quote that encapsulates Xiao’s motivations for promoting music and music education in China.

Musical Predecessors Even the “father of modern Chinese music” has forebears, and so it is necessary to recognize the contributions of Xiao’s musical predecessors— Cai Yuanpei, Shen Xiangong, and Zeng Zhimin. This not only rescues them from a lack of scholarly recognition, but also gives historical context to Xiao’s development as a musician and thinker. While Xiao was in school in Macau, Kang Youwei led the Hundred Days’ Reform in summer 1898. He sought to redress the failures of the Qing dynasty’s “self-­strengthening” movement, which had sought to adopt Western technological knowledge without making the corresponding philosophical, institutional, and social changes. In his Imperial Memorial to Emperor Guangxu, “Please Open Modern-Style Schools,” Kang suggested that the Chinese education system “should learn from as far as France and Germany and as near as Japan”7 and that “All people of the country should enter school at an age above seven, and be taught language, history, arithmetic, geography, physics, and singing, for a total of eight years in order to graduate.”8 In 1901, when Xiao Youmei left Guangzhou for Japan, Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940), Chinese philosopher, politician, and founder of the Academia Sinica, proposed to incorporate music and other artistic subjects into women’s education.9 A year later, when Cai and his colleagues in the Shanghai Educational Society founded the Patriotic Women’s School in Shanghai, Cai specified that singing should be a core course. Cai believed that the primary goal of music education should be the cultivation of moral virtue. Cai noted that music had been one of the liù yì (Six Arts) that had been practiced in ancient China: rites, music, archery, chariot racing, calligraphy, and mathematics. He was deeply influenced by Confucius’ dictum about music education: “To educate a person, you should start with poems, emphasize ceremonies and finish with music.”10 He valued above all the transformational power of music in improving a person’s moral and ethical values by restoring spiritual balance.11 Cai Yuanpei would play a pivotal role in Xiao’s future career.

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In 1902, Xiao’s second year in Japan, Shen Xingong (1869–1947) organized a music seminar in Tokyo for overseas Chinese students.12 Shen believed that the music of “modernity” (integrating Chinese words with Western-style songs) was the key to China’s national revitalization. Shen Xingong attended Kobun Gakuin (the Kobun Institute for overseas Chinese education) in Tokyo from 1902 to 190313; Japan’s early Westernization acted as a beacon for Chinese students. Xiao’s song Ticao-­ Bingcao (Physical Exercise—Military Drill), written while he was living in Japan, represents one of the earliest surviving examples of changge ji (Chinese classroom songs); its lyrics urge boys to become good soldiers for China. Zeng Zhimin (1879–1929) began his overseas studies in Japan by studying law at Waseda University from 1901; by 1903 his enthusiasm for music had led him to become a full-time student at the Tokyo Music College. In 1904, Zeng published his “Collected Works of Songs of Education.” In the Preface he proposed that singing lessons in Chinese schools were an essential part of providing a modern education for Chinese, initially to be modeled after those given in schools of America, Europe, and Japan, and then amended as necessary to suit the needs of Chinese students. In keeping with the intellectuals of his time, Zeng opined that music’s social function was “to maintain the morality of a nation, to enhance the happiness of a family, and to adjust the temperament of an individual.”14 In 1908 Zeng founded the Shanghai School for Poor Children, which featured a music department where “vocal and instrumental theory” was taught. Its Western-style school orchestra predates what is generally considered to be the first European-style orchestra with Chinese musicians (Xiao Youmei’s 1923 Peking University Institute of Music Orchestra) by over a dozen years!15 As essential as Xiao Youmei was to the development of music education in China, it is clear that he was not the first Chinese “modern” music educator. In 1893, while Xiao was spending his childhood in Macau, the Shanghai Sino-Western Women’s School and Chaozhou County Women’s School (both run by the Catholic Church) became the first schools in China to teach primarily Western music in their curriculum.16 By the early twentieth century, other Chinese schools followed suit by offering music and singing classes; in 1904, for example, the Shanghai Longmen Normal School added two hours of music and song classes each week to its curricula.17 Clearly, Western music was already being taught in China not only during Xiao’s time spent studying in Japan, but even earlier during his

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childhood. Indeed, Professor Shen Qia of the China Conservatory of Music has asserted that Shen Xingong, not Xiao, was “the earliest music teacher in the history of Chinese modern education, [and] is affirmed [as] the first man in the history of Chinese modern music also.”18 Xiao Youmei was part of the vanguard of overseas Chinese students in the decade between 1895 and 1905. Paula Harrell describes “the typical [Chinese] student” at the turn of the twentieth-century Tokyo as someone “in his early twenties, rather well educated, a product of the privileged class… Motivations for going abroad to study included personal advancement, but also a vague yearning to contribute to a strengthened China.”19 Young Xiao was such a person.

Maturation in Japan During one of the Qing dynasty’s multiple conflicts with (and defeats by) colonial powers, namely the Sino-French War of 1884–1885, “the father of modern Chinese music” Xiao Youmei was born in 1884 in Xiangshan in Guangdong Province. The town is also known as the birthplace of Sun Yatsen, claimed by both the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan as the “Father of the Nation.” The family moved to the Portuguese colony of Macau when Xiao was a small child, where he discovered that one of his neighbors was a Portuguese priest whose favorite pastime was playing a chamber organ at home. Through this happy coincidence, Xiao was introduced to Western music which, as he wrote years later in an autobiographic sketch, he found so fascinating that he “could not stop admiring it.”20 By chance, Sun Yatsen had also moved to Macau and lived nearby. Xiao returned to Guangzhou with his family in 1900, where he was enrolled in Shimin Xuetang (Shimin Academy), one of the earliest Chinese-­ run Western-style schools in the province, known for its progressive curriculum. A year later, Xiao and nine other graduates of that school embarked on a study tour to Japan, where Xiao remained for nearly a decade.21 Xiao’s studies in Japan followed the standard program of the period: intensive language study at a Japanese language school followed by a degree course at a university. Demonstrating a serious interest in music, Xiao enrolled in the Tokyo Imperial School of Music in 1902, where he focused on learning to play the piano and sing.22 After five years at that institution, he obtained a Guangdong province scholarship which allowed him to matriculate into the Humanities Department of the Imperial

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University in Tokyo, where he studied education while continuing to take piano lessons at the School of Music. While attending the University, Xiao reconnected with Sun Yatsen, who had meanwhile been exiled by the Qing dynasty as a dangerous revolutionary. Xiao’s nearly decade-long Japanese sojourn (1901–1910) is important for several reasons: as with many other Chinese overseas students, Xiao became involved in political activism directed at modernizing Qing China. He joined the Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Alliance Society), an underground resistance movement founded by his old friend Sun Yatsen in Tokyo in 1906. In truth, Xiao’s involvement was not so much a result of his own political consciousness as it was his relationship with Sun. In practical terms, Xiao’s pronounced musical inclinations and apparent disinterest in politics made him useful to Sun and his revolutionary comrades: the residence of the innocuous music student served as a safe refuge and secret meeting place.23 His youthful dalliance with Chinese radicals in Tokyo would, however, yield unexpected benefits for Xiao upon his return to China. If Macau is where Xiao’s interest in Western music was initially piqued, Japan was where his lifelong commitment to Austro-German classical music began in earnest. During Xiao’s time at the Tokyo School of Music, the curriculum had become so completely Germanized that founding director Isawa Shūji’s (1851–1917) initial guiding principle of attempting to blend Japanese music with elements of Western music had become just a faint memory. The repertoire and music theory of the First Viennese School (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) held full sway in the halls and classrooms of the Tokyo School of Music. As Sondra W. Howe has observed, “Germanism was an important influence in the Meiji period and the specialized education of the German universities was admired.”24 Xiao’s experiences at the Tokyo School of Music (1904–1910) primed him to appreciate Austro-German music, which in turn provided the incentive for Xiao to travel to Germany for more advanced music studies. Unlike most of his overseas student compatriots who embraced the nationalist Japanese “Shoka” (school songs), with their didactic lyrics and simple Euro-American tunes, Xiao demonstrated a preference for the artistic value and compositional techniques of German Lieder, which was to inspire his own compositions nearly two decades later in the early 1920s. After his time in Japan, Xiao Youmei returned to China in 1910, where he obtained an appointment as an inspector for the Ministry of Education. In August that year he was awarded the juren degree (recommended man)

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after passing the imperial examination for students who had studied abroad; one year later, Sun Yatsen’s Xinhai Rebellion revolution succeeded in overthrowing the Qing dynasty. With the founding of the new Republic of China on October 10, 1911, Sun was chosen to be the first president of the provisional government. To thank him for his aid to the Tongmenghui in Tokyo years earlier, Sun appointed Xiao Secretary of the President’s Office in March 1912. Xiao gratefully accepted the position, but he did not abandon his ambition to continue advanced music studies in Germany. Scarcely a month later, the opportunity to pursue that objective arrived when Sun was forced to relinquish the presidency to the warlord Yuan Shikai. When Sun learned about Xiao’s desire to study music in Leipzig, the outgoing president expedited a government overseas education scholarship. Sun did Xiao another kindness as well: he arranged for Xiao Youmei to be introduced to Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940), who would change Xiao’s life and career years later.

Formative Period in Germany: German Music, Traditional Chinese Music, and Compositions In 1913 Xiao went to Germany to study music theory and composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Leipzig (Königliches Konservatorium der Musik zu Leipzig, now the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig). He also simultaneously enrolled at Leipzig University to study philosophy and education. At the time of Xiao’s arrival, Leipzig was famous as the “music town” of Germany (“Musikstadt Leipzig”), with two institutions of paramount influence and significance: the Royal Conservatory of Music and the Gewandhaus concert hall and its orchestra, the Gewandhaus Orchestra. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Leipzig Conservatory had developed an international reputation, drawing students not only from Poland, Denmark, and Great Britain, but also from the United States and other countries outside Europe. Until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the Conservatory was a leading international educational institution in Germany with regard to its enrollment of foreign students.25 Indeed, it appealed to students from as far away as Asia, who admired the German music education system—hence Xiao’s decision to matriculate there.

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In addition to the Conservatory, the Gewandhaus concert hall and its symphonic orchestra (Gewandhausorchester) held pride of place in the city, with a performance tradition reaching back to 1781. The musical institutions and concert life of Leipzig had reached the highest standards of professionalism by 1913, and Xiao was astounded by the caliber of the concerts of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, conducted by Arthur Nikisch. The orchestra’s qualities of music interpretation, technical mastery, and artistic commitment were exceptional even for Germany. Years later, Xiao remarked: I remember the history of the concerts at the Gewandhaus (name of the concert hall) in Leipzig. Although it was created by a university student musical society, presently there are twenty-two symphony orchestra concerts and ten chamber music recitals held each year that are the most famous concerts in Germany. It is essential for foreigners coming to Germany to study music to listen to the concerts at the Gewandhaus, for only then can one judge music.26

Xiao’s effusive rhetoric attests to how much he valued European music and concert traditions. Xiao Youmei’s experiences in this environment and his interaction with Hugo Riemann at Leipzig University were formative. Even after he left Germany to return to China, Xiao remained faithful to German classical music values. Nonetheless, his memories of his time in Germany were not entirely preoccupied with reminiscences of Leipzig concert life. Back in China, Xiao emphasized that the Leipzig Conservatory music education practicum had been well planned and well executed, both through its system of examinations and through the overall structure of departments and classes. He was impressed by the clear departmental divisions of “music theory and composition,” “keyboard instruments,” “instruments used in musical ensembles,” and “voice” and the strict requirement for all students to take courses in music theory, history, and applied music.27 Xiao Youmei completed his studies at the conservatory with a PhD dissertation, titled “A Historical Analysis of the Chinese Orchestra Until the Seventeenth Century (Eine geschichtliche Untersuchung über das chinesische Orchester bis zum 17. Jahrhundert).” It addresses Xiao’s thinking about a subject with which he is not often identified: traditional Chinese music. His doctoral thesis was supervised by Hugo Riemann (1849–1919), a towering figure in the field of musicology, and August Conrady

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(1864–1925), an Extraordinary Professor of Sinology who had partnered with Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915) in transforming the discipline of Sinology at Leipzig University into a general study of culture in China, beyond the more traditional philological studies of the Chinese literary classics. Xiao’s dissertation topic on Chinese music matched well with Conrady’s curricular aspirations. Xiao began his dissertation with a confident, sweeping introduction: No standard monograph about Chinese music has been published in German; the few writings available in this language are inconsequential articles in journals, insignificant publications. Furthermore, no detailed understanding of Chinese music or specifically, the Chinese Orchestra can be gained from works in other languages such as English or French. … Valuable as some European essays that seek to make scientific deductions about Chinese music may be, I nevertheless will not cite them in this thesis; in order to establish a primary basis for further research, [my] sources are [drawn from] Chinese literature.28

Following an oblique acknowledgment of the scientific nature of Western knowledge, Xiao proposes to critically evaluate his Chinese sources according to a rational Western academic perspective: “I was obliged to evaluate the material collected by my fellow countrymen once more, as Chinese sources were somewhat disordered, [and] nearly all of them inconsistent and disorganized. Also, I had to discount numerous biases expressed by the conservative ethicists; from the outset, they condemned worldly music and neglected to describe it.”29 This source-critical approach is characteristic of German musicology as conceptualized by Riemann, as a discipline premised on close scrutiny and critical evaluation of musical scores and other written sources. Xiao also highlights in his introduction the important connection between the ruling state, music, and musical ensembles in Chinese history: “The purpose [of] China’s orchestras… was not only to create music and, by association, joy, but simultaneously to build a kind of state-­ institution of political importance. Each (and/or Every) new dynasty created a new music, authorized new music administrations and orchestras, and commissioned original compositions.”30 Later in the thesis, Xiao addresses the history of music education in China, identifying the roles played by various government ministries and cultural institutions and their fluctuating influence on Chinese music over the centuries. He allows

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himself a brief flash of national pride when writing about the Zhou dynasty: “It is true that the harmonious disposition of the state order during the Zhou dynasty can not only serve as a role model for Antiquity, but in many ways could also serve as one today. Accordingly, Professor Karl Lamprecht has called this period “the first golden age of world cultural history.”31 It is intriguing that the professor Xiao cited here was Professor Lamprecht, a leading proponent of Kulturgeschichte (“History of Culture”), who passionately affirmed the preeminence of German culture. Lamprecht had helped Conrady in reshaping Sinology as it was practiced at Leipzig University. Xiao would return to the subject of music in the Zhou dynasty as an exemplar later in life as well. He graduated from Leipzig University in 1916 as the first Chinese to attain a doctoral degree in music. In addition to his dissertation, Xiao also wrote some compositions in Germany. Indeed, most of Xiao’s instrumental works were composed while he was a student in Germany: there are several piano pieces and one string quartet. The piano piece Aidao jinxingqu (Funeral march) was originally titled Aidao yin (Funeral prelude); it was written in September 1916, soon after Xiao had completed his doctoral thesis. He wrote in its Preface, “This has been written, in deliberate imitation of Beethoven’s Trauermarsch, for all those foreign students in Germany who mourn Huang (Xing) and Cai (E). I have entitled it Funeral Prelude. It is hoped that the souls of the two gentlemen will understand what I mean.”32 The work is in simple ABA form; the harmonic progression in section B emulates Beethoven’s parallel major/minor modulation, modulating directly from C minor to C major. Xiao had planned to return to China immediately after completing his doctoral work, but the outbreak of the First World War during his graduate studies made travel between Europe and Asia nearly impossible. Instead, in October 1916 Xiao headed north to Berlin to enroll at both Berlin University as a postdoctoral student in philosophy and at the private Das Sternsche Konservatorium der Musik (Stern Conservatory of Music), where he continued to study composition, orchestration, conducting, and score reading. While in Berlin, Xiao composed a lengthy string quartet in D major dedicated to Fräulein Dora Müllendorf. Scholars have yet to identify her or to ascertain her relationship with Xiao. The quartet follows traditional Austro-German classical music structure in four movements.

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Xiao’s Years in Beijing: Cai Yuanpei, Peking Music Conservatory and Its Orchestra The First World War ended in November 1918 when Germany, faced with shortages of manpower and supplies, signed an armistice agreement with the Allies. Xiao had lived in Germany during the entire conflict, and he was now a direct eyewitness to the social and economic collapse of his host country: nearly three-quarters of a million civilians had died from starvation during the war. This reminder of the vagaries of national fortune, and the harsh conditions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, which included the decision to ignore Chinese sovereignty by transferring territories in Shandong Province surrendered by Germany to Japan, engendered in him a deep anxiety about China’s future. Nearly 5000 miles away, his distress was shared by university students in China. On May 4, 1919, more than 3000 students in Beijing held a mass demonstration against the Republic of China government’s timorous acquiescence to the re-­allocation of national territory dictated by the Treaty of Versailles. Their protests against the Chinese national government escalated into a violent attack on China’s minister to Japan, as well as the burning down of the house of the minister of communications. Both were prominent pro-­Japanese advocates. Xiao Youmei’s career has to be contextualized within the May Fourth Movement, the anti-imperialist cultural and political movement launched by student protests in Beijing. Politically, it was a patriotic movement that aimed to emancipate the Chinese people from feudalism and foreign intimidation so that China could, in turn, become an independent and autonomous nation-state. To achieve these goals, the May Fourth Movement proposed to embrace Western thinking as a catalyst for national revival through modernization. Leaders of the May Fourth Movement aimed to reconstruct Chinese society and culture by adopting modern Western technology and cultural practices: only then could China regain its self-respect as a modern nation-state respected by other countries. In March 1920, Xiao left Germany and returned to Beijing via a circuitous route through Switzerland, France, Italy, England, and the United States. His academic background and guanxi (personal contacts) could have ensured him a remunerative government functionary position. Surprisingly, Xiao did not choose that career path. Whether this decision was due to a distaste for the craven political decisions by the national government or to the ideals of music education instilled by his time in Germany will never be known. What is known is that Xiao’s first position

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upon his return to China was as copy-editor in the Peking Ministry of Education and, simultaneously, Director of the Experimental Elementary School attached to the Peking Higher Normal College. During the first year after his return, Xiao Youmei began and/or expanded the modest music programs at the Peking Higher Normal College and the Peking Girls’ Higher Normal School.33 Xiao reacquainted himself with Cai Yuanpei, who had also studied in Germany. Their study visits had run successively; they had missed each other only by a few months. Cai had studied philosophy, psychology, art history, and ethnology in Leipzig between 1907 and 1912, with Karl Lamprecht, the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), and as Xiao had done, the ethnologist Karl Johann Konrad Weule. Cai had also taken music-related courses at Leipzig  University and had even gone to the trouble of hiring private instructors to teach him violin and piano. During his residency in Leipzig, Cai had decided that classical music in Germany had contributed to its national purpose and power; moreover, music had cultivated the orderly and civic-minded nature of its people. The two men found much in common between the products of the German classical music tradition and the ideals of the May Fourth Movement: a commitment to modern science and modern culture— and, perhaps most importantly, a nation-building mission. Importantly for Xiao, Cai had become the first Minister of Education of the Republic of China. One of Cai’s first acts after being appointed Minister of Education within the provisional government in Nanjing in 1912 was to propose meiyu (aesthetic education) as one of the five core areas of his “modern” education model.34 As a result of this initiative, the Ministry established singing as a compulsory subject for both elementary and middle schools, and music theory and music instrument lessons became part of the regular school curriculum.35 Cai Yuanpei was appointed chancellor of Peking University in 1916, during the May Fourth Movement. The first systematic attempts at implementing modern musical education in China began in 1916 at his behest, as he sought to organize “music reform groups” whose purpose was to introduce Western music to Chinese students, and to aid the reformulation of traditional Chinese music along “scientific” lines.36 Cai’s interest in music is demonstrated by his active participation in the Beijing Daxue Yinyue Hui (the Musical Society of Beijing University), a group of music aficionados. He felt that the group’s chief purpose should be to taoye

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xingqing (mold the temperament) through musical pursuits.37 This derives from his Confucian conception of music as a means of moral regeneration—in this case, that of Peking University’s students and faculty. Xiao concurred: “Presently many of our citizens have become prone to vice. If at least one public concert could be performed every week, this would help to amend some of their immoral behaviors. If several people in a family love music, there needn’t be worry about finding gamblers in that family—for if a society has more groups of people who love music, then assuredly these bad practices will be reduced.”38 But Cai’s attitude toward music education was not reactionary by any means. In 1919, as a result of Cai’s interventions, the society was reorganized as Beijing Daxue Yinyue Yanjiuhui (the Beijing University Music Research Society), with Cai as self-appointed director.39 On November 11, 1919, Cai gave a speech in which he observed, “Our country still hasn’t established any music department for students to learn a musical instrument professionally.”40 He met with Xiao Youmei following this speech. Both men aspired to enable cultural transformation through music education. On the basis of this common understanding, and sensing that his lack of practical musical expertise was hindering a clear, structured development of music teaching at Beijing University, Cai invited Xiao to take over as the director of the Beijing Daxue Yinyue Yanjiuhui in 1922. Xiao was not satisfied with the Music Research Society existing merely as an extracurricular activity, believing instead in the necessity of creating a more formal music education institution. Accordingly, he proposed to Cai that the group’s name should be changed to the Beijing Daxue Yinyue Chuanxi Suo (the Institute for the Promotion and Practice of Music at Beijing University) and that it should become more professional in orientation. In an article written in the early 1920s, Xiao exercised linguistic license in translating the name of the institute into English as the “Conservatory of Music of the National Peking University.”41 The fact that Xiao deliberately chose the designation “Conservatory” to identify the Institute clearly signifies his educational ideals and ambitions. Xiao’s personal contacts with prominent European musicians, such as the composer Heinrich Schulz (1838–1915), musicologist Hugo Riemann, the conductor Arthur Nikisch (1855–1922), and the composer/conductor Richard Strauss (1864–1949), deeply influenced his perspectives on music education. Once in charge of the Beijing Daxue Yinyue Chuanxi Suo, Xiao expeditiously transformed it into a music

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conservatory patterned after his German alma mater, the Leipzig Conservatory of Music. Ju Qihong identifies Xiao’s Peking Music Conservatory as “the first Chinese specialized musical institution geared to turning out professional musicians, composers and teachers—[demonstrating how] Xiao adopted a professional and ‘scientific’ approach to music education.”42 Xiao chose to concentrate his attention on the applied music major. He split it into five subdivisions: theory and composition, piano, string, brass, and voice. This corresponded with Cai’s appreciation of music performance as a means of cultivating ethical qualities. This outlook influenced Xiao and later Chinese music educators, leading to the privileging of performance in Chinese music education, based on the misapprehension that “only those students who are not up to the mark study theory or musicology.”43 In April 1922, Xiao established a fifteen-member orchestra despite negligible financial support. The players were unpaid for their musical services—only personal travel expenses were reimbursed. Although fifteen musicians cannot meet the full instrumentation requirements for a Western orchestra, Xiao considered the founding of this group “most gratifying and fortunate, and utterly memorable, because this is the only wind and string orchestra in China which is entirely made up of Chinese players.”44 Xiao’s long sojourns abroad had not diminished his nationalism. From October 1922 to June 1927, under Xiao’s direction, the Peking Conservatory of Music orchestra gave twenty-three scheduled concerts and six special concerts. Xiao’s repertoire choices demonstrate his aspiration to emulate the great orchestral concerts of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Beethoven was featured most prominently, with performances of his Second, Third, Fifth, and Sixth Symphonies, a piano concerto and other works. Haydn, Mozart, and Mendelssohn were also well represented; short works by Schubert, Weber, and Wagner, and incidental works by less renowned Austro-German composers such as Franz von Suppé were also performed. German and Austrian classical and romantic works formed the heart of the orchestra’s performance repertoire, particularly the music of the First Viennese School. As a performer, Xiao is most renowned for the 1922 performance by the Peking Conservatory of Music Orchestra of the second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the first movement of his Sixth Symphony. This marked the first time that Beethoven had been performed by an all-Chinese orchestra under a Chinese conductor for a Chinese

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audience. This may explain Xiao’s pride in his modest Peking Conservatory orchestra. Earlier performances of Beethoven in China had been played by the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, but both conductor and orchestra members were foreign expatriates, and Chinese had long been excluded from attending as audience members. The Institute of Music had been in existence for less than a year when Cai Yuanpei, weary of the interference of local warlords in the administration of Peking University, resigned from his post as Chancellor in 1923. Liu Zhe, the cabinet minister in charge of education for the Northern Warlords’ government, ordered that Peking University should be restructured as the hitherto defunct “Imperial University of Peking” (founded by Emperor Guangxu a quarter century previously). Believing that “music offended against social morals” and “was a waste of the nation’s money,”45 Liu ordered that the Institute of Music should be closed in 1927, after five brief years of existence. But all was not lost. The Northern Expedition of the National Revolutionary Army against the Beiyang government and other regional warlords in 1926 was successful, and in 1927 the Kuomintang national government appointed Cai chairman of the University Council, a post equivalent to that of Minister of Education. He was once again in the position to support Xiao.

A New Beginning in Shanghai: The Shanghai Conservatory and a Music Society In early 1927, Xiao chose to leave Peking for Shanghai, which had increasingly become the center of progressive education and cultural activity in China. The task of modernizing Chinese music was increasingly taken up by the officials of the Shanghai Kuomintang, supported by a rising Chinese capitalist class. Over the next half decade, Shanghai was the site of remarkable progress in Western-influenced music education, music publishing, music performance, and other related activities. Shanghai was thus an ideal location for Xiao Youmei to launch a new music conservatory. It was the most populous city in China in the 1930s, with three million Chinese residents hosting a large community of guailo (foreigners), over 150,000 of whom resided in the foreign concessions (the foreign “settlements”).46 The city also held the distinction as the home of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, the earliest and premier symphony orchestra in China.

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Xiao rekindled his beneficial partnership with Cai Yuanpei. With Cai’s staunch support, Xiao inaugurated the National Conservatory of Music on November 27, 1927, with Cai as President and Xiao as a professor and Dean of Studies. Within a month, however, Cai’s government duties proved so burdensome that Xiao also assumed the duties of Cai’s position. Cai officially resigned as President in September 1928, and Xiao was formally appointed the new President of the National Conservatory of Music. Under Xiao’s leadership, the National Conservatory fully adopted the German music education system as its curricular model. Xiao personally designed the “Old Music Research Revolution” curriculum (which also included Chinese ancient music history),47 for which he also wrote suitable textbooks. The organization and content of courses in music theory and composition, keyboard instruments, orchestral instruments, and vocal music all closely corresponded to the curricula of music colleges in Germany. Two aspects of the founding of the Shanghai Conservatory are notable. First, the conservatory produced China’s first generation of professional composers, performers, theorists, and musicologists, as well as music educators. As Isabel Wong notes, these graduates came to “dominate the musical life of the intelligentsia of the treaty ports and to be regarded as authorities for acceptable musical standards and behavior.”48 They were to lead music education both in mainland China and in Taiwan through the mid-twentieth century. Their educational efforts directly led to an influx of Chinese music students enrolled in Western conservatories and Schools of Music over the subsequent several decades. Second, the conservatory sponsored numerous concerts, recitals, and other musical activities throughout Shanghai. These events were attended by the class to which many of the Conservatory’s students belonged: Shanghai’s petite bourgeoisie. For this elite constituency, Western musical culture and its trappings (e.g., pianos in living rooms) signified modernity and class privilege.49 In 1929, Xiao Youmei, in partnership with teachers at the Institute, established the Yueyishe (Society for Music and the Arts).50 This initiative represents a curious detour in Xiao’s drive toward professionalizing music, recalling Cai Yuanpei’s ideal of music as redeeming avocation: the Yueyishe was an extracurricular organization which published a quarterly called Yueyi (Music and Arts). Perhaps it was a special tribute: after all, without Cai’s steadfast support, Xiao Youmei may have never achieved his goal of modernizing music education in China. In early 1933, the Yueyishe became the Yueyishewenxue (Society for Music, the Arts and Literature).

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This extracurricular society expanded its operations to include publishing a monthly magazine, printing sheet music, producing concerts, and providing music and arts classes for amateurs. Its emphasis on promoting music appreciation emulated that of the former Peking University Music Research Society. Appropriately, the President of this Society was Cai Yuanpei, with Xiao serving on the advisory council. Xiao’s approach to music education rested on three principles: (1) Chinese music had stagnated for over a millennium, falling well behind European music in methods of composition and instrument technology; (2) European music offered solutions to Chinese music’s deficiencies in musical notation, harmony, counterpoint, and modulation, and keyboard instruments—consequently Chinese music must be Europeanized, provided that the Chinese national spirit could be preserved; (3) China required professional music institutions to develop modern music education and to raise national musical standards. He wrote that to revitalize Chinese music, “all our tools and techniques must come from the West, even as we retain the spirit [of Chinese music] so as to preserve a sense of our own nationality.”51 After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on July 7, 1937 (often cited as the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War), political and social conditions in Shanghai deteriorated rapidly. On August 13 a state of emergency was declared in Shanghai after Japanese saturation bombing. The Conservatory’s new building was destroyed in the attacks. Xiao and all faculty and students evacuated to the city center, transporting the Conservatory’s library and all of its musical instruments and equipment. Despite these exigencies, new students were admitted and classes continued to be held. Xiao encouraged both staff and students to write anti-­ Japanese songs, and he organized a Conservatory “Support Resistance Against the Enemy Performance Troupe” to go to the front lines to entertain the Nineteenth Route Army, as well as to assist with administering first aid on the battlefield. As the fighting became more intense, Xiao encouraged some of his faculty and students to join the Nationalist government in their retreat to Chongqing,52 in an attempt to salvage the work of the Conservatory. Accordingly, Wu Bochao, Yang Zhongzi, and several other faculty took a cohort of students and evacuated from Shanghai, to set up a Conservatory of Music in Qingmuguan in Chongqing.53 Xiao chose to stay in Shanghai, moving the Shanghai Music Conservatory to the old French concession due to safety concerns. In early 1938 Shanghai fell to the Japanese;

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unbowed, Xiao continued to work at the Institute. His refusal to cooperate with the Japanese collaborator Wang Jingwei caused stress and deprivation that inevitably took a toll on his health. On December 31, 1940, Xiao died from tuberculosis just shy of his 57th birthday, survived by his wife, Qi Cuizhen, their five-year-old son Qin, and their four-year-old daughter Xuezhen.

Conclusion Xiao provided an insight into his choice to dedicate himself to lead music education in China in his radio broadcast lecture, “The Power of Music,” originally delivered on November 15, 1933, over the Great China Wireless Broadcasting Station (XHHU) as a “Popular Scholars” lecture series sponsored by the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Education. During his talk Xiao asserted: The most obvious power of music is that musical rhythm directs the actions of the masses, to unify the movements of an entire nation. In the West, anthems are often sung before and after mass rallies… After the anthem is sung collectively, the spirit of cooperation is significantly heightened. The impact of these types of songs on the masses is similar to the power of gravitational pull on the planet; as they sing, people will involuntarily start to move en masse in the same direction. When an army of men march across the land without feeling any fatigue, when tens of thousands of men charge at the enemy singing a military song, and feel no pain—these are concrete examples of this effect.54

Disturbingly for the modern reader, this resonates with contemporaneous Nazi spectacles enhanced by musical pageantries of power. Later in his speech, Xiao praised the recent creation of the Reichsmusikkammer (State Music Bureau) in Hitler’s Germany. He related this foreign undertaking to the policies of the “powerful and prosperous” Zhou and Tang dynasties of China,55 where music was a serious matter of state since it promoted social harmony and stability. Xiao concluded that musical decline caused by state neglect foreshadowed dynastic decline. Appealing to the neo-­ traditionalist views espoused by the Nationalist New Life ideology of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang, Xiao admonished, “If our government does not… take immediate action in order to put the enterprise of musical

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education in order, there will be absolutely no hope of ever rousing the spirits of our nation’s citizens, of fostering cooperation and unity.”56 Privileging a Western-centered perspective by focusing entirely on European “influences” would be an oversimplification of Xiao’s relationship to music. This would presuppose a “passive” receiver, not a “proactive” agent. Xiao was by no means a simple “transmitter,” transferring elements of musical modernity from one place to another place without effecting any modification. It is important to avoid an essentialist characterization of Xiao Youmei as a cultural agent for European cultural hegemony. Should the many Asians, past and present, involved in Classical Western music cleave exclusively to their own native musical traditions, for fear of being characterized as cosmopolitan sell-outs? Far from being a colonized subject aspiring toward Western cultural approbation, Xiao Youmei championed a non-colonial, neo-Confucian vision of how music and music education could serve to revitalize the nascent modern Chinese nation-state.

Notes 1. Gong Hong-Yu, “Music Nationalism and the Search for Modernity in China, 1911–1949,” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 10, no. 2 (December 2008): 46; Liang Yongsheng, “Western Influence on Chinese Music in the Early Twentieth Century” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1994), 94–111. 2. W.C. Ho, “Music education in Shanghai from 1895 to 1945: the cultural politics of singing,” Music Education Research 14, no. 2 (2012): 195; Zheng Xue, “Reminiscences of the McTyeire School,” in Selected Historical Recollections of Shanghai, vol. 59 (Shanghai: People’s Publishing House, 1988), 306–7. 3. Ju, Qihong, “Looking back on Xiao Youmei’s Music Thoughts, Creation and His Educational Practice,” Explorations in Music (2012): 5. 4. Sheila Melvin and Jindong Cai, Rhapsody in Red : How Western Classical Music Became Chinese (New York: Algora Publishing, 2004), 92–100. 5. Xiao Shuxian, “Huiyi wode shufu Xiao Youmei xiansheng/Recollections of my uncle Xiao Youmei,” in Xiao Youmei jinian wenji/Essays commemorating Xiao Youmei, ed. Dai Penghai and Huang Xudong (Shanghai: Shanghai yinyue chubanshe, 1993), 120. 6. Confucius, “The Musical Records,” in Contemporary Chinese Aesthetics, ed. Zhu Liyuan and Gene Blocker (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 122.

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7. Li Gong, “Study on Background of Music Education in Higher Normal Universities in China,” Asian Social Science 6, no. 2 (February 2010): 63. 8. Yuhe Wang, Recent Modern Music History of China (Beijing: People’s Music Publications, 2001), 22. 9. Cai Yuanpei, “Xuetang jiaoke lun” [On school curricula], in Cai Yuanpei xiansheng quanji, ed. Gao Pingshu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977), 151. 10. Ji Yue, “Confucius on Music Education,” Nebula 5, nos. 1–2 (2008): 128. 11. Cai Yuanpei, “Wenhua yundong buyao wangle meiyu” [Cultural movement should not forget aesthetic education], in Cai Yuanpei xiansheng quanji, vol. 1, ed. Gao Pingshu, (Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1977), 31–34. 12. Shen Qia, Koizumi Prize lecture, “Myself and Ethnomusicology: A Couple of ‘Betrayals,’ My Academic Career,” 23 June 2011, accessed 26 July 2020, https://www.geidai.ac.jp/labs/koizumi/award_text/22sq1e.html. 13. Ouyang Yiwen, “Westernisation, Ideology and National Identity in 20thCentury Chinese Music” (PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, 2012), 66. 14. Zeng Zhimin, “Yinyue Jiaoyulun” [On music education], Xinmin Congbao [New citizen journal], (1904), quoted in Zhongguo Jindai Yinyue Shiliao Huibian: 1840–1919 [The historical materials of music in pre-­modern China: 1840–1919], ed. Zhang Jingwei (Beijing: People’s Music Publishing House, 1998), 196. All translations are mine unless noted otherwise. 15. Liu Ching-chih, A Critical History of New Music in China, tr. Caroline Mason (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2010), 37–38. 16. Yuehong Li, “Cultural Clash and Framework of School Music Education,” Chinese Music 81 (2001): 17–19. 17. Ho, 63. 18. Shen, “Myself and Ethnomusicology.” 19. Paula Harrell, Sowing the Seeds: Chinese Students, Japanese Teachers, 1895–1905 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 68. 20. Xiao Shuxian, 84. 21. Liao Fushu, “Woguo xiandai yinyue jiaoyu de kaituozhe Xiao Youmei xiansheng” [Xiao Youmei – pioneer of China’s modern musical education], in Yueyuan tanwang [A life in music], ed. Liao Chongxiang (Beijing: Huayue chubanshe, 1996), 11. 22. Zhang Qian, Zhong-Ri yinyue jiaoliu shu [Sino-Japan music exchange bookshop] (Beijing: Beijing Xin hua shu dian 1999), 289, 372–74. 23. Liao Fushu, Xiao Youmei zhuan [Biography of Xiao Youmei] (Hangzhou: Zhejiang meishu chubanshe, 1993), 7. 24. Sandra Howe, Luther Whiting Mason: International Music Educator (Sterling Heights, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 1997), 109.

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25. Stefan Keym, “Leipzig oder Berlin? Statistik und Ortswahlkriterien ausländischer Kompositionsstudenten um 1900 als Beispiel für einen institutionsgeschichtlichen Städtevergleich,” in Musik in Leipzig, Wien und anderen Städten im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Gudrun Schröder Verlag, 2011), 148. 26. Xiao Youmei, “Shuo Yinyuehui” [Talk about concert], in Xiao Youmeiquanji diyijuan—wenlunzhuanzhujuan [Collected writings of Xiao Youmei, vol. 1: Essays and monographs], ed. Chen Lingquan and Luo Qin (Shanghai: Shanghai Conservatory of Music Press 2004), 158. 27. Xiao Youmei, “Shenme shi yinyue? Waiguo de yinyuejiaoyu jiguan. Shenmeshi yuexue? Zhongguo yinyue jiaoyu bu fada de yuanyin” [What is music? Foreign musical institutions. What is musicology? Reasons for China’s backwardness of musical education], in Xiao Youmeiquanji diyijuan—wenlunzhuanzhujuan [Collected writings of Xiao Youmei, vol. 1: Essays and monographs], ed. Chen Lingquan and Luo Qin (Shanghai: Shanghai Conservatory of Music Press, 2004), 144. 28. Xiao Youmei, “Eine geschichtliche Untersuchung über das chinesische Orchester bis zum 17. Jahrhundert” (Phd diss., Leipzig University, 1920). I thank Kasper Kovitz for the translation of this manuscript. 29. Xiao, “Eine geschichtliche Untersuchung,” ii. 30. Xiao, “Eine geschichtliche Untersuchung,” ii–iii. 31. Xiao, “Eine geschichtliche Untersuchung,” 4. 32. Liu, 112. 33. Melvin and Cai, 96. 34. Cai Yuanpei, “Duiyu xinjiaoyu zhi yijian” [My views on new education], in Cai Yuanpei quanji [The complete works of Cai Yuanpei], vol. 2, ed. Gao Pingshu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984), 135–37. 35. Sun Jinan, Zhongguo jinxiandai yinyue jiaoyushi jinian [A chronology of music education in the history of modern China: 1840–1989] (Jinan: Shandong youyi chubanshe, 2000), 36. 36. Andrew Jones, Yellow Music: Media, Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 36. 37. Beijing Daxue Rikan (Beijing University Daily), 4 February 1918, 4. 38. Xiao Youmei, “Shuo yinyuehui” [Talking about concerts], in Xiao Youmei yinyue wenji [Xiao Youmei’s writings on music], ed. Chen Lingqun et al. (Shanghai: Shanghai yinyue chubanshe, 1990), 231. 39. Han Guohuang, “Cong Yinyue yanjiuhui dao Yinyue yiwenshe- (xinlun)” [From the music research association to the society for musical art and literature—a new discussion], in Han Guohuang yinyue wenji [Selected works on music by Han Kuohuang], vol. 1 (Taipei: Yueyun chubanshe, 1990), 27–40.

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40. Zhao Yun, “Research on Chinese Contemporary Piano Education in the Perspective of Culture” (PhD diss., East China Normal University, 2010), 74. 41. Gong, 47. 42. Ju Qi-hong, “On Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and Xiao Youmei’s Music Career,” Huangzhong [Journal of Wuhan Conservatory of Music] (2011): 66. 43. Wu Xinliu, “Bei Da: Xiandai Zhonggguo yinyue de huozhong” [Peking University: The kindling of new music in China], in Zhongguo jindai yinyue jiayu zhi fu Xiao Youmei xiansheng zhi shengping (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2007), 67. 44. Xiao Youmei, “Yinyue chuanxisuo,” quoted in Liu, A Critical History of New Music in China, 89. 45. Liu, 90. 46. Yao Minji, “Shanghai in the 1930s: A melting pot of history and culture,” ShanghaiDaily.com, Nov. 14, 2016, accessed July 31, 2020, https:// archive.shine.cn/feature/art-­and-­culture/Shanghai-­in-­1930s-­A-­melting-­ pot-­o f-­h istor y-­a nd-­c ulture/shdaily.shtml#:~:text=In%20the%20 1930s%2C%20Shanghai%20had,total%20population%20was%203%20 million. 47. Ye Lu, “The Reception of Gustav Mahler’s Music in Twenty-first China: Das Lied von der Erde in Beijing” (Master’s thesis, University of Calgary, 2017), 26. 48. Isabel K. F. Wong, “From Reaction to Synthesis: Chinese Musicology in the Twentieth Century,” in Comparative Musicology and Anthropology, ed. Bruno Nettle and Philip V.  Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 43. 49. Richard Kraus, Pianos and Politics in China: Middle-Class Ambitions and the Struggle over Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 24–25. 50. Han, 245–87. 51. Xiao (February 1938), quoted in Jones, 158. 52. Eric N.  Danielson, “Revisiting Chongqing: China’s Second World War Temporary National Capital,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch 45 (2005): 174. 53. Liu, 103. 54. Xiao Youmei, broadcast speech over XXHU, “Yinyue de shil,” Yinyue jiaoyu 3 (March 1934), quoted in Jones, 51. 55. Xiao (March 1934), quoted in Jones, 50. 56. Xiao (March 1934), quoted in Jones, 50.

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Bibliography Beijing Daxue Rikan (Beijing University Daily), February 4, 1918, 4. Cai Yuanpei. “Xuetang jiaoke lun” [On school curricula]. In Cai Yuanpei xiansheng quanji, ed. Gao Pingshu, 30–34. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977a. ———. “Wenhua yundong buyao wangle meiyu” [Cultural movement should not forget aesthetic education]. In Cai Yuanpei xiansheng quanji, edited by Gao Pingshu, 51–58. Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1977b. Confucius. “The Musical Records.” In Contemporary Chinese Aesthetics, edited by Zhu Liyuan and Gene Blocker, 121–25. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. Danielson, Eric N. “Revisiting Chongqing: China’s Second World War Temporary National Capital.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch 45 (2005): 173–221. Gong Hong-Yu. “Music Nationalism and the Search for Modernity in China, 1911–1949.” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 10, no. 2 (December 2008): 38–69. Han Guohuang. “Cong Yinyue yanjiuhui dao Yinyue yiwenshe- (xinlun)” [From the music research association to the society for musical art and literature—A new discussion]. In Han Guohuang yinyue wenji [Volume 1 of Selected works on music by Han Kuohuang], 27–108. Taipei: Yueyun chubanshe, 1990. Harrell, Paula. Sowing the Seeds: Chinese Students, Japanese Teachers, 1895–1905. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. Wai-ching Ho. “Music education in Shanghai from 1895 to 1945: the cultural politics of singing the cultural politics of singing.” Music Education Research 14, no. 2 (2012): 187–207. Howe, Sandra. Luther Whiting Mason: International Music Educator. Sterling Heights, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 1997. Jones, Andrew. Yellow Music: Media, Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Ju Qi-hong. “On Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and Xiao Youmei’s Music Career.” Huangzhong [Journal of Wuhan Conservatory of Music], (2011): 63–72. Keym, Stefan. “Leipzig oder Berlin? Statistik und Ortswahlkriterien ausländischer Kompositionsstudenten um 1900 als Beispiel für einen institutionsgeschichtlichen Städtevergleich.” In Musik in Leipzig, Wien und anderen Städten im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Stefan Keym and Katrin Stöck, 142–64. Leipzig: Gudrun Schröder Verlag, 2011. Kraus, Richard. Pianos and Politics in China: Middle-Class Ambitions and the Struggle over Western Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Li Gong. “Study on Background of Music Education in Higher Normal Universities in China.” Asian Social Science, 6 (February 2010): 60–66. Li Yuehong. “Cultural Clash and Framework of School Music Education.” Chinese Music 81 (2001): 16–48.

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Liao Fushu. “Woguo xiandai yinyue jiaoyu de kaituozhe Xiao Youmei xiansheng” [Xiao Youmei  – Pioneer of China’s modern musical education]. In Yueyuan tanwang [A life in music], ed. Liao Chongxiang, 1–27. Beijing: Huayue chubanshe, 1996. ———. Xiao Youmei zhuan [A biography of Xiao Youmei]. Hangzhou: Zhejiang meishu chubanshe, 1993. Liang Yongsheng. “Western Influence on Chinese Music in the Early Twentieth Century.” PhD diss., Stanford University, 1994. Liu Ching-chih. A Critical History of New Music in China, translated by Caroline Mason. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2010. Lu Ye. “The Reception of Gustav Mahler’s Music in Twenty-first China: Das Lied von der Erde in Beijing.” Master’s thesis, University of Calgary, 2017. Melvin, Sheila, and Jindong Cai. Rhapsody in Red. Sanford, NC: Algora Publishing, 2004. Ouyang Yiwen. “Westernisation, Ideology and National Identity in 20th-Century Chinese Music.” PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, 2012. Shen Qia. Koizumi Prize lecture, “Myself and Ethnomusicology: A Couple of ‘Betrayals’ in My Academic Career.” 23 June 2011. Accessed 26 July 2020. https://www.geidai.ac.jp/labs/koizumi/award_text/22sq1e.htm. Wang Yuhe. Recent Modern Music History of China. Beijing: People’s Music Publications, 2001. Wong, Isabel K.  F. “From Reaction to Synthesis: Chinese Musicology in the Twentieth Century.” In Comparative Musicology and Anthropology, edited by Bruno Nettle and Philip V. Bohlman, 37–55. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Wu Xinliu. “Bei Da: Xiandai Zhonggguo yinyue de huozhong” [Peking University: The kindling of new music in China]. In Zhongguo jindai yinyue jiayu zhi fu Xiao Youmei xiansheng zhi shengping, 48–67. Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2007. Xiao Shuxia. “Huiyi wode shufu Xiao Youmei xiansheng/Recollections of my uncle Xiao Youmei.” In Xiao Youmei jinian wenji/Essays commemorating Xiao Youmei, edited by Dai Penghai and Huang Xudong, 83–88. Shanghai: Shanghai yinyue chubanshe, 1993. Xiao Youmei.“Eine geschichtliche Untersuchung über das chinesische Orchester bis zum 17. Jahrhundert.” PhD diss., Leipzig University, 1920. ———. “Shenme shi yinyue? Waiguo de yinyuejiaoyu jiguan. Shenmeshi yuexue? Zhongguo yinyue jiaoyu bu fada de yuanyin” [What is music? Foreign musical institutions. What is musicology? Reasons for China’s backwardness of musical education]. In Xiao Youmeiquanji diyijuan—wenlunzhuanzhujuan [Collected writings of Xiao Youmei. Vol. 1, Essays and monographs], edited by Chen Lingquan and Luo Qin, 143–47. Shanghai: Shanghai Conservatory of Music Press, 2004a.

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———. “Shuo Yinyuehui” [Talk about concert]. In Xiao Youmeiquanji diyijuan—wenlunzhuanzhujuan [Collected writings of Xiao Youmei]. vol. 1: Essays and monographs], edited by Chen Lingquan and Luo Qin, 157–59. Shanghai: Shanghai Conservatory of Music Press, 2004b. ———. “Shuo yinyuehui” [Talking about concerts]. In Xiao Youmei yinyue wenji [Xiao Youmei’s writings on music], edited by Chen Lingqun and Qun Deng, 160–61. Shanghai: Shanghi yinyue chubanshe, 1990. Yao Minji. “Shanghai in the 1930s: A melting pot of history and culture,” in ShanghaiDaily.com, Nov. 14, 2016. Accessed July 31, 2020. https://archive. shine.cn/feature/art-­a nd-­c ulture/Shanghai-­i n-­1 930s-­A -­m elting-­p ot-­o f-­ histor y-­a nd-­c ulture/shdaily.shtml#:~:text=In%20the%201930s%2C%20 Shanghai%20had,total%20population%20was%203%20million. Yue Ji. “Confucius On Music Education.” Nebula 5, nos. 1–2 (2008): 128–33. Zhang Qian. Zhong-Ri yinyue jiaoliu shu [Sino-Japan music exchange bookshop]. Beijing: Xin hua shu dian, 1999. Zhao Yun. “Research on Chinese Contemporary Piano Education in the Perspective of Culture.” PhD diss., East China Normal University, 2010. Zheng, Xue. “Reminiscences of the McTyeire School.” In Selected Historical Recollections of Shanghai, 306–7. Series 59. Shanghai: People’s Publishing House, 1988. Zhongguo Jindai Yinyue Shiliao Huibian: 1840–1919 [The historical materials of music in pre-modern China: 1840–1919], edited by Zhang Jingwei. Beijing: People’s Music Publishing House, 1998.

CHAPTER 11

Between Imagined Homelands: Florian Gallenberger’s John Rabe Bruce Williams

While researching a book on the Rape of Nanjing,1 Chinese-American journalist Iris Chang came across the diaries of John Rabe, a Nazi Party member and director of the Siemens plant in Nanjing, who was instrumental in the creation of the International Safety Zone during the Japanese siege on the city, ultimately saving the lives of over 200,000 Chinese. The diaries, which were later published in English in 1998 in an edition edited by Erwin Wickert,2 provide extensive insight into the character of the “good man of Nanjing,” who in recent years has been deemed “the Oskar Schindler of China.”3 Rabe, the leader of the Nazi Party in Nanjing, deployed his national and political background and, above all, Berlin’s close ties with Tokyo, to gain the respect of the Japanese soldiers and officials, all the while earning the adulation of the Chinese. The ambivalence of John Rabe and his heroic efforts have not only provided material for fascinating historical research but, moreover, have created an intricate

B. Williams (*) Department of Languages and Cultures, William Paterson University of New Jersey, Wayne, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. M. Cho (ed.), Sino-German Encounters and Entanglements, Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73391-9_11

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intertextual web which, beginning with Chang’s book in 1997 and the publication of the English version of Rabe’s diaries the following year, culminated with two commercial films in 2009. A Chinese production, Chuan Lu’s City of Life and Death, also known as Nanjing! Nanjing! Nanjing!, presents an Asian perspective on the historical moment, although the figure of John Rabe is, at least tangentially, present. Florian Gallenberger’s John Rabe, a German/French/Chinese coproduction, foregrounds more specifically the international presence in Nanjing and shifts its primary focus to the character of John Rabe.4 Both films have met with controversy; while City of Life and Death angered the Chinese due to its sensitive and loving portrayal of a Japanese soldier, John Rabe was banned in Japan given the tendencies in Japan to deny or downplay the Massacre. This chapter will concentrate on Gallenberger’s work as a historical drama offering intense psychological insight into its main character. It will eschew a discussion of the film’s historical accuracy and fidelity to the diaries of John Rabe, using the latter exclusively as a sounding board for specific sequences in Gallenberger’s version of the events and to foreground how the two works function intertextually to inscribe the persona of John Rabe into popular culture. The diaries, in fact, constitute just one of the numerous paratexts surrounding the film.5 The present analysis will focus on the ambivalent figure of the film’s protagonist in both political and humanistic terms.6 Gallenberger’s Rabe can be deemed a stateless person, caught between an imagined world and one that he understands and accepts only in part. The discussion here will be structured as follows. Section “John Rabe in Film: A Cursory Overview” will provide an overview of films on the Nanjing Massacre. It will focus primarily on films made subsequent to Chang’s discovery of Rabe’s diaries. Special attention will be accorded to both City of Life and Death and Zhang Yimou’s The Flowers of War (2011),7 which at the time of its release was the highest-grossing Chinese film to date. Section “Historical Veracity versus Production and Marketing Demands” will explore the necessary modification in historical fact in Gallenberger’s film resulting from the demands of production, as well as from the need to present a more marketable vision of Rabe than would have been otherwise feasible. Section “Rabe and East Asia: China, Japan, and the Western Community of Nanjing” will focus on Gallenberger’s Rabe and his relationship with East Asia. It will explore the iterative and specific events that, early in the film, define his life in China and establish the normality of his life as an expatriate. It will subsequently assess Rabe’s

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membership in the Western community and his relationship with the Chinese, whose rescue constitutes the driving momentum of the film. A brief discussion of Rabe’s ambivalent dealings with the Japanese will follow. Section “A German Schindler’s List?” will examine why John Rabe has been dubbed the Schindler’s List of Germany, paying special emphasis to the paratexts of the two films. Although Gallenberger’s film draws upon excerpts from Rabe’s diaries as a structuring device, this in no way implies that the director considers these writings to be historically accurate or, more importantly, that historical authenticity is his main concern. For this reason, this chapter focuses on Rabe as a film protagonist who, drawing upon his dubious alliances, succeeds in saving the lives of some 200,000 Chinese and who figures prominently in the intertextual web surrounding the seventieth anniversary of the Rape of Nanjing.

John Rabe in Film: A Cursory Overview Early films focusing on the Nanjing Massacre did not deal specifically with the figure of John Rabe; rather, they were propagandistic in nature, primarily expressing either Japanese or US perspectives.8 It was not until the advent of the sixtieth anniversary of the event that the Massacre made its way more extensively into feature films and documentaries, although the persona of John Rabe was, by and large, absent.9 It would take another decade for the figure of Rabe to be depicted in films, and once again, this was largely due to the attention Chang drew to the German industrialist’s diaries. In 2007, Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman made Nanking, a feature-­length documentary for HBO.10 Dedicated to the memory of Chang, who had committed suicide three years earlier, the film features extensive documentary footage, still photographs, interviews with survivors, and readings from the diaries and letters of John Rabe (interpreted by Jürgen Prochnow). Other participants include Mariel Hemingway as the voice of Minnie Vautrin, the headmistress of a girls’ school located in the Safety Zone, who protected the girls under her tutelage as well as other women during the Massacre, and Woody Harrelson as the voice of Robert O.  Wilson, the only surgeon who stayed in Nanjing to care for countless victims injured in the siege. Referring to the film as a “mixed media theater piece,” Stephen Holden asserts that Nanking recalls “the unspeakable and giving it voice creates a deeper reality.”11 Two other documentaries were also made in 2007, one Canadian and one Japanese, yet the figure of John Rabe was not foregrounded. The first film focused on

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the life of Iris Chang, while the other consisted of a scathing Japanese reaction.12 From a German perspective, Annette Baumeister and Florian Hartung produced John Rabe: The Good German of Nanking (John Rabe: Der gute Deutsche von Nanking, 2008)13 for ZDF German television. The film presents a sensitive and nuanced portrayal of Rabe. It explores his political naivete and his devotion to Hitler, whose agenda he most likely did not understand. It explains that, while Rabe was venerated as a “living Buddha” in China, he was virtually unknown in the West. Underscoring that the swastika had become a symbol of humanitarianism in Nanjing, the film foregrounds the ambiguity of Rabe as a historical figure. Baumeister and Hartung devote attention to Rabe’s return to Germany, explaining how his speaking engagements, which were intended to draw attention to Japanese war crimes, were especially unwelcomed by the Nazi authorities. It follows Rabe’s detention, stressing that, although he was ultimately permitted to keep his diaries upon his release, he never again spoke in public.14 Shortly after Gallenberger received clearance from Chinese officials to undertake the production of John Rabe, authorization was also granted to Chinese director Chuan Lu to make a film on the Massacre. At the time of its production, Lu was well on the road to becoming established as a significant young director. The distinction between the two projects was noteworthy; while Gallenberger’s film focuses on the international—lire, Western!—members of the Safety Zone, Lu’s work, City of Life and Death, explores in more detail the perspective of the Chinese residents of Nanjing.15 Tony Pipolo views in Lu’s film a triptych relationship of characters reflecting the three major forces in Nanjing: Mr. Tang, the secretary to John Rabe, who stands in for the Chinese; John Rabe, who embodies the West; and the Japanese soldier Kadokawa, who not only represents the Japanese, but, moreover, most closely reflects the position of the viewer. Although Rabe is present in Lu’s film, he does not play the same benevolent role attributed to the German in Gallenberger’s film. Rather, this compassion is assumed by the Japanese soldier Kadokawa. Pipolo argues: It is Kadokawa’s wide-eyed inexperience that most closely parallels the viewer’s stance of open-mouthed disbelief […] By the end of the film, Rabe returns to Germany, and Tang dies defiantly after sending his pregnant wife off to safety. But Kadokawa, having witnessed the worst and been complicit in barbaric acts, puts a bullet through his brain. As if to counteract this image of a Japanese “victim,” to which Chinese audiences might under-

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standably object, Lu contrives a final shot of a little boy, having escaped death in the fallen city, laughing, somewhat forcibly, at his own good fortune.16

Regarding the portrayal of John Rabe in City of Life and Death, Qinna Shen foregrounds the age and energy level of the character. Shen stresses: Rabe appears as a lachrymose, elderly man in his seventies, whereas in fact, upon returning to Germany in March 1938, he was only fifty-six years old […] Lu also has Rabe kneel before the zone residents when he is called back to Berlin, asking to be forgiven for his failures in saving them—a sequence reminiscent of the final scene in Schindler’s List, where Schindler breaks down in tears and asks to be forgiven.17

Arguably the most commercial of the dramatized features focusing on the Massacre, Yimou Zhang’s The Flowers of War (2011), was based on Geling Yan’s 13 Flowers of Nanjing,18 which in turn drew heavily upon the diaries of Minnie Vautrin. Zhang’s film is of special significance in that it effaces the character of John Rabe altogether, yet creatively replaces him with an intriguing double for him. Rabe’s character is subsumed into that of John Miller, a rough-and-ready American mortician who has come to China following the death of his young daughter. A dedicated scam artist, Miller, played by British actor Christian Bale, is determined to grab any money he can get by selling his assistance and favors to the locals in Nanjing during the siege. He arrives at a Catholic cathedral, which is modeled on the historical girls’ academy run by Vautrin in the Safety Zone, where thirteen young women attend convent school. Miller is forced to dress as a priest to preserve his own safety and garner a place in the cathedral where he can bunk out. Over the course of his stay, and recalling the death of his own daughter, he grows attached to the young women of the school and fights undauntedly for their protection. In real life, Vautrin had harbored prostitutes at Ginling College inasmuch as she was committed to helping any woman in need. Although she is effaced from Zhang’s film, the presence of the prostitutes is foregrounded. Likewise, Rabe’s role as liaison between the Safety Zone and the invaders is assumed by the friendship between Miller and a Japanese soldier. Miller’s role, however, is somewhat more dramatically charged than that of Rabe in Gallenberger’s film. When his Japanese friend insists that the young women studying at convent school sing for the occupying soldiers, it is

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clear that the underlying intention is to use the girls as comfort women. Miller cunningly draws upon his expertise in mortuary makeup to render the older woman clear doubles of the students. He is thus able to escape with the young women hidden in a truck while the prostitutes entertain the Japanese. Yan stresses that Vautrin regretted for the rest of her life her decision to substitute the prostitutes, who were never heard from again, to accommodate the desires of the enemy. Yan clarifies, “These few lines in her biography touched me… even though the prostitutes were seen as very base, not so pure… they stepped forward to protect these young women. I think it was an extraordinary action.”19 The above inventory of films, which date from the time of the Massacre to recent years and which include dramas, documentaries, and hybrid films, is intended to provide context for Gallenberger’s John Rabe. It is particularly significant that a number of the films have generated controversy either in China or in Japan, due to their broad international release and the attention they have drawn to the events of the Massacre. Although Gallenberger’s film does not fictionalize events to the extent of Zhang’s work, it must be noted that some deviations from historical events and persons were necessary due to the constraints of production.

Historical Veracity versus Production and Marketing Demands Although the persona of John Rabe, and to a large extent that of his wife Dora as well, is based closely upon the actual Rabe’s own diaries, the same is not the case for all the film’s characters. Thus, the film combines fiction and fact in a manner that unmistakably grounds it in the realm of historical fiction. A clear example of this process is the character of Valérie Dupres, the director of the international girls’ school in the Safety Zone. Played by French actress Anne Consigny, the headmistress is actually based upon an American, yet is reconceived as French in response to the need to feature French talent in exchange for France’s share in the coproduction. The re-­ conception of the character is not completely out of line, given that the historical school director Minnie Vautrin, although born in 1886  in Illinois, was actually the daughter of a Frenchman who had immigrated to Peoria in 1883. Following studies at a normal school, Vautrin went to China under the sponsorship of a Christian mission and, despite short trips back to the US, devoted her life to the Ginling College in Nanjing. After

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the Nanjing Massacre, she returned to the US in 1940, reportedly highly depressed. Vautrin died by suicide in 1941. Posthumously, Vautrin was awarded the Emblem of the Blue Jade by the Chinese government for her valiant efforts in Nanjing.20 Although Valérie Dupres is depicted as a French national and the film makes no reference to any commitment to a Christian mission, there are many similarities between the fictional character and the historical figure on which she is modeled. Both women are uncompromising in their values and undertake all that is necessary to protect the young women in their school. Dupres’ clandestine concealment of a large number of refugees on the premises of the school, an act which defies the rules of the Safety Zone and places its very existence in jeopardy, mirrors the actions of Vautrin, who reportedly crammed some 10,000 women and children into the school at the height of the Massacre. Where the similarities end, besides the more secular characterization of Dupres, is that the fictional character betrays no evidence of the depression and stress that would ultimately lead to Vautrin’s suicide. Although convincingly portrayed by Consigny, Dupres is relatively more one dimensional than Rabe. She rarely falters in her resolute belief in the Safety Zone and its mission. One can argue that the character of Dupres is an example of typage in narrative cinema.21 She possesses clear-cut characteristics that are tied to a given moment and ideology. By virtue of her steadfast moral position, she represents for the spectator “the right thing to do” within a specific historical context.22 By rendering Dupres considerably less multidimensional than Rabe himself, Gallenberger is able to underscore Rabe’s own doubts and vacillation, in sum, those elements which render him a complex and multifaceted protagonist. Had Gallenberger opted to depict with more accuracy Vautrin’s psychological convolutions, her desperate sense of failure, and her personal instability, the persona of John Rabe would have been forced to share the screen with another complex, and perhaps more engaging, character. Marketing issues played a role as well in the substitution of the Vautrin character. In real life, Vautrin was a dowdy woman who, if represented more accurately, would be less commercially viable as the female lead of a feature film. Actress Anne Consigny had been known as a sex symbol in her earlier films. The creation of Dupres and the casting of Consigny in the role would guarantee higher box office receipts from French filmgoers familiar with her work and persona.

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Commercial concerns also dictated to Gallenberger those elements of John Rabe’s life that would be better excised from the film. Qinna Shen highlights an artistic choice that Gallenberger made that bears upon historical accuracy, or the partial elision thereof. Ulrich Tukur, the actor who plays Rabe, suggested to the director a very different opening scene. It would show John and Dora as an elderly couple living in poverty in a Berlin apartment. A mailman would arrive with a package of food from China. This artistic choice would have framed the film in retrospect and provided insight into Rabe’s last years. Shen explains that Gallenberger objected to this suggestion and, rather than providing any visual depiction of Rabe’s ultimate poverty, opted to end the film with the happy reunion of John and Dora. Shen notes that Gallenberger had clearly stated that the film was not meant to be a documentary. Rather, “[it is] a story about how an average person acts heroically in critical times. It is a film about love and hope.”23 She further argues that Rabe’s difficult years subsequent to his return to Germany are ignored because the film would thus lack a simple story line and sense of closure, both of which are necessary to a film’s commercial success.24 Gallenberger’s film deviates from historical accuracy to construct a protagonist who, albeit gradually and without a radical transformation, evolves into a reluctant, yet irreplaceable hero. How clearly distinct is the John Rabe of the film’s conclusion to the arrogant director who denigrates his Chinese employees in the early sequences set in the Siemens plant! One must stress that Gallenberger’s goal was to make a dramatized feature and not a documentary or docu-drama. Although John Rabe draws heavily upon historical fact, its primary purpose is not to document events as they actually happened. After all, it is first and foremost a commercial film, and particularly in light of its high budget of some twenty million dollars,25 box office returns were of considerable concern. Gallenberger, nonetheless, employs what may well be a smoke-screen technique to convey to his audience the message that what they were watching was more historically true than it actually was. It provides viewers with a reassuring sense of historicity by virtue of its use of excerpts from the actual diaries of John Rabe as a structuring device. These excerpts are carefully chosen so that they avoid drawing attention to any deviations from historical fact. The quotations, moreover, fulfill another vital function. They call attention to the film’s role in a broader cultural discourse, one defined by Iris Chang’s research and the international publication of the actual diaries.

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Rabe and East Asia: China, Japan, and the Western Community of Nanjing John Rabe opens with the reading of a November 1937 entry from the historical figure’s diary, which grounds the events in a discrete moment in time. Nonetheless, the overall feel of the initial sequences is one of habit and routine rather than of temporal specificity. This artistic choice foregrounds Rabe’s long-standing relationship with China and the Chinese, and how a clear ambivalence toward them has marked his quotidian existence. The opening of the film can thus be described as an example of the iterative mode of narrative cinema. Gérard Genette has described the iterative as a matter of frequency or repetition; a single narrative utterance can assume upon itself several occurrences of the same event.26 If one applies Genette’s notion of the iterative to human language, it can refer to the imperfect tense which, unlike the preterite, describes repeated, habitual actions in the past rather than discrete events. A sentence such as “Every day, I had breakfast at seven,” elides the differences between each individual breakfast and instead foregrounds their commonalities. In narrative cinema, although a scene may constitute one part of a longer sequence that is more clearly contextualized, it can still serve to convey regularity, habit, or the status quo. One need to only think of the opening sequences of many horror films, which foreground daily activities and textualize a sense of normality prior to the occurrence of a supernatural event which changes the status quo and leads the narrative into the realm of the specific and spooky!27 The iterative opening of John Rabe is key to defining the protagonist’s character. Rabe is seen walking to the main building of the plant, ignoring the Chinese workers along the way. It is evident from the sequence that this is part of his regular routine, with regard to both his actions and his overall attitude. Inside the plant, workers greet Rabe enthusiastically with a “Guten Tag!” The director, dismissively, orders them to keep working. Although the sequence portrays Rabe as a stern and aloof plant director, one notes a subtle expression of tenderness on his face. This suggests to the viewer that the protagonist might well be a multidimensional character whose complexity will be revealed over the course of the film. The sequence focuses clearly on Rabe’s character and on the methodical order that defines the plant. Specificity is inscribed into the sequence only through the reading of Rabe’s diary. In the entry, Rabe describes the relative calm in Nanjing, despite the Japanese having

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recently decimated nearby Shanghai. Rabe further questions whether he should mention to his workers that he has been recalled to Germany or keep this information private.28 In a subsequent scene in Rabe’s apartment, Chinese workers are awkwardly attempting to move a piano. Rabe treats them belligerently, berating their intelligence and capability. Although a seemingly specific event is under way, the sequence is iterative in that it conveys the ongoing relationship Rabe maintains with the Chinese. When Rabe’s personal assistant enters a room without knocking, the director orders him to leave, as if he were a small child. The assistant knocks and re-enters, only to be asked by Rabe why he even has a head. In broken German, the assistant replies, “So that it won’t rain through my neck.” Although on a surface level Rabe appears harsh, there is evidence of a soft and even warm relationship with his assistant. This recalls the ever-so-subtle tenderness evidenced in Rabe’s morning routine at the plant.29 The film slips from the iterative to the specific once Rabe is informed that the new director of the plant had arrived a few days earlier than expected. Rabe introduces the new arrival to the workers, who greet him with a “Heil Hitler.” The protagonist’s arrogance is evidenced as he explains to his future successor that one must learn to distinguish a good Chinese from a bad one. Such a comment clearly indicates a marked distance between Rabe and his employees; he is obviously a foreigner who has never totally become acculturated to China and who does not fully understand the Chinese, despite the many years he has lived there. Nevertheless, his affection for his Chinese assistant is subtly reinforced. Rabe is caught between two worlds, each representing something totally different to him. In China, he appears devoted to the culture of his homeland, at least as he remembers it. This is evidenced by a scene in which Dora presents him with a traditional Gugelhupf, or yeast cake, for his birthday. This gesture evokes the lost world of Germany. Yet Dora’s kind words convey her recognition that there is, for her husband, a competing world as well. She expresses her understanding of how difficult it will be for Rabe to abandon Nanjing. As mentioned earlier, the diaries of the historical John Rabe tend to detail actual events and avoid the expression of intimate feelings. It is significant to note that there are very few utterances in the diaries that function intertextually with Rabe’s nostalgia for his homeland, as expressed in Gallenberger’s film. One exception is an entry from December 24, 1937, in which Rabe expresses his gratitude to

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all who were kind to him over the Christmas season. He is specifically indebted to his assistant for coordinating the Western-style decoration of his home.30 As the couple prepares to attend a gala for the city’s Western community, the protagonist receives word that the Siemens plant is being permanently closed. Despite this disconcerting news, Dora insists that nothing will spoil their evening on the town, be it Siemens or the Japanese. At the lavish ball, the guests behave condescendingly toward the Chinese. They dance to a Chinese singer yet berate the locals for serving red wine chilled and champagne too warm. For the most part, the attendees of the gala are expatriates who bask in a sense of separation from and superiority to their Chinese hosts. A noted exception is Valérie Dupres, whose genuine affection for her Chinese students was already made evident in an earlier sequence. What is not yet quite clear is Rabe’s own position vis-à-vis the Chinese community. His stance appears to vacillate between displays of arrogance and moments of genuine affection.31 The gala is arguable a microcosm of the West inside the East. Clothing and drinks are Western, and this dynamic is echoed by subsequent sequences depicting the life of the Rabes in their Nanjing flat. There, the wallpaper and furnishings are Western, and Rabe entertains himself by playing European classical music on the piano. Nonetheless, this dynamic is ambivalent. Although this is not clearly explained in the film, the historical Rabe only returned to Germany three times during his decades in China. During this time, Europe had undergone sweeping changes, while the expatriate community in China, most notably Rabe himself, had remained static. What is at play here is the reconstruction of a bygone West. Rabe has been absent from Germany during the birth and growth of Nazism. His split alliances could well be between a China into which he is only partially integrated and a homeland that no longer exists.32 Rabe’s relationship to China and the Chinese is indeed ambiguous. Yet the same ambiguity applies as well to his contact with the Japanese. Although Gallenberger’s character grows in stature throughout the film, through his decisiveness to administer the Safety Zone and to save the lives of the Chinese who adore him, he is obliged to deploy his Nazi Party membership to appease Germany’s allies. Rabe is selected as administrator of the Safety Zone by virtue of his nationality; he is uniquely positioned, compared to the other members of the Western community, to deal with the Japanese. The film’s opening, which shows a Victrola playing the German national anthem and the Nazi flag being raised over the Siemens

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plant, foreshadows a sequence in which, during the early stages of the siege, Rabe protects a number of Chinese by displaying a massive Nazi flag horizontally so that the Japanese bombers will spare the Siemens plant and its surroundings. In a later sequence, Rabe has exhausted his supply of insulin and is in danger of lapsing into a diabetic coma. Despite his failing health, he accepts Dupres’ invitation to attend a Christmas gathering. A package arrives containing a Gugelhupf, which Dora had always prepared for him on special occasions. Realizing that Dora had not died in the bombing of a ship, as he had believed, he is overcome by emotion and collapses. A request must be made for assistance to the Japanese because the Safety Zone lacks the necessary insulin. A Japanese commander supplies the needed medication, yet his stance is, like Rabe’s, fundamentally ambivalent. Although he knows that the German is advocating on behalf of the Chinese, he still represents one of Japan’s allies, and hence the request cannot be denied. The ambivalence of Gallenberger’s character is played out once again through his relationship with the Japanese commanders. In a manner similar to his constant oscillations whether to leave Nanjing and return to Germany or remain to protect the Security Zone, his stance vis-à-vis the Japanese is always somewhat ambivalent. He is their ally in the same way in which he is a member of the Nazi Party, without fully understanding what that entails. Not unlike the manipulation of the Japanese by the protagonist of Flowers of War, Gallenberger’s Rabe essentially plays both ends against the middle. Nonetheless, however much his humanitarian nature matures over the course of the film, his primary goal is simply to save the lives of the refugees in the Safety Zone. By contrast, the diaries of the historical figure present a more direct denouncement of the atrocities perpetrated and hence reinforce the humanistic side of the popular culture persona of Rabe. On December 24, 1937, Rabe writes: The terrible crisis that has overtaken us all has restored our childlike faith. Only a God can protect me from these hordes whose deadly games include rape, murder, and arson. We’ve just had news that new troops will be arriving today who will restore the order we’ve been longing for. From now all, all crimes are to be severely punished at once. Let’s hope so! By God it’s time there was a turn for the better. We’re very near the end of our tether.33

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In John Rabe, the Japanese characters are decidedly less central to the plot than their compatriots in City of Life and Death or even Flowers of War. No Japanese figure is elevated to the status of Kadokawa in Lu’s film, who, as mentioned earlier, functions as the stand-in for the spectatorial gaze of the viewer. Gallenberger’s depiction of his Japanese characters is much more moderated than those of Lu and Zhang. This is most likely due to the fact that John Rabe was, by and large, a German production and hence subject to increased scrutiny by Chinese authorities. One must recall that China was still smarting from Western films which had indicted the country for its treatment of Tibet.34 In the afterward to the German edition of Rabe’s diaries, Gallenberger describes the Kafkaesque feeling of being spied upon as he prepared to undertake the film’s production.35

A German Schindler’s List? John Rabe has been frequently compared to Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1992),36 despite the dramatic differences in the box office grosses and international distribution of the two films. Both are informed by the historical context and ideology of the Nazi era and foreground atrocities committed by Germany or its allies. In both cases, the protagonists are individuals who defy the policies of their homeland and, in the process, save thousands of lives. In short, they depict the “good Nazi,” and this disconcerting oxymoron is at once the films’ best friend and worst enemy, accounting both for their popularity and for the considerable controversy they have attracted. John Rabe, like Schindler’s List, is a narrative exploring a single individual and his personal transformation. It is the story of a Nazi Party member caught between his personal allegiances to Germany and to the Chinese individuals who have worked for him. As is the case with the Holocaust in Spielberg’s film, the Nanjing Massacre is contextualized, but it is never the main focus of the film. Both works are primarily anecdotal in nature. Schindler’s List explores the dynamics of one individual’s efforts to fight a historical horror. Although the Final Solution is clearly present, at least for the viewers for whom the Holocaust is explicable as a concept, Schindler’s List still focuses primarily on the discrete story of Oskar Schindler and the Jews he saved. The same is true of John Rabe, in which the Massacre is personalized and plays out on the level of one individual’s humanitarian efforts. The films are similar as well with regard to their paratextual baggage. On this point one can speak of the tragic later years of both individuals,

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which are not directly textualized in the film narratives themselves, yet became more commonly known due to the release of the films. Particularly in the case of Schindler, there has been much discussion of his final years— his bankruptcies and his poverty both in Germany and in Argentina37— and these real-life trials have circulated in conjunction with the film, which itself does not discuss them. The real-life Rabe met a similar fate. Upon his return to Berlin, John Rabe was arrested on the charge of having collaborated with the Chinese. He was not allowed to divulge details of his experiences in China. After the war Rabe was denied a pension and lived in poverty with his wife, Dora. Like Schindler, he was shunned on more than one level. On the one hand, he was unemployable due to his former membership in the Nazi Party. On the other, his legacy in China was largely erased by the new Communist government. Rabe was mainly remembered in Nanjing by witnesses of the events, and by Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who provided assistance to the couple in gratitude for Rabe’s heroism. He died of a stroke on January 5, 1950, at the age of sixty-eight. In Gallenberger’s film, Rabe’s final years are mentioned only in the closing titles.38 Additional details, however, have come to light in the numerous films and narratives that have focused on Rabe in recent years, and these texts have become a part of the paratext of John Rabe, rendering the work parallel, in this regard, to Schindler’s List. Nonetheless, there are significant differences between the two films. Nowhere in John Rabe is there a pivotal moment comparable to Spielberg’s girl in the red coat which embodies the protagonist’s moral transformation. There is nothing concrete which unleashes Rabe’s humanitarian calling. Rather, the traces of kindness in Rabe witnessed in the film’s initial sequences are nurtured into resolution via a complex and sometimes coincidental sequence of events. The question emerges whether these events unfold against Rabe’s will, and whether his role in the ultimate salvation of the Zone is one that he, on a moral level, simply cannot refuse. The films, moreover, differ significantly in their psychological impact on viewers. Christopher Classen has discussed how Schindler’s List has become an integral element of international collective memory,39 and a primary distinction between the two films bears upon the differing extents to which the two have become part of this memory. The Nanjing Massacre is a historical incident that is far less well known on a global level. This could be due to the fact that there were notably fewer victims in comparison to the Holocaust, and unlike the latter, it was connected to one specific site and not to multiple diverse locations and institutions. A more

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complete explanation of its relative obscurity in international collective memory hinges on the fact that it occurred in China and not throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Even within Asia, there is conflicting acceptance of veracity. In Japan, there is strong official denial of this historical fact. Hence, the Massacre is best remembered in China and by those with a strong sense of the history of the Second World War and its associated war crimes globally. Due to the limited collective knowledge about the Massacre, it has not become associated with the extensive “icons of extermination” that Cornelia Brink has attributed to the Holocaust, and which are very much a part of global collective memory and, dare we say, popular culture.40

Concluding Remarks: A Man Between Two Illusions Gallenberger’s John Rabe is a man without a country. Both Germany and China are for him imagined communities, but not those envisioned so insightfully by Benedict Anderson.41 While Anderson posits a sociological dynamic in which community members hold a mental image of their affinity with each other, for Rabe the process unravels exclusively on a psychological level. Although specific details regarding Rabe’s thirty years in China are not overtly textualized in the film, the viewer is aware that his stay there has been a most extended one. Rabe, arguably, came to China as an expatriate, who could easily have returned to Germany at will.42 Moreover, Rabe brandishes a number of the hallmarks of a stereotypical expat: he clings nostalgically to the culture he knew in Germany; he has an ambivalent relationship with the host country; and perhaps on the most superficial level, he appears to have failed to learn Chinese, communicating only with speakers of German or English. Yet historical factors have problematized Rabe’s status as an expatriate, and hence, his ability to return home safely. His Germany now exists only in the past; he has not witnessed in person the historical changes that perhaps he only partially comprehends. Reality is ruthlessly distinct. It is the new and callous Germany that has curtailed his career and passion, and it is this same Germany that is calling him back or, more bluntly stated, extraditing him.43 Rabe is now more of an exile than an expatriate; he is a stateless individual, hovering between two imagined lands—a China that has always exceeded his full understanding, yet where he is nonetheless loved as an outsider, and a homeland of Gugelhupf and his favorite piano music, which now only inhabits the remote recesses of his memory. Gallenberger’s

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decision to end the film with the blissful reunion between Rabe and Dora appears at first glance to rectify this crisis. Yet the process is more complex and disconcerting. The director’s choice not to open the film with images of the Rabes living destitute in Berlin and hence present the events in Nanjing in media res was indeed a good decision, but it was made for the wrong reason. Like Rabe’s two affinities, the couple’s embrace as they reunite is imaginary. The presence of the two simple title cards that conclude the film problematizes narrative closure, and the viewer is confronted with the unsettling reality of displacement and futility.

Notes 1. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanjing: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Penguin, 1997). 2. Erwin Wickert, ed., The Good Man of Nanjing: The Diaries of John Rabe (New York: Knopf, 1998). 3. See Iris Chang, “The Nazi Leander Who, in 1937, Became the Oskar Schindler of China,” The Atlantic, 18 January 2012, accessed 12 February 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/ the-­n azi-­l eader-­w ho-­i n-­1 937-­b ecame-­t he-­o skar-­s chindler-­o f-­ china/251525/. This article, which consists of excerpts from Chang’s book, was published some eight years after the author’s death. 4. City of Life and Death, directed by Chuan Lu (Hong Kong: Media Arts Entertainment, 2009), motion picture; John Rabe, directed by Florian Gallenberger (Munich, Belin, Oberhaching, Mainz, H&V Entertainmentm Majestic Filmproduktion, ZDF, 2009), motion picture. 5. Robert Stam draws upon Gérard Genette’s Palimpsetes: La littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982), to define paratext as “all the accessory messages and commentaries which come to surround the text and which at times become virtually indistinguishable from it.” Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Poststructuralism and Beyond (New York: Routledge, 1992). 6. For an extended analysis of Gallenberger’s film and its relationship to both historical events and Rabe’s diaries, see Qinna Shen, “Revisiting the Wound of a Nation: The ‘Good Nazi’ John Rabe and the Nanking Massacre,” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 47, no. 5 (2011): 661–80. 7. Flowers of War, directed by Yimou Zhang (Beijing: EDKO Film, Beijing New Picture Film, and New Picture Company, 2011), motion picture. 8. In 1938 Matsuzaki Keiji’s Nanjing 1937 (Tokyo: Toho Cultural Affairs Department) presented the official Japanese version of the events, ­foregrounding the power and benevolence of the Japanese military. Six

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years later, the US provided a decidedly different point of view. The Battle of China, directed by Frank Capra (New York: US Army Pictorial Service/ Signal Corps Photographic Center, 1944), was part of the propaganda series, Why We Fight, and included footage of the Rape of Nanjing in its examination of the atrocities committed by the Japanese army. 9. A number of fictionalized features have been produced which focus on the plight of Chinese families during the massacre. Wu Ziniu’s Don’t Cry, Nanking (Long Shong Pictures, 1995), a coproduction between Hong Kong and Taiwan, was surprisingly released in Japan in 1997. Mou Tunfei’s Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre (Hong Kong and Taiwan: T.F. Film and China Film Coproduction) was also released in 1995. These two films were made in anticipation of the sixtieth anniversary of the Massacre. The new millennium has witnessed, together with several dramatized features, a number of documentaries on the Rape of Nanjing. Laurence Rees’s Horror in the East (London: BBC, 2000) focuses on the atrocities committed by the Japanese army between 1931 and 1945. Qushu Gao’s The Tokyo Trial (Beijing and Shanghai, Xianming Qinghua Culture & Media, Jiujian Changjiang Film TV Production, and Shanghai Film Group, 2006) is set during the international investigation into Japanese war crimes and has been compared to Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (Hollywood: United Artists, 1961). 10. Nanking, directed by Bill Gittentag and Dan Sturman (New York: HBO Films, 2007), motion picture. 11. Stephen Holden, “Giving Testimony on the Horror that Was Nanking,” New York Times, 12 December 2007, accessed 20 April 2000, https:// www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/movies/12nank.html. 12. Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanjing, directed by Anne Pick and William Spahic (Toronto: Real to Reel Productions, 2007), motion picture. Note the change of the film’s title from its working title, “The Woman Who Couldn’t Forget: The Iris Chan Story.” As if in direct response to this film, Saturo Mizushima made The Truth About Nanjing (Tokyo: Sakura Channel, 2007; television documentary), a three-part hybrid film combining documentary and drama, accompanied by a propagandistic website (accessed 15 February 2020, http://www.truthofnanking.com/pic.html) that unilaterally denies the Massacre. Mizushima, a founder of the extreme Japanese national movement Ganbare Nippon, holds particular disdain for the research of Iris Chang. See David McNeill, “Look Back in Anger: Nanjing Massacre 70th Anniversary,” The Japan Times, 6 December 2007, accessed 31 January 2020, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2007/12/06/films/look-­back-­in-­anger/#.Xke9oTJKgnQ. 13. John Rabe: The Good German of Nanking/Der gute Deutsche von Nanking, directed by Annette Baumeister and Florian Hartung (Mainz: ZDF

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Television, 2008), motion picture. The film is alternatively also known as John Rabe: The Good Nazi of Nanking. 14. In 2008, a dramatized feature by Roger Spottiswoode tells the story of a British journalist who, in the guise of a Red Cross worker, is able to enter Nanjing during the Massacre and photograph the horrific realities there. Titled The Children of Huang Shi (Canberra and Cologne: Film Australia and Zero West Filmproduktion), Spottiswoode’s film is an Australian, Chinese, and German coproduction. 15. Lu’s film was released in China one week prior to Gallenberger’s. The controversy that ensued following the film’s Chinese release pivoted on the fact that the greatest amount of the films’ screen time had been devoted to the character of a Japanese soldier. 16. Tony Pipolo, “Chuan Lu’s City of Life and Death,” Artforum, May 2011, accessed 15 January 2020, https://www.artforum.com/print/201105/ lu-­chuan-­s-­city-­of-­life-­and-­death-­28052. 17. Qinna Shen, “Revisiting the Wound of a Nation: The ‘Good Nazi’ John Rabe and the Nanking Massacre,” Seminar 47, no. 5 (2011): 661–80. 18. Geling Yan’s 13 Flowers of Nanjing was published in the US in 2012 under the title The Flowers of War by New York’s Other Press. 19. Lawrence Pollard, “The Story behind Chinese War Epic The Flowers of War,” BBC News, 24 January 2012, accessed 22 April 2020, https:// www.bbc.com/news/world-­asia-­china-­16638897. 20. For an in-depth study of the life of Minnie Vautrin, see Hua-ling Hu, American Goddess at the Rape of Nanjing: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). 21. For a discussion of typage in the cinema, particularly with reference to Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, see James Goodwin, Eisenstein, Cinema, and History (Urbana-Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 69–73. Goodwin’s discussion draws not only upon the theories of the above Soviet directors, but also upon later work such as that of Rudolf Arnheim and György Lukács. 22. See Hwa-ling Hu, “Minnie Vautrin: Goddess of Mercy,” National Women’s History Museum, accessed 12 January 2020, https://www.womenshistory.org/education-­resources/biographies/minnie-­vautrin. 23. Shen, “Revisiting the Wound,” 674. 24. Ibid. 25. International Movie Database, John Rabe, accessed 5 January 2020, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1124377/. 26. See Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: Am Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 113–17.

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27. For an extended application of Genette’s theories to narrative cinema, see Marsha Kinder, “The Subversive Potential of the Pseudo-Iterative,” Film Quarterly 43, no. 2 (1989–1990): 127–49. 28. The reference to the November 27, 1937, entry in Rabe’s diary serves two purposes. This gives the semblance of historical accuracy to what will transpire in the rest of the film. Of greater importance is that it introduces us to Rabe’s dilemma as to whether to remain in China or to return to Berlin, where he has been offered an excellent position. 29. For the most part, the entries in the historical John Rabe’s diaries are matter-of-fact, relating events rather than expressing feelings. Nonetheless, in its October 17, 1937, entry, Rabe’s attitude toward the Chinese is couched as a question of duty. He writes, “a man tries to behave decently and doesn’t want to leave in the lurch the employees under his charge, or the rest of his servants and their families, but to stand by them in word and in deed. It’s the obvious thing to do.” [John Rabe, The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe (New York: Vintage, 2000), 11.] Rabe further expresses his great respect for Chinese loyalty, writing “Our Chinese servants and employees, about 30 people in all including immediate families, have eyes only for their master. If I stay, they will loyally remain at their posts to the end” (ibid., 5). These examples, coupled with specific moments in the film, serve to humanize Rabe and create the benevolent popular culture figure that has evolved since the early efforts of Iris Chang. 30. Ibid., 93. 31. The moments of affection intertextually correspond to rare instances in Rabe’s diaries where his gut reactions are expressed. Such a moment occurs in an entry dated October 13, 1937, in which he describes the locals’ reaction to an alarm. Rabe writes: “At each alarm, a large number of poor neighbors—men, women, and children—all come running past my house, fleeing in the direction of Wutaishan Hill […] What a wretched sight, I’m tired of just watching their torment, especially the women with the little children in their arms.” Ibid., 10. 32. Rabe’s ambivalence in the gala sequence is intertextually underscored by an entry from his diaries from April 18, 1946, long after his return to Germany. Rabe clarifies: “If I had heard of any Nazi atrocities while I was in China, I never would have joined the party, and if my views as a German had clashed with those of the other foreigners in Nanking, the English, Americans, Danes, etc. in Nanking would never have chosen me to be chairman of the International Committee of the Nanking Safety Zone.” Ibid., 251. 33. Ibid., 93. 34. Especially well known is the case of Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Seven Years in Tibet (New York: Mandalay Entertainment, 1997). Due to his portrayal of

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the Dalai Lama’s tutor, Brad Pitt became a persona non grata in China and was only able to return to the country in 1996. 35. Florian Gallenberger, “Nachwort,” In Der gute Deutsche von Nanjing, ed. Erwin Wickert, (Munich: Wilhelm Goldmann, 2009), 418–19. 36. Schindler’s List, directed by Stephen Spielberg (Universal City: Amblin Entertainment, 1992). 37. For insights into Oscar Schindler’s final years, see Stuart Anderson, “Oskar Schindler: The Untold Story,” Forbes, 19 March 2014, accessed 30 January 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2014/03/19/ oskar-­schindler-­the-­untold-­story-­3/#2a06d71b5537. 38. For further information on Rabe’s life after his return to Germany, see Wickert’s “Afterward,” in The Good Man of Nanjing, 253–57. 39. Christopher Classen, “Balanced Truth: Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List Among History, Memory, and Popular Culture,” History & Theory 48, no 2 (2009): 77. 40. Cornelia Brink. Ikonen der Vernichtung: Öffentlicher Gebrauch von Fotografien aus nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern nach 1945 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998). 41. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 42. A clear discussion of the concept of expatriatism can be found in Eva Hoffman, “The New Nomads,” PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers 1, no 2 (2001): 191–205. 43. The stasis of immigrant communities in contrast to the continuing changes taking place in the countries they have left behind has been well recognized. This and similar phenomena are discussed at length in Eva Hoffman, Exit into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe (London: Faber and Faber), 1993.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Anderson, Stuart. “Oskar Schindler: The Untold Story.” Forbes, 19 March 2014. Accessed 30 January 2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2014/03/19/oskar-schindler-the-untold-story-3/#2a06d71b5537. Annaud, Jean-Jacques, dir. Seven Years in Tibet. New  York: Mandalay Entertainment, 1997. Motion picture. Baumeister, Annette and Florian Hartung, dirs. John Rabe: The Good German of Nanking/Der gute Deutsche von Nanking. Mainz: ZDF, 2008. Motion picture.

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Brink, Cornelia. Ikonen der Vernichtung: Öffentlicher Gebrauch von Fotografien aus nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern nach 1945. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998. Capra, Frank, dir. Why We Fight: The Battle of China. New York: Army Pictorial Service/Signal Corps Photographic Center, 1944. Motion picture. Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanjing: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New York: Penguin, 1997. ———. “The Nazi Leander Who, in 1937, Became the Oskar Schindler of China.” The Atlantic, 18 January 2012. Accessed 4 May 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/the-nazi-leader-who-in-1937-becamethe-oskar-schindler-of-china/251525/. Classen, Christopher. “Balanced Truth: Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List among History, Memory, and Popular Culture.” History & Theory 48, no 2 (2009): 77–102. Gallenberger, Florian, dir. John Rabe. Munich: H&V Entertainment, EOS Entertainment, Majestic Filmproduktion, ZDF, 2009a. Motion picture. Gallenberger, Florian. “Nachwort.” In Der gute Deutsche von Nanjing, edited by Erwin Wickert, 418–19 (Munich: Wilhelm Goldmann, 2009b). Gao, Qushu, dir. The Tokyo Trial. Shanghai: Xiamog Qinqhua Culture & Media, Jiujian Changjiang Film TV Production, and Shanghai Film Group, 2006. Motion picture. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsetes: La littérature au second degré. Paris: Seuil, 1982. ———. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. Goodwin, James. Eisenstein, Cinema, and History. Urbana-Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Guttentag, Bill, and Dan Sturman, dirs. Nanking. New York: HBO Films, 2007. Motion picture. Hoffman, Eva. Exit into History: A Journey through the New Eastern Europe. London: Faber and Faber, 1993. ———. “The New Nomads.” PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers 1, no 2 (2001): 191–205. Holden, Steven. “Giving Testimony on the Horror that Was Nanking.” New York Times, 12 December 2007. Accessed 20 April 2020. https://www.nytimes. com/2007/12/12/movies/12nank.html. Hu, Hua-ling. American Goddess at the Rape of Nanjing: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Hu, Hwa-ling. “Minnie Vautrin: Goddess of Mercy.” National Women’s History Museum. Accessed 12 January 2020. https://www.womenshistory.org/ education-­resources/biographies/minnie-­vautrin International Movie Database. John Rabe. Accessed 5 January 2020, https:// www.imdb.com/title/tt1124377/.

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Keiji, Matsuzaki, dir. Nanjing 1937. Tokyo: Toho Cultural Affairs Department. Motion picture. Kinder, Marsha. “The Subversive Power of the Pseudo-Iterative.” Film Quarterly 43, no, 2 (1989–1990): 127–49. Kramer, Stanley, dir. Judgment at Nuremberg. Los Angeles: United Artists. Motion picture. Lu, Chuan, dir. City of Life and Death. Hong Kong: Media Asia Entertainment, 2009. Motion Picture. McNeill, David. “Look Back in Anger: Nanjing Massacre 70th Anniversary.” The Japan Times, 6 December 2007. Accessed 20 April. 2020. https://www.japant i m e s . c o . j p / c u l t u r e / 2 0 0 7 / 1 2 / 0 6 / f i l m s / l o o k -­b a c k -­i n -­a n g e r / # . Xke9oTJKgnQ. Mizushima, Saturo, dir. The Truth about Nanjing. Tokyo: Sakura Channel, 2007. Motion picture. Mou, Tun-fei, dir. Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre. Beijing: T.F. Film and China Film Coproduction, 1995. Motion picture. Pick, Anne, and William Spahic, dirs. Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanjing. Toronto: Real to Reel Productions, 2007. Motion picture. Pipolo, Tony. “Chuan Lu’s City of Life and Death.” Artforum, May, 2011. Accessed 15 January 2020. https://www.artforum.com/print/201105/ lu-­chuan-­s-­city-­of-­life-­and-­death-­28052. Pollard, Lawrence. “The Story behind Chinese War Epic The Flowers of War.” BBC News, 24 January 2012. Accessed 22 April 2020. https://www.bbc. com/news/world-­asia-­china-­16638897. Rees, Lawrence, dir. Horror in the East. London: BBC, 2000. Television documentary. Shen, Qinna. “Revisiting the Wound of a Nation: The ‘Good Nazi’ John Rabe and the Nanking Massacre.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 47, no. 5 (2011): 661–80. Spielberg, Steven, dir. Schindler’s List. Burbank: Amblin Entertainment, 1992. Spottiswoode, Roger, dir. The Children of Huang Shi. Sydney: Film Australia and Zero West Filmproducktion, 2008. Motion picture. Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Poststructuralism and Beyond. New  York: Routledge, 1992. Wickert, Erwin, ed. The Good Man of Nanjing: The Diaries of John Rabe. New York: Knopf, 1998. Wu, Ziniu, dir. Nanking. Hong Kong: Long Shong Pictures, 1995. Motion picture. Yan, Geling. The Flowers of War. New York: Other Press, 2012. Zhang, Yimou, dir. Flowers of War. Beijing: EDKO Film, New Picture Film, and New Picture Company, 2011. Motion picture.

PART IV

Diplomatic Struggles and German-­speaking Jews, 1920–1950

CHAPTER 12

Illegitimate Representatives: Manchukuo-­ German Relations and Diplomatic Struggles in Nazi Germany Simon Preker

Manchukuo is often referred to as a Japanese “puppet state.” Founded in 1932 following the 1931 Manchurian Incident, the “abomi-nation” (Prasenjit Duara) struggled for international recognition. To better differentiate itself from its Japanese architects and patrons, it propagated distinct historical narratives about Northeastern China to its European audiences. Manchukuo combined modernity and anti-communism with avant-garde technology and architecture, but also tried to connect itself historically to the Qing era. In trying to establish its unique national identity it also directly competed with the Republic of China with respect to territory, culture, and diplomacy. Within the first few years of Manchukuo’s establishment various individuals who had benefited from the new regimes in Manchuria and Germany were already pursuing an economically cooperative relationship between the two states. In 1936, Manchukuo opened a liaison office in Berlin, and in 1938 Germany, bowing to Japanese demands, officially

S. Preker (*) Independent Scholar, Berlin, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. M. Cho (ed.), Sino-German Encounters and Entanglements, Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73391-9_12

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recognized Manchukuo diplomatically. A legation in Berlin as well as a consulate general in Hamburg became the hubs of the young empire’s efforts to represent itself in Europe. In the fall of 1938, Manchukuo sent a delegation to Europe, and the year thereafter, it hosted a reception for its national holiday in its Berlin premises on March 1, celebrating the seventh anniversary of the regime’s founding. At the same time, the country’s diplomatic personnel tried their best to legitimize their isolated government and to compete against its primary opponent, Chiang Kai-shek’s China. While the chain of command (especially regarding oral instructions, e.g., conveyed by Japanese diplomats in Germany) and therefore the extent of their agency is difficult to reconstruct, the activities and strategies of Manchukuo’s diplomatic agents on the ground offer an example of skilled public diplomacy. This chapter aims at exploring the initiation of official engagement between Manchukuo and Germany from the early 1930s; the formal diplomatic relationship between the two states existed from 1938 to 1945. I will discuss not only the Manchukuo-Germany diplomatic relationship, but also the previously underappreciated involvement of Manchukuo agents in Germany. Examining German language archival material as well as Chinese huiyilu-memoirs and Japanese personal accounts, I will present a widely overlooked yet central point of reference for Sino-German relations. This contribution thus sheds further light on diplomacy in Nazi Germany, through the perspective of agents of an East Asian country which ceased to exist in 1945. It is safe to assume that, to many people in the West, the term Manchukuo does not evoke much more than scenes from the 1987 movie L’ultimo imperatore (The Last Emperor) by Bernardo Bertolucci about the life of Pu Yi (1906–1967). In fact, the problem with the “abomi-nation,” as Prasenjit Duara has referred to Manchukuo, begins with its name.1 The term wei Manzhouguo (false Manchukuo), commonly used in Chinese scholarship, is a reference to, as Duara observes, “its falsity referring to its illegitimacy.”2 This chapter examines an even more obscure aspect of Manchukuo: its relationship with Nazi Germany. The state of Manchukuo, which was proclaimed in 1932 in the aftermath of the Manchurian Incident of September 18, 1931, encompassed the vast Northeast of the East Asian continent.3 China considered the “Three Northeastern Provinces”—Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang— claimed and governed by Manchukuo an integral part of the Republic of China. On May 31, 1933, however, Chiang Kai-shek, by signing the

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Tanggu Truce, granted Manchukuo de facto recognition. On the one hand, this anticipated a significant de-escalation of tensions in the SinoJapanese conflict from 1933 to 1935,4 which allowed Chiang to focus instead on his domestic enemies: the Communist forces at home. On the other hand, China was intent to obstruct any further de jure or de facto acts of recognition that could formalize its territorial losses. Manchukuo, however, fought for this diplomatic recognition. While Manchukuo and Japan each tried to gain international and diplomatic recognition for the new state in the early 1930s,5 only a few countries recognized Manchukuo diplomatically, and by the mid-1930s these efforts had been largely exhausted. Over the course of its existence, Manchukuo was recognized by only fifteen or so countries,6 the first of course being the Japanese Empire on September 15, 1932.7 Significantly, however, from 1936 to 1945 the state of Manchukuo also maintained an official presence in Nazi Germany. This chapter analyzes Manchukuo-German relations in the following five sections. The first section will discuss the origins of the Manchukuo-­ German relationship, as well as how Manchukuo represented itself abroad in order to achieve its goal of formal diplomatic recognition. The second section will examine its 1936 agreement with Nazi Germany and China’s response, as well as Nazi Germany’s formal recognition of Manchukuo in 1938. The third section examines Manchukuo’s diplomatic struggles through the case study of Han Yunjie’s mission and the Manchukuo legation and its staff in Berlin. The fourth section will analyze the regime’s activities outside of Berlin, specifically in Hamburg and Königsberg. The celebration of Manchukuo’s national holiday is the focus of the last part.

Manchukuo-German Relations and Manchukuo’s Public Diplomacy Despite Manchukuo’s struggle for recognition as discussed earlier, the decision to establish and maintain diplomatic relations with Manchukuo was actually much more complicated for Berlin, due to Germany’s close ties with China. Despite the absence of an official diplomatic relationship, Germany had become Manchukuo’s third biggest partner in trade by the mid-1930s. Political leaders in Xinjing (today’s Changchun, Jilin Province) and Tokyo thus redoubled their efforts trying to gain formal recognition by Germany.8 The German Auswärtige Amt (Foreign Office) was able to

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maintain its non-recognition policy toward Manchukuo, despite lasting and intense debate, from 1933 to 1935.9 These discussions mirrored the internal conflict of Germany’s East Asian policy. German officials emphasized their policy of non-recognition when they refused to answer the March 1, 1934, letter from Manchukuo’s Foreign Minister Xie Jieshi (1878–1946) announcing Pu Yi’s assumption of the monarchy and expressing a wish for the maintenance of friendly relations with Germany.10 The Auswärtige Amt was therefore irritated to learn that the controversial Trade Commissar Ferdinand Heye, who played an important role in the mid-1930s’ debate on the recognition of Manchukuo,11 and other Germans had attended the coronation celebrations12 in Mukden on March 1, 1934.13 Heye, obviously an annoyance to German officials, was removed as Commissar on February 4, 1935. Shortly thereafter, however, the Auswärtige Amt began to reconsider responding to overtures from Manchukuo regarding the regulation of trade between the two parties.14 In order to achieve its goal of formal diplomatic recognition, Manchukuo needed to be legitimized abroad. The new state’s attempts to reach out to a German audience preceded the formal diplomatic recognition and posting of representatives discussed earlier. An important peculiarity of its public diplomacy was that Manchukuo’s agents were in many cases not from Manchuria but instead from Japan. Particularly active in the promotion of Manchukuo were members of the Japanese diplomatic staff in Germany, individuals and groups interested in the promotion of trade with Manchuria, and, later, agents from Manchukuo itself, all of whom worked to present a favorable image of a land full of opportunities. Beginning in 1932, Manchukuo was constantly advertised in Germany by the Japanese. This was the same year that images of Japan as a military power were transmitted weekly to German audiences through newsreel coverage of the so-called Shanghai Incident, leading, as Ricky W. Law suggested, to the sights and sounds of warfare monopolizing public portrayals of Japan in Germany.15 One of the earliest works in this context was the ninety-page booklet titled Wiedergeburt der Mandschurei (Resurrection/Renaissance of Manchuria) by Yumoto Noburo and Abiko Rihei. Little is known about the two authors, but Yumoto might have been the railway visionary best remembered for his 1939 proposal for an underwater tunnel between Korea and Japan.16 The booklet was published by the small Japanese book and convenience store Nakakan Shoten, active in Berlin in the 1920s and

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1930s.17 In their disclaimer, the authors declared their intentions to introduce “a new state” to the Western world, a state based on the complete equality of all races. The authors claimed that the mere “evoking of interest for this new state” would be their greatest reward.18 In the narrative presented in their second chapter, the authors try to stress the historical and cultural differences between Manchuria and China. This was a common strategy also applied in history school books, as shown in a study by Ulrich Flick.19 As a result, they present their readers with a different sequence of dynasties prior to the Mongolian Yuan rule.20 In so doing, they were trying to dismiss the historical influence of China in Manchuria and thereby legitimize the new state’s existence. Their work is full of anti-Chinese propaganda directed at Chiang’s government in Nanjing. The eighth and second-to-last chapter takes aim at its allegedly xenophobic foreign policy and anti-foreign education system. Yumoto and Abiko accuse Republican China of a “Erziehung zum Fremdenhaß” (education to hatred of foreigners). As evidence, the authors draw on Chinese anti-imperialist propaganda material from 1931 and quote the prestigious Berlin-based newspaper Vossische Zeitung.21 Both sources were chosen in order to enhance the work’s credibility among a German readership. The authors claim that the Chinese in Manchuria had discriminated against the roughly 800,000 strong Korean community, which predominantly worked in the countryside. In substantiating this claim, Yumoto and Abiko list several incidents from the late 1920s.22 This argument is presented in a similar way to the ones discussed earlier. Their criticism of Chinese anti-foreign sentiment was meant to make their German readers less sympathetic to China’s anti-Japanese position. Similarly, the claim that the Koreans were an oppressed minority was intended to legitimize Japan’s mission in Manchuria.

The 1936 Agreement and the 1938 Formal Recognition by Germany Because of Manchukuo’s questionable legitimacy as a state, its relationship with Germany—as well as the various questions related to the nature and formality of that relationship—was inextricably entangled not just with Sino-German but also with Japanese-German relations. The signing of the “Deutsch-Mandschurisches Handelsabkommen” (German-Manchurian

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trade agreement) on April 4, 1936, was therefore a major political victory for Berlin. Germany had managed to appease Chiang’s government in Nanjing by emphasizing the agreement’s exclusively economic and technical character. This meant that the agreement did not fundamentally alter Germany’s position with respect to Manchukuo politically.23 Nevertheless, China formally protested the agreement, reaffirming that Manchukuo was, “as the German Government is fully aware, an organization brought about by illegitimate means and unrecognized by all self-respecting States in the world.”24 Both countries dispatched trade representatives following the signing of the agreement. Prior to that point, however, some Germans had been considerably more eager to establish a connection to Manchukuo than was their government. For example, two years before trade began, in March 1934 Werner Vogel, the recording clerk of the Deutsche Gemeinde (German community) in Shanghai,25 rejected an application by a Leipzig-­ based businessman named Kurt Wachtel for the post of honorary consul representing Manchukuo in Leipzig and Dresden. Vogel, apparently alarmed by the implications of this application, advised the German consulate general in Shanghai about the matter.26 It reflects nevertheless the promising potential of Manchukuo, at least in the eyes of the German business world. This potential became a trope for Manchukuo’s agents to further exploit and utilize in their outreach to Germany. By 1935, rumors about Manchurian intentions to open a trade representative office in Berlin had reached the Auswärtige Amt from Harbin.27 The Manchurian representative, Katō Hiyoshi, arrived in Berlin in 1936. In his memoirs, the Ambassador of the Republic of China in Berlin at the time, Cheng Tianfang (1899–1967), noted with satisfaction that Katō, due to his irregular diplomatic status, never met with Germany’s Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath (1873–1956) and had only been in contact with officials in charge of trade matters at the Auswärtige Amt.28 Germany reciprocated by opening a trade representative office in Xinjing on March 9, 1937.29 On June 9, Karl Knoll (1894–?), the first head of the German “Handelsvertretung” (trade representative),30 attended a dinner party hosted by Manchukuo’s Prime Minister Zhang Jinghui (1871–1959).31 Germany was, of course, much more cautious in its relations with Manchukuo than vice versa. Karl Knoll, however, was supportive of Manchukuo’s participation at the Deutsche Ostmesse (German eastern fair) and backed its (ultimately unsuccessful) initiative to

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open an additional consulate in the fair’s host city Königsberg in early July 1940.32 In order to proceed with these plans formal recognition on both sides had to be enacted. Much to Manchukuo’s benefit, Germany’s East Asian policy became much more clearly pro-Japanese during the first months of 1938. Acceding to Japanese demands, Germany terminated elements of its cooperative relationship with China in spring 1938 shortly after announcing its intentions to formally recognize Manchukuo. Japan naturally welcomed this new commitment. Adolf Hitler’s speech in the Reichstag from February 20, in which he formally proclaimed the German recognition of Manchukuo,33 was celebrated as a “victory of Nazi diplomacy” by the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun. The article also noted the concerns that had previously stalled the formal recognition, due to the negative impact it was bound to have on Chinese attitudes toward Germany. Although, according to the article, this step had become much more likely after Italy’s decision to recognize Manchukuo on November 29, 1937, it was the removal of a group of “anti-Nazi” diplomats as well as the resignations of Hjalmar Schacht and Konstantin von Neurath that had finally made the decision possible.34 From the Japanese perspective, this was, of course, a favorable outcome. On February 23, Hitler met with Japanese representatives in the prestigious Streit’s Hotel in Hamburg for further consultations. Representing Manchukuo was Katō Hiyoshi, who had played an active part in setting up this meeting. Two diplomats from Hamburg’s Japanese consulate general also attended. They were joined by numerous Japanese business associates as well as around fifty representatives from German enterprises directly or indirectly affected by the recognition.35 This meeting underscores the strong focus on trade in the German-Manchukuo relationship. At the same time, this meeting and what it portended were interpreted by China as political provocations. In response, on February 24, China registered its protest with Germany’s ambassador in Hankou, Oskar Trautmann (1877–1950). The same message of protest was cabled to the Chinese embassy in Berlin, and Cheng Tianfang was expected to convey the dismay of the Chinese to the German authorities. Cheng’s message, however, was received somewhat dismissively during his meeting with Secretary of State Hans Georg von Mackensen (1883–1947).36 Regardless of the Chinese protest, the formal recognition was realized through a treaty of friendship between the two parties, signed by Germany’s State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker (1882–1951) and Katō

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on May 12, 1938.37 Katō, in what appears to have been both an attempt to strengthen Manchukuo’s position in Germany and a desire to be included in the diplomatic and social circles of Berlin, requested two tickets for different events scheduled for May 1, 1938, from the Auswärtige Amt in April the same year.38 Over the course of the summer, Germany was still attempting to mitigate concerns that it was becoming too close to Manchukuo,39 but relations between the two countries intensified in many ways, and Germany’s presence in Manchukuo grew. In 1938, the German news agency DNB opened its Xinjing offices, further linking Germany and Manchukuo.40 Visible signs of this relationship also became more frequent. In 1939 almost a million passengers arrived at the principal ports of Dalian, Yingkou, and Andong.41 Furthermore, Germany’s Minister Wilhelm Wagner briefly mentioned the visit of a German Schriftleiterdelegation (editor delegation), headed by the prominent broker of German-Japanese cultural ties, Richard Foerster (1879–1952),42 as well as the arrival of the first German airplane in May 1939.43 The Manchukuo-German relationship was further intensified politically during the following years. On February 24, 1939, Manchukuo joined the Anti-Comintern Pact, a step that was widely celebrated in Manchukuo.44 Germany’s treaty of nonaggression with the Soviet Union, the Molotov– Ribbentrop Pact, signed in late August 1939, did raise concerns among Manchukuo’s political leaders, and German diplomats in Xinjing were forced to explain this surprising decision to a government which saw the necessity of fighting the Soviet Union as political dogma. Economically, the relationship had an interesting internal contradiction. While Manchukuo was positioning itself domestically as a model for a unique modernity, as “a laboratory for what was not possible to achieve within Japan itself,”45 its trade relations with Germany were similar to those pursued by the Republic of China and followed more or less the same proven formula: resources—soy beans in particular—in exchange for German industrial products. Thus, in terms of its economic influence, Japan was competing with Germany in East Asia. This presented a problem to Germany because Manchukuo was neither an independent government with which to negotiate nor a helpless market to exploit. The Manchukuo officials which have been recruited within the borders of the new state were, at best, Japanese proxies and could not act independently.46 German diplomats correctly identified the Japanese as the key advocates for closer economic ties.47

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Manchukuo’s subordinate status to Japan became even more obvious with the proclamation of the “New Order in East Asia” by Japanese Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro (1891–1945) in late 1938. Building upon the earlier attempts of reaching the German public through publications by a small Berlin-based Japanese publishing house, Manchukuo became a mainstream topic in the German media landscape and geopolitical discourse. Echoing both Japanese and Manchurian propaganda, the German media in 1936 became increasingly interested in developments in both Japan and Manchukuo. The Völkischer Beobachter, for example, covered topics such as the Japanese invasion of China, the construction of Manchukuo, and the preparations of Japanese athletes for the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.48 With Die Tochter des Samurai (The Samurai’s Daughter), a German-­ Japanese joint cinematic production, the two states tried to institute a cultural Wahlverwandtschaft (elective affinity), as discussed by Valerie Weinstein.49 The film had broad audience appeal in both Japan and Germany, despite its “ham-handed ideological messages and torturously slow pace, remarked upon by a number of critics, including Joseph Goebbels.”50 This public interest in Manchukuo was further evidenced by the numerous travelogues published in Germany about the country, which often rhapsodized about its vast size, youth, and potential.51 Although German representations of Japan hinged on its military power, as discussed above, Manchukuo’s military was, of course, weak in comparison to its patron’s highly modernized armed forces. Manchukuo’s modernity was, instead, depicted in these travelogues in connection with the train tracks and streamlined engines running through the land.

Han Yunjie’s Mission and the Formal Diplomatic Staff The young nation did not have to rely on its diplomatic staff alone to lobby for its interests. In the fall of 1938 (after Germany’s official recognition but prior to the arrival of Manchukuo’s diplomatic staff), a delegation headed by Manchukuo’s Minister of Economic Affairs, Han Yunjie (1894–1982), visited Germany.52 Mutō Tomio, a member of the delegation, later remembered a dispute over who was the highest-ranking official in the group.53 The mission first visited Italy and arrived in Vienna on September 20—the city had recently become German as a result of the

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Anschluss in March earlier that year. During their short stay in Vienna, the delegation visited a factory and the Viennese Hofburg Palace.54 Their trip took them to Munich the following day and then Nuremberg, Berlin, Hamburg, Hanover, Cologne, and Frankfurt. They departed from Frankfurt to Poland, subsequently visiting Danzig (Gdańsk) and Königsberg (Kaliningrad). Han and his approximately thirty-member delegation were received with the highest honors in Italy, meeting with, among others, the Italian King Victor Emmanuel (1869–1947, r. 1900–1946), Mussolini, Italy’s Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano (1903–1944), as well as Italy’s Minister of Economic Affairs.55 The Auswärtige Amt therefore stressed the need to treat the delegation with comparable hospitality. Han’s delegation arrived in Berlin on the morning of September 24. They stayed in the prestigious Hotel Adlon. Despite the importance the Auswärtige Amt had attached to the delegation’s visit, Han and his associates were slightly more constrained in their ability to represent the new state in Germany than they had been in Italy. Mutō Tomio remembered with disappointment that the entire delegation was unable to meet Hitler personally on September 26. According to Mutō, this was disappointing: Mussolini had received all of the delegation’s members in Italy, but their German hosts only allowed the delegation head and his deputy, Amakasu Masahiko (1891–1945), to meet with Hitler.56 Italy had been a constant point of reference for Manchukuo’s relations in Europe. When Italy recognized Manchukuo, China recalled its ambassador.57 China’s diplomatic staff was similarly not pleased about the German recognition of Manchukuo, but was not recalled. Chiang Kai-­ shek’s staff at the Chinese Embassy unhappily observed the mission’s activities and compiled reports about the receptions it hosted and about which Japanese diplomats had attended. They reported Han as having worn formal diplomatic attire, as well as having delivered his speech in front of Hitler in Japanese58—both apparently had a highly symbolic and offensive meaning for the Chinese diplomats in Berlin. The fact that Han Yunjie and his delegation received meritorious orders in Hitler’s name59 was highlighted by the Chinese Foreign Ministry after receiving notice from its Berlin staff.60 For his part, Han also attached a lot of importance to protocol and decorations.61 Even in comparison to the often flamboyant diplomatic uniforms still common in the late 1930s, Han’s elaborately decorated uniform communicated a clear signal regarding Manchukuo’s diplomatic aspirations, namely how eager—verging on

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desperate—Manchukuo and its agents were to gain international recognition and to be treated as equals. In 1941, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946) and Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring (1893–1946) were in return awarded the Dragon Order by Manchukuo.62 In the context of the delegation’s visit, the project to clearly demarcate Manchukuo’s history from that of China’s was further advanced by a remarkable present: two sets of the Qing shilu, the “Veritable records of the Qing,” were presented to Hitler in July 1938.63 The message was clear: Manchukuo should be treated as the sole legitimate successor to the Qing dynasty—and treated separately from Chiang’s China. A formal diplomatic staff representing Manchukuo was dispatched in the fall of 1938. The newly established legation chose the German title “Gesandtschaft von Mandschutikuo” (Legation of Manzhou Diguo). The newly added character di, which implied an imperial status, was, however, rejected by the Auswärtige Amt—more in adherence to established procedure than out of any skepticism regarding Manchukuo’s imperial pretensions.64 The Foreign Office of Manchukuo briefed the German legation in Xinjing about the recently chosen diplomats and informed them that Katō Hiyoshi would be leaving Germany following their arrival.65 The Office of the Trade Commissioner, which Katō had led, was abolished on the same day, August 16, 1938. Lü Yiwen (1897–1950), who had previously served as governor of Manchukuo’s Tonghua Province, was appointed the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary for Germany. Ehara Kōichi, previously a provincial vice governor in Manchukuo, was appointed counselor to the legation. The post of General Consul for Hamburg was filled by An Jiyun, the former Directing-Secretary of the Department of Commerce and Finance. Karl Knoll, then chargé d’affaires of the German Legation in Xinjing, informed the Auswärtige Amt of the appointments on August 24, 1938. He had received this information from Cai Yunsheng (1879–1959), Chief of the Foreign Office of Manchukuo, on August 19. Knoll informed his ministry that he did not know An Jiyun or Yebara (Ehara Kōichi) personally. Apparently this was worth noting, because the relevant diplomatic circles were extremely well connected. For example, in Xinjing Knoll rented his home from Lü Yiwen, and the two men had known each other since 1934.66 Naturally, these developments were met with concern among Chiang’s team of diplomats. Tan Boyu (1900–1982), who led the German Embassy after Ambassador Cheng Tianfang’s departure, informed Chongqing of both the appointments and the departure of Lü.67 Wang Tifu, secretary to

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Minister Lü, published his memoirs in 1988.68 His public claims of having saved thousands of Jews by issuing visas for Manchukuo earned him the honorary nickname “Schindler” in Chinese scholarship.69 While at times inaccurate and apologetic—Wang spent his life after the war in the PRC and apparently had to later whitewash his biography—his memoirs offer valuable insight into the activities of Manchukuo’s diplomatic staff. It is noteworthy that the highest-ranking diplomats representing Manchukuo did not have any prior experience in diplomacy, nor did they have any specific connections with Germany. Wang Tifu remembered that no Manchurian diplomat had visited Germany prior to their arrival in November 1938.70 One, Sawaguchi did know some German, which was duly noted by the Protocol Department.71 In some ways, the composition of Manchukuo’s diplomatic staff mirrored the administration of the state itself. While the public face of most agencies and ministries was ethnically Chinese, their deputies were usually Japanese. These “Japanese shadows” were also noted by German observers when they visited Xinjing.72 Lü Yiwen and his staff arrived in Germany on November 7, 1938. They were received by Germany’s Deputy Chief of Protocol Gustav Adolph von Halem (1899–1999),73 as well as Japan’s Ambassador to Germany Ō shima Hiroshi, and several representatives from Japanese companies.74 Because the legation’s premises in the Lessingstraße were not ready, they initially resided in the Hotel Esplanade.75 Shortly after his arrival Lü presented his credentials to Hitler on November 21, 1938, at the Obersalzberg in a joint ceremony with, among others, the new ambassador from France.76 China still maintained a strong presence in Germany in 1938, and the Republican Chinese representatives were certainly the most serious opposition faced by the Manchukuo legation. According to Wang Tifu the Manchurian diplomats literally crossed the street when they encountered Chinese students on the streets of Berlin.77 However, with China’s diminishing influence in Germany and Germany’s increasingly pro-Japanese foreign policy, Manchukuo managed to increase its visibility in Europe. In August 1939, Lü Yiwen—in addition to his position in Germany—was appointed Manchukuo’s Minister to Hungary78 and in May 1940 Minister to Romania. Diplomatic relations between Romania and Manchukuo were established on December 1, 1940.79 With its receptions in late 1941 to celebrate and orchestrate the cooperation among the Axis powers, Manchukuo’s agents in Germany managed to attract some media attention.80 In 1944, part of the legation’s staff was recalled to Manchukuo. According to his memoirs, Wang Tifu

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remembers a feeling of relief after receiving his instructions to withdraw to Xinjing. He claims to have even traveled to Switzerland to buy watches before his departure. According to his memoirs, five people in total were recalled. Shortly before their departure on July 20, 1944, they were received by the Auswärtige Amt and were advised to be careful on their return journey.81

Manchukuo’s Activities in Hamburg and Königsberg Manchukuo tried to expand its presence not just in Berlin, but all across Germany. It is impossible to discuss all of the activities related to Manchukuo which took place in Germany, but a glimpse at Germany’s second biggest city Hamburg and the commercially important port Königsberg, where one of the key trade fairs was held, can provide us with a general overview. Owing to its existing close trading relationship with the city, Manchukuo opened a consulate general in Hamburg in 1938.82 On November 19, Manchukuo’s legation in Berlin informed German authorities that the consulate general in Hamburg would be responsible for all of Germany, not explicitly excluding Berlin.83 The importance of Hamburg and Königsberg is also evident in the itinerary of Han’s delegation visit in 1938. One particularly important agent was Sugimoto Yūzō (1900–1992), who was associated with the Japanese consulate general in Hamburg and then had several overlapping assignments lobbying on behalf of Manchukuo’s interests.84 He helped to convey the news of Germany’s recognition of Manchukuo on February 20, 1938, via the Japanese news agency Dōmeisha. His report was printed three days later in the Ō saka edition of the Asahi Shimbun.85 In 1941, Sugimoto, then a representative of a German-Manchurian Trading Company, was featured in a newspaper special on the Japanese community in Hamburg. His trade office was located in the Manchukuo Consulate’s building.86 The consulate general, located at the northern end of Hamburg’s Alster, a tributary of the river Elbe, was the only one of its kind in Europe.87 After 1940, the legation was housed in a mansion at Bellevue 51. The German Protocol Department registered its prior addresses as Alsterdamm 39 and Rondeel 25. The mission head An Jiyun and at least one other registered staff member lived at Nonnenstieg 26, a fifteen-minute walk from the waterside strip of the Bellevue. Remarkably, this placed them in direct proximity to the Chinese consulate general, which was literally

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around the corner on St. Benedictstraße. Sawaguchi also resided near the Klosterstern Square at Abteistraße 30, less than a hundred meters from the Chinese consulate general.88 The consulate staff, among them Sugimoto, assisted the Verein zur Förderung der deutsch-mandschurischen Wirtschaftsbeziehungen (Association for the Promotion of German-Manchurian Economic Relations), which was founded in 1938  in order to promote business interests between the two countries. Consul General An Jiyun was recalled in 1940, and the Japanese vice consul general Sawaguchi Seitoku thereafter filled An’s post.89 The consulate general had its authority expanded to include issuing visas by the Auswärtige Amt in 1943.90 In October 1944, Manchukuo’s legation informed the Auswärtige Amt that, due to a shortage in diplomatic staff, the consulate general in Hamburg would be led by Nakagawa Eiichi (1909–?), who would serve as acting consul general. To fulfill this task, Nakagawa was expected to commute to Hamburg on a weekly basis.91 Hamburg remained a key hub and was as important as Berlin to the Manchukuo-German relationship, at least with respect to trade. In addition to Hamburg, the Deutsche Ostmesse, a large trade fair held in Königsberg, underlined the importance of East Prussia for Manchukuo (Fig. 12.1). Manchukuo had advertised its soy products at the Deutsche Ostmesse even before the state’s formal recognition.92 Its participation in 1938 was planned with the help of the aforementioned Verein zur Förderung der deutsch-mandschurischen Wirtschaftsbeziehungen, an association heavily invested in the Manchukuo-­Germany soy trade. Indeed, the association’s three committees dealt with the soy bean trade, general trade, and trade politics respectively.93 A reception was held on August 23 with the mayor of Königsberg, Helmuth Will (1900–1982), attending.94 A Manchurian delegation visited the city and the fair in 1938,95 followed a year later by the Manchurian Minister Lü Yiwen.96 A member of Lü’s staff even produced a film about his visit and East Prussia,97 which increased pressure on China to establish a more visible presence at the fair. China was only able to participate in the 1940 fair, displaying outdated trade figures in an attempt to salvage what was left of its trade relationship with Germany.98 In 1941, after the final collapse of Sino-German diplomatic relations, Manchukuo (primarily advertising soy and soy-derived products) participated without its Chinese competitor, again supported with a visit by Lü from Berlin.99

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Fig. 12.1  Sugimoto Yūzō (second from the left) at the Deutsche Ostmesse in 1936 (The backdrop of Manchukuo’s booth reads “Manchukuo, the Land of Rewards.” Photo from the private collection of Sugimoto Shintaro, used by kind permission). (A photo from the private collection of Sigimoto Shinatoro)

On February 5, 1940, Ehara (sometimes also transcribed as Yebara) Kōichi, the counselor of Manchukuo’s Berlin legation, visited the Auswärtige Amt to discuss the dissolution of Manchukuo’s consulate general in Warsaw with the head of the Protocol Department Alexander von Dörnberg. During that meeting, he proposed the establishment of a new consulate general in the city of Königsberg.100 Manchukuo’s intentions to open a consulate in Königsberg were discussed internally in the Auswärtige Amt in early 1940. Germany was not concerned about Manchukuo interfering with Polish affairs and assumed that this step was simply a way to find a new role for Manchukuo’s diplomats in Poland, as Karl Knoll speculated in a memorandum filed on February 7, 1940. Knoll was in support of Manchukuo’s plans to open an additional consulate, under the condition that Manchukuo’s political interests were advanced exclusively through its legation in Berlin.101

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The National Holiday of Manchukuo Not only did the Manchurians participate in events hosted by the Nazi state, such as a cocktail party hosted by the Reichskanzlei on May 9, 1939, which Wang Tifu remembered attending together with Lü Yiwen.102 Manchukuo had established its presence in Germany by the beginning of 1939. Thus, around the same time that Manchukuo joined the Anti-­ Comintern Pact Lü Yiwen visited Weizsäcker in late February in order to “exchange kind phrases.”103 Manchukuo celebrated its national holiday for the first time in Berlin also in the year 1939. Indeed, Manchukuo’s legation in Berlin had informed the Auswärtige Amt as early as November 19 the previous year about its upcoming national holiday on the first of March.104 In the years before Katō Hiyoshi’s lobbying work began to yield results, and even before Manchukuo’s official recognition, Japanese, Manchurians, and Germans celebrated Manchukuo’s national holiday in Berlin on March 1, 1937.105 At the time, however, officials of the Auswärtige Amt were reminded several times not to treat the trade representative’s office as a de jure consular representative.106 This, of course, was because Germany had “not yet” recognized Manchukuo for “distinct reasons,” which were not elaborated.107 By 1939, however, Manchukuo and Japan had succeeded in its struggle for recognition, and these obstacles were finally out of the way. Manchukuo tried to reach out as an equal to its German hosts. All of the diplomatic staff in Berlin was invited to attend the reception on March 1, 1939. Wang Tifu remembers the prominent role played by the “rather numerous” representatives dispatched by the Auswärtige Amt.108 According to Wang Tifu, the diplomats had been instructed to maintain an “independent diplomatic posture” and to consider the interests of both Japan and Manchukuo. The legation’s building was decorated with Manchukuo’s national flag and a banner written in Chinese characters, reading: “Celebrate the fifth anniversary of the founding of the great Empire of Manchukuo.” The men wore evening dress and the women wore Qipao and Kimono: a hint, via fashion, about the complex identity of the Manchukuo state. Lü Yiwen’s daughter, as Wang Tifu remembers, “broke fresh ground” by dressing up as a member of a German youth organization, but he failed to specify which one. The first to arrive at the reception was Berlin’s mayor Julius Lippert (1895–1956). Wang Tifu remembers that Ribbentrop and Weizsäcker, as well as Walther Funk, Wilhelm Frick, Minister of Finance Lutz von Krosigk

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(1887–1977), and Minister for Labor Franz Seldte (1882–1947) also attended. Among the most important guests was the Japanese ambassador Kurusu Saburō. Wang Tifu remembers Kurusu as a pro-American figure who interacted with the Germans in “moderate politeness.” Both Lü Yiwen and Ribbentrop gave short toasts, the latter of which received the Hitler salute by the Nazi representatives in attendance, and the guests waltzed.109 Wang Tifu remembered a brief conversation with Lü Yiwen, in which he had expressed doubts that the Hungarian, Czech, or Spanish diplomats would make an appearance. Kurusu responded “Not everyone takes us seriously.”110 Although the course of the war limited the scale of such events significantly, it can be verified—despite the difficult state of source material— that these activities continued after 1941. For example, Manchukuo’s tenth founding anniversary was celebrated with a concert conducted by the Korean composer Ahn Eak-tai (1906–1965), who is today remembered for composing the music for South Korea’s national anthem.111 Lü Yiwen attended the concert, and one of his diplomats, the Manchurian diplomat Ehara Kōichi, wrote the lyrics for the choir.112

Conclusion Many of the individuals who had worked on behalf of Manchukuo had to atone for their roles after the war, if they chose to return to China. Minister Lü Yiwen was very likely executed in the late 1940s, and his secretary Wang Tifu had to endure more than ten years in a Soviet labor camp. Given the complexities of collaboration and the peculiar role played by Manchukuo in Chinese historiography, lack of access or the loss of archival sources will complicate future research on Manchukuo. Manchukuo’s policies toward Germany had a strong emphasis on trade, despite the competition between Germany and Japan with respect to the markets in China and Manchukuo. For the diplomats representing Manchukuo it was crucial to utilize this interest in trade in order to advance their state’s political objectives. Although the Manchurian Incident accelerated Japan’s confrontation with major powers, the state of Manchukuo did not play an exposed role in the armed conflicts of World War II. Its symbolic allegiance to the Axis was, however, a key tool in its struggle for legitimacy. This examination of the activities of Manchurian agents of public diplomacy is by no means complete. However, it does suggest that

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Manchukuo—with notable help from Japan—succeeded in its efforts to achieve diplomatic recognition. Germany was a stage upon which the Manchurian nation was performed, particularly in the interest of differentiating it from its main political opponent, the Republic of China. The case of Manchukuo offers a fascinating example of how a regime, considered illegitimate by most countries, was treated in wartime Europe. It could be rewarding to expand this perspective in examining the international position of China, torn apart by Cold War politics, after 1949.

Notes 1. Other common transcriptions of Manchukuo (Chinese: Manzhouguo, Japanese: Manshūkoku), which literally means the “State of Manchuria,” include the German “Mandschukuo” and, after 1934 “Manchoutikuo” (Chinese: Manzhou Diguo), literally meaning the “Empire of Manchuria.” Manchukuo’s legation in Germany used the name “Legation of Manchoutikuo” in its seal. However, the Auswärtige Amt rejected this name and instructed its staff to use the name “Mandschukuo” instead. Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA R 119013. 2. Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 59. 3. On the Manchurian Incident as well as the history of Manchukuo, see Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity; Rana Mitter, The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Louise Young. Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 4. The Province of Rehe, which is today part of the PRC’s Hebei Province, was annexed by Manchukuo after an armed struggle in early 1933 between Chinese Republican forces and the armed forces of Manchukuo and Japan. Rana Mitter, China’s War with Japan, 1937–1945. The Struggle for Survival (London: Allen Lane, 2013), 59–60. 5. Noburo Yumoto and Abiko Rihei, Wiedergeburt der Mandschurei; Ihr Verhältnis zu China und Japan (Berlin: Nakakan Shoten, 1932), 30. 6. This number varies, depending on how nation states are defined. See: Stefan Talmon, Kollektive Nichtanerkennung illegaler Staaten (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 117–18. 7. Ibid, 110. 8. Ibid, 115. 9. John P. Fox discusses the policy conflicts over Manchukuo, including the missions led by the controversial trade commissioner Ferdinand Heye.

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John P. Fox, Germany and the Far Eastern Crisis, 1931–1938: A Study in Diplomacy and Ideology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 24–51. 10. Ibid., 37. 11. Heye was a German businessman with a strong interest in East Asia. His connections to the Nazi Party before 1933 remain unclear, but he went to Manchukuo in 1933 and impinged on matters of German foreign policy by offering to secure Manchukuo’s recognition without the authority to do so. Ibid., 27–28. 12. Puyi initially became Chief Executive of Manchukuo in 1932. In 1934 he was crowned Emperor of Manchukuo, with the era name of Kangde. 13. Fox, Germany and the Far Eastern Crisis, 351. 14. Ibid., 147. 15. As Ricky W. Law suggests, this battle, for most viewers, “not only meant their first exposure to real combat on screen, but also it would come to define the presentation of Japan in newsreels for the rest of the decade.” Whether the German coverage of the Manchurian Incident preceded the Shanghai Incident in media coverage remains unclear, “as no newsreel [Wochenschau] from September 1931 to February 1932 seems to have survived.” Ricky W.  Law, “Beauty and the Beast: Japan in Interwar German Newsreels,” in Beyond Alterity: German Encounters with Modern East Asia, ed. Qinna Shen and Martin Rosenstock (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 17–33, 22. 16. Daqing Yang, “Japanese Colonial Infrastructure in Northeast Asia. Realities, Legacies, Fantasies,” in Korea at the Center: Dynamics of Regionalism in Northeast Asia, ed. Charles K.  Armstrong et  al. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 92–109, 103–4. 17. Katō Tetsurō, “Personal Contacts in German-Japanese Cultural Relations during the 1920s and Early 1930s,” in Japanese-German Relations, 1895–1945. War, Diplomacy and Public Opinion, ed. Christian W. Spang and Rolf-Harald Wippich (New York: Routledge, 2005), 76–87, 81. 18. Yumoto and Abiko, Wiedergeburt der Mandschurei, 3. 19. Ulrich Flick, Identitätsbildung durch Geschichtsschulbücher: Die Mandschurei während der faktischen Oberherrschaft Japans 1905–1945 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014). 20. In contrast to mainstream Chinese historiography, their accounts draw a connection from the tribes of the Sushen to the Fuyu, Goguryeo/ Gaogouli, Balhae/Bohai, Khitan/Qidan, and then to the Jin Dynasty (also called Jurchen/Nüzhen). Yumoto and Abiko, Wiedergeburt der Mandschurei, 12. 21. Ibid, 51–53. 22. Ibid, 72.

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23. Ambassador Trautmann also broached this issue with Chiang Kai-shek in early 1936. Trautmann’s account of the meeting in Nanjing has been archived. Chiang asked Trautmann whether the agreement was signed by a German government body and whether this would result in the recognition of Manchukuo by Germany. Trautmann answered that the German position had not changed. Chiang replied that he would not oppose the agreement if it did not carry any implications with respect to international law. ADAP, C, 6, 2, p. 769; ADAP, C, IV.2, p. 1095. 24. An English translation of the memorandum sent to the German Embassy in China and signed on June 8 was filed by the Foreign Ministry in Nanjing. The German response was that: “The German Government cannot understand why the Chinese Government should interpret such real facts as amounting to recognition [sic!] of Manchukuo, whereas official quarters in Japan and other interested Powers [sic!] have declined to draw such con[c]lusions. The German Government trusts that the question will now be considered as closed.” Academia Historica, Taipei, AH 020-010114-0015-0053a; Academia Historica, Taipei, AH 020-010114-0015-0056a. 25. Barbara Schmitt-Englert, Deutsche in China 1920–1950: Alltagsleben und Veränderungen (Großgossen: Ostasen Verlag, 2012), 90. 26. Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA R 119013. 27. The German mission head Karl August Balser (1887–1956) cabled the Auswärtige Amt in Berlin as well as the German Embassies in Nanjing and Tokyo on October 24, 1935. Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA R 86281. 28. Cheng Tianfang, Cheng Tianfang zao nian huiyilu (Taipei: Zhuanji Wenxue chubanshe, 1968), 167. 29. Alfons Esser, “Die drei Fernostverträge des Jahres 1936 und ihre Bedeutung für die deutsche Chinapolitik,“ in Beiträge zu den deutsch-­ chinesischen Beziehungen, ed. Kuo Heng-yü and Mechthild Leutner (Munich: Minerva-Publikation, 1986), 91–112, 109. 30. ADAP Ergänzungsband zu den Serien A-E, p. 578. 31. Kurt Bloch, German Interests and Policies in the Far East (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1940), 31–32. 32. Karl Knoll informed the Protocol Department on February 7, 1940, that he and his desk (Ref. Pol. VIII) supported Manchukuo’s initiative, on the condition that Manchukuo would pursue its political interests exclusively through the legation in Berlin. Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA R 119013. 33. Hitler’s three-hour-long speech is accessible online in the digitalized Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, “Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags”

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(Negotiations of the German Reichstag), accessed July 16, 2020. http:// www.reichstagsprotokolle.de/Blatt2_n3_bsb00000143_00024.html. 34. “Doitsu – Manshūkoku: Hitoraa sōtō seimei,” Asahi Shimbun, February 21, 1938 (morning edition). 35. No title, Asahi Shimbun, November 25, 1938 (morning edition). 36. Mackensen responded by referring to Cheng’s remarks that the recognition of Manchukuo would be considered an unfriendly act by China as “abwegig” (unfounded). Mechthild Leutner, ed., Deutschland und China 1937–1949. Politik  – Militär  – Wirtschaft  – Kultur: eine Quellensammlung (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998), 98; ADAP D, 1: 685–86. 37. The “Freundschaftsvertrag zwischen dem Deutschen Reich und Mandschukuo” (Treaty of Friendship between the German Reich and Manchukuo) announced the immediate establishment of diplomatic and consular relations, and that a trade agreement would be signed as soon as possible. The trade agreement followed on September 13, 1938, and was signed in Xinjing. Leutner, Deutschland und China, 66. 38. Katō Hiyoshi wrote to the Protocol Department on April 19, 1938. The Auswärtige Amt incorrectly expected Katō to be officially named Minister in a matter of weeks and granted him two tickets for him and his wife. His small staff was not considered eligible for diplomatic rank. Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA R 118846. 39. In a “Presseanweisung” [press directive] from July 29, 1938, the German media was advised to not address the “misleading” Japanese coverage that Germany and Manchukuo had already had concluded a trade agreement. They emphasized that such an agreement was still being negotiated. See Karen Peter, ed., NS-Presseanweisungen der Vorkriegszeit (1938). Edition und Dokumentation (Munich:K. G. Saur, 1999), 694–93. 40. Christian Taaks, Federführung für die Nation ohne Vorbehalt? Deutsche Medien in China während der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2009), 127. 41. This number significantly increased in the 1930s. A total of 530,962 people had arrived in these ports in 1930, versus 694,610 by 1934. Young. Japan’s Total Empire, 263. 42. Foerster was a retired admiral who had become head of the German-­ Japanese Society in 1937. Hans-Joachim Bieber, SS und Samurai. Deutsch-­Japanische Kulturbeziehungen (Munich: Iudicium, 2014), 449. 43. The 1939 annual report of Germany’s Minister to Manchukuo, Wilhelm Wagner, to the Auswärtige Amt, filed January 13, 1940, does not include any further details. See Leutner, Deutschland und China, 195. 44. As Germany’s Minister to Manchukuo, Wilhelm Wagner noted in his annual report to the Auswärtige Amt on January 13, 1940, that the

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Manchukuo-German Treaty of Friendship (from May 12, 1938) was extended by an additional treaty, signed in Xinjing on March 24, 1939. The additional treaty included a most-favored-nation clause, previously granted to Italy. Ibid., 195. 45. Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity, 250. 46. In 1942 and 1943, Manchukuo’s efforts to realize limited autarky led to tensions with Japan, as well as with the collaborationist regime in Nanjing. Leutner, Deutschland und China, 164. 47. As did the German Minister to Manchukuo Wilhelm Wagner in his annual report to the Auswärtige Amt on January 13, 1940. Wagner specifically mentions Hoshino Naoki’s (1892–1978) support for closer ties with Germany. Ibid., 195. 48. Bieber, SS und Samurai, 392. On the admiration for Manchukuo in the Nazi media, especially in the year 1937, see further ibid., 465. 49. Valerie Weinstein, “Reflecting Chiral Modernities: The Function of Genre in Arnold Fanck’s Transnational Bergfilm, The Samurai’s Daughter (1936–37),” in Beyond Alterity. German Encounters with Modern East Asia, ed. Shen Qinna and Martin Rosenstock (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 34–51, 44. 50. Ibid, 48. 51. Sören Urbansky, “Mapping Manchuria Station. Crossing Borders into the ‘Yellow Land,’” Comparativ: Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 22, no. 5 (2012): 87–105. 52. A memorandum on the itinerary of the delegation by Martin Luther (1895–1945), filed on September 2, 1938, suggests that the delegation’s visit had been hastily planned. Their visit occurred immediately after the party’s Nuremberg Rally, held from September 5 to September 12. See Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA R 27645. 53. According to Mutō, Han Yunjie had to compete with Manchukuo’s Minister of Industry, Lü Yinghuan (1890–1946), regarding leadership of the delegation. Mutō Tomio, watashi to Manshūkoku (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1988), 206–7. 54. Mutō, watashi to Manshu ̄koku, 225. 55. These details were recorded in an internal memorandum from September 16, 1938. See Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA R 27645, p. 4. 56. Mutō, watashi to Manshūkoku, 229. 57. Li Zhi, “wo suo zhidao de Liu Wendao,” In Wuxue wenshi ziliao – di yi ji, ed. Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshang huiyi. (Wuhan: Wuxue-shi weiyuanhui wenshi ziliao gongzuo weiyuanhui, 1988), 19–23, 22. 58. For an outline of the delegation’s visit with Hitler, which was cabled by the embassy to the Foreign Ministry in Chongqing on the night of

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September 27, 1938, see Academia Historica, Taipei, AH 020-010102-0163-0104a. 59. Mutō Tomio describes the ceremony, which took place the morning of September 27, in his memoirs. He remembered Han and Amakasu as receiving larger decorations with swastikas and the rest of the delegation receiving smaller ones. See Mutō, watashi to Manshūkoku, 231. 60. The embassy informed the Foreign Ministry in Chongqing of these developments on September 28, 1938. Academia Historica, Taipei, AH 020-010102-0163-0103a. 61. Mutō Tomio remembered that Amakasu Masahiko pointed out to Han that he wore decorations he had never been awarded. Mutō, watashi to Manshu ̄koku, 232. 62. German Federal Archive, Berlin, BArch R 901/59146. 63. German Federal Archive, Berlin, BArch NS 43-II, p. 50. 64. . See the memorandum filed by Werner von Schmieden on November 7, 1938, instructing the Protocol Department to continue using the established name “Mandschukuo.” Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA R 119013. 65. Other media coverage suggests that Katō either remained in Germany or later returned, and continued to speak on behalf of Manchukuo. For example, see “Preserve in China Trade, Promised to Germany, Italy,” New York Times, December 2, 1938, p. 8. 66. See Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA R 119013. 67. Tan Boyu of the Chinese Embassy in Berlin cabled China’s Foreign Ministry in Chongqing on August 20, 1938, referring to an unspecified German newspaper report. Shortly thereafter, the Chinese Embassy informed the Foreign Ministry in Chongqing that Lü had embarked on the “Yasukuni maru” on October 2 Academia Historica, Taipei, AH 020-010102-0163-0098a; AH 020-010102-0163-0110a. 68. Shortly before Wang’s death, Chen Ming and Yang Mingsheng both re-­ published Wang’s memoirs. Chen Ming and Wang Tifu, yi ge wei-Man waijiaoguan de rensheng gaobai (Shenyang: Chunfeng Wenyi chubanshe, 2001); Yang Mingsheng and Wang Tifu, jian guo Xitele yu jiu guo Youtairen de wei-Man waijiaoguan (Harbin: Heilongjiang Renmin chubanshe, 2001). 69. Mao Qin, “liang ge Zhongguo de ‘Xindele,’” Xinyuedu 5 (2004): 16; Wang Yan and Wang Jialing, “Minguo you ge ‘Xindele,’” Tuanjie 4 (2001): 32–34. 70. See Wang Tifu, wei-Man waijiaoguan de huiyi, 68. 71. A handwritten memorandum, based on a report of the German consulate general in Osaka from October 3, 1938, noted that Sawaguchi had visited

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German classes during his university studies in Tokyo. See Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA 119013. 72. Hans Brosius, Fernost formt seine Gestalt (Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1936), 118. 73. The Deutsch-Japanische Gesellschaft collected several newspaper clips which contain detailed information on Lü’s arrival. See German Federal Archive, Berlin, BArch R 64-IV/276, p. 139. 74. See Wang, wei-Man waijiaoguan de huiyi, 75. 75. Asahi Shimbun, November 8, 1938 (morning edition). 76. Ibid. Robert Coulondre, the new French ambassador, described the ceremony and his meeting with Hitler over the course of seven full pages in his memoirs, but failed to mention any of his fellow diplomats. See Robert Coulondre, Von Moskau nach Berlin 1936–1939. Erinnerungen des französischen Botschafters (Bonn: Athenäum, 1950), 303–9. 77. Wang, wei-Man waijiaoguan de huiyi, 80. 78. Asahi Shimbun, August 8, 1939 (morning edition). 79. Asahi Shimbun, May 14, 1941 (morning edition). 80. Banater Südostdeutsche Tageszeitung, November 29, 1941. 81. Wang, wei-Man waijiaoguan de huiyi, 95. 82. Katō Hiyoshi wrote to Weizsäcker in English about his government’s intentions to establish a consulate general in Hamburg on August 9, 1938. Ernst Woermann, representing the Auswärtige Amt and replying on Weizsäcker’s behalf, informed Katō on August 18 that no objections to the establishment of a consulate general were expected. Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA R 119013. 83. This was a reply to an inquiry from the Auswärtige Amt from November 17, 1938. See Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA R 119013. 84. According to a list of staff sent to the Protocol Department on February 2, 1940, Sugimoto was listed as economic advisor in February 1939. Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA R 119013. 85. Ohori Sō, “Sugimoto Yūzō no taiken shita senzen, senji-ka no Hamburugu,” in Ni-Zui kankei peiji, May 25, 2014, http://www.saturn.dti.ne.jp/~ohori/sub-­sugimoto.htm. 86. Mittagsblatt Hamburg, January 30, 1941. 87. Ohori Sō, “Sugimoto Yūzō no taiken shita senzen, senji-ka no Hamburugu,” in Ni-Zui kankei peiji, May 25, 2014, http://www.saturn.dti.ne.jp/~ohori/sub-­sugimoto.htm, accessed on July 3, 2020. 88. Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA R 119013. 89. Bernd Eberstein, Hamburg  – China: Geschichte einer Partnerschaft (Hamburg: Christians, 1988), 253.

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90. The handwritten memorandum in the protocol department of the Auswärtige Amt is partly illegible, but was most likely filed on March 2, 1943. PA AA R 119013. 91. Nakagawa had previously been re-assigned as press attaché to the legation in Berlin. The Manchukuo legation informed the Auswärtige Amt about Nakagawa’s change of posts on December 21, 1942. Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA R 119013. 92. Mutō, watashi to Manshūkoku: 239. 93. Verein zur Förderung der deutsch-mandschurischen Wirtschafts­ beziehungen, Mandschukuo in Zahlen (Hamburg: self published, 1941). 94. [no title] Ostasiatische Rundschau, 17 (1837): 419. 95. “Die Deutsche Ostmesse und der Ferne Osten,” Ostasiatische Rundschau, 14/15 (1939): 352–57. 96. “Gesandter Lü-I-Wen in Königsberg,” Ostasiatische Rundschau, 13 (1939): 330. 97. “Mandschurischer Diplomat filmte Ostpreußen,” Ostasiatische Rundschau, 5/6 (1940): 122. 98. Simon Preker, “Republican Chinese Public Diplomacy in Nazi Germany, 1936–41” (PhD Diss, University of Hamburg, 2018), 152–54. 99. “Mandschukuo auf der 29. Deutschen Ostmesse,” Ostasiatische Rundschau, 10 (1941): 223. 100. Dörnberg filed a memorandum about Ehara’s visit on February 5, 1940. See Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA R 119013. 101. Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA 119013. 102. Wang Tifu, wei-Man waijiaoguan de huiyi (Harbin: Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshang huiyi Heilongjiang weiyuanhui wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, 1988), 75. 103. Ernst von Weizsäcker filed a short memorandum about Lü’s visit on February 24, 1939, noting that Ribbentrop was not present during the meeting. Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA R 29829, p. 231584. 104. This was a reply to an inquiry by the Auswärtige Amt from November 17, 1938. Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA R 119013. 105. Ohori Sō, “Sugimoto Yūzō no taiken shita senzen, senji-ka no Hamburugu,” in Ni-Zui kankei peiji, May 25, 2014, accessed July 3, 2020, http://www.saturn.dti.ne.jp/~ohori/sub-­sugimoto.htm. 106. In January 1935, German diplomats decided to return a letter to the not yet existing representation of Manchukuo in Berlin. They recommended that the matter, which was not further explained in the files of the Protocol Department, could be addressed to the Japanese Embassy

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instead. Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA R 119013. 107. See the internal memorandum from April 13, 1937, filed by the Protocol Department. Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, PA AA R 119013. 108. Yang and Wang, jian guo Xitele yu jiu guo Youtairen de wei-Man waijiaoguan, 98–99. 109. Ibid., 99–101. 110. Wang Tifu describes a brief conversation between Ribbentrop and Lü wherein Ribbentrop scoffed at the Hungarians and the Czech diplomats. Yang and Wang, jian guo Xitele yu jiu guo Youtairen de wei-Man waijiaoguan, 102. 111. On the friendship between Ahn Eak-tai and Ehara Kōichi, see Ohori Sō, “sakkyokaku, shikisha Ahn Eak-tai no katsuyaku shita senji-ka no Ō shū,” in Ni-Zui kankei peiji, April 2, 2016, accessed on July 6, 2020, http:// www.saturn.dti.ne.jp/~ohori/sub-­ekitaiahn.htm. Mun Hak-su, “[Exclusive] Ahn Eak-tai Performed the ‘Kimigayo’ on a Japanese Holiday,” The Kyunghyang Shinmun, August 31, 2015, http://english. k h a n . c o . k r / k h a n _ a r t _ v i e w. h t m l ? c o d e = 7 1 0 1 0 0 & a r tid=201508311839097. 112. See the undated recording of a concert in 1941/1942, conducted by Ahn Eak-tai, as well as correspondence between Ehara Koichi and the Japanese studies Professor Wilhelm Gundert (1880–1971). Nachlass Gundert, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, accessed June 16, 2020; Moon Ma, “A Berlin, le célèbre chef d’orchestre japonais Ekitai Ahn dirige lui – même l’exécution d’une de ses oeuvres qui révèle l’influence occidentale sur la musique nippone d’aujourd’hui,” YouTube (User: Moon Ma), 6 February 2015, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=YTS5lyKBfFc.

Bibliography Academia Historica, Taipei, AH 020-010102-0163-0098a; AH 020-010102-0163-0110a; AH 020-010102-0163-0103a; AH 020-010102-0163-0104a; AH 020-010114-0015-0053a; AH 020-010114-0015-0056a. ADAP  – Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik 1918–1945. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1950–1995: C, 6, 2; C, IV, 2; Ergänzungsband zu den Serien A-E; D, 1. Asahi Shimbun: February 21, 1938, Tokyo (morning) Edition; November 8, 1938, Tokyo (morning) Edition; August 8, 1939, Tokyo (morning) Edition; May 14, 1941, Tokyo (morning) Edition.

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Banater Südostdeutsche Tageszeitung, November 29, 1941. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. “Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags” (Negotiations of the German Reichstag). Accessed on July 13, 2020. http:// www.reichstagsprotokolle.de/Blatt2_n3_bsb00000143_00024.html. Bieber, Hans-Joachim. SS und Samurai. Deutsch-Japanische Kulturbeziehungen. Munich: Iudicium, 2014. Bloch, Kurt. German Interests and Policies in the Far East. New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1940. Brosius, Hans. Fernost formt seine Gestalt. Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1936. Chen Ming and Wang Tifu. yi ge wei-Man waijiaoguan de rensheng gaobai. Shenyang: Chunfeng Wenyi chubanshe, 2001. Cheng Tianfang. Cheng Tianfang zao nian huiyilu. Taipei: Zhuanji Wenxue chubanshe, 1968. Coulondre, Robert. Von Moskau nach Berlin 1936–1939. Erinnerungen des französischen Botschafters. Bonn: Athenäum, 1950. Eberstein, Bernd. Hamburg  – China: Geschichte einer Partnerschaft. Hamburg: Christians, 1988. Esser, Alfons. “Die drei Fernostverträge des Jahres 1936 und ihre Bedeutung für die deutsche Chinapolitik.“ In Beiträge zu den deutsch-chinesischen Beziehungen, edited by Kuo Heng-yü and Mechthild Leutner, 91–112. Munich: Minerva-­ Publikation, 1986. Duara Prasenjit. Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Flick, Ulrich. Identitätsbildung durch Geschichtsschulbücher: Die Mandschurei während der faktischen Oberherrschaft Japans 1905–1945. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014. Fox, John P. Germany and the Far Eastern Crisis, 1931–1938: A Study in Diplomacy and Ideology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. German Federal Archive, Berlin, BArch NS 43-II; BArch R 64-IV/276; BArch R 901/59146. Katō Tetsurō. “Personal Contacts in German-Japanese Cultural Relations during the 1920s and Early 1930s.” In Japanese-German Relations, 1895–1945. War, Diplomacy and Public Opinion, edited by Christian W. Spang and Rolf-Harald Wippich, 76–87. New York: Routledge, 2005. Law, Ricky W. “Beauty and the Beast: Japan in Interwar German Newsreels,” In Beyond Alterity: German Encounters with Modern East Asia, edited by Qinna Shen and Martin Rosenstock, 17–33. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. Leutner, Mechthild, ed. Deutschland und China 1937–1949. Politik  – Militär  – Wirtschaft – Kultur: eine Quellensammlung. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998. Li Zhi. “wo suo zhidao de Liu Wendao.” In Wuxue wenshi ziliao – di yi ji, edited by Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshang huiyi, 19–23. Wuhan: Wuxue-shi ­weiyuanhui wenshi ziliao gongzuo weiyuanhui, 1988.

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Mao Qin. “liang ge Zhongguo de ‘Xindele.’” Xinyuedu, no. 5 (2004): 16. Mittagsblatt Hamburg, January 30, 1941. Mitter, Rana. China’s War with Japan, 1937–1945. The Struggle for Survival. London: Allen Lane, 2013. Mitter, Rana. The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Moon Ma. “A Berlin, le célèbre chef d’orchestre japonais Ekitai Ahn dirige lui – même l’exécution d’une de ses oeuvres qui révèle l’influence occidentale sur la musique nippone d’aujourd’hui.” YouTube (User: Moon Ma). Accessed on July 13, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTS5lyKBfFc. Mun Hak-su. “[Exclusive] Ahn Eak-tai Performed the ‘Kimigayo’ on a Japanese Holiday.” The Kyunghyang Shinmun, August 31, 2015. Accessed on July 13, 2020. http://english.khan.co.kr/khan_art_view.html?code=710100&ar tid=201508311839097 Mutō Tomio. watashi to Manshūkoku. Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1988. Nachlass Wilhelm Gundert (1880–1971). University of Hamburg, Hamburg. Ohori Sō. “sakkyokaku, shikisha Ahn Eak-tai no katsuyaku shita senji-ka no Ō shū.” In Ni-Zui kankei peiji. April 2, 2016. Accessed on July 6, 2020. http://www. saturn.dti.ne.jp/~ohori/sub-­ekitaiahn.htm. Ohori Sō. “Sugimoto Yūzō no taiken shita senzen, senji-ka no Hamburugu.” In Ni-Zui kankei peiji. May 25, 2014. Accessed on July 6, 2020. http://www. saturn.dti.ne.jp/~ohori/sub-­sugimoto.htm. Ostasiatische Rundschau. [No title], 17 (1837): 419; n.a. “Gesandter Lü-I-Wen in Königsberg.” 13 (1939): 330; n.a. “Die Deutsche Ostmesse und der Ferne Osten,” 14/15 (1939): 352–57; n.a. “Mandschurischer Diplomat filmte Ostpreußen,” 5/6 (1940): 122; n.a. “Mandschukuo auf der 29. Deutschen Ostmesse,” 10 (1941): 223. Peter, Karen, ed. NS-Presseanweisungen der Vorkriegszeit (1938). Edition und Dokumentation. Munich: K. G. Saur, 1999. Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office, Berlin: PA AA R 119013; PA AA R 29829; PA AA R 27645; PA AA R 118846; PA AA R 86281. Preker, Simon. “Republican Chinese Public Diplomacy in Nazi Germany, 1936–41,” PhD diss, University of Hamburg, 2018. Schmitt-Englert, Barbara. Deutsche in China 1920–1950: Alltagsleben und Veränderungen. Großgossen: Ostasen Verlag, 2012. Taaks, Christian. Federführung für die Nation ohne Vorbehalt? Deutsche Medien in China während der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2009. Talmon, Stefan. Kollektive Nichtanerkennung illegaler Staaten. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006.

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Urbansky, Sören. “Mapping Manchuria Station. Crossing Borders into the ‘Yellow Land.’” Comparativ: Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 22, no. 5 (2012): 87–105. Verein zur Förderung der deutsch-mandschurischen Wirtschaftsbeziehungen. Mandschukuo in Zahlen. Hamburg: self published, 1941; Wang Yan and Wang Jialing. “Minguo you ge ‘Xindele.’” Tuanjie, no. 2 (2001): 32–34. Weinstein, Valerie. “Reflecting Chiral Modernities: The Function of Genre in Arnold Fanck’s Transnational Bergfilm, The Samurai’s Daughter (1936–37).” In Beyond Alterity. German Encounters with Modern East Asia, edited by Shen Qinna and Martin Rosenstock, 34–51. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. Yang, Daqing. “Japanese Colonial Infrastructure in Northeast Asia. Realities, Legacies, Fantasies.” In Korea at the Center: Dynamics of Regionalism in Northeast Asia, edited by Charles K.  Armstrong, Gilvert Rozman, Samuel S. Kim, and Stephen Kotkin, 92–109. New York: Routledge, 2005. Yang Mingsheng and Wang Tifu. jian guo Xitele yu jiu guo Youtairen de wei-Man waijiaoguan. Harbin: Heilongjiang Renmin chubanshe, 2001. Young, Louise. Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Yumoto, Noburo, and Abiko Rihei. Wiedergeburt der Mandschurei: Ihr Verhältnis zu China und Japan. Berlin: Nakakan Shoten, 1932.

CHAPTER 13

Psychoanalysis in Chinese Exile. A. J. Storfer and His Magazine Project Gelbe Post Thomas Pekar

In July 1939, German Nazis were able to read the following in the anti-­ Semitic magazine Der Stürmer:1 “An emigrant from Vienna has settled in Shanghai. It is the Jew A.  J. Storfer, who once ran the International Psychoanalytical Publishing House in Vienna. … He is working on injecting his Jewish poison into wide circles of the Chinese community.”2 What was reported here, in the denigrating jargon of the Nazis, was based in fact: the publicist and colleague of Sigmund Freud, Albert Josef Storfer (1888–1944), had emigrated to Shanghai at the end of 1938.3 There, in founding an émigré magazine called Gelbe Post: ostasiatische Halbmonatschrift (Yellow Mail: East Asian Bi-Monthlies),4 he attempted to make psychoanalysis known not only within the circles of the emigrant community, but possibly also within the broader Chinese public. This chapter explores Storfer’s attempts to achieve the cultural transfer of psychoanalysis during his Chinese exile through the publication of the Gelbe Post. The first section gives a brief overview of Storfer’s life. The

T. Pekar (*) German Department, Gakushuˉin University, Tokyo, Japan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. M. Cho (ed.), Sino-German Encounters and Entanglements, Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73391-9_13

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second section provides some information on the situation of German-­ speaking Jewish emigrants in Shanghai in order to shed light on the social and cultural contexts of Storfer’s magazine project. Finally, the possibilities or impossibilities of Storfer’s project of psychoanalytic cultural transfer will be discussed. It is obvious, of course, that average Chinese would not have been able to learn about psychoanalysis from a German language journal. Regardless of that practical hurdle, the articles on psychoanalysis published in the Gelbe Post represented a first attempt to introduce psychoanalysis to the Chinese.

Storfer’s Life Storfer was born in 1888 in Botoşani (Romania) as the son of a Jewish timber merchant. He studied law and political science in Cluj-Napoca (Klausenburg), Vienna, and Zurich, where he first became aware of psychoanalysis. In 1910 he wrote a psychoanalytic study on patricide, which was included by Sigmund Freud in an edited series of writings on applied psychology.5 Following the First World War, which Storfer participated in as a volunteer and consequently suffered severe hand injuries, he worked as a journalist for leftist newspapers. In 1919 he became a full member of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Association, where he soon assumed the important roles of editor and, from 1925 to 1932, managing director and director of the International Psychoanalytical Publishing House, as well as co-editor of the Gesammelte Schriften (collected writings) of Sigmund Freud.6 Freud initially appreciated his presence as an “active and capable publishing director and restless mind.”7 In 1929 Storfer also founded his own journal, Psychoanalytische Bewegung (Psychoanalytical Movement), which was published until 1933.8 Although he had completed a training analysis (Lehranalyse) with Freud, Storfer never actually worked as a practicing psychoanalyst. In 1932 there was a dispute with Freud and the psychoanalytic circle; Storfer was blamed for the poor financial state of the Psychoanalytical Publishing House and subsequently withdrew from all psychoanalytic activities.9 He subsequently discovered a new field of scholarly inquiry for himself in the history of language and published two books on this subject in 1935 and 1937, Wörter und ihre Schicksale (Words and Their Fates) and Im Dickicht der Sprache (In the Thicket of Language).10 The manuscript of a third work on name research, entitled “Von A bis Z” (From A to Z), which was almost completed, was confiscated by the Nazis when he emigrated and has since been lost.

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After Germany’s invasion of Austria in 1938, Storfer tried in vain to obtain a visa for Switzerland or the United States before escaping at the last moment, prior to a possible arrest, to Shanghai, for which no visas, affidavits, or similar documentation were required. Due to special political arrangements, there were distinct sections in Shanghai which could be easily entered, namely the International Settlement, which was essentially controlled by the British and Americans, as well as the French Concession, and also the Chinese districts, which were controlled by the Japanese occupation forces or their Chinese collaborators; Storfer lived in one of the latter districts, Hongkou, as did most of the European emigrants, because of its cheap cost of living.11 Storfer did not stay in Shanghai for long, however. In 1941, shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he emigrated to Australia, where he died impoverished in Melbourne in 1944 at the age of 56. One of Storfer’s friends, the Austrian journalist Milan Dubrovic, attributes Storfer’s inability to emigrate to the United States, as many other psychoanalysts had done,12 to the fact that the American psychoanalysts (or the Austrian-German psychoanalysts who had previously emigrated to the United States) regarded Storfer as a “renegade” from Freud’s authority in the field and were therefore unwilling to help him.13 Another theory is that Storfer could not have been granted a visa for the United States because of his Romanian birthplace. The psychoanalyst and Freud’s first biographer Fritz Wittels, who emigrated from Vienna to New  York in 1932, references this in a short obituary of Storfer published in 1945: “We would have liked to have him with us in America, but because he was a Romanian and his country’s quota was filled for ten years, he was lucky to be admitted to Shanghai, China.”14 However, some years earlier (on September 7, 1938), Storfer himself had written to Wittels about this “Romanian quota,”15 so that one is forced to conclude that no one in the United States made any serious efforts to resolve Storfer’s immigration status, because there would certainly have been ways to bypass the quota.16 Even if Storfer had made himself somewhat unpopular in psychoanalytical circles, he was still judged positively by many as a “real bohème,”17 as a typical Viennese coffeehouse regular (legendary was the circle in Vienna’s Café Herrenhof, which, besides Storfer, included writers such as Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Ernst Pollak, and Friedrich Torberg),18 or simply as “an original” (according to the Austrian writer Alfred Polgar, another one of Storfer’s friends).19 This coffeehouse environment, familiar to Storfer from childhood and an important part of his daily life,20 can be

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described as a “state of latent readiness to talk with informal contacts.”21 One can clearly see the connections between Storfer’s background and his idea for the Gelbe Post magazine project, which was intended to provide a forum for this kind of informal conversation across cultures, especially between the European-Jewish emigrants and the Chinese, but also between various scientific fields (such as psychoanalysis, linguistics, cultural studies, and ethnology, to name just a few that appeared in the journal). Unfortunately, Storfer was forced to abandon this project for financial reasons after a relatively short time, only about a year after the founding of the magazine.

Shanghai and the Gelbe Post A penniless man fled into exile in Shanghai, and just a few months later, he published a magazine. He accomplished this feat not alone, but with the assistance of a circle of outstanding colleagues,22 including the journalists Julius R. Kaim and Bruno Kroker, the Berlin art historian Lothar Brieger, and the philologist and sinologist Willy Tonn.23 The successful publication of this magazine was miraculous,24 remains even if, like Dubrovic, one suspects that Storfer had secured an unnamed financier, namely the German Shanghai representative for Adlerwerke, a German automobile company.25 If this was indeed the case, that is, the financing of, to borrow Nazi terminology, a “Jewish” exile magazine by an “Aryan” German, this nevertheless casts a significant light on the internal frictions that existed between the Nazi organizations responsible for foreign affairs, such as the party’s foreign organization (NSDAP-AO), and the internationalized Germans on site, whether in Shanghai or Tokyo. Some of these Germans were not at all in agreement with the Nazification of German state and society (Gleichschaltung),26 even if they did not dare to openly resist it. One might interpret the financing of Storfer’s magazine by this hitherto unknown German representative abroad as a small yet significant sign of resistance against the Nazis. Nevertheless, Storfer was denounced by other “loyal” Germans in Shanghai, such as the officials at the Consulate General, who worked to accomplish his expatriation.27 How can we best characterize the Gelbe Post, which was initially published bimonthly May to July 1939, and then again as a single issue in November of that year, for seven issues in total?28 Storfer subsequently “gradually transformed his magazine into a daily newspaper,”29 but after a short time he was forced to sell it to a competitor due to financial

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problems, who then halted publication a short time later. There was, after all, “fierce competition” within the Shanghai emigrant press environment.30 The Gelbe Post was not just a psychoanalytical journal,31 but rather a political, cultural, and feuilletonistic medium, which also aimed at offering practical assistance to the approximately 18,000 German-speaking Jewish emigrants in Shanghai by reporting on local “land prices and rents” and other opportunities for emigration. Another important goal of the magazine was to introduce Chinese culture to the emigrants, most of whom had come to Shanghai without any prior knowledge of China. Already by the second issue a grateful reader wrote in a letter to the Gelbe Post: “It seems to me that the most important thing for the German-speaking European is, finally, the bridge to China’s country and people has been built” (GP 25). Also, a number of articles about Japan, as well as some about Korea, attempted to expand the readers’ knowledgeability about East Asia.32 Storfer’s primary interest, however, lay in psychoanalysis, as he made clear in a letter from Shanghai addressed to Siegfried Bernfeld, a psychoanalyst who had emigrated to the United States. On March 31, 1939, he wrote: “The Gelbe Post is concerned with East Asian things, but will seek every opportunity to use psychoanalysis, even if it’s a stretch.”33 These editorial priorities can clearly be seen in at least two areas. The first is a kind of “applied” psychoanalysis, which, oriented to a progressive view of mankind, focused its attention on reporting about particularly disadvantaged groups or “taboo subjects,” especially with regard to poverty or sexuality. The second area encompassed theoretically oriented articles on psychoanalysis and East Asia. Regarding the image of humanity presented in the Gelbe Post, one can basically argue that it diverged—and I think quite deliberately—from the heroic-racist ideas propagated in Germany and Japan at the time. Examples of this divergent perspective are reports on reform movements, such as the emancipation of women in East Asia, or an article on anti-Semitism from a psychoanalytical point of view in the June 1939 issue,34 the latter of which was a bit of a sensation, because it included excerpts from Freud’s not yet published and final book, The Man Moses and the Monotheistic Religion (Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion).35 Another topic highlighted by the Gelbe Post was the living conditions of the Chinese, especially those of the underprivileged classes. For example, one of the first articles which appeared in the Gelbe Post was a programmatic statement by Storfer, titled: “Hats off to the coolie!” (GP 2),

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referring to the Chinese day laborer. He vividly described the image of one who has to “carry huge loads on his back, dripping with sweat” (GP 2). It was the coolie, and not the cliché image of the Chinese Mandarin, “who in the serene peace of his study, amidst exquisite works of art, is immersed in the works of the time-honored classics” (GP 2), that most accurately represented the Chinese people, or rather “the working population of the Chinese city” (GP 2). This appreciation was remarkable, given the ignorance and arrogance that the Europeans, Americans, and especially the Japanese showed toward the Chinese; in a city like Shanghai, itself a relic of colonial rule, this was even more so the case. Storfer probably saw parallels to the treatment of European Jews by the Nazis. He was able to observe firsthand the oppression of the Chinese by the Japanese on a daily basis. Thus, as he wrote in a letter from Shanghai: “We must constantly pass by the felled bayonets of the Japanese guards,36 but we do not have to greet every guard like all the Chinese and show them their legitimacy again and again.”37 His appreciation of the Chinese extended to the point that he wrote in a letter about his impression that in Shanghai there is “a real intellectual life only among the Chinese. Europeans and Americans here are mostly nothing but moneymakers, quite unscrupulous, as one can imagine in this masterless and rootless city.”38 As a result, a report on emancipatory reform movements among Chinese women can be found in the Gelbe Post (see GP 3f.), and Storfer also took up the discussion about the Chinese Jews, the so-called Kaifeng Jews (see GP 12-14).39 He published a report on a Chinese refugee camp; in addition to the European emigrants, there were thousands of Chinese refugees in Shanghai who had fled to the city during the Sino-Japanese war in order to avoid the brutal treatment of the Japanese (see GP 55f.).40 Other topics presented included disadvantaged marginalized groups such as beggars (cf. GP 36-38) and street children. Storfer’s reporting gave an unsparing picture of reality and mentioned, for example, the corpses of children who had been dumped on the streets of Shanghai (cf. GP 86). Taboo topics were tackled, such as Shanghai’s “blood alleys,” that is, the prostitution district (see GP 42), or prostitution in general (see GP 126). One article on this topic, “On the Hygiene of Sex Life,” was based on a publication by Freud disciple Paul Federn (see GP 150-152).41 This range of topics was based on a progressive conception of mankind interested in identifying social grievances and openly challenging, thereby breaking, social taboos, which can be seen as one of the main goals of psychoanalysis. It also demanded that every individual, including the prostitute, the

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beggar, or the street child, should become aware of themselves as an individual—not as part of a collective—and work to improve their social status. This agenda clearly did not align with the Chinese way of thinking. The problems faced in introducing psychoanalysis to China could have been based on its different valuations of the “individual” and the “collective.” The French sinologist and psychoanalyst Rainier Lanselle expresses it in this way: “Is psychoanalysis compatible with the … cultural environment in China? Here one must be strict: from its point of view, psychoanalysis presents itself only in its concept of ‘subject’ and of ‘subject of the unconscious.’” It does not present itself in collective expressions; it does not concern the collective, for it is first and foremost a clinic, a clinic of “one by one [un par un].”42 He further demands: “[W]hen psychoanalysis turns to China, it should take no account whatsoever of a supposed Chinese peculiarity--and certainly not of a ‘different rationality’—in danger of undermining what it constitutes.”43 This kind of viewpoint can of course be accused of “Eurocentrism.” The French sinologist François Jullien currently takes the exact opposite position when he dips psychoanalysis “into this foreign bath of Chinese thought”44 in order to identify the gaps and deficits of psychoanalytic theory.45 It is not a question of deciding between one of these two models, but rather of showing the breadth of this discussion, to which Storfer contributed.

Psychoanalysis in China: A Failed Cultural Transfer? One result of this history of exile in Britain and, above all, America, which becomes so important to the project of psychoanalysis,46 is the emergence of the United States as a “new center” for this kind of work.47 The history of psychoanalysis in its East Asian or Shanghai exile context, which is inseparably associated with Storfer and his work, seems of marginal significance by comparison. There are, however, at least two reasons that speak to the relevance of this East Asian exile, which may not have been East Asia’s first encounter with psychoanalysis48 but is, nonetheless, a unique historical occurrence. So why was this encounter so significant? A first reason concerns the development of psychoanalytic theory itself, which culminates in the question as to whether psychoanalysis should be regarded as a universal-global project or “only” as a Western project, which would make it of little relevance for China or East Asia. The aforementioned sinologist Jullien, for example, is currently asking precisely this question:

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Today, as psychoanalysis is about to be exported to other parts of the world, especially to China49, one cannot avoid questioning whether the views it openly expresses are valid for any subject—described in the functioning of what it calls, as objectively as possible, a ‘psychic apparatus’, whose universal character it is not inclined to doubt—but not in a specific and limited way, only for the European subject.50

It is especially significant that an early version of these contemporary theoretical discussions can be found in Storfer’s Gelbe Post. The American psychiatrist James Lincoln McCartney, who worked in a Shanghai hospital, wrote the article “On Psychoanalysis of the Chinese Script” (“Zur Psychoanalyse der chinesischen Schrift”).51 Storfer translated his article, abridged it slightly (see GP 9-11), and provided a short commentary which accompanied it. From the “naïve” Eurocentric perspective of the era, McCartney and Storfer both advised the Chinese to transition away from their complicated writing system. According to McCartney: “An awakening such as world history has never seen before awaits the world when the libido of the Chinese people, now entangled in the intricacies of its people’s script … will one day be liberated and given to socially constructive national achievements” (GP 11). Storfer continued on to speak of the necessity of “freeing Chinese culture from its fixation on an early stage of writing” (GP 11). Although this view, oriented on the supposed progress of Western alphabetical writing systems, is certainly problematic from a contemporary perspective, it is nevertheless worth noting that this essay is framed around the “psychoanalytical significance of Chinese writing,” which has “so far been almost completely overlooked” (GP 10). In short, albeit from a false perspective, the essay’s focus is nevertheless concerned with the fundamentally correct issue of writing. In my opinion, this is the crucial point that connects Storfer’s and McCartney’s early efforts with current psychoanalytic research, which does not argue for the abolition of the Chinese writing system, but instead asks what this completely different approach to the mechanics of writing could mean for the theoretical development of psychoanalysis.52 Questions arise: what are the consequences to the necessity of dreamwork (Traumarbeit), as an investigation into the unconscious using the basic principles of condensation (Verdichtung) and displacement (Verschiebung), when the images are already present on the surface of the writing itself, so to speak? Would “dream-writing (Traumschrift) be structured similarly to Chinese”?53 These questions are of particular interest to Lacanian

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psychoanalysis, which is based on the “literal order of the unconscious.” Indeed the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was so fascinated by China that he not only began to learn the Chinese writing system, but also devoted significant attention to it with respect to the theoretical formulation of his understanding of psychoanalysis.54 In order to answer these questions, substantive theoretical redefinitions of psychoanalysis are necessary. Further discussion on these questions will also decide whether Freud’s theory can claim validity “beyond the borders of the alphabetical writing system of the West,”55 in this context meaning the East Asian cultures of logographic Chinese writing, including those of Japan and Korea.56 The second reason why the East Asian exile of psychoanalysis is of such great importance concerns the socio-cultural development of East Asia, that is, Korea, China, Taiwan, and Japan. The question to be posed here is whether and to what extent psychoanalysis, with its specific image of humanity, that is, one that is primarily focused on the individual, can make a contribution to the development of these East Asian societies. The question of the history of psychoanalysis in China has come into focus in recent years through a number of publications. Although they will not be discussed in detail here,57 they clearly substantiate the relevance of the East Asian exile phenomenon for the development of psychoanalysis in China. If one acknowledges this relevance, then one would have to ask how psychoanalysis came to East Asia in the first place, and how this attempt at cultural transfer from Vienna to Shanghai actually took place. And as one of the very first attempts at this kind of cultural transfer, we should look to Storfer’s Gelbe Post!58

Conclusion Fritz Wittels, a former Viennese psychoanalyst who emigrated to the United States, wrote in his 1945 obituary for Storfer the following about his Gelbe Post project: “He tried the impossible even there [in China]—to propagandize Freud and Freud’s teachings—but only a very thin layer of intellectuals in Shanghai could be interested in such a subject.”59 This is certainly true, though perhaps a bit too optimistic with respect to his reference to a “thin layer” of engaged participants. One should not hold any great illusions about the influence of the Gelbe Post at the time, especially on the Chinese themselves, although Storfer certainly wanted to include them. Although the Gelbe Post regularly published articles by Chinese

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authors, these were always reprinted from other sources,60 which is why research suggests that Storfer may not have actually had any close contact with Chinese intellectuals.61 The Shanghai German studies scholar Zhiying Yuan quite rightly calls Storfer’s desire to engage Chinese intellectuals with his journal a “utopian idea,” 62 not least because of the language problem (after all, the Gelbe Post was written only in German, which most Chinese could not read). Moreover, due to the war between Japan and China, which flowed into the Second World War, all of Shanghai’s residents were often struggling just to survive in the overcrowded metropolis with refugees from all over the world. Nevertheless, especially in dark times, utopias are necessary for survival. From a contemporary Chinese perspective, Yuan sees the Gelbe Post “as a monument of intellectual resistance against the Third Reich and Japanese aggression” and Storfer himself “as a great friend of the Chinese people.”63 Although this is, of course, in a certain sense a posthumous political instrumentalization, it does contain the potential for the further influence of Storfer’s work. This influence could mean the development of an East Asian psychoanalysis, which is currently somewhat advanced in Japan, but still in its infancy in China. Only the future will show whether Storfer’s project to introduce psychoanalysis to East Asia, which he initiated with his Gelbe Post, will remain more than just a utopian episode.

Notes 1. This particularly virulent propaganda newspaper appeared from 1923 to 1945 and was edited by the Nazi publicist Julius Streicher, who was executed after the war as a war criminal. 2. “Juden in China,” Der Stürmer, July, 1939 No. 29. Kreissler was the first to refer to this article. See Françoise Kreissler, “Ein Journalist im Exil in Shanghai: Adolph J.  Storfer und die Gelbe Post,” in From Kaifeng to Shanghai. Jews in China, ed. Roman Malek (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 2000), 519. It was also discussed in detail by Kaufhold. See Roland Kaufhold, “Die gelbe Post  - eine deutschsprachige Emigrantenzeitschrift aus Shanghai,” haGalil.com. Jewish Life Online, 2018, accessed September 9, 2020, https://www.hagalil.com/2018/06/storfer-­3/print). 3. His original name was Adolf Josef; he had his first name changed to Albert in 1938 for obvious reasons. See Elke Mühlleitner, Biographisches Lexikon der Psychoanalyse (Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1992), 335; Christine Rothländer, “Adolf Josef Storfer,” Psychoanalytic Document Database [PADD], accessed September 9, 2020, http://www.padd.at/

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people/747?locale=de. As he himself recorded, he arrived in Shanghai on December 31, 1938. Cf. the facsimile of his report of January 1, 1939, in Paul Rosdy, Adolf Josef Storfer, Shanghai und die Gelbe Post. Dokumentation zum Reprint der Gelben Post (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 1999), 13. 4. Henceforth abbreviated here as GP when quoting from it. The journal appeared from May 1939 to July 1939 as a bimonthly publication. Another issue appeared in November 1939, after which the Gelbe Post appeared irregularly in weekly, half-weekly, and daily newspaper editions. Cf. Rosdy, Adolf Josef Storfer, 9. 5. Cf. Adolf J. Storfer, “Zur Sonderstellung des Vatermordes. Eine rechtsgeschichtliche und völkerpsychologische Studie,” in Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde, ed. Sigmund Freud (1911; Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1970). In this paper Storfer combines the psychoanalytic perspective with his legal and ethnological interests. His other psychoanalytical work, Mary’s Virgin Motherhood, is also oriented toward ethnic psychology. Cf. Adolf J. Storfer, Marias jungfräuliche Mutterschaft. Ein völkerpsychologisches Fragment über Sexualsymbolik (Berlin: Barsdorf, 1914). 6. Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, volumes 1-IXI, ed. Anna Freud and A.  J. Storfer (Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1924-1928). From 1926 to 1938 he was also the editor of the Almanach des internationalen psychoanalytischen Verlags, the Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Pädagogik, and co-editor of the journal Imago published by Freud. 7. See Freud’s 1925 letter to Sándor Ferenczi, in Briefwechsel Sigmund Freud – Sándor Ferenczi, ed. Ernst Falzeder, Vol. 3,2: 1925-1933 (Vienna/ Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau, 2005), 27. 8. Cf. Mühlleitner, Biographisches Lexikon, 335; Milan Dubrovic, Veruntreute Geschichte (Vienna/Hamburg: Zsolnay, 1985), 108f. 9. One of Freud’s biographers Ernest Jones accuses Storfer of having “accumulated” considerable debts during his “extravagant management” of the publishing house. Ernest Jones, Das Leben und Werk von Sigmund Freud, Vol. III: The Last Phase 1919  - 1939, trans. Gertrud Meili-Dworetzki (Bern/Stuttgart: Huber, 1962), 203. 10. Cf. Adolf J.  Storfer, Wörter und ihre Schicksale (1935; Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8, 2000); _____, Im Dickicht der Sprache (1937; Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8, 2000). Storfer is also listed in the catalog of persecuted German-­ speaking linguists 1933–1945, which was created by the linguist Utz Maas and is also available on the Internet. See Utz Maas, “Verfolgung und Auswanderung deutschsprachiger Sprachforscher 1933-1945,” ZfL, 2019, accessed September 10, 2020, https://zflprojekte.de/sprachforscher-­im-­ exil/index.php/catalog/s/457-­storfer-­adolf-­ab-­1938-­albert-­josef. 11. I will not go into the situation in Shanghai here, since there is a lot of prior scholarship available on this topic. See David H. Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis

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and Jews. The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai. 1938-1945 (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1976). With respect to current research, see especially the three books by the Israeli sinologist Irene Eber, Voices from Shanghai. Jewish Exiles in Wartime China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Wartime Shanghai and the Jewish Refugees from Central Europe. Survival, Co-existence, and Identity in a Multi-ethnic City (Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter, 2012); Jewish Refugees in Shanghai 1933-1947; A Selection of Documents (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018). 12. Cf. Bruno Bettelheim, “Kulturtransfer von Österreich nach Amerika, illustriert am Beispiel der Psychoanalyse,” in Vertriebene Vernunft II. Emigration und Exil österreichischer Wissenschaft. Internationales Symposium. 19. Bis 23. Oktober 1987 in Wien, ed. Friedrich Stadler (Vienna/Munich: Jugend und Volk, 1988), 216-20. 13. Cf. Dubrovic, Veruntreute Geschichte, 114; “From the influential international psychoanalytical environment, no one supported Storfer’s emigration plans.” Kaufhold, Die gelbe Post, 3. 14. Fritz Wittels, “Albert Joseph [sic!] Storfer 1888-1944,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 14 (1945): 235. 15. Cf. the facsimile of his letter to Wittels in Rosdy, Adolf Josef Storfer, 10-12. 16. Storfer writes about such possibilities “outside the ‘quota’” in the aforementioned letter. Cf. Rosdy, Adolf Josef Storfer, 11. 17. Cf. Alfred Polgar, Kleine Schriften. Bd. IV (Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1984), 329. 18. Cf. Dubrovic, Veruntreute Geschichte, 32. 19. Polgar, Kleine Schriften, 329. 20. Storfer had been raised by his single father from the age of five, after his mother ran away with a Hussar officer. His father saw the coffeehouse as his home, and he regularly took his son along with him. See Dubrovic, Veruntreute Geschichte, 107. 21. Ibid., 33. 22. See also Rosdy, Adolf Josef Storfer, 4. 23. Cf. the materials at the Leo Back Institute New  York: “Willy Tonn Collection,” Center for Jewish History, accessed September 7, 2020, https://archives.cjh.org//repositories/5/resources/19660. 24. Cf. Rosdy, Adolf Josef Storfer, 3. The Gelbe Post was typeset by Chinese workers who did not know German. Storfer himself said: “I founded the magazine under the most amazing editorial, technical and financial emergency conditions.” Ibid., 17; Storfer’s letter from Shanghai to Siegfried Bernfeld, dated March 31, 1939. 25. Cf. Dubrovic, Veruntreute Geschichte, 113.

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26. On this problem see the chapter “The Gleichschaltung der Shanghai-­ Deutschen,” in Astrid Freyeisen, Shanghai und die Politik des Dritten Reiches (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2000), 54-101. 27. Cf. Kreissler, Ein Journalist, 519. 28. These seven issues were reprinted in 1999 by the Viennese publisher Turia + Kant (and reprinted in 2005). The reprinted version consists of 160 pages total. The later editions of the Gelbe Post as newspapers (until 1940) have not been reprinted. 29. Kaufhold, Die gelbe Post, 6. 30. Various newspapers and magazines were already published in Shanghai, mainly in English, but after the arrival of the emigrants from Germany and Austria, some German and even Yiddish newspapers were published. The competitor to whom Storfer sold his magazine was the “newspaper king of emigration.” Matthias Messmer, China: Schauplätze west-östlicher Begegnungen (Vienna/Weimar/Cologne: Böhlau, 2007), 401. The editor of the Shanghai Jewish Chronicle was Ossi Lewin. On the financial situation of the Gelbe Post and its sale, see also Kreissler, Ein Journalist, 517f. 31. Kreissler does not regard psychoanalysis as its “main topic,” but speaks of its “sinocentric image.” Kreissler, Ein Journalist, 519f. 32. On the image of Japan in the Gelben Post, see Zhiying Yuan, “A. J. Storfer und das Japanbild in der Gelben Post,” in Österreich im Reich der Mitte, ed. Liu Wei, and Julian Müller (Vienna: Praesens-Verlag, 2013), 105-16. 33. Printed in Rosdy, Adolf Josef Storfer, 17 34. Cf. “Der Judenhass in der Welt. Sigmund Freuds neueste Forschungen,” in GP 65-68; Storfer’s linguistically oriented essay, “‘Jud’ in der deutschen Volkssprache,” in GP 113-14, 140. 35. The book was published in June 1939, simultaneously in Amsterdam in German and as an English translation in the United States; parts of it had been published in advance in the magazine Imago. In this book, which deals with the origins of the Jewish religion, Freud tried to clarify the foundations of anti-Semitism. Another extensive article in the Gelben Post discussed psychoanalysis in Palestine (GP 105-6), and in an additional article, Arnold Zweig, who emigrated to Palestine during the Nazi era, discussed Sigmund Freud (GP 149-50). 36. Storfer lived in the Japanese occupied district of Hongkou, which was connected to the other parts of Shanghai by a bridge on which such posts stood. 37. Storfer’s letter of January 18, 1939 from Shanghai, in Rosdy, Adolf Josef Storfer, 13. 38. Ibid., 14. 39. These were Jewish merchants who had immigrated to China in the eighth and ninth centuries, the descendants of whom, who still practiced the

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Jewish faith, were “discovered” by the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci in the early seventeenth century. 40. The Second Sino-Japanese War began on July 7, 1937, with the Japanese invasion of China. Japan attacked Shanghai in August of that year, resulting in the fiercely fought battle for Shanghai, which lasted until November and ended with the capture of Shanghai by Japanese troops. 41. Cf. Paul Federn, and Heinrich Meng, Das psychoanalytische Volksbuch (Stuttgart: Hippokrates-Verlag, 1926). 42. Rainier Lanselle, “Das chinesische Subjekt im Anspruch der Psychoanalyse,” Riss. Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 67, no. 3 (2007): 125-26. 43. Ibid., 132. 44. François Jullien, China und die Psychoanalyse. Fünf Konzepte, trans. Erwin Landrichter (Vienna/Berlin: Turia + Kant, 2013), 17. 45. An example of this is the Chinese concept of disposability, which is intended to shed light on the Freudian concept of evenly suspended attention (gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit), which, according to Jullien, in Freud’s case is an “almost contradictory formula.” Ibid, 29; “As a European concept stuck in its infancy and only marginally present in the formation of theories, disposability/absorption capacity is proving to be a source of thought in China.” Ibid, 33. 46. Cf. Stephan Broser, and Gerda Pagel, eds., Psychoanalyse im Exil. Texte verfolgter Analytiker (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1987). 47. Cf. Johannes Reichmayr, “Einleitung zur Psychoanalyse,” in Vertriebene Vernunft II.  Emigration und Exil österreichischer Wissenschaft. Internationales Symposion. 19. Bis 23. Oktober 1987 in Wien, ed. Friedrich Stadler (Vienna/Munich: Jugend und Volk, 1988), 213. 48. Recent research suggests an intensive reception of psychoanalysis in China since its origins, see Wei Liu, Kritische Studie zur chinesischen Übersetzung der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse von Sigmund Freud (Kassel: University Press, 2019), 27-30. 49. The question is less about whether psychoanalysis can be exported to China. It instead appears as if it is not promoted for ideological reasons, at least at present: Liu sketches the “order of importance” that various schools of psychology currently hold in China, with cognitive psychology in first place and psychoanalysis in last place. Ibid., 24. 50. Jullien, China, 11. 51. McCartney (1898–1969) was likely born in China as the child of American missionaries and worked there as a doctor for a while before he went to New York, where he died. He published books and essays on psychological-­ medical issues, including some related to China; for more on his work and its significance for the psychiatric discourse in China, see Angelika

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C.  Messner, Medizinische Diskurse zu Irresein in China (1600-1930) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2000), 62f. 52. I am orienting myself here in accordance with discussions which appeared in the psychoanalytic journal Riss in 2007. There it states, among other things: “Since this [Chinese] culture is determined by its writing to an extent that can hardly be overestimated, it is just as unreliable to present the essence of this writing and to draw conclusions regarding psychoanalysis. It goes without saying that the dream thereby moves to a privileged place. According to Freud, the dream, even if we dream in pictures, just like the Chinese, is a rebus, its material ultimately a linguistically literal one—what is it like in China, when the picture, the pictorial writing, has such a dominant meaning there? Is the interpretation of dreams also based on the literal, or is its precedence even questioned by Chinese dream interpretations and the picture given priority?” Peter Widmer, “Introduction,” Riss. Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 67, no. 3 (2007): 11. 53. Dany Nobus, “Jenseits des Rebus-Prinzips? Psychoanalyse und chinesische Traudeutung,” Riss. Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 67, no. 3 (2007): 102. 54. For an introduction see Guy Flecher, “Plus de Chine/More China,” accessed September 10, 2020, http://www.lacanchine.com/FG03_De.html. 55. Nobus, Jenseits des Rebus-Prinzips?, 95. 56. The Japanese writing system combines logographic characters (kanji) from China and syllabic scripts (hiragana and katagana). The alphabetical Korean Hangul script sometimes also uses Chinese characters (hanja). 57. Cf. the 2011 issues of Psyche and International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, both of which were dedicated to this topic China; Salman Akhtar, ed., Freud and the Far East. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the People and Culture of China, Japan, and Korea (Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson, 2009); Sverre Varvin, and Alf Gerlach, “The Development of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in China,” International Journal of Apllied Psychoanalytic Studies 8, no. 3 (2011): 261-67; and David E. Scharff, and Sverre Varvin, eds., Psychoanalysis in China (London: Karnac, 2014). 58. Besides Storfer, the Chinese Bingham Dai or Dai Bingyeung (1899–1996) is considered the “first pioneer of psychoanalysis in China.” See Geoffrey H. Blowers, “Bingham Dai, Adolf Storfer, and the Tentative Beginnings of Psychoanalytic Culture in China: 1935-1941,” Psychoanalysis and History 6 (2004): 93-105; Brigitte Nölleke, “Psychoanalytikerinnen. Biographical Encyclopedia. History of Psychoanalysis in Asia,” accessed September 10, 2020, http://www.psychoanalytikerinnen.de/asien_geschichte.html. 59. Wittels, Albert Joseph Storfer, 235. 60. For example, an article on Chinese writing (“Die vier Schaetze der Schreibstube” by Liu Sze-Hsun) was re-printed, as indicated in the Gelben

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Post, from The China Press Sunday Magazine, where it was originally published in English. See GP 32f. 61. “While articles by Chinese intellectuals appeared regularly in Gelbe Post, they all appear to have been reprinted from other sources, leaving open the question of whether he was ever successful at establishing direct contact with any of them at all.” Blowers, Bingham Dai, 101. 62. Zhiying Yuan, “A.  J. Storfer und die Gelbe Post,” Literaturstraße. Chinesisch-deutsches Jahrbuch für Sprache, Literatur und Kultur (2008): 226. 63. Ibid., 238. This characterization echoes the Austrian filmmaker Paul Rosdy, who, in cooperation with Joan Grossmann, made a documentary about exile in Shanghai in 1998 (Zuflucht in Shanghai. The Port of Last Resort), and who called the Gelbe Post “a monument of intellectual resistance against the Third Reich.” Rosdy, Adolf Josef Storfer, 7.

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Flecher, Guy. “Plus de Chine/Mehr China.” Accessed September 10, 2020. http://www.lacanchine.com/FG03_De.html. Freyeisen, Astrid. Shanghai und die Politik des Dritten Reiches. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2000. Jones, Ernest. Das Leben und Werk von Sigmund Freud. Bd. III. Die letzte Phase 1919  – 1939. Translated by Gertrud Meili-Dworetzki. Bern/Stuttgart: Huber, 1962. Jullien, François Jullien. China und die Psychoanalyse. Fünf Konzepte, translated by Erwin Landrichter. Vienna/Berlin: Turia + Kant, 2013. Kaufhold, Roland. “Die gelbe Post–eine deutschsprachige Emigrantenzeitschrift aus Shanghai.” haGalil.com. Jüdisches Leben online. 2018. Accessed September 9, 2020. https://www.hagalil.com/2018/06/storfer-­3/print. Kranzler, David H. Japanese, Nazis and Jews. The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai. 1938-1945. New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1976. Kreissler, Françoise. “Ein Journalist im Exil in Shanghai: Adolph J. Storfer und die Gelbe Post.” In From Kaifeng to Shanghai. Jews in China, edited by Roman Malek, 510-24. Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 2000. Lanselle, Rainier. “Das chinesische Subjekt im Anspruch der Psychoanalyse.” Riss. Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 67, no. 3 (2007): 115-44. Liu, Wei. Kritische Studie zur chinesischen Übersetzung der “Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse” von Sigmund Freud. Kassel: University Press, 2019. Maas, Utz. “Verfolgung und Auswanderung deutschsprachiger Sprachforscher 1933-1945.” ZfL. 2019. Accessed September 10, 2020. https://zflprojekte. d e / s p r a c h f o r s c h e r-­i m -­e x i l / i n d e x . p h p / c a t a l o g / s / 4 5 7 -­s t o r f e r-­ adolf-­ab-­1938-­albert-­josef. Messmer, Matthias. China: Schauplätze west-östlicher Gegegnungen. Vienna/ Weimar/Cologne: Böhlau, 2007. Messner, Angelika C. Medizinische Diskurse zu Irresein in China (1600-1930). Stuttgart: Steiner, 2000. Mühlleitner, Elke. Biographisches Lexikon der Psychoanalyse. Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1992. Nobus, Dany. “Jenseits des Rebus-Prinzips? Psychoanalyse und chinesische Traudeutung.” Riss. Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 67, no. 3 (2007): 94-114. Nölleke, Brigitte. “Psychoanalytikerinnen. Biografisches Lexikon. Geschichte der Psychoanalyse in Asien.” Accessed September 10, 2020. http://www.psychoanalytikerinnen.de/asien_geschichte.html. Polgar, Alfred. Kleine Schriften. Bd. IV. Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1984. Reichmayr, Johannes. “Einleitung zur Psychoanalyse.” In Vertriebene Vernunft II. Emigration und Exil österreichischer Wissenschaft. Internationales Symposion. 19. Bis 23. Oktober 1987 in Wien, edited by Friedrich Stadler, 212-15. Vienna/ Munich: Jugend und Volk, 1988.

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Index1

A Ahn Eak-tai, 305, 314n111, 314n112 Allgemeiner Evangelisch-­ Protestantischer Missionsverein (AEPM)/General Evangelical Protestant Missionary Society, 111, 112, 120, 127n37 Amann, Waldemar, 126n19 An Jiyun, 299, 301, 302 Anglo-German Brewery Company, 91 Anti-Comintern Pact, 8, 296, 304 Antisemitism, 41 Arbeitsschule, 168–171, 178n59 Aristocracy, 12, 13, 29–35, 38, 43–45, 61, 142 Austria, 61, 321, 331n30 Auswärtiges Amt (German Foreign Ministry), 81, 84, 112

B Bauer, Max, 8 Bebel, August, 56, 60, 70n19 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 17, 224, 240, 244, 248, 252, 253 Beijing, 4, 7, 10, 31, 33, 35–37, 42, 44, 47n30, 51n90, 58, 59, 63, 66, 109, 136, 137, 140, 192, 240, 249–253 Berlin, 9, 17, 30, 61, 90, 96, 110, 116, 118–121, 134, 216, 222, 224, 248, 265, 269, 272, 278, 280, 283n28, 289–292, 294–298, 300–304, 308n27, 308n32, 311n67, 313n91, 313n106, 322 Berliner Missionsgesellschaft (BM)/ Berlin Missionary Society, 111 Berlin Missionary Society, 111 See also Berliner Missionsgesellschaft (BM)/Berlin Missionary Society

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. M. Cho (ed.), Sino-German Encounters and Entanglements, Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73391-9

337

338 

INDEX

Bloch, Ivan, 61, 65, 66 Blonski, Pavel, 170 Boxer movement, 57, 58 Boxer Rebellion, 3, 4, 11, 12, 42, 44 See also Boxer Uprising Boxer Uprising, 13, 31, 42, 55–67, 70n19, 109, 111 See also Boxer Rebellion Brecht, Bertolt, 16, 211–227 Bücher, Karl, 222 Bülow, Bernhard von, 59, 60, 62, 91 Bureaucracy, 142, 143 C Cai Yuanpei, 241, 245, 249–255, 258n9, 258n11, 259n34 Canton Commune, 217, 218, 225 Capitalism, 14, 43, 133, 134, 138, 139, 141–143, 145–148, 222, 223 Cheng Tianfang, 294, 295, 299 Chiang Kai-Shek, 7, 18, 256, 278, 290, 298, 308n23 China-Klub der deutschen Industrie (China-Club of the German Industry), 7 Chinese Association for Vocational Education (CAVE), 165, 167 Chinese characters, 220, 222, 304 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 215, 216, 218 Chinese music education, 16, 239, 252 Chinese trading guilds, 95 Chinesisch-Deutscher Kulturverband (Chinese-German Cultural Association), 7 Cixi, Empress Dowager, 4, 35, 39, 40, 49n61 Clan, 143–146 Colonial discourse, 30, 32, 33, 36

Colonialism, 2, 9–12, 19, 30–35, 40–42, 44, 45, 47n27, 78, 191 Communist International (Comintern), 16, 212, 214, 217–221, 224, 225 Confucianism, 10, 134, 139–141, 146 Confucius, 135, 140, 141, 241 Constant, Paul Henri Benjamin Balluet d‘Estournelles, Baron de, 64 Cooley, Edwin G., 165, 177n38 Cordes, Richard, 119 Crull, Wilhelm, 120, 121 Cultural flow, 2 Cultural transfer, 319, 320, 325–327 Customs Agreement, 79–86, 92–96 Customs duties, 81, 86, 94 D Deutsch-chinesische Hochschule (German-Chinese University), 107, 108, 115 Deutsch-Chinesische Seiden Industrie Gesellschaft (DCSIG) (Silk Industry), 90–92 Deutsche Medizin- und Ingenieursschule für Chinesen (German Medical and Engineering School for Chinese), 119 Deutsche Ostmesse, 294, 302, 303 Deutschland Institut (German Institute), 7 Dewey, John, 158, 159, 161, 162, 165–168, 170 Die Friedens-Warte (Peace Watch), 61–66 Diplomat, 12, 29, 30, 32, 36, 38, 39, 43, 134, 290, 295, 296, 298–300, 303–305, 312n76, 313n106

 INDEX 

Diplomatic post, 33 Diplomatic service, 33 Dominance, 32, 34, 37, 43, 44 Dongguan, China, 189, 195–197 Durus (pseud. Alfred Kemeny), 218 E East Asia, 1, 11, 13, 31, 44, 64, 78, 80, 81, 85–89, 91, 94, 115, 163, 191, 203, 231n43, 266, 273–277, 296, 307n11, 323, 325, 327, 328 East Asia Squadron, 81, 110 East Asiatic Teachers’ Gazette, 107 See also Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung (OALZ, East Asiatic Teachers’ Gazette) Education civic, 15, 160, 163–169, 171 compulsory, 160 continued, 160, 163, 176n25 labor, 158, 160, 164, 168–170, 178n59 public, 163 vocational, 14, 15, 158–161, 163–168, 170–172, 174n8 Eight-Nation Alliance, 136 Eisler, Gerhart, 219 Eisler, Hanns, 16, 211–227 Elias, Norbert, 32 Elvin, Mark, 142, 144, 147 Emigration, 18, 323 Eurocentrism, 325 Exile, 11, 18, 214, 279, 319–328 F Falkenhausen, Alexander von, 8 Fan Bingqing, 164 Fighting Organization of Worker-­ Singers (Kampfgemeinschaft der Arbeitersänger), 223

339

Fink, Carl, 114, 125n14 Fisher, Ruth, 214, 215 Formalism, 146 Free Conservative party, 59 Freud, Sigmund, 18, 319–321, 323, 324, 327, 333n52 Fried, Alfred Hermann, 61–66 G Gelbe Post (Yellow Mail, magazine), 18, 319–328 General Evangelical Protestant Missionary Society, 111 See also Allgemeiner Evangelisch-­ Protestantischer Missionsverein (AEPM)/General Evangelical Protestant Missionary Society German-Chinese University, 107, 108, 115, 121 See also Deutsch-chinesische Hochschule (German-Chinese University) German Hong Kong, 11, 13, 77–97 German Institute for Medical Mission (Deutsche Institut für ärztliche Mission), 192, 194, 205n18 German Medical and Engineering School for Chinese, 119 See also Deutsche Medizin- und Ingenieursschule für Chinesen (German Medical and Engineering School for Chinese) German Revolution, 216, 224 German Worker-Singer Federation (Deutsche Arbeiter-Sänger Bund), 223, 224 Gershenkron, Alexander, 143 Gewandhaus Orchestra, 239, 245, 246, 252

340 

INDEX

Gründer, Horst, 4, 31, 42 Gu Shusen, 164, 166 Gu Zhaolin, 170 H Hamburg, 17, 85, 127n37, 134, 290, 291, 295, 298, 299, 301–303, 312n82 Hannaford, Ivan, 41, 50n75 Hanus, Paul Henry, 165 Hardiman, David, 190 Hart, Robert, 82 Hauptmann, Elisabeth, 212 Hebephrenia, 197, 201 Hering, Clemens, 114, 117, 118 Heyking, Edmund von, 12–13, 29, 34, 42, 50n74, 82, 84 Heyking, Elisabeth von, 13, 29–45 High-level equilibrium trap, 147 Hitler, Adolf, 8, 179n78, 256, 268, 295, 298–300, 305, 310n58, 312n76 Hong Kong, 11, 14, 78, 80, 82–84, 91, 96, 109, 196 Hongkou, 321, 331n36 Hospitals, 15, 189, 190, 192, 194–197, 326 House Unamerican Activities Committee, 214 Hueck, Otto, 190, 195, 197, 198, 200–203 Hybridity, 2 I Illness, 16, 191, 192, 198, 200–202 Imperialism, 4, 10, 13, 31–35, 44, 47n27, 57, 60, 64–67, 97n1, 98n6, 139 Imperial Maritime Customs Service (IMCS), 82–84

Institut für deusche Kultur (Institute for German culture), 7 Insurance, 89, 199, 200, 203 International Settlement of Shanghai, 321 Italy, 30, 58, 136, 249, 295, 297, 298, 310n44 J Jacobson, Leo, 113, 123, 124 Jaeschke, Paul, 85 Japan, 4–9, 34, 58, 83, 89, 95, 97, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115, 136, 147, 172, 191, 240–245, 249, 266, 270, 273–277, 279, 281n9, 291–293, 295–297, 300, 304–306, 307n15, 308n24, 310n46, 323, 327, 328, 332n40 Jesuits, 109, 140, 191, 332n39 Jews, 9, 11, 41, 277, 300, 319, 324 Jiang Menglin, 164, 165, 167 Jiaozhou, 97n1, 108–113, 115, 120–122, 127n37 See also Kiaochow; Kiautschou Jiaozhou Bay, 14, 110, 138 See also Kiaochow Bay K Kampfmusik, 221–225 Kang Youwei, 39, 241 Kardorff, Wilhelm von, 59, 60 Katõ Hiyoshi, 294, 295, 299, 304, 309n38, 312n82 Kehrer, Elisabeth, 15, 189–204 Keiper, Georg, 107, 122 Kerschensteiner, Georg, 14, 15, 157–173, 174n8, 177n37, 178n59, 179n78, 180n81 Ketteler, Clemens von, 58, 64, 69n10

 INDEX 

Kiaochow, 2–5, 10, 18, 82, 93, 97n1 See also Jiaozhou; Kiautschou Kiaochow Bay, 2, 3, 31, 35, 48n38, 98n10, 101n51, 137 See also Jiaozhou Bay Kiaochow Leasehold, 77, 80 Kiautschou, 48n38 See also Jiaozhou; Kiaochow Knappe, Wilhelm, 84 Knoll, Kal, 294, 299, 303, 308n32 Königsberg, 291, 295, 298, 301–303 Korea, 34, 292, 323, 327 Korean, 293, 305 Korsch, Karl, 215, 228n21 Krupp, 87, 88, 100n40 Kuomintang, 253, 256 See also Nationalist Party Kurella, Alfred, 216–218, 228n22 L Lacan, Jacques, 327 Lamprecht, Karl, 247, 248, 250 Legge, James, 135, 140 Lehrstück, 212, 216 Leipzig Conservatory of Music, 252 Letters, 36, 37, 40, 42, 43, 48n40, 50n74, 84, 107, 118, 124n1, 179n78, 195–198, 202, 203, 267, 292, 313n106, 323, 324, 329n7, 330n15, 330n16, 330n24, 331n37 Leutner, Mechthild, 4, 31, 32, 46n13, 48n38, 48n40 Li Lisan, 218, 219, 224 Liberalism, 61, 67 Lineage trust, 145 Literati, 142, 143 Livingstone, David, 190 Lü Yiwen, 299, 300, 302, 304, 305, 311n67

341

M Macau, 240–244 Mao Zedong, 215, 219, 230n36, 230n38 May Fourth Movement, 6, 161, 166, 249, 250 Medical missionaries, women, 192–193 Medical missions, 2, 14, 192 Medicine, 190, 191, 194, 200–203, 204n11 Mell, Rudolf, 128n43 Mental health, 199, 200 Middle Management of Empire, 79 Missionaries, 9–12, 14–16, 35, 60, 65, 108–113, 115, 120, 122, 123, 134–138, 140, 141, 148, 189–203, 204n11, 205n18, 332n39, 332n51 Missionary doctors, 190, 203 Müller, Max, 135 N Nanking, 6–8, 267, 283n32 National Conservatory of Music, 254 Nationalist Party, 7, 219 See also Kuomintang Naval base, 14, 29, 34–36, 110, 111, 137 Nazi Party, 8, 17, 265, 275–278, 307n11 Nazism, 275 Neurasthenia, 191, 192, 197, 201–203, 205n15 New Life Movement, 161 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 11, 43 Nineteenth century, 3, 11, 12, 16, 18, 31, 33, 36, 41, 56, 97n1, 109, 111, 134, 135, 139–141, 144, 163, 190–192, 195, 197 Nobility, 32, 34, 38

342 

INDEX

O Ohlmer, Erich, 82, 88, 90, 93 Olpp, Gottlieb, 194–196 Opium War, 36, 109, 147 Ostasiatische Lehrerzeitung (East Asiatic Teachers’ Gazette), 14, 107–109, 113–118, 120, 122–124 P Pacifism, 13, 56, 57, 61, 63, 70n27, 141 Paris Peace Conference, 6 Peking University Institute of Music, 240, 242 Peking University Music Research Society, 255 Property, 4, 136, 144–146 Protestantism, 145, 146 Prussification, 166 Psychiatry, 192, 198 Psychoanalysis, 2, 12, 17, 18, 319–328 Q Qing court, 4, 147 Qingdao, 3, 5, 10–14, 34, 35, 77–97, 107, 108, 110, 111, 115, 120–122 See also Tsingtau Qing dynasty, 15, 38, 58, 133, 241, 243–245, 299 R Racism, 40, 41 Rationalization, 144, 146 Reichsmarineamt (Imperial German Navy), 81, 84, 95, 110 Reichstag, 56, 59, 60, 86, 91, 96, 160, 295

Rheinische Missionsgesellschaft (Rhenish Missionary Society), 15, 115, 189, 192–200 Rhenish Mission, 195, 196, 198–200 Rhiel, Mary, 33, 42 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 8, 299, 304, 305, 313n103, 314n110 Richthofen, Ferdinand von, 29, 34, 41, 137 Rosendahl, Hans Carl, 81, 84, 85, 99n16 Royal Prussian Asian Trading Company, 137 Russian Revolution, 216 S Sander, Hermann, 117, 118, 122 Schantung-Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft (Shantung Railway Company), 111 Schizophrenia, 199–202 Schmidt, Wilhelm, 117 Schumpeter, Joseph, 143 Second Sino-Japanese War, 3, 8, 255, 332n40 Seeckt, Hans von, 8 Selznick, Philip, 146 Shandong, 1, 2, 4, 6, 10, 35, 77, 81–83, 85, 86, 88–90, 95, 108, 110, 111, 138, 249 See also Shantung Shanghai, 3, 5, 8–11, 14, 17–19, 31, 37, 49n57, 84, 91, 94, 99n24, 108, 109, 112, 114, 115, 119, 122, 125n14, 137, 176n33, 219, 222, 228n17, 240, 241, 253–256, 274, 294, 319–328, 329n3, 329n11, 331n30, 331n36, 331n37, 332n40, 334n63

 INDEX 

Shanghai Music Conservatory, 241, 255 Shantung, 77, 98n6 See also Shandong Shantung Bergbau Gesellschaft (Coal Industry), 88–90, 92 Shantung Railway Company, 111 See also Schantung-Eisenbahn-­ Gesellschaft (Shantung Railway Company) Shen Xingong, 242, 243 Siemens, 17, 88, 265, 272, 275, 276 Sinophilic, 33, 43 Sinophobic, 4, 18, 33, 47n24, 71n38 Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), 60, 70n19, 96 Societas Verbi Divini (Society of the Divine Word), 107, 110, 111 Society of the Divine Word, 107 See also Societas Verbi Divini (Society of the Divine Word) Soviet Union, 169, 212, 216, 219, 296 Soy, 296, 302 Stalin, Joseph, 214, 215, 217, 218, 225, 230n38 Stead, W. T., 65 Steinmetz, George, 4, 10, 13, 41 Stenz, Georg Maria, 107, 108, 110, 117 Stern Conservatory of Music, 248 Steyler Mission, 110 See also Societas Verbi Divini (Society of the Divine Word) Storfer, Albert Josef, 17, 18, 319–328 Straw braid industry, 92 Sugimoto Yūzō, 301–303, 312n84 Sun Yatsen, 240, 243–245 Suttner, Bertha von, 61–66, 70n27

343

T Tagebücher, 35, 43, 44, 45n2, 50n74 Tagore, Rabindranath, 168 Tang Shouqian, 157, 256, 268 Tao Xingzhi, 165, 168, 171 Tariffs, 82, 83, 86, 93 Tirpitz, Alfred von, 3, 4, 29, 42, 80–82, 85, 87, 92, 96, 97n4, 98n10, 121, 138, 139 Tokyo School of Music, 244 Treaty of Tientsin (Tianjin), 137 Treaty ports, 83–85, 91, 95, 96, 99n24, 254 Tretiakov, Sergei, 216, 217, 231n50 Trotsky, Leon, 215, 217, 218, 225 Tsingtao Brewery Corporation, 91 Tsingtau, 77, 85, 94, 96, 97n1 See also Qingdao U University, Columbia, 165 V Vienna, 18, 66, 297, 298, 319–321, 327 Visa, 300, 302, 321 Vocational schools, 14, 108, 111, 123, 158, 159, 164, 166, 167, 170, 178n56 W Waldersee, Alfred von, 4, 58, 62, 64 Wang Jingwei, 9, 256 Wang Tifu, 299, 300, 304, 305, 311n68, 314n110 Wang Wenpei, 165, 166 Weber, Max, 11, 14, 15, 133–148, 252 Weltpolitik, 3, 10, 12

344 

INDEX

Wiethoff, Hans, 118, 119 Wilhelm, Richard, 10, 56, 59, 64, 112, 116, 123 Wilhelm II, kaiser of Germany, 3, 4, 29, 42, 48n40, 56, 63, 97n4, 100n40, 110 Wittfogel, Karl, 217 Wolf, Friedrich, 216 World War II, 3, 171, 213, 214, 279, 305, 328 Writing systems, 326, 327, 333n56 X Xiao Youmei, 16, 17, 239–260 Xinjing (Changchun), 291, 294, 296, 299–301, 309n37, 310n44

Y Yan Yangchu, 168, 270 Yang-Yu, 66 Yellow Peril, 33, 47n24, 225 Yuan Shikai, 4, 89, 245 Z Zeng Zhimin, 241, 242, 258n14 Zhou Enlai, 248, 256 Zhu Yuanshan, 164, 176n33 Zimmerer, Jürgen, 32 Zoff, Otto, 216 Zongli Yamen (Chinese Foreign Ministry), 33, 34, 37, 82, 99n16