The emigration of German sinologists 1933-1945: notes on the history and historiography of Chinese studies.

• Author: Kern, Martin

I

In 1949, Hellmut Wilhelm (1905-90), professor of Chinese history at the University of Washington, began his article "German Sinology Today"(1) with a critical observation:

In contrast to the general tendency of resurgence of academic life in Germany, which has been reported from all the former academic centers and even from an additional one at Mainz, the pace of the recovery of German Sinology has been rather slow. Some of the main former seats of Far Eastern studies still remain unoccupied. The reason for this special development is, in the first place, lack of personnel.

Where had the academic teachers gone? As Wilhelm makes clear, they had left in very different directions, revealing different consequences of the rise and fall of Nazism: several scholars had passed away, some of them directly or indirectly because of the war and its aftermath; others were still to return from abroad, mainly from China where they had gone during or even before the twelve years of the Third Reich, not as emigrants but with German scholarships or on official or professional missions; a third group were those who, as a result of their entanglement with the Nazis, had been removed from their chairs after 1945 and were not (yet) reinstalled by 1949; and finally, most substantially, both in terms of their number and of their established or emerging scholarly reputation, there were those who had been dismissed from the universities - on the basis of the infamous "Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums" of April 7, 1933(2) - and, threatened by the Nazi terror after 1933, had left the country as opponents of the regime. It is this last group to which the present article is devoted. A record of their names, their positions, and the consequences of their emigration, both in Germany and in their new homes offers insights into the institutional history of Chinese studies - insights without which we can hardly comprehend the development of these fields in Western academia during the last five decades.

The lists of political emigrants and of those who left Germany immediately after World War II reveal that the emigration, as a whole, was the single most significant hiatus in the short history of professional Chinese studies in Europe. The exodus not only of individual scholars but of whole fields and new approaches of scholarship is particularly obvious with regard to the study of Chinese (and East Asian) art history, social and economic history, ethnology, and linguistics; to a substantial degree it is apparent even in the study of the Central Asiatic aspect of Chinese history. In addition to scholars working in the several areas of Chinese studies, German Sinology lost museum directors, librarians, and the journal Asia Major, at the time of its suspension in 1935 "the only German professional journal of international rank"(3) in Chinese studies. To understand the effects of this exodus, it is also crucial to realize that it took place at a time when Sinology, as "our science" (as Hellmut Wilhelm was wont to say) with its own niche at German universities, had been in existence for little more than two decades and was still a young and very small field, especially when compared, for example, to the traditional "Oriental Studies" of the Near and Middle East. Hans Georg Conon von der Gabelentz (1840-93), for example, was professor of general linguistics (in Leipzig from 1878 to 1889, and afterward in Berlin) when he wrote his pioneer work Chinesische Grammatik, reit Ausschluss des niederen Stiles und der Umgangssprache (1881). The two most distinguished German Sinologists at the turn of the century, Friedrich Hirth (1845-1927) and Berthold Laufer (1874-1934), did not find employment in Germany but rather in the United States: Hirth at Columbia University, Laufer at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. When juxtaposed to the rather lengthy list of emigrants, the small number of teaching institutions with chairs in Sinology established before 1933 is indeed astounding. The first German chair in Chinese studies was established as late as 1909 at the Kolonialinstitut der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg, the forerunner of Hamburg University,(4) and it was followed by only three other chairs: 1912 in Berlin,(5) 1922 in Leipzig,(6) and 1925 in Frankfurt.(7) In addition, Sinological seminars and lecturer positions were established at Gottingen and Bonn, and research on East Asian art history was conducted at museums in Berlin, Cologne, Leipzig, and Munich. No professorships were added under the National Socialists; the fifth German Sinological chair was founded only in 1946 at Munich.(8)

As the scholarship of many of the emigrants defined distinctively new areas and approaches in Chinese studies, the life and work of a scholar like Hellmut Wilhelm - son of Richard Wilhelm - also reflects the disruption of an all too brief tradition. Contrary to what some earlier state-of-the-field reports try to suggest, after 1945 there was much less a continuity than a disjunction, only gradually to be followed by a new beginning in German Sinology. In this context, the loss to Germany of teachers like Wilhelm or Wolfram Eberhard (1909-89) may be regarded as even more severe than their loss as researchers.

Although I will trace in part III of this paper the emigrants' careers outside Germany, the perspective from which they are viewed here is essentially the German one. Dealing with a phenomenon that consists of two parts, emigration and immigration, I am more concerned with the former than with the latter, more with loss than with gain, more with the umbra than with the shining side of our common history. A general appreciation of the post-war achievements of German scholars in Chinese studies and in East Asian art history, in particular in the United States and the United Kingdom, may be found elsewhere.(9) Here I wish to ask also how and to what degree the fact that so many scholars of Chinese studies and East Asian art history left their country has been acknowledged and perceived within German Sinology itself (part II). I suggest in what follows that this question is crucial not only for the historiography of our field but also for the self-perception of German scholars in Chinese studies, if they recognize the present state of the field as the result of historical development. In my concluding remarks (part IV), I will try to relate chosen aspects of the double phenomenon emigration/immigration to one another, considering some of its consequences for the whole of our now international field.

There are a number of difficulties involved in this undertaking which require preliminary considerations. First of all, I will not attempt to present a comprehensive picture of Chinese studies in Nazi Germany, although this would help us to understand the various dimensions of the individual emigrants' decisions to leave their country. In a number of cases, like those of Jewish scholars or Marxists, who were mostly dismissed from the universities very soon after 1933 (or never gained access to a scholarly position), the motive for emigration is clearly identifiable. Other scholars who do not immediately fall into the religious, racial, or political categories that were regarded by the National Socialist regime as hostile to German society and who therefore did not experience the direct threat of persecution may have had a variety of reasons to leave. Here, it seems impossible and also inappropriate to identify one single motive, unless it has been made explicit by the individual emigrant himself. The decision to emigrate - or not to emigrate - was in many cases based on the interplay of many problems and questions, and I will resist the temptation to reconstruct simplistic solutions.

In the historical event of the emigration - an event that spans a number of years and is bound to individual biographies, but which nevertheless constitutes a single historical phenomenon - a number of lines intersect: the rise of Nazism as a political phenomenon; the general situation of German universities after 1933; the role of Chinese studies and East Asian art history within academia at that time; the individual problems and perspectives - private, political, academic - which differed in every case. A comprehensive picture of the situation would comprise these different aspects, and it would need to be based on both institutional and biographical history. Therefore, to unfold the many facets of the emigration, we need first to consult the archives of all universities and other scholarly institutions both whence the emigrants left and whither they arrived.

As the following overview shows with sufficient clarity, the great majority of German scholars in Chinese studies and East Asian art history left their country after the Act of 1933: in addition to professors Ferdinand Lessing (1882-1961) and Walter Simon (1893-1981), most of the promising young lecturers and recent Ph.D.s departed. We might therefore expect that this most important single event would have been publicly recognized and discussed in the years directly after 1945, so that we could draw on a rich fund of sources and studies. This is not the case. There is no systematic account of the issue, and I take this very fact itself as part of an ongoing history. The almost total historiographical failure to recognize the immediate past in our fields is therefore part of the problem: an issue to discuss and, at the same time, the central obstacle to understanding the historical phenomenon of the emigration.(10) As a result, what follows is a preliminary but late attempt, one that is far from complete but which provides a framework of names and dates that may be supplemented by future contributions. The accounts of individual scholars are rather unbalanced: I provide more information on the most famous scholars, because they have sometimes been honored with a Festschrift, their careers are...