Chinese Studies in the Three Major Centers of Leipzig, Berlin, and Hamburg and the Expansion of Classical Sinology

Berlin had been a center of Chinese studies for some time.Footnote ¹¹ The first Sinologist who was to work at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin was Wilhelm Christian Schott (b. 1802 in Mainz; d. 1889 in Berlin). Schott had studied Oriental languages in Halle since 1821 and taught two Chinese students who had come there. Having written his doctoral dissertation on the Arabo-Islamic Sunna, his Habilitation was the first German translation of the Confucian Analects, in 1826. For this he relied heavily on Marshman's English translation.Footnote ¹² In 1830 Schott went to Berlin, where he worked with Neumann's collection of Chinese books, obtaining an extra-curricular professorship in 1838, a position that did not involve a salary. Only in 1841 was he given a salary at the academy of sciences, but he had to teach the Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian languages since Chinese did not attract enough students. He is one the fathers of the so-called Altaic theory, which postulates a relationship between the Finnougric, Turkish, Mongolian, and Tungusic languages.

With the foundation of the German Kaiserreich in 1871 the need for expertise on China increased. In 1887 the University of Berlin had established a Seminar for Oriental Languages because of Germany's obvious need of experts for its expanding consular service in China. When Schott died in 1889, the university of Berlin offered Georg von der Gabelentz a chair for East Asian languages and general linguistics (Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft), which he accepted. Berlin became a major center for Chinese studies also because Ferdinand von Richthofen (b. 1833 Carlsruhe (Silesia); d. 1905 Berlin), who had travelled extensively in China, in 1886 became a professor of geography there. He popularized the term “silk road,” and he taught major students such as the Swedish traveler and geographer Sven Hedin (1865–1952). At the same time Carl Arendt (1838–1902) became professor for Chinese language and established the teaching of modern Chinese at the university. Arendt had studied Chinese in Beijing from 1865, and he worked as an interpreter for the German legation that had been sent to China after the treaty of Tianjin in 1861.

Wilhelm Grube worked at the anthropological museum in Berlin. For many years he had been preparing a translation of the novel Fengshen yanyi 封神演義,Footnote ¹³ and he had hoped to become the successor of his teacher von der Gabelentz when the latter died in 1893, but the position was only filled again in 1912, when de Groot was summoned. Grube remained an extraordinary professor without a salary until the end of his life, working at the anthropological museum. Friedrich Hirth (1845–1927) wrote that in 1889 everybody had thought that Grube would become the successor of von der Gabelentz in Leipzig,Footnote ¹⁴ and the Prussian ministry for culture had already offered Grube's position to Friedrich Hirth. Hirth, who had learned Chinese and met with renowned Sinologists while working at the Chinese maritime customs between 1870 and 1897, did not accept the position, since he wanted a full professorship. He was to get what he wanted only in 1902, and not in Germany but at Columbia University in New York.Footnote ¹⁵ Hirth was to write books on ancient China and Rome and to translate the chapter on Central Asia and the Xiongnu 匈奴 of the Hanshu 漢書, but he did so in English, not in German. Because of its unwillingness to pay appropriately for scholars, Germany lost many China experts during that time. Together with Hirth, Sir Robert Hart had also hired Paul Georg von Möllendorff (b. 1847 Zehdenick; d. 1901 Ningbo) whose works on Manchu Grammar and literature are still worth studying.Footnote ¹⁶

Grube's name is important not only because of his work on Chinese literatureFootnote ¹⁷ and customs, but also because in Berlin he taught three important German Sinologists, namely Otto Franke (1863–1946), Berthold Laufer (1874–1934), and Erich Haenisch (b. 1880 Berlin; d. 1966 Stuttgart) whose works were to become crucial for the further development of Chinese Studies in the early twentieth century. Laufer, who was of Jewish descent, left Germany in 1898 to work in the United States, first in New York and then in Chicago, and he is therefore not to be considered among those who shaped the development of German Sinology.Footnote ¹⁸ Franke and Haenisch, however, were to become central figures in the development of traditional Chinese studies in Germany.

After studying the Chinese language in Berlin and writing a Ph.D. dissertation in the field of Indology, Otto Franke had gone to China to work as an interpreter for the German embassies in Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai between 1888 and 1901, a time during which he travelled widely in China. As Franke had come to Sinology as a man who had lived in China before becoming a scholar, he made his Habilitation in Berlin in 1903, at the age of forty, which in those days was very late. Much of what he wrote at that time did actually concern modern China, and that may have been the reason that in 1909 he was selected to become professor of languages and history of East Asia at the Colonial Institute in Hamburg (since 1919 University of Hamburg), the first chair for East Asian studies in Germany. This institution certainly had become necessary, due to the rise of imperialism in Europe and the USA, which had led to the acquisition of colonies by all major Western powers in the 1890s. In 1902 Franke published a book on Jehol, today called Chengde, the summer residence of the Manchu emperors. His book on the Chunqiu and the Han scholar Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (179–104)Footnote ¹⁹ was inspired by his contact with contemporary Chinese reformers such as Kang Youwei 康有為 (1858–1927). Here we again encounter the problem of actually making a distinction between contemporary and classical China studies at the time when Franke wrote.

In 1923 Franke became successor to de Groot in Berlin, where he had many more students than in Hamburg. Among them were Walter Simon, Stephan Balàzs, Wolfram Eberhard, Annemarie von Gabain, Walter Fuchs, and Hellmut Wilhelm, to name only those who later were to become most influential. In Berlin, he worked at his monumental history of China, especially after his retirement in 1931. He managed to publish three volumes that covered the time from the historical beginnings until the end of the Tang dynasty. Two more volumes consisting of text and notes were ready for publication in 1944 but could not be published during the war.Footnote ²⁰ They came out posthumously and, although of course they do not meet modern historiographic standards, they are still an extremely useful tool for those seeking a narrative of Chinese history that is critical of its sources but still allows the reader to know how the authors of the Chinese standard histories told it.

Like Otto Franke, Erich Hauer (1878–1936) studied Chinese in Berlin in order to work afterwards for fifteen years in the German consular service. Only afterward did he study again in Berlin. His monumental translation of documents on the foundation of the Qing empire, the Huang-Qing Kaiguo fanglüe 皇清開國方略, was published in 1926. Subsequently he taught at the University of Berlin as a Sinologist with a focus on Manchu and Mongolian. His Handwörterbuch der Mandschusprache, which was published posthumously in 1952, remains the best Manchu dictionary in Western languages.Footnote ²¹ He died of a heart attack aboard a ship that was bringing him back from vacation in the summer of 1936.

One other important name of the Berlin school of East Asian studies was Ferdinand Lessing (1882–1961), who had studied with Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Müller at the Museum for Anthropology in Berlin. He went to China in 1907 to teach languages in Chinese and Japanese colleges for seventeen years before becoming professor of Chinese and succeeding Müller as the curator of the museum in 1927. In the early 1930s he joined Sven Hedin on an expedition to China, and in 1935 he was recruited by the University of California, Berkeley, where he headed the Department of Oriental Languages; he became an American citizen in 1946. Being the second German to work as a professor in East Asian studies at Berkeley, he added Mongolian and Tibetan to the Berkeley curriculum.Footnote ²² There he met Peter Alexis Boodberg (1903–1972), a descendant of a Baltic-German family who had been born in Vladivostok where his father had served in the Russian army and had come to San Francisco in 1920. Lessing is best known for his Mongolian–English Dictionary, which is still the most widely used dictionary for classical Mongolian in the Western world, and for his work on the Lama temple in Beijing.Footnote ²³ In China Lessing met Anna Bernhardi (1868–1944), apparently the first woman in a Sinological world that was for a long time almost exclusively male. Bernhardi had been a painter until 1900, when she heard about the political events in China. She decided to study Chinese at the Berlin Institute and then went to China for several years, corresponding with Grube and working at the museum for anthropology afterwards. She will always be remembered for having made the first complete translation of the poems of Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 (365–427), published as an offprint of the Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen in 1912.Footnote ²⁴

Although Hamburg had created the earliest chair for Chinese studies, Leipzig remained, as far as the number of students was concerned, the second center for Chinese studies after Berlin. That Hamburg could not compete may have had something to do with the character of Alfred Forke (1867–1944) who became Franke's successor in Hamburg. He was interested in philosophy but he apparently did not teach many students.Footnote ²⁵ Forke had studied law in Berlin and worked for the German consulate in Beijing between 1890 and 1903 before he returned to Berlin to teach Chinese at the Seminar for Oriental Languages. This was not a major position, and so Forke was happy to accept an offer by the University of California, Berkeley, to teach there as well. His tenure in Berlin apparently did not end, but World War I allowed him to stay at Berkeley from 1914–1917. Berkeley counts him as the holder of the chair for East Asian Languages and Cultures during that time, while Haenisch says in his obituary that Forke actually had to stay in the United States during World War I.Footnote ²⁶ Forke translated the works of the Han philosopher Wang Chong 王充 (30–100?) into the English language,Footnote ²⁷ and later, in 1922, those of Mozi 墨子 into German.Footnote ²⁸ This was to become a major source of inspiration for Berthold Brecht's fragmentary Me-ti, Buch der Wendungen, a text that Brecht worked on in the early thirties.Footnote ²⁹ Forke's major work, however, would be his history of Chinese philosophy, the Geschichte der chinesischen Philosophie in three volumes. Erich Haenisch later was to remark that this was rather a history of Chinese philosophers than one of Chinese philosophy. Yet, these volumes still remain a landmark in the field because Forke actually covered many names which do not appear in major Western histories of Chinese philosophy even today.Footnote ³⁰ Forke also translated several Yuan 元 dramas which were published only posthumously.Footnote ³¹ This remains an extremely important achievement, since after him there is very little German scholarship on this subject, which was also considered unworthy of scholarly consideration in China until Wang Guowei 王國維 (1877–1927).

In 1935 Forke was succeeded in Hamburg by Fritz Jäger (1886–1957), a student of Otto Franke. Jäger was interested in the Shiji 史記 and in Ming 明 history, the latter probably because Otto Franke's history of China did not cover it, but he did not publish very much, and there is no major book by him. He was, however, a very serious scholar. The judgments on experts that he wrote as a member of the National-Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP), between 1938 and 1943 on the younger generation of German Sinologists show him as an extremely sharp and also fair observer.Footnote ³² He must also have been a gifted teacher since former Franke students such as Otto's son Wolfgang Franke (1912–2007) and Alfred Hoffmann (1911–1997) left Berlin and came to study in Hamburg when Erich Haenisch took over the Berlin chair.

The position which Georg von der Gabelentz had held in Leipzig until 1889 remained vacant for several years. It was only filled by August Conrady (1864–1925) in 1896. The University of Leipzig created a chair for him in 1920 which was the third of its kind in Germany after those in Hamburg and in Berlin. Like Otto Franke, Conrady had begun as an Indologist and become a Sinologist only later in his career. Unlike Franke, he did not go to China, and as a result he did not become an eminent Sinologist as far as his publications were concerned. However, he seems to have been a rigid philologist. As such he was able to train students among whom the most important names were Bruno Schindler (b. 1882 Leschnitz; d. 1964 London), Gustav Haloun (b. Pirnitz/Brtnice 1898; d. Cambridge 1951) and Eduard Erkes (b. Genua 1891; d. Leipzig 1958). What made a difference between the Sinologists from Leipzig and those from Berlin was that almost all of the Leipzig Sinologists lacked any experience in China, while most Berlin protagonists knew China well. An exception was Franz Xaver Biallas (1878–1936) from Silasia, one of Conrady's first students, who was the first academically trained Sinologist of the Steyler missionaries. He wrote a dissertation on Qu Yuan, a subject in which Conrady was very much interested, as can be seen by his own posthumous publications and more so by those of his son-in-law Eduard Erkes. Biallas went to China in 1926 to teach at the catholic Fu-jen 輔仁 University, which in the fifties was to become incorporated into Beijing Shifan daxue 北京師範大學. In 1928 he published a book on Confucius and his Cult which in some respects is still unsurpassed.Footnote ³³ His main life achievement, however, was the foundation of the journal Monumenta Serica which is the only one of the major German journals in Chinese Studies of those times that still exists today in Germany.

Erich Haenisch became Conrady's successor in Leipzig. He continued the tradition that was common to both the Berlin and the Leipzig centers for Chinese studies that combined Chinese with Manchu and Mongolian studies. On the other hand, he did not really continue the tradition of religious studies that had always been an important element at Leipzig. Already his dissertation which he finished at the age of 23 in 1903 dealt with a comparison of the Chinese translation of the Mongolian history Erdeni yin tobci, rendered as “Geschichte der Ostmongolen” by Isaac Jacob Schmidt in his complete German translation of 1829.Footnote ³⁴ In 1904 Haenisch went to China as a teacher of the German language at the military academy in Wuchang where he stayed until the outbreak of the Chinese revolution in 1911. During these seven years he travelled widely in China. Upon his return to Berlin he worked for the Anthropological Museum. In 1913 he finished his Habilitation on the uprising of Wu Sangui 吳三桂 (1612–1678) at the beginning of the Qing period.Footnote ³⁵ During World War I Haenisch served in the German army, becoming a prisoner of war in the end. After his return, in 1920 he became an adjunct professor of Chinese “colonial languages” (Mongolian and Manchu) in Berlin. He remained in Leipzig until he was recalled to succeed Otto Franke in Berlin in 1932. In 1928 he had travelled to Northern China and Mongolia for several months to study Mongolian manuscripts in Ulan-Bator. On the basis of one of the first Chinese textbooksFootnote ³⁶ that had been compiled after the reforms of the school curriculum in 1905, in 1929 Haenisch began to publish his own Lehrgang der klassischen chinesischen Schriftsprache,Footnote ³⁷ an introduction into Classical Chinese that was used in many German Sinological institutes until the end of the twentieth century, although it was superseded as early as 1985 by Ulrich Unger's Einführung in das Klassische Chinesisch.Footnote ³⁸ Probably the most important of Erich Haenisch's publications was his reconstruction and translation of the Secret History of the Mongols which came out in Leipzig in 1941,Footnote ³⁹ eight years before Paul Pelliot's version, which appeared posthumously.Footnote ⁴⁰ Haenisch also translated many chapters of the Shiji and published widely on Confucianism.

Before becoming a professor in Leipzig in 1925, in the beginning of the same year Haenisch went to Göttingen, where he founded the Sinological institute. It took another six years until Gustav Haloun was called to Göttingen to teach mainly in the field of classical Chinese philosophy. In 1926/27 the University of Bonn decided to establish a department for Chinese with an associate professor for which Erich Schmitt (1893–1955), a student of de Groot, was chosen.Footnote ⁴¹

Also in 1925, the university of Frankfurt decided to establish a position in Chinese studies; this was filled by the famous translator Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930) from Stuttgart in southern Germany. Wilhelm stood in a German missionary tradition that included Karl Gützlaff (1803–1851), who had worked in the administration of Hong Kong, Ernst Johann Eitel (1838–1908), who is famous for his book on the practice of Fengshui 風水,Footnote ⁴² as well as Ernst Faber (1839–1899), who had worked on ancient Chinese philosophers. Faber is important because he wrote on Mengzi 孟子, Liezi 列子 and on Mozi 墨子 whom he declared to be the founder of ancient Chinese socialism.Footnote ⁴³ Wilhelm praised his translation of the Zhuangzi 壯子 which, however, was destroyed in a fire before being published.Footnote ⁴⁴ Wilhelm succeeded Faber in Qingdao 青島 (or Tsingtau) in 1900, two years after the German colony had been founded there. He had studied Protestant theology in Tübingen in 1891 and began a career as a Protestant minister in Southern Germany before in 1900 for the German East Asia mission going to Qingdao where all his four sons were born and where he learned Chinese. He established a German-Chinese school for which he was given the “button fourth rank” by Empress Dowager Cixi 慈禧 (1835–1908). He stayed in China until 1920.

During this time he befriended numerous Chinese intellectuals and, with the help of his teacher Lao Naixuan 勞乃宣 (1843–1921), began his prolific work as a translator of Chinese classical texts into the German language. He began with the Lunyu 論語 and the Daodejing 道德經, which were published with Eugen Diederichs in Jena in 1910 and 1911 when his Liezi also came out. Wilhelm's preface to the translation of the Zhuangzi is dated 21 March 1912. In 1916 he prepared a Mong Dsi for the same publisher, and in 1924 he published his translation of the Yijing 易經 which was, thanks to the famous translation by Cary F. Baynes into English, to become his greatest success. In 1928 the Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋 followed, and in the year of Wilhelm's death Diederichs produced his partial translation of the Book of Rites (Li Gi 1930), while a translation of the Kongzi jiayu 孔子家語 was published posthumously by Wilhelm's son Hellmut.Footnote ⁴⁵ What made all these translations so valuable was the German prose that Wilhelm was able to write. It is a mixture of influences from such classics as Goethe or the Luther bible that makes them predestined for teaching undergraduates. His Liezi, Zhuangzi or his Lunyu make better reading for the non-Sinologist than every other translation of these works that came out in German afterwards. There are many problems with these translations, of course. Wilhelm translated technical or philosophical terms often in different ways, and a word such as dao 道 became “der Sinn” (meaning) in some of his translations which is inspired by Goethe's Faust but certainly does not render what dao actually means. His rendering of ren 仁 and yi 義 in Mong Dsi as “Liebe” und “Pflicht” is heavily influenced by a southern German protestant and a Prussian background and has little to do with the Chinese original. And yet, these translations have made Chinese thought visible in Germany in a way that would otherwise not have been possible. The German translation of the Lüshi chunqiu was a major achievement that remained unparalleled in Western Sinology until John Knoblock and Jeffrey Riegel superseded it in the English-speaking world seventy-two years later.Footnote ⁴⁶

Wilhelm published widely, but many of his books were not written in the rigorously scholarly manner that was characteristic of German Sinology in the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴⁷ For this he was criticized by colleagues back home. While in Tsingtau he was admired in China because of his willingness to interact with the Chinese people, which was not often the case with the colonial inhabitants of Tsingtau. Wilhelm stayed in China during World War I. In 1920, after the treaty of Versailles had been ratified and Jiaozhou 膠州 was given to the Japanese, he came back to Germany where he met a rich countess in Darmstadt, an acquaintance that was to become important in 1925 when, after having again gone to China and worked as a professor for German literature and philosophy at Peking University from 1922 to 1924, he for a second time returned to Germany to teach at Frankfurt University. The countess gave an endowment to create a chair for him, which he filled for the remaining years of his life.Footnote ⁴⁸

Finally, some words should be said here about two other famous translators, namely Franz Kuhn (1884–1961) and Vincenz Hundhausen (1878–1955). According to Franz Kuhn's own words de Groot threw him out of the Berlin Institute because he was interested only in novels, which according to his teacher were not a good subject for a serious Sinologist. Kuhn briefly worked for the German foreign service but then studied Sinology in Berlin between 1913 and 1919 and became a successful translator who introduced the German readership to shortened versions of the Jin Ping Mei, the Shui hu zhuan 水滸傳, the Honglou meng 紅樓夢, the erotic novel Roupu tuan 肉蒲團, and many other Ming or Qing stories.Footnote ⁴⁹ Vincenz Hundhausen went to China in 1923 as a lawyer, but then became a professor of literature at Peking University. There he discovered Chinese poetry and drama. He translated several important Chinese dramas such as the Xixiangji 西京雜記, the Pipaji 琵琶雞, and the Mudan ting 牡丹亭 into German and had these pieces performed with a German-Chinese theatre group in Beijing as well as in Europe—though not in Nazi Germany. Hundhausen was expelled from China in 1954 and had to abandon his library of 12,000 volumes. He died a year later, a broken man.Footnote ⁵⁰

The Third Reich and its Consequences for German Sinology

German Sinology had grown steadily during the first three decades of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁵¹ The rise of Hitler's NSDAP was to bring this development to an end. It is obvious that Germany lost half a generation of its Sinologists in the thirties and forties, although the reasons for emigration are not always entirely clear. In the twenties many young men had been trained in the two institutes of Berlin and Leipzig the history of which was closely intertwined. They were actually waiting for open positions. Hamburg had been an offshoot that was to truly take off only after World War II, as would the other three centers in Bonn, Göttingen, and in Frankfurt.

Erich Haenisch's major students in Berlin after 1932 were Peter Olbricht (1909–2001) who after earning his Ph.D. in 1938 worked for the foreign service, probably deciphering Chinese messages, and Herbert Franke (1914–2011) who was to become the major figure in developing Sinology in Munich after the war. In Hamburg Fritz Jäger's main students were Alfred Hoffmann and Wolfgang Franke, while in Frankfurt, Erwin Rousselle (1890–1949) succeeded Richard Wilhelm in 1931 as he had done in Beijing where he had taught as a professor of German philosophy at the Chinese University, today Peking University, and at Tsinghua. He did not hold a chair, however, since the endowment of the countess had only been ad personam for Richard Wilhelm. Moreover, he had not studied Sinology and could not therefore train students with the necessary philological rigor. He approached the Daodejing from a philosophical point of view but for a Sinologist he did nothing to improve a scholarly understanding of the text. As a member of the Masons he was not well liked by the Nazis, and in 1939 his license to teach was revoked. Carl Hentze (1883–1975), a Belgian and one of the founders of the journal Artibus Asiae, replaced him with the protection of the National Socialists. Hentze worked on Shang 尚 bronzes and rejected the Wilhelm/Rousselle approach to classical Chinese studies, which he deemed entirely unscientific or, in his own words, as “frothing at the mouth” (Schaumschlägerei). For scholarly reasons many other German Sinologists agreed.Footnote ⁵² In March 1944 bombs destroyed the institute in Frankfurt with all its holdings. Sinica, the Frankfurt journal for Chinese studies that had been founded by Richard Wilhelm in 1925, had come to an end two years earlier. Hentze and Rousselle fought for some time after the war over who could lead the institute in Frankfurt again, but both lost in this struggle. It took three decades to revive Sinological activities in Frankfurt.

As has been stated above, the Sinological center of Leipzig had been led by Haenisch from 1925 until 1932. Students of Conrady were still there. Bruno Schindler had in his youth been to England where he had worked as a secretary. When he began to become interested in Chinese he went back to Germany to register in the University of Leipzig to study Oriental languages. In 1912 he went to China, living for some time in Kaifeng and studying the Jewish community which had existed there. In Shanghai he helped to found a Jewish community. He returned to Germany before the outbreak of the war, and in 1919 submitted his dissertation entitled Priestertum im alten China. Schindler is remembered for founding the journal Asia Major, in 1920, which was to become the second major journal for Chinese studies in Germany after the Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen (1898–1935). In 1933 he emigrated to England. This brought Asia Major to an end, but he was able to revive it in England in 1949.Footnote ⁵³

Conrady's major student was Gustav Haloun (1898–1951) from Pirnitz (today Brtnice in the Czech Republic), who had begun to study Sinology in Vienna with Arthur von Rosthorn and had then come to Leipzig to write his dissertation on the history of clan settlement in ancient China, Beiträge zur Siedlungsgeschichte chinesischer Clans II: Phratrie Yen-Ying-Ki I: Der Ahnherr Shao-Hao (mit einem Exkurs über die Genealogie der Chou, part of which was published in English in Asia Major in 1924.Footnote ⁵⁴ In 1926 at the German University in Prague he submitted his Habilitation on the relations between Chinese and Tocharians or Indogermans,Footnote ⁵⁵ a study that still is cited by scholars working in this field. His argument that Daxia 大夏 and Tocharians are not the same words has been widely accepted. In 1928 he went to Halle but was called to Göttingen in 1930/31 where he became director of the new Sinological Institute and built up a Sinological library without, however, receiving a regular salary. In 1934 he was promoted to associate professor, a position that still did not mean riches. It is therefore not entirely clear whether he accepted the offer to become successor of Arthur Christopher Moule in Cambridge because he was an enemy of the Nazis or, as Walter Fuchs speculates, because this simply was a true promotion. It does seem, however, that opposition to the Nazis indeed was a reason for him to leave Germany.Footnote ⁵⁶ In Cambridge he built up the institute and its library. There is no major book by Haloun but his articles on the Guanzi and on such little-studied texts as the Yi Zhoushu 逸周書 as well as on China's relations to Central Asia were important ground work on which later research could build.

Eduard Erkes (1891–1958), the third student of Conrady (and his son-in-law), had submitted his dissertation on the Zhaohun 招魂 poem of the Chuci 楚辭 in 1913, a subject that at that time had not yet been studied by others, and he worked on related chapters of the Chuci and Song Yu 宋玉, one of its authors, in the twenties after having submitted his Habilitation on the Huainanzi 淮南子 in 1917. Conrady himself had worked on the Heavenly Questions (Tian wen 天問), a study on this subject by him was published posthumously. His and Erkes’ work were of lasting influence, and it should also be pointed out that Erkes’ translation of the Heshang gong 河上公 commentary on the Laozi was a milestone in the history of research on Daoism that, despite Henri Maspero's work, was to really take off only long after World War II.Footnote ⁵⁷ Erkes became a member of the social-democratic party in 1919, and in 1933 this led to the revocation of his permission to teach. There had been problems when he was considered to become an “außerordentlicher Professor” in 1925. Already then, this may have had something to do with his political convictions. But Sinologists also had problems with the way he translated and understood classical Chinese. For socialists the noble man of Confucius became a person of higher standing in the social hierarchy,Footnote ⁵⁸ a reading that does have some plausibility and that was preferred by more radical communists before and during the cultural revolution in China. It was, however, a problem that the twentieth century was more concerned with than ancient China. Political differences often were mixed with scholarly ones. Erkes apparently was denounced as politically not reliable by Otto Kümmel (1874–1952) who had worked as one of the first specialists of East Asian arts in Berlin.Footnote ⁵⁹

Erkes stayed in Leipzig and worked as an independent scholar, producing articles on animals in ancient China, many of which appeared in the leading journal T'oung Pao.Footnote ⁶⁰ From his students he demanded a more meditative approach to philology than most Sinologists at this time would accept. This, too, may have been a reason that his scholarly work was not fully appreciated for a long time. Erkes became a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and was to lead the institute until his death in 1958. During the 1930s and during the war the Leipzig institute was led by André Wedemeyer, a historian who mainly worked in the field of Japanese Studies. Thus, of Conrady's three major students, two went to England while one was able to stay in Leipzig and managed to continue the Leipzig tradition of Sinology after the war although he never published a major scholarly book.

Conrady's students in Leipzig were by far outnumbered by the students of Otto Franke in Berlin. The oldest of them was Walter Simon (1893–1981) who had first studied romance and classical philology classical philology in his hometown Berlin. After World War I, during which he was working in military intelligence, he earned his Ph.D. in 1919 and only then, at the age of twenty-six, did he become interested in Sinology, becoming a Privatdozent in 1926. In 1932 he got the title of an extra-curricular professor receiving an income from working as a librarian. Wolfgang Franke, who was a student in Berlin when his father Otto retired, later said that he enjoyed the seminars of Simon, in particular in comparison with purely philological readings offered later by Haenisch, whose approach to texts he did not appreciate. When Simon was forbidden to teach, students protested to the authorities, but, obviously, to no avail.Footnote ⁶¹ He was dismissed after the anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws in 1935 and left Germany in 1936 when it became obvious that there was no future left for a Jew at home. Otto Franke, Erich Haenisch, and Paul Kahle (1875–1964) had recommended him, and with the help of some donors he was appointed at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he held a chair from 1947 and in 1952 became head of the Department. Simon was later to build up the Sinological library at SOAS. As a scholar, Simon had been famous for his Tibetan-Chinese word equations.Footnote ⁶² Schindler, Haloun, and Simon all thus went to Britain to help to build up Sinology there.

Another student of Franke was Annemarie von Gabain (1901–1993) who earned her Ph.D. with the first translation of the Xinyu 新語 of the Han scholar Lu Jia 陸賈 (died 170 BCE). She was to become a Turkologist, working in Ankara from 1935 to 1937. She became a member of the National Socialist Worker's Party in 1939 but she did also try to help persecuted scientists. As far as Chinese studies are concerned, it is important to note that she worked on the Turfan texts in Uyghur script which had been brought to Berlin by Artur von Le Coq's expeditions. Becoming an eminent figure in German Turkic studies, not in Sinology, she was the one who helped Wolfram Eberhard, another student of Otto Franke's, to find a position in Ankara.Footnote ⁶³

Eberhard (1909–1989) had begun to study Sinology and Manchu in Berlin in 1927, and, as one biographer says, as an anthropologist he studied modern Chinese with Ferdinand Lessing secretly at the institute for Oriental languages because his teachers in Sinology disapproved of this, thinking that a good Sinologue should not waste his time studying colloquial Chinese in Germany. On the other hand, the teachers at the seminar disapproved of Eberhard studying classical Chinese, a division that later was to become characteristic of some places in Germany.Footnote ⁶⁴ Eberhard earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation on Beiträge zur kosmologischen Spekulation in der Han-Zeit, a study in which he discussed the long treatise on the Five Elements of the Hanshu. Nothing relevant has been done in Western Sinological literature on this text since this remarkable study. Eberhard married in 1934 and, barely twenty-five years old, immediately went to China with his wife. He briefly returned to Germany in 1936 but left again when he saw that, as a social-democrat,Footnote ⁶⁵ his situation in Germany would be difficult, and at the same time got the chance to go on a journey around the world in 1937. On this trip, in Hong Kong he heard that there was a position for him in Ankara where Annemarie von Gabain had laid the foundations of Sinology.Footnote ⁶⁶ After two years he was expected to teach in Turkish, and he began to publish in German and Turkish on Turkish and other Central-Asian peoples in ancient China. His path-breaking studies on the Weishu 魏書 and the Toba/Wei, for which he introduced an anthropological/sociological approach that was also characteristic of his short history of China published in 1948,Footnote ⁶⁷ were a natural result of his new surroundings in Turkey. He stayed in Ankara until 1948 when through Franz Michael (1907–1992)Footnote ⁶⁸ he was recruited to Berkeley where he became a professor of sociology, joining Ferdinand Lessing and Peter Boodberg. Chinese Studies at Berkeley was under a strong German influence for some time. Eberhard, who throughout his life remained in contact with Chinese studies in Germany, had a vast interest in Chinese folklore and literature.Footnote ⁶⁹ Fritz Jäger, who was obviously distressed about the difficult situation of German Sinology, which had been decimated by the emigration of many talented scholars, wrote in 1938 that Eberhard was clearly the most gifted of the younger German Sinologists, the greatest hope of Sinology.Footnote ⁷⁰

The Hungarian Istvan (German: Stefan, French: Étienne) Balázs was another Franke student who began to apply the sociological approach to China which Max Weber had introduced without being a Sinologist. It is said that Franke considered him his best student.Footnote ⁷¹ First interested in history of thought, Balázs wrote his dissertation on the economic history of the Tang 唐 and published two articles in German on the economic history of other periods. In 1935 he left Germany for political reasons, but he stayed in contact with German Sinologists.

Balazs was to become a bone of contention in Fritz Jäger's efforts to produce a Festschrift on the occasion of the seventieth birthday of Alfred Forke. In November, 1935, Jäger had asked Erwin Rousselle whether it would be possible to make use of a special edition of Sinica to produce a Festschrift for Forke. Given Rousselle's approach to scholarship, Jäger cannot have been a great friend of Sinica, and he would probably have loved to publish the Festschrift in Asia Major, which had been the major journal for Chinese studies in Germany. Now he wrote that the future of Asia Major was all but secure.Footnote ⁷² This was a euphemism since it was clear that the editor had had to leave Germany and was certainly not willing to allow those who had stayed to make use of his journal. Why the Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen in Berlin was not considered is not clear—maybe Jäger knew that it would have been difficult to get Otto Franke and Erich Haenisch on board. The lack of a good journal in Germany for scholarship on China in Germany had become a problem. Rousselle answered positively. By March 26, 1936, Jäger had drawn up an impressive list of twenty-six SinologistsFootnote ⁷³ who he thought should contribute, although he commented with regret that he had had to leave out Walter Simon because he was Non-Aryan. On August 5 of that year Rousselle sent out a different list, which included nineteen of the names that had been on Jäger's list. Some of Jäger's names had been omitted and new ones had been added, among them that of Dr. Stefan Balázs.

In a letter dated 23 October 1936 Rousselle told Jäger that among the contributions which had been sent in there was one by “Dr. Stefan Balàzs, Neuilly sur Seine. However, I feel as if there have been great differences of opinion about him lately.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Jäger answered that he had seen Balazs only once but that he had asked Hans O. Stange (1903–1978), another student of Franke, about him. Stange had told him that during a political discussion “B revealed himself to be a sworn Marxist and Communist to the last brutal Bolshevik consequence.”

With this, the case was closed, and Rousselle sent Balàzs back his article. Otto Franke declined to write a preface to the Festschrift, and Jäger stated that he did not dare to ask him again—obviously because he knew that the answer certainly would have been no. Franke had written a preface to the Festschrift for the Japanologist Karl Florenz the year before, and already at that time the name of Simon had been a problem.Footnote ⁷⁶

Other than the omitted Walter Simon, Jäger had clearly listed all those German Sinologists whom he considered good, no matter whether they were in Germany or not. But there were, of course, limits that could not be passed. It took years until the Festschrift was finished. Partly this was due to Jäger's failure to hand in his own article in time. In the end, the Festschrift Forke consisted of a dedication by Jäger and Rousselle, a bibliography of Forke's works by Fritz Jäger, and eight articles, among them one by Jäger, one by Werner Eichhorn (more on whom later), and one by Walter Fuchs. The other contributors were not Sinologists.Footnote ⁷⁷ A planned second volume never appeared.

Stange was soon promoted to become successor of Gustav Haloun in Göttingen as a “Dozent,” a kind of associate professor with a low but stable income. Stange was a party member like Jäger himself. Jäger promoted him but subtle remarks clearly show that he did not appreciate Stange, whom he apparently regarded as a careerist.Footnote ⁷⁸ Neither did he regard his scholarly work particularly highly. Among Stange's few works he only praised his translation of the long biography of Wang Mang 王莽 (45BCE–23 CE) in Ban Gu's 班固 (32–92) Hanshu which Stange submitted as his Habilitation in 1939.Footnote ⁷⁹ It was indeed a book of high philological standard which preceded its English equivalentFootnote ⁸⁰ by sixteen years and was of equal quality. In 1945 Stange was removed from his position but he returned in 1953, after denazification,Footnote ⁸¹ and was director of the Göttingen Institute in 1957 until his retirement in 1970. His name is associated with the only Chinese–German Dictionary for classical Chinese, the new edition of 1959 of the Chinesisch–Deutsches Wörterbuch that had originally been published by Werner Rüdenberg (1881–1961) in 1925.

Fritz Jäger emerges from his posthumous letters and experts’ opinions as a tragic figure. He certainly was convinced of the German cause as the NSDAP presented it, but at some points the reader gets the impression that he also may have thought that by being a member of the party he could protect German Sinology and hold together as many of its branches as possible. He certainly was more interested in quality of research than in Nazi ideology, and he tried to do as much as possible for young German Sinologists of whom it was clear that they did not share Nazi beliefs. On some of them who left Germany he was very positive, while he criticized his fellow party member Stange. Although certainly not impressed by the scholarship of Erwin Rousselle, who was not a Nazi, their correspondence shows that he apparently got along with him well.Footnote ⁸² But in the end he failed. Having lost his children during the war he was personally bitter, and he was forced to realize that joining the party had not given him the power to stop the decline of German Sinology.

German Sinologists in Beijing

One institution that was to become important for German Sinology was the “Deutschland-Institut” in Beijing which seems to have been a safe harbor for a group of young Sinologists who, contrary to the other emigrants, returned to Germany after the war. The Deutschland-Institut had been founded in 1931 by Zheng Shoulin 鄭壽麟 (1900–1981), although the idea originally went back to Richard Wilhelm. Zheng had studied in Germany and earned his Ph.D. in 1925 in Leipzig and he wanted to spread the knowledge of this country in China. In March 1933 Zheng Shoulin together with the Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhang Junmai 張君勱 (Carsun Chang, 1886–1969) held a founding ceremony together with a group of German and Chinese. One impetus was the desire to counter the powerful Anglo-American influence on Chinese intellectuals, but at the same time the institute was in close contact with the American Yanjing University and other universities such as the catholic Fu-jen University.Footnote ⁸³

Hellmuth Wilhelm (1905–1990), the third of four sons of Richard Wilhelm, had been born in Tsingtau. Back home in Europe he had first studied law, but in 1930, when his father died, he decided to study Sinology. He wrote a dissertation with Otto Franke in Berlin on Gu Yanwu 顧炎武 (1613–1682), although it seems that Franke had not appreciated the work of Richard Wilhelm. In 1933 Wilhelm became one of the German founders of the “Deutschland-Institut.” He stepped down from his position there shortly afterwards when the new German government no longer allowed Jews anymore to occupy academic positions. Wolfgang Franke said that he wanted to protect the institute and, since his wife was Jewish, did not see any other way. At Fu-jen University Wilhelm worked for Monumenta Serica, and in 1935 he became a Professor for German at Peking University, where he continued among other things his father's work on the Yijing.Footnote ⁸⁴ After the war he went to Seattle where he taught from 1948. Although he was German, his career from this point is part of the history of American Sinology, not German.Footnote ⁸⁵

For young German Sinologists the foundation of an institute in China was a wonderful thing. There they had a place to stay and learn something about China. Otto Franke's son Wolfgang had begun his studies in Berlin in 1930 when his father was still active and had then moved to Hamburg where he had been born. In 1937, after earning his Ph.D. in 1935 with a dissertation on the reforms of Kang Youwei, he went to the Deutschland-Institut as a managing director.Footnote ⁸⁶ The institute was for some time directed by Max Löhr (1903–1988) who had studied Far Eastern Art in Munich and obtained his Ph.D. in 1936, working afterwards at the Munich “Völkerkunde-Museum.” In 1940 he became director at the Deutschland-Institut and in 1949 came back for a short time to Munich before emigrating to the United States. Jäger describes him as not a true Sinologist, just as Werner Speiser (1908–1965), also a specialist of Chinese art, who worked at the museum for East Asian Art in Cologne.Footnote ⁸⁷

Walter Fuchs (1902–1979) had begun his studies with de Groot but wrote his dissertation in 1925 on the Turfan Oasis with Otto Franke, having studied Manchu as well as Chinese. He immediately afterwards succeeded Ferdinand Lessing as reader of German and Latin at the Japanese occupied Mukden (Shenyang 瀋陽).Footnote ⁸⁸ After having taught at Fu-jen university he became director of the Deutschland-Institut for one year in 1940, being at the same time one of the editors of Monumenta Serica. As Wolfgang Franke says, Fuchs gave up his position because the University of Munich offered him a chair.Footnote ⁸⁹ Already at that time he was a major specialist for Manchu history and literature. A final name that is associated with the Deutschland-Institut was that of Alfred Hoffmann who, without having obtained his Ph.D., was able to go to Beijing in 1941 with the help of Otto Franke. Between 1943 and 1945 he worked at the German embassy in Nanjing, but he then returned to Beijing until 1946 when he was also repatriated.Footnote ⁹⁰

Rebuilding Sinology in Germany after World War II

When the war in Europe was over, German Sinology, which had been thriving until the early thirties, was at the bottom. Otto Franke had left Berlin in 1943 and had gone to a village close to his place of birth in Saxony-Anhalt where he could work on his history of China. He died in 1946. Fritz Jäger was removed from his position in Hamburg just as Otto Stange was in Göttingen. The East Asian Seminar of the University of Leipzig and its 20,000 volumes was destroyed by fire during the bombing on the night from December 3 to 4, 1943. The institute in Frankfurt suffered from the same fate in March 1944. Sinology at Bonn had never really flourished under Erich Schmitt.

Erich Haenisch had helped to build up the library of the Berlin Institute which was also destroyed in the war. He himself moved to Herrenchiemsee in Bavaria, where a daughter of his lived, late in 1944. In 1946 the Bavarian state called him, a true Prussian, to Munich to found the Sinological Institute there. Haenisch had gone there occasionally to teach since the late twenties, and, as mentioned above, in 1940 the University of Munich had offered a chair to Walter Fuchs in an institute that was yet to be finally established. Fuchs had not accepted, officially because the ties between Germany and China had been interrupted in 1941 when the war between Germany and the Soviet Union broke out.Footnote ⁹¹ Yet, one wonders whether Fuchs, who was barely thirty years old at that time, did not actually think that it was safer—and also nicer—to stay in Beijing and wait there for better times. Haenisch got the position in Munich at the age of sixty-four because he was the only Sinologist of international standing left who could be employed. Haenisch had never become a party member, and he had protested to the authorities when they had put his French colleague Henri Maspero (1883–1945) in the concentration camp of Buchenwald. He obliquely alludes to this in his obituary for Maspero. In language that sounds as strange in the German original as in the translation attempted here he exclaimed:

Wolfgang Bauer (1930–1997), one of Haenisch's first students in Munich, notes how, with the help of his private library, Haenisch began to teach “under unimaginably primitive conditions” (eighty percent of the city of Munich had been destroyed as well). He refers to Haenisch's articles on “Mencius und Liu Hsiang, zwei Vorkämpfer für Moral und Charakter” (1942) and “Die Ehreninschrift für den Rebellengeneral Ts'ui Lih im Lichte konfuzianischer Moral” (1944) in which, drawing on examples of upright resistance in Confucian China, Haenisch expressed his criticism of the circumstances of his own time in a barely veiled manner.Footnote ⁹³

By these circumstances, Haenisch became the most important figure in German Sinology in the transition period after the war. As Fritz Jäger had been before, he now was constantly asked to comment on others, and, of course, not everybody liked this. Wolfgang Franke describes him as highly formalistic and says that he did not regard his research highly; he adds that Haenisch once disparagingly remarked to Walter Fuchs that he always graded work done in China one grade lower and told him to do some proper work, forcing him to translate the Annals of the Yuanshi to win his goodwill and esteem. Fuchs referred to this as his punishment work.Footnote ⁹⁴ Wolfgang Franke also compared Haenisch to Walter Simon, saying that students in Berlin liked Simon and found Haenisch boring.Footnote ⁹⁵ When, after the war, Carl Hentze in Frankfurt fought with Rousselle over the question of who should be given the chair, Haenisch seems to have said that Hentze—a former National-socialist—was not qualified for a chair because he was too narrowly specialized. Furious, Hentze wrote that Haenisch himself was only a Mongolist and that his introduction to classical Chinese was flawed.Footnote ⁹⁶

Wolfgang Franke, who had been a good friend of Fuchs's in Beijing, admitted that in 1948 when Fuchs had been the best candidate for the chair in Hamburg this was not possible because he was a former party member. This was the reason why when Franke came back to Germany in 1950, he himself, not Fuchs, was chosen for this second chair in what was to become the Federal Republic of Germany. He added that it was obvious that Haenisch would not recommend Fuchs to become his own successor in Munich, a position that was taken in 1952 by Herbert Franke, who was not related to Otto and Wolfgang and who was half a generation younger than Fuchs.Footnote ⁹⁷ The historian should be careful when reading Wolfgang Franke's comments, since it is obvious that he disliked Haenisch.Footnote ⁹⁸ Haenisch may have had good reasons for his choice. When he retired, Fuchs had not yet published a book-length study, and Haenisch judged him the same way he did Hentze, considering his scholarly interests too narrow.Footnote ⁹⁹ Fuchs later became an associate professor at the Free University Universität in (West-)Berlin in 1956 and then obtained the newly created chair in Cologne which he held until his retirement in 1970. At the Free University he was replaced by Alfred Hoffmann, who finally completed his Ph.D. after the war, with a dissertation on the Ci 辭 poems of Li Yu 李煜 (937–978), the ruler of the Southern Tang dynasty, with Jäger in Hamburg in 1949. He enlarged this thesis for his Habilitation in Marburg in 1952, teaching and becoming an associate professor there in 1957.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This book remained Hoffmann's only important book-length study. It is one of the very few studies that introduces Western readers to the metaphors and hidden meanings of Chinese poetry and still a must for German students interested in that field.

Berlin did not recover quickly from the wounds of the second world war. At the old Friedrich-Wilhelm University, now renamed as Humboldt University, Paul Ratchnevsky (1899–1991) taught from 1953 to 1964. He had studied in Berlin between 1919 and 1923 before continuing in Paris. As a specialist of Mongolian he published a translation of the Yuan code in FrenchFootnote ¹⁰¹ and the first scientifically sound biography of Cinggis Khan.Footnote ¹⁰² After him, the Humboldt University was almost exclusively concerned with contemporary China studies.Footnote ¹⁰³ The center for traditional Chinese studies was Leipzig where Eduard Erkes was soon promoted to chair the institute. Erkes began to interpret ancient China in Marxist terms in 1950, although he denied that ancient China had been a slaveholder society.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Hentze had commented on him very sarcastically already in 1948.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Traditional China was also dealt with at the Academy of Sciences in Eastern Berlin, with Gerhard Schmitt (1933–2017)Footnote ¹⁰⁶ and Thomas Thilo as the most important names.

In West Germany, Munich and Hamburg under the direction of the two Frankes became the two nuclei out of which research on China grew. While Wolfgang Franke stressed the importance of combining contemporary China studies with traditional Sinology, the institute in Munich focused almost exclusively on traditional China. Wolfgang Franke built up a research center on Ming studies in Hamburg. His own major contribution in the traditional China field was an introduction to the sources of Ming history.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In 1954 he founded the journal Oriens Extremus which became the second journal for Chinese studies, on the same level of importance as Monumenta Serica which after the war was brought to St. Augustin close to Bonn.

Herbert Franke had earned a Ph.D. in law in 1937 at the university of Cologne where he came from. He had at the same time studied Chinese in Bonn and Berlin. After having served in the military between 1937 and 1945, in 1949 he earned his Habilitation in Cologne with a thesis on the economy of China under the Yuan dynasty.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Widely interested in Chinese and other Oriental studies he was also very successful as an administrator. Soon other universities became interested in this still-young man whom Haenisch had called the best among the younger German Sinologists, although “he still lacked knowledge of land and people.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Franke wrote his Habilitation on a collection of pen jottings (biji 筆記) of Yuan times,Footnote ¹¹⁰ still an understudied subject. Canberra, Cambridge, Columbia and Cologne, but also Oxford, Frankfurt and Bonn soon tried to lure Herbert Franke out of Munich, but he stayed.Footnote ¹¹¹ In 1959, together with Wolfgang Bauer, he published a volume of Chinese fiction in German translation, mainly from Tang times, which became a great success and which, as he once told the author of this article, laid the foundation for his house in a suburb of Munich close to Lake Starnberg.Footnote ¹¹² As he also told this author, it was only at the age of forty that he began to study classical Mongol in order to continue the tradition of Erich Haenisch. In the 1960s he began to focus more and more on Mongolian history and literature. That was, as he also once remarked, his way to avoid getting into conflict with Maoist students in 1968. Herbert Franke is also renowned as a man who started international collaborations. The Song Biography project is one example, his editorship for the volume of the Cambridge History of China on conquest dynasties another one.

After the war a time began during which it became more and more difficult to travel to China and to actually know how contemporary China looked. It was also the time of “armchair Sinologists” (as they were called in Britain)—men who had never seen China but who knew ancient China very well, just as professors knew ancient Greece or Rome. We do not know whether earlier generations of German professors had been so much better as far as spoken Chinese was concerned. Kristoffer Schipper once remarked during a lecture at the conference of the European Association of Chinese Studies in Riga in 2014 that Haenisch, who himself had spent seven years in China, used to say: “Das Chinesisch Sprechen überlassen wir doch besser den Chinesen.” (speaking Chinese we should leave to the Chinese). Eberhard's experiences in pre-war Berlin cited above as well as other indicatorsFootnote ¹¹³ suggest that many of the Sinologists who had stayed at the Deutschland-Institut also obviously did not spend their time learning modern Chinese but instead preferred to buy ancient Chinese books. Of course, there had always been those who were excellent Sinologists without ever having been to China. The von der Gabelentz were early examples of this, and Haloun was a later one. Nevertheless, an important part of the China experience was now missing, and that naturally also changed the direction of China studies.

Two other factors were influential. One was the economic miracle in Western Germany, which at the end of the fifties all of a sudden allowed universities to think about fields which they did not yet cover, among them China. The other one was the development in Eastern Germany where the grip of socialism on the life of individuals became tighter. This led to a second emigration of Sinologists, this time one not from Germany to other countries but one from Eastern to Western Germany. It also meant that West German Sinology was less caught up in the wave of Maoism in 1968 than other European Sinologies. Half of the West German holders of Sinological chairs were actually East Germans, and contrary to their colleagues elsewhere they had had their reasons for leaving that part of Germany.

An early example was Hans Steininger (b. 1920 in Breslau (Wrozlaw); d. 1990) who received his Sinological training in Leipzig. He earned his Ph.D. in Erlangen, close to Nuremberg, in Western Germany in 1951 and stayed there afterwards as an assistant professor, earning his Habilitation in 1960 on a Daoist philosopher. He kept teaching in Erlangen until 1965 when he was called to Würzburg where the university had created a new chair. In Erlangen he was replaced by Heinz Friese who had been born in Mukden in 1931 and had studied at the Humboldt University in East Berlin. When his father came home in 1953 after many years as a prisoner of war, the family went to the West and he continued his studies in Hamburg with Wolfgang Franke. Like Franke, he had worked on the Ming. He died very young, in 1975, and was replaced by Wolfgang Lippert (b. 1932) who also had studied at the Humboldt University but had then shortly before the building of the Berlin wall “fled the republic” to West Germany and earned his Ph.D. in Frankfurt.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In 2000 he was replaced by Michael Lackner (b. 1953), a student of Wolfgang Bauer.

Ulrich Unger (1930–2006), born in Leipzig, had studied at the Karl-Marx University in Leipzig and earned his Ph.D. on preclassical Chinese grammar. In 1958 he left the German Democratic Republic in disgust and became an assistant professor at the University of Freiburg with the task of establishing Sinology there. As he once told me, his mentor was Herbert Franke, who also helped him to earn his Habilitation with a study of paleographic Chinese bronzes of the Western Zhou period. In 1966 Unger moved to Münster where a chair had been established in 1962 and filled by Tilemann Grimm (1922–2002), another student of Wolfgang Franke. Like other Franke students Grimm had earned his Ph.D. and his Habilitation on Ming studies, but also like others he afterwards developed into a specialist on contemporary China. Unger shaped the Münster institute according to his ideas, introducing his own system for the transcription of Chinese, further developing the system of Haenisch by introducing elements which allowed his student to recognize middle-Chinese phonetics. Also building on Haenisch's Introduction he wrote his own Einführung in das Klassische Chinesisch. It is not always easy to use because Unger used Latin and Greek grammatical terms, but it remains nevertheless one of the best introductions to Classical Chinese ever written. Unger also published a book on rhetoric in ancient China in which he also made use of the categories of ancient Europe, and he wrote a monumental grammar of classical Chinese in nine volumes that was published posthumously by his successor Reinhard Emmerich (b. 1954).Footnote ¹¹⁵ Under the title of Hao-ku Unger wrote a series of seventy-eight articles, mainly on the reconstruction of ancient Chinese and on bronze inscriptions, but later also increasingly on the cultural history of ancient China. He sent copies of these articles to colleagues, a mode of publication that he had learned from Peter Boodberg.Footnote ¹¹⁶ He was without doubt the greatest specialist of preimperial ancient China language and literature that Germany produced in the twentieth century.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Tilemann Grimm who had lived in China until the age of twelve became a professor in Bochum in 1965. A new university had been founded there, a so-called “Reform-Universität.” Bochum established two chairs for Sinology, one in Chinese literature that was filled by Alfred Hoffmann who had earlier been in Berlin, the other in Chinese history with Grimm. Both chairs were taken by modern China specialists, namely Bodo Wiethoff and Helmut Martin, when Hoffmann retired and Grimm accepted an offer from the University of Tübingen. In 1978 the Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung was founded, a third journal for German Sinology.

In the 1960s the universities of both Hamburg and Munich realized that in order to be competitive with newcomers such as Bochum in Germany and also on an international level it was necessary to add a second chair for China. Wolfgang Franke managed to establish a position for Liu Mau-tsai (1914–2007) who in his youth had worked at the embassy of Manchuguo in Berlin. After the victory of Mao Zedong in mainland China, Liu had chosen to stay in Germany, earning a Ph.D. in Göttingen with Hans O. Stange. Liu Mau-tsai wrote a dissertation with a translation of the chapters of the Tangshu 唐書 on the Tujue 突厥. He worked as a teacher of Chinese at the Universities of Göttingen and Bonn before Franke brought him to Hamburg in 1967 to the newly created chair for Language and Literature of China, which he held until his retirement in 1980. In 1971 Jutta Rall-Niu (1929–2006), a specialist in Chinese medicine became an associate professor at Hamburg. A fourth position was added which was taken by Bernd Eberstein (b. 1942), a student of Franke and a specialist in contemporary China who taught at the institute until 2008. With these additions the Sinological Institute in Hamburg for a long time remained the largest of its kind in Germany.

Herbert Franke created a second chair for Wolfgang Bauer who before had become the first professor of Sinology in Heidelberg in 1962. Bauer had earned his Ph.D. with a slim dissertation on the biographies of Zhang Liang 張亮 and Chen Ping 陳平 in the Shiji. His Habilitation on names in China was, however, a very substantial work that showed the skills of its author.Footnote ¹¹⁸ After short stays in Michigan and Frankfurt he went to Heidelberg where he had numerous followers, among them Rudolf Wagner (1941–2019) and Lothar Ledderose (b. 1942) both of whom were to hold chairs in Heidelberg later on. Having received a chair in Munich in 1966, in 1971 he published what was probably his greatest success, China und die Hoffnung auf Glück, a history of Chinese thought that focused on utopias, a subject that fitted the times.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Munich added two more positions in 1971 for the archeology and art of China (filled by Käte Finsterbusch, 1924–2018, professor from 1977–1989, who also had left Leipzig) and for Chinese medicine (Manfred Porkert 1933–2015, professor from 1975 until 1996), thus remaining on the same level as Hamburg. In the medical faculty of the University of Munich, Paul Unschuld (b. 1943), another Sinologist, taught the history of Chinese medicine from 1986 to 2006.

Munich also gave an appointment to Rolf Trauzettel (1930–2019), another man who had been born in Leipzig and had studied in Leipzig until 1956. Trauzettel was a librarian in Leipzig, but in 1962, after the Berlin wall had been built, he left the GDR and used a holiday, possible because he had actually never contradicted those in power back home, to come via Casablanca to Munich. Herbert Franke assigned him the dissertation topic of Cai Jing 蔡京 (1047–1126), the bad last chancellor of the Norther Song dynasty. Franke himself in 1962 had published an article on “Jia Sidao 賈似道 (1213–1275): A Bad Last Minister.” Together Franke and Trauzettel published a history of China that until recently remained a standard reading for students in Germany.Footnote ¹²⁰ In this book, they continued the thread of writing a social history that Balazs and Eberhard had begun with their research. Trauzettel replaced Stange in Göttingen in 1972 before he accepted the chair in Bonn in 1975, which had been held by Peter Olbricht since the death of Erich Schmitt in 1955. In Göttingen Trauzettel was followed by Erhard Rosner (b. 1940), a specialist on the history of traditional Chinese medicine. After Rosner's retirement the chair in Göttingen remained vacant for several years. The institute is now focusing on contemporary China.

In Cologne, Walter Fuchs was succeeded in 1970 by Martin Gimm (b. 1930), who was born in Thüringen (former GDR) and had studied first in Leipzig and then at the Free University in Berlin where he became a student of Fuchs. From 1959 to 1963 he worked in Taibei where he continued his studies of Manchu. After the retirement of Walter Fuchs this made him the last representative of the formerly strong tradition of that field in Germany. Having written his Habilitation on the history and function of music in Tang times,Footnote ¹²¹ Gimm has edited numerous forgotten texts and books that remained unpublished, among them Forke's translations of Yuan drama and Hans Conon von der Gabelentz’ translation of the Jin Ping Mei. He continues to publish today, mainly on Qianlong and the Jesuits. For several years around the turn of the twentieth to the twenty-first century, Gimm travelled on weekends to Munich, to train a young generation of German Sinologists in Manchu. His student Dieter Kuhn (b. 1946), a specialist in the history of traditional Chinese weaving techniques,Footnote ¹²² replaced Hans Steininger as a professor in Würzburg in 1988. Mainly focusing on the history of Chinese technology, he built up a tradition of Song studies.Footnote ¹²³ Erling von Mende (b. 1940), who had begun as a student of Olbricht and Fuchs, but who was also a student of Gimm and a specialist in Sino-Korean relations in ancient China, became a professor in Berlin in 1983 several years after Bodo Wiethoff had left.Footnote ¹²⁴ After von Mende the Berlin Institute was turned into an institution specializing mainly in contemporary China.

Although the famous Hungarian archeologist Marc-Aurel Stein had studied in Tübingen as early as at the beginning of the twentieth century, Sinology was introduced there only in 1960 by Werner Eichhorn (1899–1990), who, after having studied other subjects in Heidelberg in 1926, came to Leipzig and discovered China, writing his first article on the Song philosopher Zhou Dunyi. After some time as a teacher at Tsinghua University in Beijing, he earned his Ph.D. in 1936 in Bonn, with a translation of the Western Inscription of Zhang Zai 張載 (1020–1077). After short stays in Göttingen and Frankfurt he went to London, where he worked for more than ten years at the School of Oriental Studies, led at that time by Walter Simon. In 1960 Tübingen offered him a position as honorary professor. Eichhorn is known for his book on the religions of China,Footnote ¹²⁵ but perhaps his most important contribution to German Sinology was his translation of the Wu Yue Chunqiu 吳越春秋.Footnote ¹²⁶

In Frankfurt, Sinology was revived in 1973 when Chang Tsung-tung 張聰東 (1930–2000), the former teacher of Chinese, was promoted to the position of professor. He was interested in paleography and in language comparisons of ancient Chinese with Indo-European languages.Footnote ¹²⁷ After his retirement in 1999 the chair was filled by the linguist Dorothea Wippermann (modern Chinese) and a second position was created for the historian Iwo Amelung (b. 1962).

The great transformation

Until the 1970s traditional Sinology was the dominant form of China expertise at German universities.Footnote ¹²⁸ With the exception of Hamburg, Munich, and Bochum, the institutes were small, with one chair responsible for teaching all aspects of China but usually specializing in one area. This had much to do with China itself which had become increasingly closed since the fifties. Mao Zedong's China was a poor socialist country. That made it easy for Western societies to ignore its presence. When Nixon's pingpong-diplomacy began, it had, however, immediate consequences also in Europe. In 1972 the Federal Republic of Germany officially recognized the People's Republic of China, and already in 1973/74 the German Academic Exchange Service sent a first ten students to China in exchange for ten Chinese students who came to Germany. The program soon grew. At the same time, German universities underwent great changes. They were now forced to admit many more students than before. At the beginning of the eighties Sinological seminars, which had seldom had more than ten students, all of a sudden had to cope with more than a hundred first year students. With the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping, China had its own economic miracle in the 1980s, on a much smaller scale than the one that was to follow in the nineties, but German industry began to be interested in China.

As one of the first Sinologists, Wolfgang Franke had introduced a proper Chinese language training at the Sinological Institute in Hamburg. Other institutes were to follow soon. Going to China for language training for a year or two—which many earlier Sinologists had not done since the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany—became part of a normal curriculum. Students often realized that as far as modern Chinese language competence was concerned, they were better than their venerated teachers. This situation exerted pressure on Sinological institutes to invest more in language training. Starting with the late eighties and with increasing speed in the nineties other universities than the traditional centers began to add one or sometimes two positions to their China programs.

Usually these new trends did not strengthen traditional China studies but rather brought them under pressure. In Hamburg the opposite happened around 1980. Wolfgang Franke and Liu Mau-tsai, the holders of the two chairs, retired almost at the same time. Wolfgang Franke had apparently thought that the University of Hamburg would be able to bring his student Tilemann Grimm back from Tübingen as his own successor, but Grimm preferred to stay in Tübingen.Footnote ¹²⁹ Instead, the chair went to Hans Stumpfeldt (1941–2018), who had been born in Schroda/Posen in what is now Poland and grew up on the island of Rügen in North Eastern Germany. He left the German Democratic Republic at the age of about twenty before the wall was built. In Ulrich Unger he found a teacher at Freiburg who had done the same. Having obtained a thorough training in early Chinese language, history, and literature, he earned a Ph.D. in Freiburg in 1967 on territorial boundaries, roads, and streets in ancient China,Footnote ¹³⁰ and then followed Unger to Münster. When the masses came to the Hamburg institute in the beginning of the eighties, Stumpfeldt continued to give a thorough training to his students in traditional China studies. He was to publish many articles later on, but perhaps his most important contributions to German Sinology were his translations of Han texts: a volume devoted to Han poetry and two volumes of the Shuoyuan 說苑 of Liu Xiang 劉向 (79–8).Footnote ¹³¹ Although unable to hold a conversation in modern Chinese, Stumpfeldt always supported Franke's approach as far as the necessity of a proper language training in modern Chinese for his students was concerned.

For the second chair, Hamburg had originally wanted to appoint William Nienhauser who had been trained in Bloomington, Indiana. Instead, it went to the Austrian Sinologist Friedrich Bischoff, who had been one of Nienhauser's teachers. Bischoff had grown up in Paris. His father had been Austrian ambassador in Paris in 1938, when Austria ceased to exist as an independent state. Bischoff chose to study with Robert des Rotours (1891–1980) and Paul Demiéville in Paris, earning his Ph.D. with a dissertation on the Hanlin 翰林 academy.Footnote ¹³² As his father became Austrian Ambassador in Moscow after the war, he was one of the few German speaking Sinologists who were given the opportunity to travel to Mongolia and China (Beijing) in 1957 where he stayed for several months. He had studied Tibetan and Mongol, as well, and had gone to Bonn as a teacher of Tibetan in 1961. In 1964 he became Professor for Tibetan and Chinese studies in Bloomington. Bischoff's experiences in China were not very positive. When I once asked him what China had been like back in 1957 he laconically replied: “Dusty.” Teaching classical Chinese with Haenisch's grammar, alternating with Jutta Rall-Niu who used Shadick, and adding Mongolian to the Hamburg curriculum, he also liked to discourage his students from going to China, telling them that they would learn nothing there, but would lose what they had learned before in Germany. When Wolfgang Franke once remarked that evil spirits had taken possession of the Hamburg institute,Footnote ¹³³ he was referring to the fact that, despite China's growing importance, the Hamburg seminar's contemporary China program was no longer very strong.

Both students of the Hamburg seminar who were to become professors in the 1990s—Reinhard Emmerich, who became Unger's successor in Münster, and this author, who succeeded Wolfgang Bauer in Munich—earned their doctorates with Stumpfeldt on the two dynasties with which Stumpfeldt was most familiar: the Han and Tang dynasties.Footnote ¹³⁴ Friedrich Bischoff was replaced by Michael Friedrich (b. 1955) in 1994, a student of Wolfgang Bauer in Munich, who continued the classical China tradition while also training many students in contemporary China studies. Friedrich has recently established a research cluster for the study of manuscripts which has added a new area to the Hamburg curriculum. Stumpfeldt was replaced by Kai Vogelsang (b. 1969) who had been trained in Hamburg, having written a Ph.D. on the nineteenth-century reformer Feng Guifen 馮桂芬 (1809–1874). Vogelsang wrote a Habilitation on the principles of ancient Chinese historiography while working as an assistant professor in Munich.Footnote ¹³⁵ The Hamburg institute suffered from cuts in its resources in the nineties and in the first decade of the new millennium.

Munich students from the Bauer/Franke school found positions in several places. Florian Reiter (b. 1948) became a professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin when the East German professors who had worked there before were replaced after 1989. He is a specialist in Daoism. Michael Lackner obtained the chair in Erlangen where, with the help of money from the Federal Ministry for Education and Research, he co-established a multidisciplinary international research center on divinization. In Munich itself, Herbert Franke was succeeded by Hellwig Schmidt-Glintzer (b. 1948), a prolific writer who had earned his Ph.D. with a study of the Buddhist Hongming ji 弘明集.Footnote ¹³⁶ He left Munich in 1994 to become director of the Herzog-August Bibliothek in Wolffenbüttel. His successor was Roderich Ptak (b. 1955), a specialist for the sources of maritime China. The two associate positions formerly held by Käte Finsterbusch and Manfred Porkert were forged into one chair for the history of Chinese art and archeology, filled for a long time by Thomas Höllmann (b. 1952), also a student of the Munich school. His successor is Armin Selbitschka (b. 1972) who was trained in Munich. The Munich institute thus has remained a center for traditional China studies.

In Heidelberg, Bauer's student Wagner invested time and energy in building the biggest library of all Sinological institutes in Germany. Its holdings are not as large as those of the two state libraries in Berlin and Munich, but they include many precious books not to be found elsewhere in Europe.Footnote ¹³⁷ An ambitious program for language training and several new professorships were added, although only one of them, now filled by Enno Giele, a student of Erling von Mende, is explicitly specializing in traditional Chinese culture. In Tübingen, Hans-Ulrich Vogel (b. 1954) who had studied in Berlin and Zurich, a historian of the economic and social history of China, followed Karl-Heinz Pohl in 1994. A second position was first filled by Hermann Kogelschatz and then by Achim Mittag (b. 1958), had long been in Munich. Tübingen also added further positions for contemporary China. The same happened in Würzburg where now only Roland Altenburger (b. 1964) is teaching traditional Chinese literature with a focus on the novels of late imperial China. Two more positions are concerned with the economics and the social situation of contemporary China.

The Leipzig institute underwent many changes. In 1963 Anthony Hulsewé published a very angry review on the low scholarly quality of the volume edited by Johannes Schubert for Eduard Erkes after his death.Footnote ¹³⁸ This author does not know much about Fritz Gruner who headed the institute after him, but his successor Ralf Moritz (b. 1941) who had studied in Beijing from 1963 to 1966 wrote a study on Hui Shi 惠施, the interlocutor of Zhuangzi, and the development of early Chinese philosophical thought that is still worth recommending to students.Footnote ¹³⁹ He was able to shape the tradition of Sinology in Leipzig until his retirement in 2006, being the only professor who had taught in the GDR and had remained in office after 1989. Hubert Seiwert continued the old tradition of research on the religions of China in Leipzig from 1994 to 2014, while Rainer von Franz, a student of Trauzettel obtained a position for contemporary China there in 1992. This position was filled from 2013 to 2017 by Stefan Kramer, who then went to Cologne, to be followed by Elisabeth Kaske, while Philipp Clart, also a specialist for the religions of China, obtained the chair for Culture and History of China. Clart had studied and taught at the University of British Columbia and at Missouri-Columbia.

In North-Rhine Westfalia four universities covered traditional China, namely Münster, Cologne, Bonn, and Bochum. The state began to invest money into contemporary China studies which meant that resources had to be shared. The institutes in Münster and Bonn have continued to uphold the study of traditional China, but they have paid for this by remaining small.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Cologne has given up traditional China studies. The opposite happened in Bochum, where Heiner Roetz (b. 1950), a student of Chang Tsung-tung and a specialist of premodern philosophy, gained the chair when Bodo Wiethoff retired. After his retirement Christian Schwermann (b. 1967), a student of Trauzettel in Bonn, succeeded to this position. Schwermann is also working on preimperial China.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Challenges

Germany established an academic tradition of research on China in the nineteenth century with a focus on history, literature, and philology. However, proper philological training needs time. When the European Union in Bologna in 1999 started a process that aimed at harmonizing national study programs it also endeavored to shorten the times for studying. Bachelor and Master programs were introduced which had been alien to the German university of the past. Traditional philologies such as Sinology have suffered from this process with the result that fewer students now get an MA than before in many places. At the same time it has become difficult to attract students to the field of traditional Sinology that, instead of complementing contemporary China studies, is now often competing with it.

In Europe, Asian studies have always been more internationally oriented than the large disciplines. But in the past, being international did not mean giving up one's own language for scholarly writing. Until the 1970s or 1980s it was normal for a traditional China scholar in Europe to read publications in at least Chinese, English, French, and German. As language-training in French and German has come under pressure this is not the case anymore. Many Chinese students today come to Germany to study traditional China because our approach is different from the one they are getting back home and many of them do actually learn German, although many are also surprised when they learn that Sinology is not being taught in English. In many cases it is impossible to improve the language abilities of Chinese students in German to the level to enable them to write a dissertation in German. What is published in French and in German is now read by very few scholars outside of the countries where it is written. Acknowledging this problem, academic journals such as Monumenta Serica and Oriens Extremus now almost exclusively publish articles written in English.

Thus, many colleagues in Europe are now switching to English for their publications. But many of us who are non-native speakers of English also underestimate the important role that the language factor plays in scholarship. Dissertations written in English by Chinese students in Germany will only rarely be as good as those written in a country where this language is actually spoken, and the same is also often true for German ones. It takes precious time to produce a good book in a language which is not one's own mother-tongue, time that scholars formerly used for research. It is hard to keep a scholarly tradition alive when its language is not written anymore. Universities have always had the duty to train students to write in a good style. German Sinology is currently facing the dilemma that students have to be able to learn to write good German and good English at the same time. This does not always work.

The rise of China to its current economic and political power has been unprecedented since traditional Sinology at German universities was first established two centuries ago. More than ever the China field has the responsibility to train students who know more than economic figures or the contemporary Chinese political system. A deeper understanding is needed, and that is the reason why some centers for traditional Sinology will have to continue to fight for the necessity of a proper philological training in classical Chinese literature and thought.