Something Childish, but...

I was censured twice in my academic career – as far as I consciously know – once at the beginning about 1970 I was asked to change the expression “the Japanese occupation of Korea” into something more friendly like, I suppose “the benevolent Japanese rule in Korea”. At that time I was a not yet middleaged hypocrite, and I was able to ward off this attempt against my then Koreanophily. But in 2007 I was less successful. I was asked to write one of these popular accounts on the Western explorers along the Silk Road for one of these now so opulent catalogues. And I pondered, where I would be able to break away from the well trodden paths starting from the Indian agents of the British Raj and the brothers Schlagintweit and ending with Sven Hedin and what reading I could recommend besides the scholarly and popular reports by Sir Aurel Stein, Albert von Le Coq, and Sven Hedin. First thinking of the Swedish missionaries at Kashgar, I found their publications were not easily enough available, so it fell quite natural to move on to Mildred Cable and Francisca French of the China Inland Mission, whose more important books, whatever that may mean, like The Gobi and Through the Jade Gate, were reprinted so often to be found almost everywhere. This recommendation was accepted by editor and publisher, but, my much more heartfelt advise to read Fritz Műhlenweg’s “In geheimer Mission durch die Wűste Gobi” (On secret mission through the Gobi desert), one of these children’s books, which can be recommended for children from ten – I am afraid not younger – until one does not find ones car anymore in the parking lot, was not accepted, much worse, it was brutally removed from my manuscript. I will return to this author and especially this book by him later.
There are a lot of possibilities to approach China, or rather, there have been still more, by boat, perhaps with one of the P&O steamers some weeks, and then you had time to start to learn Chinese, or still earlier, on the land route on foot, horse or camel in almost one year like Marco Polo, in the 1930s by Citroën, or, what I recommended my students to do, by the Transsib, all these means meant a gradual approach to China, not just dropping out of the clouds.
There is one more way, perhaps not so acceptable today and not necessary anymore, if you do not mind being treated like a sardine, and this especially, if you use the sinister German word Schreibtischtäter – something perhaps like the “desk perpetrator”, reading the Lonely Planet guide at home, or, as I preferred, children’s books. This method has a great advantage, you need not miss your usual breakfast.
Of course, there are a lot of children’s books with China as their subject, or even Chinese children’s books and comics I did not enjoy, at least up to 1980, when too much started to appear in print for me to register. So, I stopped. Before that date I tried to keep up with the flood, but different from the Czechs and the Japanese with many pleasant surprises, Chinese children’s books tended to be drab hypereducational reading with a tiring socialist bias – as if there had never been the precedent of the books by Edith Nesbit or the not really children’s books by El Lissitzky and other constructivists. So I would rather recommend and hand along the habits of Chinese mothers, at least of an older generation, who read or told their children from the great traditional novels like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Journey to the West, or the Shuihu zhuan, translated by Pearl S. Buck as All Men are Brothers.
If I were more of a bibliophile or a bibliomaniac I would fall into a rage about the Chinese translation of Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard”, translated in the Tongwenguan, the translation bureau of the Zongli yamen, and printed in 1884. But, at least I feel, I have outgrown this kind of reading stuff, as well as those actually obtrusive late imperialist juvenile books as, to take a German example, “Aus der Prima nach Tientsin” something like From school to Tianjin (to crush the Boxer uprising) from 1904 by Tanera. There are also later books in the same vain, as for example by the prolific writer Hans Eduard Dettmann who was a member of the Hedin expedition 1927-1929 as meteorologist, astronomical observer and expert for air transport, and later a member of the German air force, who among many other books wrote “Ein deutscher Junge in Ostturkestan” (A German boy in Eastern Turkistan), which was published in 1943. It never could become an immortal book, but whether that was enough to put it on the index of forbidden books in the Soviet zone of Germany after the war, I am not to judge.
There is another kind of books which make me feel melancholy: In a way I am a member of the youngest generation which was targeted by the British reeducation programs in Germany after the war and, in this way, I grew up with translations of Arthur Ransome and came to love both the books and the author, at least, as he describes himself in his autobiography. Though he was a correspondent – I cannot remember, whether for the radical Daily News or for The Manchester Guardian – in Manchuria during the twenties, his only novel with a Chinese background, Missee Lee, published in 1941, seems to me the weakest in his Swallows and Amazons series. I think I only read it to tell afterwards I had read all his novels.
I want to tell a bit more of three authors, one with connections to the Institute for Advanced Study, the two others, because I am convinced that their writings not only show a genuine love for China and for humans in general, but because they are pieces of almost timeless art. If I had to defend my opinion, I think I would try to convey to you that I feel both authors let stray their phantasy afar, but know, when to retrun to reality to feel safe again. To illustrate what I mean let me just mention the end of Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things are”. After scarcely imaginable adventures you find yourself in bed, and the evening soup is still steaming.
The one connected with the Institute has nothing of this, I am sorry to say. The knowledge that both names belong to the same person I share with Hartmut Walravens, who in his review of Documenta Barbarorum in the “Nachrichten der Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens” (149-150.1991) states it as a fact that Walther Heissig, whose library is slowly becoming part of the Historical Studies – Social Sciences Library, is identical with Peter Zuckmantl, the author of three juvenile books on Marco Polo, Jenghiz Khan, and the “Mongolensturm”, all published by the Publishing House W. Fischer in Göttingen, all of them reprinted at least once, but at least the first two published some time in the fifties, judging from the layout of the books, the style of the illustrations, and the series (Göttinger Jugendbücher), which was quite popular in the fifties. There is also an adult novel by Peter Zuckmantl “Mongolisches Intermezzo”, which was published in 1953 by C.W. Leske Verlag in Darmstadt.
In the accession list of Heissig’s library, which I was kindly permitted to consult, I did not find any book by Peter Zuckmantel, though there is listed some lightweight literature, among others an English translation of Fritz Mühlenweg’s “Großer Tiger und Kompassberg” from 1954 (# 002443).
There is some circumstantial evidence, as long as we do not have hard proof, that Heissig is Zuckmantl. One of the owners of the Leske Verlag was Franz Alfred Six (1909-1975), the director of the Auslandswissenschaftliche Fakultät of the Friedrich-Wilhelm (now Humboldt) Universität in Berlin from 1940 to 1945. I could not find anything about the W. Fischer Verlag in Göttingen. Here it seems strange that it is not a great problem to find something about the illustrators, while Peter Zuckmantl remains an enigma. The first illustrator Carl Friedrich Josef Benedek is a forgotten, but still recognizable person, still easier it is to find information on his later illustrator Frantisek Chochola, and the third name F.M. Kleselbach, sometimes incorrectly written Kieselbach, crops up in many juvenile books from the fifties onwards. Last but not least, the books on Marco Polo and Jenghiz Khan, though not really exciting or attractive – and I do not share Walravens’ opinion on the novel “Mongolisches Intermezzo” (“sehr lesenswert”) – the author of these books shows that he knows his subject extremely well, something also noted in a Ph.D. dissertation from Konstanz by Margit-Ute Burkhardt from 2004, “Hexengeschichte/Hexengeschichten. Strategien des Erzählens von Hexenverfolgung in der deutschen Jugendliteratur des 20. Jahrhunderts“, p. 19, note 30, where she mentions another German author of historical juvenile books Hans Baumann, I think with greater narrative talent than Heissig/Zuckmantl.
When I in the beginning said that I think that Fritz Mühlenwegs Book “On secret mission through the Gobi” is suitable for any age between ten and …, the books by Eleanor Francis Lattimore (1904-1986) are suitable from the age of five onwards.
But, I am afraid, I tend to be very gossippy. I got my German copy of “Little Pear. The Story of a Little Chinese Boy” Xiao Li ji 小梨記, which was first published in 1931 with Harcourt, Brace and Company Inc. in New York in 1950, the year it appeared in German for the first time and was printed in ten thousand copies with the title “Klein Pear. Die Geschichte eines kleinen Chinesenjungen” – I think it was a very clever decision of the translators Margarete Naundorf and Elisabeth Eisenbach not to translate the name “Pear” into German. And as in the original with Eleanor Lattimores line drawings – you can notice the professional illustrator with a slight but recognizable Chinese touch, more in the vain of the drawings of Feng Zikai than those somewhat clumsy attempts of Hans Robert van Gulik rather imitating the likewise crude Ming erotic colour prints, he once published. Lattimore’s book is about a five year old boy, but I, almost ten at that time enjoyed it extremely. I may have been a somewhat retarded child, but I feel consoled, when I read the appropriate websites today, the most negative remark I found was “My kids liked it more than I did”, ending “I liked this book, I just didn’t love it”. All others – and there were quite a few of them – fell in love with this book as I did, recognizing things Chinese, when they went to China later, especially the Tang Hulu’r 冰糖葫芦, the candy sticks, popular in the Beijing and Tianjin region. So, if anything, reading Little Pear is a way to acquire this horrible thing which is called “intercultural competence”. But, it is not only an approach to China, but also to the brighter sides of Sinology. I never had the chance to really know Owen Lattimore – to say as it was, I failed in an interview with Brian Hook in 1964 or 1965, when I wanted to go to Leeds to study there, therefore, for many years I believed it was his wife Eleanor, who were the author of Little Pear and other almost as nice children’s books on China. I failed in my intercultural competence as far as the Americans are concerned, not noticing the middle name Francis in the case of the author, his sister, Holgate in the case of his wife. In 1971, when Lin Biao’s plain crashed somewhere on its way out of China, the annual congress of the then still Junior Sinologues and not so junior also, a lovely informal affair, which has become much more sophisticated nowadays with a grand name, something like European Association of Chinese Scholars, convened in Christ Church, Oxford, and, somehow accidentaly I came to sit beside Owen Lattimore on some steps in the square of the college. When he heard I was German, he asked me: “Where do you come from? From free Germany or the American occupied zone?” outing the still smouldering anger of a victim of MacCarthyism. I got away with my growing up in the British occupied zone, and then we started to talk , he about his wife, who had died shortly before, I about his sister’s books, who I at that time still believed had been his wife’s. We talked for quite a long time, and it seems so discreetly, that neither he nor I noticed that we talked about two different persons. But, at least in the quite attractive edition, which I got hold of in spring 2009, of Eleanor Holgate Lattimore’s “Turkestan Reunion” from 1927, in which she describes the long journey to the reunion with her husband, also Eleanor Francis Lattimore is represented by her illustrations, “decorations” they are called on the title page. I was mistaken, when I thought it were the first edition, because that I bought through the internet for my daughter Leyla, and was later disappointed to find it carried not the above named illustrations, but photographs by the author herself.
But, in this short meeting I sensed an attitude of sympathy or even love for humans whether they were Chinese or not, which may have stemmed from childhood and adolescent experiences in Shanghai and later Tianjin, where their father taught at Beiyang University until winter term 1920/21, though, the family returned to the States already in 1920, while Owen Lattimore stayed on first on the staff of the Peking and Tientsin Times, then as a representative of the import- export firm Arnhold until 1926.
I have never had the ambition to read everything by Eleanor Lattimore, though I know some of her other children’s books with a Chinese background. Perhaps I could say the same as was said in the quoted internet review: “I liked them, but did not love them” as for example “Jerry and the Pusa” from 1932, which as far as I can judge moves nearer to the Lattimore family’s own life in China, but the flair is still very Chinese and I do not agree with the initials G.L. in the Swedish “Biblioteksbladet” volume 19.1934, p. 158 that the book does not convey knowledge – or perhaps rather impressions of China, but, of course, the short review ends with the remark that the book is well written and very well illustrated. And if, as I suppose, the book reflects the Lattimore family’s life in China, I think, I can better understand Owen Lattimore’s attitude, and why Eleanor Lattimore wrote as she did.
The last book I would like to recommend not only to people who intend to travel along the Silk Road, but to anybody who is curious about the world and by whom it is peopled, but, perhaps is too lazy to rise from the sofa, is the volume named at the beginning “On secret mission through the Gobi desert” by Fritz Mühlenweg.
The frequent German self criticism about their own children’s books, enviously looking to Great Britain or America, seems to be justified – with the usual exceptions like Erich Kästner and some others especially since the sixties of the last century, of course. One of these exceptions is this book by Fritz Mühlenweg (1898-1961) which appeared for the first time in 1950 in the Herder Verlag in Freiburg in a one volume edition under the title mentioned and in the same year in a two volume edition as “Großer Tiger und Kompaßberg” and “Null Uhr fünf in Urumtschi”. They were reprinted several times in abridged form, ten reprints up to 1961, and, I am sorry to say also the English translation is an abridgement. They experienced a kind of renaissance in the nineties up to the present, because the publisher Ekkehard Faude of the Libelle Verlag in Lengwiel, Switzerland outed – and is still doing so – his love for this author.
If one should be interested in Fritz Mühlenweg, Ekkehard Faude is his hagiographer, and with great sympathy for him the Sinologist Gabriele Goldfuß has in addition to introductions to the new editions of Mühlenweg’s books published a shorter and a longer article on Mühlenweg, one “Fritz Mühlenweg: Tausendjähriger Bambus: Nachdichtungen aus dem Schi-King“, in: Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung 21.1998, pp. 188-191, the other “Tausendjähriger Bambus: Lyrik und Prosa Fritz Mühlenwegs (1898-1961)”, in: Chinawissenschaften – Deutschsprachige Entwicklungen. Geschichte, Personen, Perspektiven. Hamburg: Institut für Asienkunde 1999 (Mitteilungen des Instituts für Asienkunde Hamburg 303), in which she primarily discusses his translations or adaptions from the Shijing, which when they were published in 1946, were praised by Bruno Snell (1896-1986), the ancient historian from Hamburg and friend of the Oxford Classicist Eric Robertson Dodds (1893-1979), who went to China like Needham, though wasn’t influenced by it as deeply as the first named, and had a part in the British re-eduction policy in Germany after the war. Bruno Snell described Mühlenwegs translations as perfect German poems, and the now rightly so or not, tainted educationalist Hartmut von Hentig chose one of the translations as his favorite German poem for the Frankfurter Anthologie in 1990, edited by Marcel Reich-Ranicki.
Fritz Mühlenweg originally was a chemist, born in Konstanz and working in his father’s drugstore. He was a passionate mountaneer. This brought him into contact with the newly founded German Luft Hansa in 1926, which planned to open an air route Berlin-Beijing. In this way he came to meet Sven Hedin and became responsible for the logistics of the last great Hedin expedition through Central Asia between 1927 and 1932.
When he returned to Europe he studied art in Vienna and spent the years of the Third Reich in a kind of inner immigration in Allensbach on the Bodensee befriending the somewhat more famous painter Otto Dix, painting himself somewhat in the way of magic realism. But, overall, he seems not to have been politically interested, and he kept up his friendship with Sven Hedin, who on his request wrote a preface to the first edition of “In geheimer Mission”, which was dropped in later reprints, because we Germans try so hard to be politically correct. The critique, which has come from outside the circle of Mühlenweg’s adherents, therefore, aims at his unpolitical stance and that he blocked out German contemporary politics before and after the war.
This unpolitical attitude is also strong in “In geheimer Mission”, though the plot is built on politics, when two boys, one Chinese, the other German are expected to bring information from Beijing to Ürümqi, and it becomes a wandering with many detours. On their way they experience also Mongolian nationalism. Therefore, there have been some attempts to unravel the historical background of the story, the Mongol Dampignak has been tentatively identified with Dambijzancan, attempts, which in another context may make sense, but not, if one simply wants to enjoy the book. The plot is not the strong point of the book, though not badly construed and often on the brink of catastrophe, it is the journey itself through Mongolia and Xinjiang and the persons they meet, which form a kind of commedia humana, it is the sprinkling of strange names translated verbally from a strange world and some Mongolian and Chinese expressions, greeting formulas or orders, which can be understood without any explanation. A world is conveyed, which is, though strange, very human and familiar at the same time. And, predominantly, the whole book is a plea for slowness. And, in this way I am back at my beginning, how much sense it made in earlier days to approach China on foot, on mule or camel, and perhaps by boat.