Berlin Koreans and Pictured Koreans

“Berlin Koreans is an exciting portrayal of the activities of Korean intellectuals and artists living in Berlin during the first half of the 20th century. It is bound to make an important contribution to the field of Korean colonial studies that will generate new discussion.” — Lee Kyungboon (Seoul National University) “Frank Hoffmann’s brilliant work is a revelation. It provides a Korean corollary to the enormous Japanese interest in German history, politics and ideas, and highlights internal differences among these exiles that proved to be a microcosm of postwar North-South conflicts. Scrupulously researched, this inquiry illuminates the deep influence of urban modernism on a presumably colonized elite. Readers will be fascinated by the unique lives revealed here, in such loving detail and with consummate skill. Sometimes a close, knowing study of a few individuals can uncover an entire world that we had not imagined before.” — Bruce Cumings (University of Chicago) “The masterful accounts of contacts and connections documented in this book, produced by Hoffmann’s meticulous research and accompanied by rare archival images, are deeply engaging and enrich our understanding of early 20th century politics, religion, economy, art, and society.” — Dafna Zur (Stanford University) “A fascinating and virtually unknown aspect of modern Korean history …” — Carter J. Eckert (Harvard University) “Frank Hoffmann is ideally placed and qualified to write this book. With his encyclopedic command of Korean Studies bibliography and critical command of social theory and art history, his voracious appetite for and tenacious pursuit of out-of-the-way yet revealing primary sources, and his provocative juxtaposition of ‘Koreans in Berlin’ with Koreans in colonial Korea, Hoffmann forces us to question the very viability of the notion of ‘colonial modernity’ in Korea. Hoffmann’s portraits of the ‘Berlin Koreans’ are sometimes chilling, and always fascinating, while his readings of the 1904 Liebig Trading Cards as collectible spectacle and of the ‘choreography’ of Emil Nolde’s ‘Missionary’ as primordialist German expressionism raise important questions about 20th-century Germany’s relationship to both colonialism and Korea.” — Ross King (University of British Columbia) isbn 978-3-7069-0873-3 (print) isbn 978-3-7069-3005-5 (digital edition) www.praesens.at Schirmer (ed.) | Koreans and Central Europeans: Informal Contacts up to 1950 • Vol. 1 — Gregory Maertz (St. John’s University) Andreas Schirmer (ed.) Koreans and Central Europeans: Informal Contacts up to 1950 Vol. 1 Hoffmann | Berlin Koreans and Pictured Koreans “Engagingly written and exhaustively researched, Frank Hoffmann’s book comprehensively discloses the rich and nuanced relationship between the city of Berlin (as capital successively of Wilhelmine, Weimar, and National Socialist Germany) and a gallery of Korean intellectuals and cultural figures who played leading roles in forging a modern Korean identity and who made signal contributions to National Socialist culture and science. Hoffmann brings this story of Korean expatriates in Berlin to life in vivid prose and vigorous scholarship. The resulting Korean–German–Japanese tapestry, comprised equally of strands of political, social, and cultural history, incorporates a vast number of previously unpublished sources in German, Korean, and Japanese. Lavishly illustrated with photographs, documents, and letters, Hoffmann’s work reveals a world that is as fascinating as it is new.” Frank Hoffmann Berlin Koreans and Pictured Koreans Koreans and Central Europeans Informal Contacts up to 1950 Vol. 1 Berlin Koreans and Pictured Koreans Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. ISBN: 978-3-7069-0873-3 (print) ISBN: 978-3-7069-3005-5 (digital edition) 2nd printing, 1 st edition © 2015 Andreas Schirmer and Frank Hoffmann All rights reserved. Praesens Verlag http://www.praesens.at Wien 2015 Rechtsinhaber, die nicht ermittelt werden konnten, werden gebeten, sich an den Verlag zu wenden. Koreans and Central Europeans Informal Contacts up to 1950 ______________________________________ Andreas Schirmer, Editor Praesens Vienna Volume 1 Berlin Koreans and Pictured Koreans ______________________________________ Frank Hoffmann with an introduction by Andreas Schirmer Contents Editor’s Note ix Introduction Andreas Schirmer 1 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s Frank Hoffmann 9 Modular Spectacle: The 1904 Liebig Trading Card Set on Korea Frank Hoffmann 180 Ultra-Right Modernism, Colonialism, and a Korean Idol: Nolde’s Missionary 200 Frank Hoffmann Image Credits 237 Contributors 241 Volume 2 Koreans in Central Europe Introduction Andreas Schirmer To Yu-ho’s Life in Europe and Korea Lee Chang-hyun Do Cyong-ho: A Korean Who Taught Japanese in 1930s Vienna Ogawa Yoshimi and Chikako Shigemori Bučar To Yu-ho in Vienna Andreas Schirmer To Yu-ho: Itinerant Expat, Pioneering Archeologist, Purged Scholar Hong Sŏn-p’yo Sound Recordings of Koreans in the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv: The Voices of To Yu-ho (1934) and Kim Kyŏng-han (1944) Christian Lewarth Memories of To Yu-ho: A Personal Reminiscence Helga Picht Han Hŭng-su in Vienna Andreas Schirmer Han Hŭng-su in German-Occupied Prague Zdenka Klöslová Han Hŭng-su in Post-War Prague and His Return to Korea Zdenka Klöslová Han Hŭng-su in Moscow Ekaterina Pokholkova Bibliography of Han Hŭng-su: Published and Unpublished Books, Articles and Translations (1935–1954) Jaroslav Olša jr. and Andreas Schirmer Alice Hyun: Spy or Revolutionary? Jung Byung Joon Doctor Wellington Chung: The Tale of a Korean-American Doctor Serving in Czechoslovakia Vladimír Hlásny Image Credits Contributors Volume 3 Central Europeans in Korea Introduction Andreas Schirmer and Christian Lewarth The Long Path before the Establishment of Formal Ties between AustroHungaria and Chosŏn Korea Hans-Alexander Kneider Austrian Missionaries and Korea Werner Koidl Haas, Rosenbaum, Steinbeck, and Krips: Early Danubians in Chosŏn Korea Robert Neff An Austrian Globetrotter in Korea in the Wake of the Sino-Japanese War: Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg and His Summer’s Journey to the Land of the Morning Calm Veronika Shin Hungarian Visitors to Korea up to 1910 Mózes Csoma The Hopp and Bozóky Collections of Old Korean Photographs in Budapest’s Ferenc Hopp Museum Beatrix Mecsi Through the Eyes of Czech Legionnaires: Koreans in the Russian Maritimes (1918–1920) Zdenka Klöslová Koreans through the Eyes of Austrian Artists, 1911–1919 Werner Koidl and Andreas Schirmer Koreans in the Russian Maritime Territory as Depicted by Czech Artists Zdenka Klöslová Alice Schalek ― An Austrian Photojournalist in Korea, 1911 and 1923 Christian Lewarth Alma Karlin in Korea: A Slovenian Woman’s Observations of Land and People Chikako Shigemori Bučar Hungarian Sympathy for the Korean Freedom Struggle of the 1920s and 30s Mózes Csoma A Letter from Korea: Austrian Atomic Bomb Pioneer Fritz Hansgirg Writing from Hŭngnam in 1935 Bill Streifer Austrians in Korea from 1945 to 1953 Werner Koidl and Patrick Vierthaler Late 19th to Mid-20th Century Contacts between Koreans and Poles: A Testament to Common Fate and Mutual Empathy Lee Min-heui Image Credits Contributors Editor’s Note Koreans and Central Europeans: Informal Contacts up to 1950 is a three-volume book about early relations between Koreans and Central Europeans, focusing on reallife interpersonal encounters, and including revelations about the reception of Korean things in Central Europe. This first volume, Berlin Koreans and Pictured Koreans, exclusively features research of Frank Hoffmann, as it is distinguished from the chapters of the forthcoming volumes in connecting the Korean–European encounter to Germany, which is often perceived as somehow oscillating between “Western” and “Central” Europe. The forthcoming two volumes will follow developments in what was the Habsburg Monarchy and in successor states after its demise, and voyagers from those countries to Korea and subsequent encounters. This book owes its inception to the Korea Foundation for providing funding when this was still just an idea. In January 2012, a two-day conference at the University of Vienna hosting over a dozen scholars generated the skeleton for most of the chapters. The Austrian Ministry for European and International Affairs provided substantial extra funding based on the significance and timeliness of our research during the commemoration of the 120th anniversary of the signing of the first treaty between Korea and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (in 1892) and the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the ROK and the Republic of Austria (in 1953). The Youngsan Company (namely CEO Jongbum Park) with its headquarters in Vienna, the AVL Company (namely CEO Helmut List, an honorary consul of the ROK), and Hyundai Austria helped us with additional sponsorship. The overly ambitious original goal of this project was to have contributors develop their papers into chapters, edit them, and submit the completed manuscript for publication within one year. Yet, in the compilation of this three-volume work, some planned contributions were never completed and others were sought after and incorporated because the topics and contents were so promising. As the chapters improved and the scope of the book expanded substantively and conceptually, we were determined to publish a book that would not look like a conference proceeding but would stand up to any standard. Thus we had to seek out additional funding. At that point, luckily, when asked for permission to print a very fine 1912 drawing of two Korean women by the Austrian Hans Böhler, the owners Raj and Grace Dhawan took a strong interest in this project and donated a substantial amount that helped cover expenses. Andreas Schirmer But when all of our other funding was exhausted, Changro Im, CEO of Euroscope, came to our rescue. Two times he made genourous private gifts to help move this project to completion, subsidizing numerous tail end costs, such as unforeseen fees for publication rights, for additional professional copy editing, as well as for extra expenses associated with printing the significantly expanded 800+ page book in three volumes, instead of one. Mr. Imʼs genuine interest in the topic of this book and his conviction of its value made his financial support all the more precious and encouraging. This three-volume book could never have been completed without the persistence and enthusiasm of Christian Lewarth, who followed this project out of pure conviction — no, immersed himself in this project — from the very start, helping a number of contributors develop their papers into full-fledged chapters, shouldering much of the translation work and joining in the work of reading and rereading most of the chapters, suggesting many improvements, and sacrificing countless hours and evenings. He shares in the credits as the joint editor of the third volume, but my debt to him goes far beyond that. Right from the start, Patrick Vierthaler was employed as project assistant and assumed an important role, administering, with his talent for structured procedure and organization, the constant cycle of improvements, being helpful to an extent far beyond his official capacity. Frank Hoffmann took on many tasks that would otherwise have been our responsibility, and also helped enormously in raising our awareness of problems and upgrading our editing standards. The ceaseless exchanges with him were invaluable to me. His skills and his sense of design, expression, and argument have left a deep imprint on all three volumes. As copy editors, Jim Thomas and Brian Folk invested much more than we could have asked, far exceeding the conventional work of “copy editing.” As colleagues in the field, both made very substantive as well as linguistic improvements that enhanced the finished texts. They endured stress and exchanged countless mails and made countless checks and counterchecks with individual authors as well as with me. We trust their work makes this book a good read. Several of the contributors voluntarily took a larger part in contributing to the development of the overall project, helping with reading and scouting out those never identified small mistakes and problems. In addition to Christian Lewarth and Frank Hoffmann, I would especially like to thank Lee Chang-hyun, Lee Min-heui, Vladimír Hlásny, Zdenka Klöslová, and Werner Koidl in this connection. There are obviously others to thank for various contributions. Brad Ayers served as a very dedicated copy editor and proof reader during the first stages of this project, but was forced to pull out. Jan Schindler served as project assistant in the last stages x Editor’s Note and helped getting corrections and improvements implemented. I would like to single out Norbert Eigner, Philipp Haas, Susan Jo, Lilith Samer, Ingomar Stöller, and Soomin Yang for various forms of assistance. Of course, a voluminous book like this involves — on all kinds of levels and capacities — many more people than I can cite here. So I cut this short, without forgetting all of their help and not omitting them in my thankful memory. As for more specific aid that contributors received while writing their chapters or having them edited, there are occasionally special acknowledgements attached to those chapters. We are also grateful to numerous archives and institutions, which are acknowledged within each chapter or in the image credits. Lastly, we are indebted to our publisher, Michael Ritter, who I fear has made a great sacrifice by putting scholarship before profit. Andreas Schirmer University of Vienna xi Introduction Andreas SCHIRMER Lost and unexpected historical records continue to be discovered, sometimes gaining media attention throughout the world. In historical areas that seem completely exhausted or lacking adequate records, truly new findings are all the more surprising. When an old document is found, when an artifact is excavated, when the restoration of an old house suddenly opens up a hidden room and thus a window into the past, we celebrate — or historians, at least, celebrate — such discoveries, eager to integrate them into the historical record or probe whether they can challenge the accepted image of the past and rewrite it. The initial impetus for this project was our recognition that we, as well as contemporary Koreans in Vienna, had little inkling about the Koreans who lived in Vienna for some time eight decades ago and that many discoveries could be made based on substantial records that were buried in letters, archival newspapers, and institutional archives. We also became increasingly aware of the lack of knowledge about Austrians in Korea before 1950. Originally envisioning “the Habsburg Empire and its successor states” as our scope of research, we then redefined it as Central Europe, in a broader sense of the term. I extended invitations to other scholars, incorporating, after a long process of editing, thirty-one chapters, all addressing encounters between Central Europeans and Koreans. This does not aim to be a comprehensive history or an encyclopedic account of this subject, however. The sheer numbers of Koreans in Europe and their subsequent influence make evident the rich potential of this research. Official colonial era Japanese documents in 1925 recorded at least 258 Koreans in Europe as a whole. While this may not seem to be a large number, almost all of the later returnees would assume important roles in politics and culture in colonial and post-liberation Korea, in both South and North. In the heyday of 1925 — again according to official records — there were 53 Koreans in Germany, 32 of them students. Bear in mind that Korea’s only university, newly founded in Seoul (Keijō), accepted no more than 103 Korean students at that time, while in Japan proper only 214 Korean students were registered at full-fledged universities. Speaking of discoveries from the period of Korea’s past that concern us here, anything related to the fight for independence gains a great deal of attention. Yet, 1 Andreas Schirmer whatever may be revealed by new knowledge of interactions between Koreans and Central Europeans before the middle of the 20th century — whatever it confirms, contradicts or modifies vis-à-vis the existing record — it should be acknowledged in their own right, regardless of whether it serves any agenda or may result in political instrumentalization. Despite regrettable backward steps, like the dismantling of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission or the recent push to impose state-approved history textbooks written by government-sponsored authors for public education, surely the time has passed when history could simply be buried, when governments incubated memory,* silencing victims and survivors and preventing the commemoration of massacres and the pursuit of redress. Korea’s democratization has put an end to muting people who are unwilling to forget. But wariness over touchy and sensitive matters has lingered on as an aftereffect. Yet, even that has significantly waned and most of the fearfulness of getting into trouble or being disadvantaged for showing interest in sensitive matters of the past is gone. For a long time, however, that wariness, especially in dealing with wŏlbukcha (intellectuals opting for the North who immediately became anathema in the South), was mirrored in the obvious reluctance to thoroughly investigate the history of Koreans who stayed in Europe before the Korean War. Purported collaboration among some of these people (or the probability that such collaboration might come to light) may also have made the history of the first Koreans living in Europe an awkward topic. Despite currents in recent Korean history that might seem to contradict this (e.g. the ideological thaw that began in the late 1980s and the confiscation of the property of the descendants of collaborators), these are — unless we content ourselves with trivial explanations — the deep-seated reasons for why Koreans have, until recently, shied away from digging too deep into the backgrounds of that small, precious group of Koreans who stayed in Europe before liberation. At the beginning of this project, a small group of us maintained a working blog, collecting materials and details. We asked ourselves how far we could go beyond simple fact-finding, beyond the mere collection of information. There was a resistance to subsuming our research and our pursuit of new “findings” within one explicit interpretive framework. Indeed, finding new discoveries has been the primary concern of this project, not establishing new theories. Yet, this should not be taken as an admission of naïve positivism, but as a form of scholarly pragmatism: digging out this or that photo, recording, manuscript, or unrecorded memory opens up additional windows to the past — and we wanted such basic work to be given due credit. We * 2 Refer to Bruce Cumings in “(De)Memorializing the Korean War: A Critical Intervention,” a remarkable issue of Cross-Currents, whose epilogue begins: “A curiosity of South Korea’s history is the way in which dictatorships incubate memory” (Cross-Currents 14, March 2015, 234). Introduction sought to ensure that substantial findings would not be withheld due to the reluctance to frame these findings, to present theory or situate those findings within a larger historical narrative or debate. This enterprise began as an effort to promote research and to make public the significant findings of some colleagues. Ultimately we also included chapters that, while full of newly discovered findings, are at the same time very “narrative.” Some are even rich with what might be called theory imbued with empiricism. This is nowhere more evident than in the three selections assembled in the first volume of this book. Frank Hoffmann’s first chapter, with its cogent title “The Berlin Koreans,” which comprises nearly a book in itself, draws out the fascinating life-stories, activities, and legacies of a dozen Korean individuals (including the very first Korean student in Germany) who are bound together by their commonality as “Berlin Koreans.” All of them lived in Berlin for several years over a span of more than two decades between 1909 and the mid-1940s. Hoffmann’s account is much more than a simple biographic rendering of those early Korean residents of the German capital. The rich panorama that unfolds through Hoffmann’s narration exposes layer after layer of historical relationships and connections. This reveals numerous other Korean figures (including many who visited Berlin or lived in other parts of Germany at that time). Some of the stories Hoffmann tells would make a great novel; but he never leaves us wanting for a different genre. Indeed, at times this story of the Berlin Koreans unfolds like a murder mystery, exposing larger background issues and intertwined threads of motifs lurking beneath the surface. One astonishing discovery chases the next. A veritable breakthrough in this field,** Hoffmann’s work on the Berlin Koreans illuminates and supplements our image of Koreans as a whole at that time, in thought-provoking and sometimes confounding ways. His chapter also has the merit of expanding and challenging our conventional understanding of colonial modernity. Many of the details Hoffmann presents are as surprising as they are telling. The political and cultural activities of Koreans who went to Berlin to study (and to work and make a living) paralleled developments back in the Japanese Empire, thus repro** The list of previous publications in this field is not long. Most prominent are Hong Sŏnp’yo’s work on Korean independence movement activists in Germany during the 1920s (2006), Frank Hoffmann’s article (1991) on the Korean graphic artist and painter Pae Unsŏng in Berlin, Yi Kyŏng-bun’s book (2007) and several articles on the composer of the South Korean national anthem and his career in Berlin, and several studies by Ko Yŏng-gŭn and others on the leftist intellectual and linguist Yi Kŭng-no and his time in Berlin. All of these are in Korean. Andreas Schirmer has published extensive research in German on Kim Chae-wŏn, a Korean who studied in Munich. Hoffmann cites all of these sources in his chapter. Beyond them are several German and Korean articles and books by and about the Bavaria-based writer Mirok Li, as well as various publications about German-Korean relations where we find scattered passages about some Koreans in Germany during the first half of the 20th century. 3 Andreas Schirmer ducing colonial conditions outside of Japanese occupied Korea. Likewise, the political activities of the Berlin Koreans consistently parallel the general political climate of Wilhelmine, Weimar Republican, and Nazi Germany, as Hoffmann convincingly argues. We get the impression that these Berlin Koreans were children of their times, swimming with the current. When the anarchist and communist movements gained strength after Germany’s defeat in World War I, these Koreans joined in that. When the climate fostered a more vociferous demand for Korean independence, this was again reflected in the activities of Koreans in Berlin. After Hitler’s takeover, several of the Berlin Koreans apparently got very cozy with the Nazis while simultaneously working with and for the Japanese regime. As citizens of the Japanese Empire, Koreans benefited from the “honorary Aryan” designation that the Nazis inofficially assigned to the entire Japanese “race.” One might argue that the Koreans who opted to stay for any length of time in Nazi Germany would have approved of the conditions there. There were others, of course, who clearly loathed the Nazi regime, such as To Yu-ho, who will be featured in the second volume of this book. To Yu-ho wrote home to Korea in 1932: “the one thing that should disappear from Germany is Hitlerism;” he left Frankfurt for Vienna in 1933, the year of the Nazi seizure of power, and later claimed that he was even imprisoned. But we will leave the details of that for the second and third volumes. Even while assisting the Nazis and the Japanese, the Berlin Koreans of those days — students and professionals alike — remained patriotic in their own minds, like many Korean elites back home who were simultaneously and dilemmatically nationalist and pro-Japanese. In this connection, the role of the conductor and composer An Ik-t’ae, who is now acknowledged to have collaborated, seems to be more the rule than the exception. Some of the Koreans in Berlin give the impression that, ultimately, they were busy just muddling through; some were outright leftists, while others embodied another strong current: that of Korean fascism. We get the creepy feeling that some of those seen here exhibit tendencies that eventually come to dominate the South Korean political landscape after liberation. Frank Hoffmann’s research will have an enduring legacy. Offering a wealth of new findings that are unique discoveries in their own right — while exerting a free-handed command of all the information, old and new, supplemented by rich scholarship on the relevant contexts — he has compellingly identified a very specific sociotope, a sphere of Korean colonial modernity that emerged outside of the confines of the Japanese Empire, offering a new take on the past from a novel angle. The second chapter of this volume, “Modular Spectacle,” explores the early 20th century Western fetish with things “Oriental.” Frank Hoffmann’s probing analysis of a trading card set depicting Korea will trigger surprise and perhaps even something 4 Introduction between amusement and dismay. Drawing from his background as an art historian, Hoffmann very profitably illustrates a variety of interrelated issues. His captivating analysis — matched by magnificent illustrations that, again, are never mere accessories but always pivotal to his argument — brings together numerous related issues: early corporate advertising, international trade, emergent nationalism within imperial powers, perceptions of colonialism among Europeans, the lively exchange of photographs and reproductions of artworks within the print media and advertising industries in Western colonial powers. Named after Justus von Liebig, the famous German organic chemist who, among many other discoveries, developed a method for meat processing, Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company was very creative in promoting its products. From 1875 to 1975, the company issued high quality trading cards. Similar cards of varying quality were commonly used by numerous other brands as well for marketing products. Packaged with consumer goods, these cards became highly popular collector’s items for adults as well as children. They are acknowledged to have contributed significantly to Liebig’s success. The Liebig card set depicting Korea was issued in 1904 during the Russo-Japanese War, a time when Korea was headline news unlike ever before. The images of Korea on the cards are opulent displays of imaginary exotica and examples of fabricated Orientalized fantasy places. Hoffmann astutely shows that the imagery was obviously assembled from ready-made templates or models of figurative elements of exotic people (their appearance, attire, customs and way of life) and places in “the Orient” or the Far East (whereby “the Orient” subsumed the Far East) and then altered and modulated into new images through the whim of advertising designers and press artists. Thus, just by adding Korean hats and making the clothing look more Korean, a scene from Shanghai or elsewhere in Asia could end up attributed to Seoul, or the scene of stilt jumping in a Spring festival in southeastern China might be refashioned as stilt jumping in Korea where such entertainment was unheard of. In an extreme case, one of the cards depicts a “Korean lady” adjacent to the main image; but she looks nothing like a Korean; the only Korean element is the word “Korean” in the caption. As Hoffmann points out, the practice of free or uninhibited modulation resulted in “fantasy places with real-world names.” The author also explains how this modular manufacturing of images fits into our own, that is, European, cultural and art historical practices, much as the practice of modulating images in East Asian traditional brush painting (landscape painting). Here we learn that the assumed differences of civilization between the colonized and the colonizer, between East and West, are belied by the fact that the visualization of pre-colonial or colonialized peoples and cultures could operate in such “unscientific” ways in early 20th century Europe. 5 Andreas Schirmer The third and last chapter, “Ultra-Right Modernism, Colonialism, and a Korean Idol,” explains why a changsŭng, a Korean village guardian or totem pole, is depicted in The Missionary, a famous expressionist painting by Emil Nolde. What are the reasons and circumstances behind this appropriation and manipulation of the image of this Korean object by a man who became the most popular modernist artist and expressionist painter in Germany of the 20th century? To answer this intriguing question, Hoffmann again sets out on an investigation that is filled with surprises and thought-provoking insights in an equally ingeniously illustrated text. Hoffmann documents how the image of the changsŭng in Nolde’s 1912 painting was modeled on a specimen in the Berlin Ethnological Museum collection. Nolde’s entire painting was assembled using three artifacts that were appropriated and adjusted from there — as his extant sketches make very obvious. A political message is commonly attributed to the painting, based on the artist’s anti-colonialist stance, which is substantiated by views Nolde expressed in a number of his letters and writings from that time. Ironically enough, Nolde viewed the symbolism of the changsŭng in much the same terms as the 1980s minjung movement, which — after the changsŭng had almost completely disappeared — offered up an alternative history based on village egalitarianism and the purportedly authentic culture of mutual solidarity among Korean commoners, as opposed to the highbrow culture of the dynastic ruling class or, in modern times, capitalist exploitation by Japanese colonizers and later by Korea’s own authoritarian regime. Changsŭng are finally revived as an object of nostalgia and consumer tradition, which Hoffmann also touches on in this chapter. One of the twists in Hoffmann’s account is that Nolde’s motif, the changsŭng itself, was probably not even Korean-made, but could well have been produced by Japanese craftsmen in Chemulp’o — at least there is strong evidence for this. Similarly, in a coda (that once again bears the imprint of his investigative style) Hoffmann refutes the claim that the images of four masks in another painting by Nolde could have all been modeled after Korean masks. On a more general level, the author exposes approaches to the “Oriental,” the exotic Other, during the first half of the 20th century in German modernist art. Hoffmann argues that modernism and specifically expressionism in Germany were informed by two prevalent, yet competing, philosophies: social Darwinism versus German idealism and romanticism. The influence of these schools within German expressionism compelled expressionists to seek out “primitive,” primordial, and “folk art” motifs from “exotic” cultures as central subjects of their artworks. This largely defined how Asian and Oceanic culture were received at the time. German modernism ultimately saw the culture of the Far Eastern “Other” as a reservoir of new motifs that could supposedly help revive the ancient, now idealized, “originality” of the West, or its primitive roots and creative powers. 6 Introduction Primitivist aesthetics values what is perceived as backward. This is paralleled in Nolde’s paradoxical blend of “cosmopolitanism” and “ultra-right” positions. In other words, as romanticism, reform, revolution, and ultra-right movements often coexisted and intertwined, the painter epitomizes his times as a product of dominant currents of thinking and the mainstream intellectual milieu. Emil Nolde’s personal encounter with Korea is of special interest, given that the main theme of this three-volume book is interpersonal cross-cultural connections. Nolde completed The Missionary the year before he ever set foot on Korean soil. In contrast to the six weeks Nolde and his wife Ada spent in Japan and China, they were only in Korea for a few days. And Nolde brought home only two sketches of Korea, one of a Korean grandfather and the second of a Japanese geisha. Aside from that, Nolde’s visit to Korea had no measureable influence on his artistic work. His wife Ada, however, wrote an enthusiastic report (based on her diary), praising the country and its people: “Seoul, Seoul, we will never forget you with your beautiful Koreans all dressed in white, your charming colorful children, with your palace with the lotus pond, where the sweetest colorful children play in the afternoon sun.” She also intimates cherishing her fond memories of their visit to the royal tombs near Seoul. And in a letter to an old friend, Nolde himself also attested to the positive impression Korea left on him. The research Hoffmann presents in this volume is consistently meticulous, wonderfully detailed, and commendably well-documented. His historical narratives are accompanied by a cornucopia of illustrations that are never simple glosses or happenstance decorations but fitting visual testimony and poignant evidence for each case in point. All in all, these three chapters unveil a stunning array of previously unknown or unexamined sources and facts as well as of compelling and persuading interpretations. 7 1 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s Frank HOFFMANN The history of Koreans studying and working in the German capital is in many ways a case in point of Jean Paul’s frequently quoted observation that Berlin is not so much a city as the world in miniature. Berlin is during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the unrivaled center of scientific research and academic education in the Western World. It attracts many international students of medicine, law, engineering, physics, philosophy, and political science, including a number of elite Korean students who would later shape the politics and culture of postliberation North and South Korea. Yet, while we would expect Berlin’s cosmopolitanism, eclecticism, and vibrant modernity to take the young Korean academics and professionals highlighted in this chapter onto a very different path than those they left behind, the Japanese Empire and its own project of modernity, in one way or another, continue to exert a strong hold over them — even living half a world away from Korea or Japan. Berlin itself goes through a series of rapid, major transformations, from monarchism, through an unfinished communist revolution, to an unstable democracy that ends in fascism. Add to this two lost world wars, the second of which turns the world-in-miniature that was Berlin into a mere “rubble-heap near Potsdam,” 1 as Brecht succinctly put it. Looking at the rough and often violent political fights, the long and disastrous economic depression and, as a reaction to and within that, the essential modernist changes of the cultural life that defines the Roaring Twenties, Hobsbawm’s notion of the Thirty-One-Year World War 2 seems most apt. The Koreans who were to go to the German metropolis jumped out of one political boiling pot into another. Korea, during this same period, is transformed from a weak but independent nation into a colony. It finds itself subsumed by the expanding Japanese Empire; and its youth, both on and off the peninsula, experiment with many of the same political systems and ideologies as the Berliners: monarchism (or its remnants), democracy, 1 2 Bertolt Brecht, Werke: Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Werner Hecht et al., vol. 27, Journale 2: 1941–1955 [Journals 2: 1941–1955] (Berlin and Frankfurt am Main: Aufbau-Verlag and Suhrkamp, 1995), 281. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of non-English quotations in this chapter are the author’s. See Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), 52. Hobsbawm himself left Berlin in 1933. 9 Frank Hoffmann anarchism, and communism. The immutable and unifying objective of most Koreans up to the early 1930s, however, is to regain national independence. Later, though, a large cross-section identifies with the expanding Imperial Japanese Empire. This chapter examines the lives of twelve of the Berlin Koreans, documenting and briefly discussing their connections to political movements and to other overseas Korean communities, as well as their activities and achievements. It sketches out the lives of An Pong-gŭn, a self-made business man and devoted representative of Korean independence and culture who started out as an assistant to a missionary; Kim Chung-se, a scholar of classical Chinese Buddhist and Confucian scriptures who managed to continue in Berlin what he had done back home; Yi Kŭng-no, a highly intellectual and fast learning socialist and later linguist who used science to work for a modern and independent Korea while on the way having established what may well be called the first Korean studies courses in Germany; Kim Chun-yŏn, a leftist independence activist and leading figure of the Korean Marxist-Leninist movement who even translated Stalin, but immediately after liberation turned into a passionate anticommunist; Ko Il-ch’ŏng, an independence activist who turned into a venture capitalist and collaborator; Yi Kang-guk, a professional revolutionary and underground activist who was purged and killed by his own party once he had accomplished his major patriotic and socialist objectives; Pae Un-sŏng, an apolitical graphic artist and painter who worked for the Japanese while in Berlin and Paris in order to attain his own goals of fame and wealth, but still ended up in the communist North; An Ik-t’ae, a talented conductor and composer who joined the Third Reich from the U.S. for some crumbs of fame (and completed his composition of the later South Korean national anthem in Berlin) before finally emigrating to yet another fascist dictatorship; Kuni Masami (aka Pak Yŏng-in), a modernist dancer who adopted a Japanese persona and concealed his Korean identity, and allowed himself to be a tool of Goebbels’ war propaganda efforts while spying on the Nazis for their Japanese allies; Chang Kŭk, a highly talented and well trained aeronautics student and technician who worked within the institutional frame of technological cooperation between Germany and Japan to assist the Nazis in constructing wartime bomber motors; Kim Paek-p’yŏng, a physical anthropologist and physician who worked in the core group of Nazi eugenicists and race researchers, providing the NS regime with the scientific cover to carry out mass sterilizations, ethnic cleansing, and the Holocaust; and finally Kang Sehyŏng, an avowed full-time blood-and-soil NS propagandist who managed to combine Nazism with Japanese colonial ideologies and Korean nationalism. The Berlin Koreans show how the special conditions that account for colonial modernity, as we have come to name and define it since the 1990s, reached well beyond the borders of colonial empire. This finding then opens up a new set of vexing questions that challenge prevailing assumptions about how and to what extent the Korean modernity project was tied to a specific institutional framework. 10 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s 1. An Pong-gŭn: The Martyred Hero’s Cousin Our excursion begins in 1920 in Shanghai, China, where many of the threads of our Berlin story converge. We can begin tracing those threads from Shanghai by looking at two Koreans who made their way to Germany. The Korean Empire lost its sovereignty at the end of 1905 when Japan won the Russo-Japanese War and, through force, immediately subjugated the nation into protectorate status, with Itō Hirobumi 伊藤博文 as the first Resident-General of Chōsen. It was more than just a coincidence that Itō had once gone to study constitutional law in Berlin. Indeed, half of the subsequent governor-generals in colonial Korea had gone to Berlin to study law or military studies, where they gained the tools to rule and administer modern empires and their colonies.3 The transformation of Korea’s status into an actual colony five years later, when annexed by Imperial Japan, was little more than a formality. This was truly a new world order in which Japan joined the ranks with Great Britain, France, and other Western colonial powers as one among equals. Reacting to the new situation, thousands of Koreans immediately began to engage in active resistance, even taking up arms against the Japanese. Yet, only the mass mobilization of hundreds of thousands of Koreans in the 1919 March First Movement for independence, simultaneously and all over the country, would truly succeed in challenging the Japanese colonial rulers to the degree that they deemed it necessary to change colonial policy: loosening harsh and suppressive rules; sanctioning more freedom of speech by allowing the founding of more Korean language newspapers, magazines, and other media; and permitting the establishment of institutions of higher education and the promotion of many cultural policies that would immediately and drastically have a positive impact on living conditions and drive rapid modernization. By the time these momentous developments were occurring, some wealthy Korean families had already spent the previous decade sending their children to 3 Itō, who was responsible for drafting the Japanese constitution of 1889, had studied constitutional law at Berlin University between May 1882 and February the following year. Governor-General Yamanashi Hanzō 山梨半造 (in office 1927–1929) was in Berlin and Dresden for Military Studies from August 1898 to October 1902, while also attached to the Prussian army as an officer; the same goes for Governor-General Ugaki Kazushige 宇垣 一成 (1927 and 1931–1936), in Germany from 1902 to 1904 and 1906 to 1907, and for Korea’s last Governor-General, Abe Nobuyuki 阿部信行 (1944–1945), in Germany from 1910 to 1913, both in Berlin and other locations. Many other high-ranking officers and bureaucrats in the colonial apparatus had also studied in Germany, e.g. Kawashima Yoshiyuki 川島義之, in the early 1930s Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Armed Forces in Korea, and Suzuki Atsushi 鈴木厚, Director of Finances of the Government-General of Chōsen. One study calculates that until the early 1930s, depending on the year, 60 to 80% of all Japanese students in the West had chosen German universities. Up until 1914 alone the military officers studying in Germany numbered several hundred. See Rudolf Hartmann, “Japanische Offiziere im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 1870–1914” [Japanese officers in the German Empire, 1870–1914], Japonica Humboldtiana 11 (2007): 93–158. 11 Frank Hoffmann study in Japan’s modern Western-style universities and art academies, but from the early 1920s their numbers would grow exponentially. Significant numbers of young Koreans now also begin traveling to Europe and the United States. German universities and other institutions of higher learning, even after the devastation of World War I, were still unrivaled leaders in the hard sciences, especially in technical engineering and physics, but also in traditional fields such as philosophy and law. This scientific, educational, and cultural excellence — never quite to be regained — only came to an end through the cultural destruction wrought by Nazi rule. Of the Koreans going to Europe, those staying in Great Britain are usually businessmen, while those in France are either laborers or artists, and most of those making their way to Germany are university students. For example, Na Hye-sŏk 羅蕙錫, Korea’s first female modern oil painter and the author of feminist novels, is also well known for her role as a pioneer of the urban New Women’s movement, and stays in Paris in 1927 for the beaux-arts. Her husband Kim U-yŏng 金雨英 (1886–1958), until then Vice Consul for the Japanese in southern Manchuria, instead goes to Berlin to study law in hopes of further ascending the diplomatic ranks in the service of the Government-General of Korea.4 Some of the young men who leave Korea go for political reasons, such as avoiding imprisonment by the colonial authorities for their active participation in the March First Movement. One of these men, Mirok Li (Yi Mi-rŭk 李彌勒, aka Yiking Li, 1899–1950), is known to German language speakers for his 1946 novel Der Yalu fließt [The Yalu flows]. From about 1921 onwards, many other Koreans leave for Europe with legitimate Japanese passports in hand. During the entire colonial period, the majority of Korean students arrive in Berlin in 1922 and 1923 (also see footnote 66). Previously, most Koreans in Europe, like Mirok Li (whose actual Korean birth name is Yi Ŭi-gyŏng 李儀景), had come with passports issued by Chinese government offices.5 Li had fled to Shanghai since it was the nexus of Korean resistance to 4 5 12 Forever a theme for Korean pulp fiction writers, a sojourn in la ville des amoureux was not the smartest of tourist schedules a husband could have assigned to his young wife. Na opted for making her own choices and started a love affair with Ch’oe Rin 崔麟, a signatory of the March First Independence Declaration (who later, though, morphed into an open collaborator with the Japanese). Cf. Kim U-yŏng, Hoego [Memoirs] (Pusan: Sinsaeng Kongnonsa, 1954), 83–102. The passports, IDs, and travel documents of these Koreans were legitimate and valid, although they clearly contained some inaccurate personal information. Most student activists embarked on their journeys to Europe and the United States from Shanghai, where a Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea (hereafter Korean exile government) had been established. One of the reasons for this was that, operating within the territory of the French Concession, the exile government could cooperate with Chinese authorities sympathetic to the Korean anti-Japanese activities, especially prior to the Manchurian Incident. European local and government authorities, on the other hand, were more or less aware of the political situation and did not mind accepting these IDs. In official German documents we often find entries such as “identity established by means of Chinese passport.” Other The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s the Japanese, the place where the Korean exile government had been established, and the only place where Koreans not affiliated with the colonial government could obtain passports to go overseas. Like many others with plans for ‘bigger’ things than could be accomplished at home, the young father left his wife and children in Korea, never to return to his family or home. Modern Korean movies and novels usually depict Li and others like him as heroic, adventurous and romantic personalities who suffered from separation from family and country. The reality, though, is somewhat less romantic, often involving adultery, parallel marriages, and dual families. While the means of communication between the various exiled anti-Japanese compatriots was amazingly well organized, lively and effective, many had little or no contact with wives and children in Korea. Moreover, many of the long-term students and residents from Korea, even those from well-to-do families, were subject to the same severe economic struggles and hardships most German students and common people had to endure during those troubling years. Once in Shanghai, Mirok Li is lucky enough to be taken in by the An family. The An family is that of An Chung-gŭn 安重根, the man who assassinated Itō Hirobumi at the Harbin Railway Station in October 1909. Ever since this assassination, An has been accorded a most prominent place in the national pantheon of heroes, in both parts of Korea, as well as among the Korean communities in China. Likewise, Itō, the target, continues to be celebrated across the sea as the principal architect of Japan’s modernization project.6 An’s handprint with the last joint of his ring finger severed, a pledge to kill Itō, has become the icon of Korea’s national self-determination and independence, much as Van Gogh’s severed ear symbolizes the genius and unique obsessions of that artist. During the months of Mirok Li’s stay with the An family in Shanghai, he is a houseguest of An’s widow Kim A-ryŏ 金亞麗 and 6 documents, sometimes issued by the same office, designate the nationality of the same individual as “Korean” (in documents since the 1930s sometimes also as “Japanese”); we find every possible variation. In most cases, the Japanese embassies in Berlin, Paris, and London were aware of the identity of each person of interest and monitored the overseas Korean community as a whole. Most of the intelligence reports filed by Japanese Embassy security officers and then delivered to the Government-General of Chōsen were published in the 1970s and are now accessible online via the Korean History Information Center DB at URL #1. (Online materials are coded with the number sign and a sequential number; please refer to the corresponding listing at the end of this chapter’s list of references.) We may note that An Chung-gŭn’s act was not completely unexpected; it was not the first political assassination in modernizing Korea. Hong Chong-u 洪鍾宇, a former assistant to the Asian collection of the Guimet Museum in Paris, shot the leading pro-Japanese reformer Kim Ok-kyun 金玉均 in 1894. The Korean government awarded the assassin. And just the year before An shot Itō, two Korean Americans in San Francisco killed the proJapanese Durham Stevens, adviser to the Korean Foreign Office, which was covered widely in Korean news gazettes as a patriotic act. Later in the 1920s terrorist acts would become a common tool for the Korean exile government in Shanghai, managed by Kim Ku 金九 and usually with one of the An brothers involved. 13 Frank Hoffmann their two sons,7 a daughter, and the older of his two younger brothers, An Chŏng-gŭn 安定根. Also in residence is the hero’s cousin An Pong-gŭn 安奉根 (sometimes 安鳳根, aka Han Fongkeng or Han Fong Keng, and on occasion Han Pong-gŭn 韓鳳根, known to the Benedictines also as Bokum Joann An, 1888–ca. 1945).8 Li mentions his meeting with An Pong-gŭn in Der Yalu fließt,9 but it is his autobiographical text “Der Weg nach Westen” [The way west] that describes his encounter with the An family and specifically with this Cousin An, as he calls him, in far more detail.10 It is the hero’s brother’s decision to take Li into the family home. An Chŏng-gŭn himself had just recently come to join the Korean exile government in Shanghai. 7 8 9 10 14 Although, remarkably, Mirok Li never mentions An’s second son Chun-saeng 俊生, who later, as an adult, visited Korea to publicly apologize for his father’s assassination of Itō. Mirok Li simply censored him out of his autobiographic story, but Kim Ku, who had been very close to the An family and whose own parents had once found refugee at An Chunggŭn’s father’s residence, wanted to have him killed. See the (Ōsaka) Mainichi shimbun and the Keijō nippō of 19 October 1939, and Kim Ku, Paekpŏm ilchi: Paekpŏm Kim Ku chasŏ-jŏn [Paekpŏm ilchi: Paekpŏm Kim Ku’s autobiography], annot. To Chin-sun, rev. ed. (Seoul: Tolbege, 2002), 408. Several more members of the An family either found their way to Shanghai or were active in Korean opposition politics before and after liberation. Most notably, An Chung-gŭn’s youngest brother Kong-gŭn 恭根 (who worked closely with Kim Ku for many years and once even represented the Provisional Government in Moscow), his cousin An Kyŏng-gŭn 安敬根, and his nephew An U-saeng 安偶生 (also 安優生, An Kong-gŭn’s son), who worked after liberation as the secretary of Kim Ku, with whom he went to North Korea in 1948 to a joint North–South conference. He stayed in the North and held several offices. His remains are now buried in the Martyrs’ Cemetery near P’yŏngyang. In the 1930s this same An U-saeng was involved in the Esperanto movement with direct connections to Berlin. Cousin An Kyŏng-gŭn, on the other hand, was after liberation active in the Korean reunification movement and was sentenced to seven years in prison during the Park Chung Hee regime (1962–1979). It should further be noted that it was at the time, specifically among Koreans involved in the independence movement, common practice to use several if not many names and pseudonyms and also to use variations of how to write one’s name in Chinese characters (same pronunciation, different characters). Contemporary references, including those by An family members, alternate equally between using 奉 and 鳳 for the “pong” in An Ponggŭn’s given name. In his case though, one more obstacle for identifying him in sources is that there is frequent confusion in reports from 1916 onwards with his above-mentioned uncle An Kong-gŭn (with 恭 for “kong,” not “pong”). In short, An Kong-gŭn was never in Berlin while An Pong-gŭn never met with Lenin, not withstanding claims to the contrary. See e.g. Chosŏn sasangga ch’onggwan [A compendium of Korean thinkers], (Keijō: Samch’ŏllisa, 1933), 62, and the National Institute of Korean History’s Sidaebyŏl yŏnp’yo (kŭndaesa) [A chronology by period: Modern times], accessible online at URL #2. In his Yalu novel Li’s descriptions are very dense; he just identifies “Pongun” as one among four Korean students he hangs out with and also makes good use of literary imagery when describing the place he first settles in Germany. See Mirok Li, Der Yalu fließt: Eine Jugend in Korea [The Yalu flows: A Korean childhood] (Munich: R. Piper, 1946), 195– 196 and 213–215. See Mirok Li, “Der Weg nach Westen” [The way west], in Vom Yalu bis zur Isar: Erzählungen, ed. Kyu-Hwa Chung, 2nd ed. (St. Ottilien: EOS, 2011), especially 105–107. The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s Before that he had been active in the Russian Far East and in Puk-Kando 北間島 (today’s Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in northeastern China, across the border from Korea), where he helped orchestrate military resistance and, among other things, in November 1918 also co-organized the drafting of the first Korean independence declaration, the so-called “Muo Declaration of Korean Independence.”11 In the newly formed Shanghai government, An was responsible for fundraising, propaganda work, and initiating the publication of the Tongnip sinmun 獨立新聞, the exile government’s gazette. According to the account in his autobiography, Mirok Li assists An Pong-gŭn — Cousin An, that is — who is working for the exile government. Li thus also meets with many of the other exiled leaders and independence activists: major exiled Korean political leaders like the government’s Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, the socialist Yi Tong-hwi 李東煇; and An Ch’angho 安昌浩, the main leader of the Korean American immigrant community, who had gone over from San Francisco; Yŏ Un-hyŏng 呂運亨 (aka Lyuh Woon-hyung), a socialist and a member of the Koryŏ Communist Party who plays a major role in South Korea immediately after liberation until he is assassinated in 1947; as well as the celebrated Buddhist novelist and poet Yi Kwang-su 李光洙 , then serving as editor-in-chief of the Tongnip sinmun and probably the best known and most influential independence activist and role model for young Korean contemporaries, although he would in later years turn into a notorious collaborator with the Japanese.12 It is Cousin An who helps Mirok Li to leave China in order to study in Germany. Li gets a chance to study in Würzburg, Heidelberg, and Munich. We will meet him again later. But first let us follow An Pong-gŭn, who will finally settle down in Berlin. Mirok Li describes the friend with some critical distance, as their characters are far apart: Li is the only child, rather introverted, scholarly, but still attentionseeking, while An is clearly more sociable, extroverted and in Li’s view more of a non-scholarly happy-go-lucky, yet short-tempered, guy who has somewhat simplistic but clear ideas about how the world and politics work. For Mirok Li “Cousin An came from the other end of the world. He was younger than his cousin Chŏng-gŭn, at the end of his twenties.” He describes him as “of medium height with a round face, strongly-built and exhibiting no distinctive features, at the same time, full of life, brave and optimistic, passionate when praising and angry when rebuking.” 13 Li further notes An’s overzealous praise of European life, culture, ethics, and economic strength. And he spares no effort in using literary chicanery to mock An’s enthusiasm. It turns out that An had already been to Germany and even speaks the language. 11 12 13 For further details, see Frank Hoffmann, “The Muo Declaration: History in the Making (Translation and Commentary),” Korean Studies 13 (1989): 22–41. See Li, “Der Weg nach Westen,” 105 and 110–111. Ibid., 107. 15 Frank Hoffmann When Mirok Li came into the orbit of the An family, the esteem of the shy student among experienced military fighters and political leaders could hardly have been based on his anti-Japanese record (which was next-to-non-existent). Instead, Li’s ticket was his natal home, Haeju 海州 , in South Hwang- (Fig. 1) An Pong-gŭn (cousin of national hero An Chung-gŭn), Mirok Li, and Chang Kŭk (brother of later ROK Prime Minister Chang Myŏn), Bavaria 1940. hae Province, about 120 km north-west of Seoul, the hometown of the An family. There, the Ans figured among the wealthy, landed gentry. An Chung-gŭn’s grandfather had once been the magistrate of Chinhae 鎭海 and participated in the Kaehwap’a’s 開化派 1884 Palace Coup, and his father An T’ae-hun 安泰勳 was among the few youths selected to be sent to Japan to study the reforms there. The Ans were among the first families to become engaged in efforts to westernize and modernize their country; and with westernization came Catholicism. The clan thus was among the first wave of Catholic converts after the initiation of religious tolerance in the 1880s. Thousands of their farmer neighbors in Southern Hwanghae Province converted along with the Ans. The person responsible for this mass conversion to Christianity was another important figure who we should follow for a little while: Father Joseph Wilhelm (birth name Nicholas Joseph Marie Wilhelm, aka Hong Sŏk-ku 洪錫九, 1860–1938), known as “Miracle Wilhelm” for his missionary successes. In Mirok Li’s autobiography, after having reached Marseille on board the French steamer Paul Lecat at the end of a journey lasting several weeks, An and Li take the train through Lyon, Dijon, and Mulhouse to Strasbourg. By then, it is May 1920 and we read in Li’s text that An Pong-gŭn is headed to join that same Father Wilhelm at his home in the AlsaceLorraine region, while Li himself will take up residence with the German Benedictines at Münsterschwarzach Abbey in Bavaria. Without referring to him by name, Mirok Li still makes it clear that he would not have made it to Europe without the help of Father Wilhelm: “Just one request: give my heartfelt thanks to all your friends in Lorraine who have helped me! You know who to thank the most, and for what!”14 14 16 Ibid., 136. The entry of 26 May 1920 in the Annals of Münsterschwarzach Abbey (vol. 2: 1916–1927, pp. 304–306), however, informs us that Father Wilhelm and An Pong-gŭn did in fact accompany Mirok Li to Münsterschwarzach, where they stayed for some time. See Kyu-Hwa Chung, “Mirok Li — ein koreanisches Literatenschicksal in Bayern” [Mirok Li The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s It would be a misconception to think the family of national hero An Chung-gŭn had advocated for the lower classes, such as the illiterate tenant or slash-and-burn farmers who made up the vast majority of the Korean population at the time. At least in the late 19th century, the situation was more complicated than that. Had they succeeded — which they did not — reformers such as An Chung-gŭn’s father, who successfully fought against the Tonghak peasant army, not for it, would have turned Korea into a westernized, Christianized, modern nation-state shaped after the Japanese model. One may very well speculate as to whether the adoption of Christianity as part of the modernization package, differing fundamentally with the Japanese model, may have been a major obstacle that at least partially contributed to its failure. Be that as it may, the Tonghak Peasant Movement was strictly anti-Japanese, antiWestern, and anti-Catholic; but it was at the same time also anti-modern, and therefore failed to offer any economic or political strategies and policies that would have allowed Korea to respond successfully to the transformation in major power relationships in East Asia. While An Chung-gŭn’s own father had fought the Tonghak, his uncle An T’ae-gŏn 安泰健, the father of Mirok Li’s traveling companion Pong-gŭn, is mostly known for having instigated the so-called Catholic riots of 1897. Again, those riots were not pro-peasant, anti-government actions, but caused by Cousin An’s father overtaxing “his” peasants, possibly an illicit fundraising measure to support Catholic missionaries. The various historical source materials do not clearly reveal the purpose of his activities. With An T’ae-gŏn incarcerated in the county jailhouse, his brother (An Chung-gŭn’s father), together with Wilhelm and An’s men, try to free him by storming the magistrate’s office. Father Wilhelm, who leads the operation, seems quite convincing with his wooden stick, but both An brothers wind up in jail in the end. Yet, even after the failure of this forceful intervention, the magistrate does not dare touch Father Wilhelm, who goes on to save the An brothers from prosecution on accusations of misappropriating government revenues and organizing a private army.15 Father Wilhelm’s next visit to a prison to help a member of the An family — and this will not be the last time — is thirteen years later at Port Arthur (today’s Lüshun 15 — a Korean writer’s fate in Bavaria], in Interkulturalität und Deutschunterricht: Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Karl Stocker, eds. Kurt Franz and Horst Pointner (Munich: Ars Una, 1994), 39. For detailed analyses of the Catholic riots, Father Wilhelm’s role as a missionary and household priest for the An clan, as well as the harsh conflicts within the Catholic Church and with the Presbyterian missionaries, see the new scholarly discussions by Rausch and Moon: Franklin Rausch, “Conversion and Moral Ambiguity: An Chunggŭn, Nationalism and the Catholic Church in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Korea,” in Asia in the Making of Christianity: Conversion, Agency, and Indigeneity, 1600s to the Present, ed. Richard Fox Young and Jonathan A. Seitz (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 323–346; Yumi Moon, Populist Collaborators: The Ilchinhoe and the Japanese Colonization of Korea, 1896– 1910 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 50–58. 17 Frank Hoffmann 旅順). An Chung-gŭn had assassinated Itō Hirobumi and was awaiting execution. Rallying virtually the entire nation behind this one man, the three bullets that kill Itō shroud the earlier family history and put an end to any competing alternatives within the Korean modernization project. Those three bullets, instead, turn An immediately into a national hero, a hero (Fig. 2) Father Wilhelm (back turned to the viewer) and An’s two brothers visit An Chung-gŭn in prison, Port Arthur, 10 March 1910. who is advised even by his own mother not to ask for forgiveness and instead to die for his country as an unmitigated hero.16 Between March 8 and 10, 1910, Wilhelm visits him three times in prison, the last time together with An’s two brothers (see fig. 2). The missionary not only receives An’s last confession and gives him Last Rites, but he himself asks An’s forgiveness for having beaten him too hard ten years earlier.17 As a member of the French Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris, Father Wilhelm’s visit is a clear violation of the orders issued by Bishop Mutel in Seoul, the head of the French missionaries and the Catholic Church in Korea. What is more, just a few months later, in late December 1910, An Myŏng-gŭn 安明根, another cousin of An Chung-gŭn and also a pupil of Wilhelm, tries to assassinate Terauchi Masatake 寺内正毅, who has replaced Itō as Resident-General of Korea and then enacted the country’s annexation treaty to become the first Japanese Governor-General of Chōsen. In 1914, Mutel finally orders Father Wilhelm to leave Korea, seemingly complying with higher orders from the Vatican.18 All studies of Korean missionary history have Father Wilhelm leaving Korea for France in April 1914. In fact, “Miracle Wilhelm,” accompanied by “Cousin An” on his first German adventure, travels to Bavaria, not to France. Wilhelm’s relations with his French order are already strained by that time. Since 1909 he has been assisting the German Benedictines to establish their mission in Korea; and on returning to Europe, Wilhelm and An Pong-gŭn go to live at the St. Ottilien monastery 16 17 18 18 See Asahi shimbun, 17 February 1910. The details of Father Wilhelm’s visits and related documents were recorded and commented on by the Japanese prison interpreter, as rediscovered and published in 2002. For a good summary see P’yŏnghwa sinmun, 19 May 2002. See URL #3. The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s near Munich and in Münsterschwarzach.19 Archabbot Norbert Weber and the abbot of Münsterschwarzach Abbey, Placidus Vogel, had in 1911 visited Korea and been shown around by Father Wilhelm. Weber’s well-known book Im Lande der Morgenstille [In the land of the morning calm (1915 and 1923; see figs. 12 and 13 in this author’s “Ultra-Right Modernism” chapter in this volume)] is indeed full of references to Father Wilhelm. An entire chapter is dedicated to Wilhelm’s missionary achievements, the An family, and their visit to the An family residence.20 Weber’s preface to the book is dated 6 June 1914. Father Wilhelm and An Pong-gŭn (or at least Wilhelm alone) must surely have helped Weber editing the work for publication, as it is rich with detailed information and no one else then in St. Ottilien had any knowledge of Korea. Not surprisingly, in the archabbot’s book both An’s uncle An Chung-gŭn, the assassin, and Father Wilhelm appear as true heroes. All around, Wilhelm and Weber seem to be a match made in heaven: both come from poor, rural families, both achieve careers and a life-style only a missionary order could provide, both are hard-headed individualistic men who follow their own convictions and repeatedly disregard church hierarchies. Wilhelm with his over 7,000 converts had become an influential and highly respected man in Korea, while Weber had rose to become the head of the St. Ottilien Congregation, traveling all over the world and publishing “ethnographic” treatises like the above Morgenstille, which carries as the frontispiece a full-page portrait of himself. Wilhelm’s renown ends when his French order expels him from Korea in 1914, while Weber is forced out of his position as archabbot by his German order in 1930. Weber is quite sophisticated in fashioning himself as a kind of modern, enlightened, itinerant managing director for his monasteries, while serving his church and his fatherland’s colonial interests. The last chapter of his book, on the national and political importance of missionary work, presents a long passionate defense of the necessity of German colonialism and progressive colonial policies, describing how missionary work and the spiritual conversion that it brings are preconditions for the political and economic progress of the colonies and how large German corporations in particular will benefit from this.21 Explicitly recognized as a fellow latecomer to colonialism, Japan is clearly cast as a competitor on the Asian continent. Kiaochow Bay/Tsingtao (Jiaozhou Bay/Qingdao 膠州湾/青島), which is in fact taken over by the Japanese even before the book goes into print, is specifically mentioned as an 19 20 21 See Frumentius Renner, “Die Berufung der Benediktiner nach Korea und Manchukuo” [The vocation of the Benedictines to Korea and Manchukuo], in Der fünfarmige Leuchter: Beiträge zum Werden und Wirken der Benediktinerkongregation von St. Ottilien, vol. 2, ed. Frumentius Renner (St. Ottilien: EOS, 1971), 399. See Norbert Weber, Im Lande der Morgenstille: Reiseerinnerungen an Korea [In the land of the morning calm: A Korea travelogue] (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herdersche Verlagshandlung, 1915), 316–338. See ibid., 418–445. 19 Frank Hoffmann example. Helping Koreans in their efforts to strengthen their nation and working against the Japanese is regarded as contributing to the German national interest. In the context of this understanding of the world, Weber and Wilhelm must be considering the fact that having An Pong-gŭn as a disciple is a valuable opportunity: having the scion of a formerly powerful and still politically influential Korean family prominently engaged in the anti-Japanese movement under their wings is totally in line with their personal and ideological interests and convictions. Conversely, An and other Koreans are using the Benedictines as a stepping stone to Europe and as a convenient device for uncensored communication, money transfers, and the circulation of books and various other items between their overseas compatriots and activists on the peninsula. In any event, several archival documents prove that Father Wilhelm and An Pong-gŭn reside in Bavaria, southeastern Germany: first at St. Ottilien, near Munich, and then at the just reopened Münsterschwarzach Abbey, near Würzburg, 200 km to the north. This is An’s first adventure in Europe and will last for only two years. Just a few weeks after their arrival another Wilhelm, ruling in Berlin over the German Empire as Kaiser Wilhelm II, is led into war by the k.u.k. government of the Austrian Empire. At the time, Japan is a British ally and seizes the opportunity to easily gain control of German territories in East Asia and the Pacific: Japan’s most important territorial gain is Tsingtao, which enables the new colonial power to strengthen and extend its position in mainland China. On 4 August, Britain declares war on Germany and on 15 August Japan follows suit, by issuing an ultimatum to Germany demanding that it withdraw from and hand over control of its territories in China. Most of the Japanese nationals living in Germany had anticipated this outcome and manage to leave Germany in time, including the roughly 150 Japanese university students. On the 20th, three days before Japan formally declares war on the German Empire, the German police and military is ordered to take all Japanese nationals into protective custody (Schutzhaft) and detain them in police prisons and provisional internment camps.22 By September, a total of sixty to seventy civilians from the Japanese Empire are reported to be in protective custody. Among them are three Koreans: a young student in Hannover, a Mr. Kimm in Berlin (we will get to him soon enough), and An Pong-gŭn in Kaiserslautern.23 On the way to St. Ludwig Monastery, near Münsterschwarzach Abbey where Father Wilhelm and An plan to live for the next two years, An is taken into custody some time between the 20th and the 24th of August, apparently while in the company of Wilhelm. He is not released until the 2nd of October. Thus An, who like 22 23 20 See Rolf-Harald Wippich, “Internierung und Abschiebung von Japanern im Deutschen Reich im Jahr 1914” [Internment and deportation of Japanese in the German Reich in 1914], Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 55, no. 1 (2007): 23 and 26. See ibid., 28–29. The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s most Koreans favors a German victory in the war, because it would mean a Japanese defeat and the slight chance for Korea to regain its independence, spends five to six weeks in a police prison in Kaiserslautern.24 According to his report of the event, An suffers a great deal. There he is kept with about 60 other enemy internees — British, French, Russian, but not a single Japanese — and he is left to starve and almost beaten to death.25 On the 25th of August, Abbot Placidus Vogel of Münsterschwarzach writes a first letter to the Royal Bavarian Ministry of War, requesting An’s release: I, the undersigned, in the company of the Most Reverend Archabbot Nobertus Weber of St. Ottilien, conducted a study tour to Korea in 1911. On this occasion, over a period of three weeks, I also enjoyed the hospitality of the Catholic missionary Father Josef [Joseph] Wilhelm, a German-born man from Spicheren in the Lothringen [Lorraine] area, and at that time I also became acquainted with his attendant and parish catechist An Joann Bonkun. This summer the selfsame missionary was on a leisurely trip (Erholungsreise) with his attendant to visit his homeland. In the past few days, due to the outbreak of the war and following an invitation by the undersigned, he wanted to come here and bring the Korean An Bonkun here, so that he could be taught the German language in our monastery and trained to be an able catechist while the war goes on. However, on the way An Bonkun has been arrested in Kaiserslautern and, because of his Japanese citizenship, taken into protective 26 custody. In the same letter, Vogel continues trying to persuade the Ministry of War to have An released and allow him to stay with them, either in the St. Ludwig Monastery or at Münsterschwarzach Abbey. He also offers to serve as a guarantor for An “in person” with “any required warranty.” The second part of the letter lays out arguments in favor of his release, emphasizing that An has no political intentions, that he is a Korean without sympathy for Japan, and so forth. The War Ministry receives the letter two days later, but does not issue a response. Two weeks later, Archabbot Norbert Weber himself writes another letter to the Ministry of War. Weber also asks for An Pong-gŭn’s release, but this time suggests An stay at St. Ottilien. Like Vogel 24 25 26 Today that very prison in Kaiserslautern has been converted into a hotel, the Prison Hotel Alcatraz, still with barred windows and other “original features.” See MailOnline of 9 October 2013 (URL #4). An Pong-gŭn submitted a report about his daunting adventure to the newspaper Maeil sinbo in Seoul, see the 25 July 1916 issue. There, for unclear reasons, he is misidentified as An Chung-gŭn’s brother. Shorter versions of his story were published in the 22 July issue of the same paper and the 24 August issue of the Sinhan minbo in San Francisco. On 3 August, the Maeil sinbo carried one more article about An’s experiences in Germany, this time the article gives a somewhat less dramatic account of the activities he engaged in together with Father Wilhelm. Letter by Abbot Placidus Vogel to the Royal Bavarian Ministry of War, dated 25 August 1914, Bavarian State Archives, Section IV: War Archive, folder StV GKdo. II AK 169 (hereafter War Archive, AK 169). 21 Frank Hoffmann (Fig. 3) Father Joseph Wilhelm’s letter to Abbot Placidus Vogel, dated 18 September 1914, regarding An Pong-gŭn’s imprisonment and expected release. (© Bavarian State Archives. Section IV: War Archive, folder StV GKdo. II AK 169.) »... Once poor Johann is released, I will bring him to St. Ludwig. When he saw me at noon, he remained speechless and was sobbing for several minutes; I could have cried with him. What a misery he has gone through in there. Let’s hope that the answer from Würzburg will not be too much longer in coming, so I will be soon with him in St. Ludwig. The trip to Lothringen [Lorraine] will be done later.« 22 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s before, Weber also offers to serve as An’s guarantor “in person,” and in addition he underlines the trustworthiness of “P. Joseph Wilhelm — a citizen of the German Reich.”27 Another ten days later, after having gone to court, the District Attorney’s Office states that it does not object to An’s release. Meanwhile Father Wilhelm stays in Kaiserslautern the entire time waiting for An’s release. 28 Having moved from temporary accommodation in a local vicarage to a hotel, Wilhelm writes a short letter to Abbot Vogel, briefly describing An’s desperate situation (see fig. 3): “Once the poor Johann is released I will bring him to St. Ludwig. When he met me at noon he remained speechless and was sobbing for several minutes; I could have wept with him.”29 Several more letters and notes are exchanged, until Placidus Vogel receives a telegram on 2 October 1914 from the Deputy General Command II. Army Corps Würzburg, announcing that An will be released from prison.30 Father Wilhelm picks him up. An signs a formal “Protocol of Instructions”31 that Wilhelm has to translate for him and sign as well. An pledges not to take any sort of action against Germany or its allies, agrees not to change his residence, to report to the police on a daily basis, and to allow his correspondence to be monitored. In the coming days, Wilhelm and An arrive in Münsterschwarzach Abbey. In mid-December they request permission to move to nearby St. Ludwig, which is granted;32 nonetheless, the tripartite communication between the American Consulate in Nuremberg, the Deputy General Command II. Army Corps in Würzburg, and Placidus Vogel in Münsterschwarzach suggests that both have left for St. Ottlilien.33 (The United States, until it joins the war in 1917, represents Tōkyō’s diplomatic interests in Germany and thus tries to keep track of the whereabouts of Japanese citizens.) The informal nature of this note exchange, all conducted on the same sheet of paper, highlights the working relationship of the Benedictines with the local army 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 Letter by Archabbot Norbert Weber to the Royal Bavarian Ministry of War, dated 9 September 1914, War Archive, AK 169. See the note by District Office Kaiserslautern to Deputy General Command II. Army Corps Würzburg, dated 18 September 1914, and a telegram sent by Father Joseph Wilhelm, also to the Deputy General Command II. Army Corps Würzburg, same date, War Archive, AK 169. Letter by Father Joseph Wilhelm to Abbot Placidus Vogel, dated 18 September 1914, War Archive, AK 169. See telegram by Deputy General Command II. Army Corps Würzburg to Abbot Placidus Vogel, dated 2 October 1914, War Archive, AK 169. Protocol, signed by An Pong-gŭn and Father Joseph Wilhelm, not dated, War Archive, AK 169. See handwritten permit by Deputy General Command II. Army Corps Würzburg, dated 17 December 1914, War Archive, AK 169. See the letter by American Vice & Deputy Consular Ralph N. Dox in Nuremberg to Deputy General Command II. Army Corps Würzburg, dated 19 December 1914; handwritten information request to Abbot Vogel on reverse side by an officer of the Deputy General Command II. Army Corps Würzburg, dated 21 December 1914; a handwritten reply, also on the reverse, by Placidus Vogel, dated 23 December 1914, War Archive, AK 169. 23 Frank Hoffmann command. An is now allowed to travel around, as long as he does so with Wilhelm or another Catholic brother. Indeed, there is a bit more to this relationship between the Benedictine order and the military: with Archabbot Weber’s personal enthusiasm for kaiser and war, his padres have a hard time keeping him from enrolling himself in the Bavarian Army, though he goes on to encourage his congregation’s monks to do just that: a year after the outbreak of war, 135 have already done so, at least 43 of whom die fighting for the kaiser’s ambitions. At war’s end, the St. Ottilien Annals record 275 missionary monks who had enlisted in military service (and at Father Wilhelm’s French order, by the way, the same thing happens, with even higher losses). At Weber’s directions, St. Ottilien itself is converted into a wartime military hospital.34 The two new arrivals from Korea stay until mid-July 1915 with the German Benedictines before leaving to Alsace-Lorraine. The documents from the Ministry of War at the Bavarian State Archives show that Abbot Vogel applied for a (Fig. 4) Telegram by Deputy General Command XXI. Army Corps in Saarbrücken to transfer to the Deputy General Command II. Army Corps Würzburg, 8 July 1915; permitting An’s move Lorraine area to Kleinrosseln. (© Bavarian State Archives. Section IV: War Archive, folder StV GKdo. II AK 169.) on behalf of 34 24 See Beda Danzer, Die Beteiligung der Benediktinerkongregation von St. Ottilien (für Auswärtige Missionen) am Weltkrieg 1914–1918: Als Dankes- und Erinnerungsgabe in Liebe gewidmet den vom Felde heimkehrenden Mitbrüdern [The participation of the Benedictine Congregation of St. Ottilien (for Foreign Missions) in the World War 1914–1918: As a thank-you gift in love and remembrance dedicated to the brothers returning from war] (St. Ottilien: Erzabtei St. Ottilien, 1919); Cyrill Schäfer, Stella Maris: Größe und Grenzen des ersten Erzabtes von St. Ottilien P. Norbert Weber OSB 1870–1956 [Stella Maris: Significance and limitations of the first archabbot of St. Ottilien, P. Norbert Weber OSB 1870–1956], Ottilianer Reihe 3 (St. Ottilien: EOS, 2005), 90–95. The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s An.35 A briefing by the local district director, having been consulted by the military, states that Father Wilhelm has been assigned as the “2nd vicar” to the parish of Kleinrosseln (Petite-Rosselle), a village where his brother is the head teacher, and that the family would be “politically quite reliable.”36 The travel permit for An is granted on July 8th (see fig. 4).37 An Pong-gŭn, who works side by side with Wilhelm in Kleinrosseln, now speaks some German in addition to Korean and Japanese and prepares for a university education in mechanical engineering. The ongoing war changes everything, however. The Alsace-Lorraine region turns into the war’s most horrible battleground. Facing all of the hunger, misery, and violence in the ongoing war, An decides to return to Korea several months later via the neutral Netherlands. He gets arrested immediately after crossing the border on 26 April 1916. This time, it is the Japanese Embassy in the Netherlands that holds him as a detainee, accusing him of espionage for the Germans. On the one hand, this is a typical wartime story that illustrates how the stupefying logic of war works against those with complex national or ethnic identities. On the other hand, it is a good example of the slick and efficient operations of the embassy-based Japanese intelligence services, which seem to always know the real identity of every Korean in Europe. Japanese agents escort An to the Japanese Embassy in London and then all the way to Kobe, Japan. He is further interrogated and beaten up by the Japanese police agents before being shipped back to Korea.38 As was noted, a few years later An Pong-gŭn makes his way to Shanghai to support the new Korean government in exile and join some of his family members. He leaves behind his wife with his three small sons, never to see them again. Back in Europe, with Mirok Lee, he once more joins Father Wilhelm in his French–German border village (that now belongs to France). An’s whereabouts for the next couple of years are unclear. However, we know that he always stays in close contact with the Korean government in Shanghai and, among other things, arranges to have Korean students in exile sent to Germany. Kim Kap-su 金甲洙 (1894–1938), for example, is 35 36 37 38 See letter by Abbot Placius Vogel to Deputy General Command II. Army Corps Würzburg, dated 17 June 1915, with two comments on the reverse side by an officer Etzel from the II. Army Corps in Würzburg, agreeing to the petition on 22 June, and by another officer from the XXI. Army Corps in Saarbrücken, dated 26 June 1915, asking the district director in charge of Father Wilhelm’s village for an evaluation of the situation, War Archive, AK 169. Report by the district director of Forbach to Deputy General Command XXI. Army Corps Saarbrücken, dated 1 July 1915, War Archive, AK 169. See telegram by Deputy General Command XXI. Army Corps Saarbrücken to Deputy General Command II. Army Corps Würzburg, dated 8 July 1915, War Archive, AK 169. Contradicting these documents, an official biographical sketch of Wilhelm by his French order states that he served at a pastor of Dalem, another small village thirty kilometers west of the German city Saarbrücken, right across today’s French–German border, and that he only moved to Kleinrosseln (by then officially Petite-Rosselle) in 1919 (see URL #3). See the report about An’s story in the Maeil sinbo of 25 July 1916. 25 Frank Hoffmann already a member of the exile government, when in 1921 he comes to Berlin via France to study mathematics and physics. And when Kim becomes seriously ill it is again An Pong-gŭn who arranges for him to spend several months with the German Benedictines in Bavaria to recover.39 Father Wilhelm likewise continues to be part of the network of independence activists, likely in union with the German Benedictines in Bavaria and Korea. In 1919 the representative of the Shanghai exile government, Kim Kyu-sik 金奎植 (aka Kiusic Kimm) travels to the Paris Peace Conference to lobby for Korean independence. Father Wilhelm then helps the uninvited and unaccredited diplomat get the attention of the conference. In the 18 April 1919 entry Bishop Mutel of the Paris Foreign Missions Society in Seoul notes in his diary: Abbas came by to see me in regards to some secret matters. That is, it seems Father Wilhelm is in Paris, and it appears that thanks to his arrangements the so-called Korean delegates succeeded in handing over their petition to the top-ranking officer, and as usual this news found its way through secret 40 channels. The source of this news, the person he calls Abbas, is Father Boniface Sauer, the abbot and founder of the first German Benedictine abbey in Seoul.41 We have many more examples indicating that the secure information gateway, as we might call it today, that the Benedictines provided between Bavaria and Korea, is an integral part of the communication network among independence movement activists at that time. The unique amalgam of religion, personal and official business, of private needs and power ambitions, so typical of the Church as an organization, helps in concealing and camouflaging such clearly political activities. Unfortunately, the order does not permit independent research in its archives, which leaves the classic question open: who instrumentalized whom and for which purposes? Yet, it is relatively clear that, over many years, the order serves an important role in supporting anti-Japanese activists as part of the networking setup between groups in Korea, Manchuria, the Russian Far East, the United States, and Europe. The intelligence officers in the Japanese embassies and in Korea naturally viewed this with disdain and suspicion. Although An Pong-gŭn’s place of residence is unclear for most of the 1920s, he makes an appearance here and there as an educator and activist in connection with the Korean cause. In September 1924, for example, he gives a slide presentation on China, Japan, and Korea at the community college (Volkshochschule) in the south39 40 41 26 See Hŏ Chŏng-gyun’s report on Kim in Nyusŭ sŏch’ŏn, 9 August 2010. The journalist also claims the Shanghai exile government would have sent another 16 students with Kim to Berlin. However, that cannot be confirmed. What is certain is that the number of newly arriving Korean students in Germany was never higher than in 1921–22, which also applies to Japanese students. Gustave Charles Marie Mutel, Mwit’el Chugyo ilgi [Journal de Mgr. Mutel], transl. Han’guk Kyohoesa Yŏn’guso, vol. 6 (Seoul: Han’guk Kyohoesa Yŏn’guso, 2002), 264. In 1927, the abbey is moved from Seoul to Tŏkwŏn 德源 near Wŏnsan. The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s west German city of Heilbronn.42 From the middle of the 1920s to early 1930 he resides in Dresden, works for the Ethnological Museum Dresden (Völkerkunde Museum Dresden) and, for example, gives a special lecture about Korea to the students at a local middle school. 43 By this time, he is indeed well-established as top reference person and a trustworthy, highly educated cultural insider for all things Korean, someone who is being consulted by various scholars writing about (Fig. 5) Short story by An Pong-gŭn, aka Han Fongkeng, in the magazine Atlantis, November 1931. various aspects of the country. He now speaks and writes German fluently. Under his Chinese passport name Han Fongkeng, he even publishes a short story entitled “Die chinesische Witwe” [The Chinese widow] 44 in the magazine Atlantis, where Mirok Li would later publish as well. Knowing that An himself hardly ever lived together with his wife in Korea, the story, written in a first person singular perspective of a Chinese widow, seems to contain a good deal of self-irony: he describes how a young, upperclass woman gets married to a man that turns out to be just an innocent boy, and how she never sees that boy once he attends school and later goes away for his university education as a young man. 42 43 44 See Friedrich Dürr et al., Chronik der Stadt Heilbronn [Chronicle of Heilbronn], vol. 3 (Heilbronn: Stadtarchiv, 1986), 150. See Dieter Prskawetz, Blasewitzer Schulgeschichte [History of the Blasewitz School], at URL #5. (The 1996 print version of the booklet does not include this reference.) See Han Fongkeng, “Die chinesische Witwe” [The Chinese widow], Atlantis 3, no. 11 (November 1931): 677–679. The magazine itself looks like a German clone of the National Geographic. 27 Frank Hoffmann The same year, 1931, he also publishes an article about the history of the Korean school system.45 On another occasion, when he is already living in Berlin, he coproduces a 25-minute radio broadcast aimed at school children under the title “Reise nach Korea” [Journey to Korea].46 One of his compatriots, who is discussed later in this chapter, comments in the early 1940s that An Pong-gŭn must be given credit for introducing Korean fairytales, classical literature, and short stories to Germans, and educating the general public about the Korean situation on lecture tours through all parts of the country. He is also said to have published related articles in newspapers and magazines. 47 An, after all, seems not quite as disinterested in education and happy-go-lucky as Mirok Li would have him. A German geographer whom An helps with the writing and transcription of East Asian place names is so impressed that he assumes An holds a doctoral degree and he describes him as a writer and former medical doctor.48 At the time, An’s work as an assistant at the Ethnological Museum Dresden is his main occupation. One of his main tasks is assisting with the collection that the ethnographer Walther Stötzner brought back from the southernmost Korean island of Cheju-do, mostly items used in daily life.49 An Pong-gŭn had then been hired to identify, label and describe those items for the museum; he even manufactures models of traditional Korean farming implements. An works closely with the museum’s curator Martin Heydrich, one of Germany’s top two anthropologists at the time. Heydrich is writing a book about traditional Korean agriculture, using as his assistant An, someone he respects highly and without whom he cannot publish the book.50 Nevertheless, once he completes his work on the book and with the Korean and East Asian collections at the museum, An moves to Berlin, finds no job there and considers emigrating to the USSR. Heydrich 45 46 47 48 49 50 28 See Han Fong-keng, “Koreanisches Schulwesen in alter und neuer Zeit” [The Korean school system in ancient and modern times], Allgemeine deutsche Lehrerzeitung 60 (1931): 682– 683. The broadcast was aired on 15 June 1932, from 9:00 AM to 9:25 AM by Deutsche Welle in their program Berliner Schulfunk [Berlin broadcasts for schools]. An’s co-producer was the writer and screenwriter Ernst Keienburg. See Theresia Wittenbrink, comp., Schriftsteller vor dem Mikrophon: Autorenauftritte im Rundfunk der Weimarer Republik 1924–1932, eine Dokumentation [Writers before the microphone: Radio appearances of writers during the Weimar Republic 1924–1932, a documentary] (Berlin: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 2006), 371–372. See Kang Se-hyŏng, “Chosŏn munhwawa togil munhwaŭi kyoryu” [Cultural exchange between Korea and Germany], Samch’ŏlli 13, no. 6 (June 1941): 116. See Wilhelm Filchner, Kartenwerk der erdmagnetischen Forschungsexpedition nach Zentral-Asien 1926–28 [Map series to a geomagnetic research expedition to Central Asia 1926–28], Petermanns Mitteilungen 215–217 (Gotha: J. Perthes, 1933), 17. See Walther Stötzner, “Have You Been in Quelpart?,” Asia 33, no. 7 (July 1933): 412–417. See Martin Heydrich, Koreanische Landwirtschaft [Korean agriculture], Beiträge zur Völkerkunde von Korea I, Abhandlungen und Berichte der Museen für Tierkunde und Völkerkunde zu Dresden 19 (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1931), 4, 23, and 26. The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s writes him a recommendation letter for his colleague in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), a specialist of Siberian shamanism: A highly educated Korean, who had to leave his own country because of the Japanese, was the authority (Gewährsmann) for my research on Korea. For a long time he did part-time work for us at the museum and also gave lectures. (...) He worked his way through much of our East Asian collections and provided us all over with highly valuable information. Because of financial reasons we could not keep him any longer, and he moved to Berlin. But over there he seems to live in dire circumstances, as a result of the economic conditions in present-day Germany. As he wrote me, he toys with the idea of going to Russia. Perhaps then you could employ him for shorter or longer 51 periods at the museum for everyone’s benefit. An Pong-gŭn’s plan to go to Leningrad is politically and economically motivated. An, there is little doubt, is somewhere on the left of the political spectrum. In the 1920s and early 1930s, communism and anarchism are highly attractive to large sections of society, especially in urban centers such as Berlin, Paris, and Shanghai. Proletarische Sozialpolitik [Proletarian social policy], a periodical published by the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), lists An as the contact person for Korea.52 Such details and the apparent contradictions they reveal (e.g. between communism and Catholicism) demonstrate that, for Korean activists, political ideologies and religious or church associations were foremost tools to be instrumentalized for their ultimate aim: regaining Korea’s independence. This is not to suggest that those involved were not serious about all the seemingly disparate belief systems to which they subscribed. Martin Heydrich may or may not have been aware of the political inclinations of his Korean assistant. Heydrich himself, who would soon later become a leading exponent of Nazi race ideologies, now advocates winning back lost territories and fighting for new colonies, also in Asia. He joins the NSDAP’s paramilitary wing, the SA, and begins working for the Office of Racial Policy (Rassenpolitisches Amt), becomes a museum director in Cologne, a key position in German ethnography, and creates and directs a Central Office for Colonial Matters (Zentralstelle für Kolonialfragen) at the University of Cologne, which then provides the “scientific” reasoning for the propaganda campaigns of the NSDAP Office of Colonial Policy (Kolonialpolitisches Amt). Nazi Germany, of course, did not have a single colony. After Hitler gains power, any political activism or networking among other exiled Korean groups grinds to a halt. Yet, An remains in Berlin and starts operating his 51 52 Letter by Martin Heydrich to his colleague Eugen Kagarow in Leningrad, 7 September 1931, Historical Archives Cologne, file Acc. 1729 I-L; the German original is quoted in full by Ingrid Kreide-Damani in her edited volume Ethnologie im Nationalsozialismus: Julius Lips und die Geschichte der “Völkerkunde” (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2010), 71. See Clemens Klockner, ed., Proletarische Sozialpolitik: Organ der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Sozialpolitischer Organisationen, ARSO [Proletarian Social Policy: Organ of the Association of Social Political Organizations, ARSO] (Darmstadt: Verlag für wissenschaftliche Publikationen, 1987), 318. 29 Frank Hoffmann own tofu factory. He is now married to a young German woman and is listed as a grocer in the Berlin address directory. That business is already flourishing at the time of the Berlin Olympics in 1936. A contemporary magazine article reports how, years earlier, An had started out dressed in rags, then gradually began earning money by producing tofu for Korean and other Asian students in Berlin, then also importing tea and other goods from China; he now owns a respectable business that delivers tofu everywhere, generating a profit of 50 marks or more a day.53 (50 RM would convert to $20 in 1936, equivalent to about $330 in 2015 U.S. dollars.) His moderate business success, after years of economic struggle, enables him to move from the small room at Heimstraße 23 in Kreuzberg, where he had lived since 1930, to another larger Kreuzberg apartment at Solmsstraße 50 in 1934, and a year later he and his wife already move to Kantstraße 132 in the Charlottenburg district in the center of Berlin. Their apartment has a small storefront and a telephone, and is very close to the Kurfürstendamm, or Ku’damm, as Berliners affectionately call it, a highly attractive spot for businesses and private residences. Then, as today, that section of Kantstraße had developed into Berlin’s unofficial Little Chinatown. At the time, though, it is a Chinatown specifically for the upper and middle class, a hangout for elegantly dressed Asian students from mostly wealthy, upper class families. (Poor and often illegal migrant Chinese workers live around Schlesischer Bahnhof, the Silesian Station, a run-down area in what is today the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district.) Next door to An’s new home, at number 130, is the China-Haus, a shop selling imported Chinese goods. In his immediate neighborhood itself, there are three Chinese restaurants,54 which may well have been among his tofu customers. One of them, the Tientsin, is just a few steps away, at number 130b. By the time An moves to his new residence, the Tientsin is long been known as the meeting point and hangout for Asian students and intellectuals to debate politics.55 For the renowned writer Anna Seghers, a Jew, a communist, and a loyal KPD member with a strong affinity for China, the Tientsin serves as the prototype for the restaurant she describes in Die Gefährten [The wayfarers, 1932], her novel about the lives and activities of Chinese and other international revolutionaries in Europe. At the entrance to the Tientsin was a sign, Seghers writes, “Japs and Brits are hereby kindly informed that we cannot guarantee your safety in this restaurant,”56 which cheered up most of her readers. 53 54 55 56 30 See Yonghŭnggangin (pseud.), “Kujuesŏ hwalyakhanŭn inmultŭl: Paegŭiinjaedŭrŭi pinnanŭn chach’oerŭl ch’ajŏ” [Individuals active in Europe: Tracing the splendid footsteps of the white-dressed people], Samch’ŏlli 8, no. 2 (February 1936): 82. The author’s pseudonym means Yonghŭng River Man; the term “paegŭiinjae,” white-dressed people, is a seldom-used 16th century lyrical name for Koreans. Both terms seem of northern origin. See Dagmar Yu-Dembski, Chinesen in Berlin [The Chinese in Berlin] (Berlin: Bebra, 2007), 65–66. See ibid., 26–30. Anna Seghers, Die Gefährten [The wayfarers] (Berlin: Kiepenheuer, 1932), 180. Cf. ibid. The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s The 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin bring some special visitors to Kantstraße 132: a couple of Korean members from the Japanese Olympic team visit An’s home several times. They stay for a few weeks in Berlin, and An’s home is the home away from home where they are served Korean food and can talk freely. “We enjoyed eating (Fig. 6) Twenty years later: Son Ki-jŏng and Leni Riefenstahl 1956. rice and chicken soup with (Photo courtesy Son Kee Chung Memorial Foundation.) tofu that his German wife served us,”57 remembers Son Ki-jŏng 孫基禎 many years later. The marathon gold medalist, featured at length in Leni Riefenstahl’s spectacular agitprop masterwork Olympia (the Führer’s favorite filmmaker continued to stay in contact with the sportsman, even decades later) and the marathon bronze winner Nam Sŭng-nyong 南昇龍 visit An Pong-gŭn’s home the day after their big win for a private celebration. Every Korean schoolchild today is taught the story of Son Ki-jŏng — how he had to compete under the Japanized name Son Kitei with the colonizer’s flag on his chest, and how a major Korean newspaper, in a feature story it published two weeks later, scratched out the Japanese flag from a photograph of him at the Olympic medal ceremony.58 For this young gold medalist these visits to Kantstraße would mean far more than chicken soup with tofu. The young sportsman who had won the first Olympic gold in the history of Korean sports just the previous day had never seen the Korean flag before that day on the 10th of August 1936. An Pong-gŭn leads him to his studio, and there it is. Son is completely thrilled and enthralled by An and by this experience. Much later he remembers: I saw the Korean national flag for the very first time in my life. (...) That is our national flag! Yes, that is our flag! My whole body was trembling as if an electrical current was passing through it. I lost my fatherland, and it felt as if I saw the face of that dead nation. But despite oppression and surveillance our 57 58 Son Ki-jŏng in an interview with the Tonga ilbo, 4 January 1964. The warm caretaking of Koreans visiting or living in Berlin by An Pong-gŭn and his wife is also well attested to in an article by the music student An Pyŏng-so 安炳昭 (1908–1979) who studied violin in Berlin from 1934 to 1938: “Paengnim yugi” [Berlin travel notes], Sahae kongnon 4, no. 10 (October 1938): 102–105. That photo appeared on page two of the Tonga ilbo on 25 August 1936. A few days later, the colonial authorities consequently suspended publication of the paper for the next nine months. 31 Frank Hoffmann national flag was still alive, and that assured me that the Korean people were 59 still alive. We cannot help but perceive An Pong-gŭn as exceptionally versatile. While running his business, he and his friend Pae, a Korean artist also living in Berlin (to be discussed later in this chapter), take on small parts as extras in the movie Der Kurier des Zaren (1935–36; U.S. release title The Soldier and the Lady), whose lead character is played by the Viennese actor Adolf Wohlbrück.60 Moreover, Pae and An Pong-gŭn are not the only Koreans in Berlin with ties to the movie industry. An Ch’ŏl-yŏng 安哲永 (aka Chul Young Ahn, 1910–?) finds it worthwhile to write a lengthy essay about An’s and Pae’s side jobs for a Korean daily.61 The young movie director and son of a pastor and Korean independence activist living in Hawaii, An Ch’ŏl-yŏng had just left Berlin himself. After three years in Japan, he had come to Berlin and studied film from 1931 to 1936, and had even worked as part of the Riefenstahl team (see fig. 7). Back in Korea, An continues to inform his readers about the UFA studios and the latest German movies with their stars and starlets. (Fig. 7) An Ch’ŏl-yŏng with Leni Riefenstahl and her team at the Film Studio Berlin-Babelsberg, ca. 1935. (National Library of Korea, An Hyŏng-ju Collection. Thanks to Dafna Zur and Jee-Young Park for help in accessing a copy.) 59 60 61 32 Son Ki-jŏng, Naŭi choguk, naŭi marat’on: Son Ki-jŏng chasŏjŏn [My country, my marathon: The Son Ki-jŏng autobiography] (Seoul: Han’guk Ilbosa, 1983), 146. Between 1935 and 1937 three different versions of the movie are produced, in different languages for different international markets. Once in California for the film’s U.S. version, Adolf Wohlbrück drops the Adolf to become Anton Walbrook, “Hollywood’s newest star.” An Ch’ŏl-yŏng’s suggestion that Pae and An Pong-gŭn would add some original Korean dance scenes and costumes to the film is too far-fetched. See Tonga ilbo, morning edition of 12 October 1937. The same paper published several more essays by An on German film. The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s (Fig. 8) German and French film posters for the 1939 movie Männer müssen so sein (Men Are That Way). On the lower left a still shot of An Pong-gŭn in the role of the animal keeper Shing. A few years later, just months before the Second World War breaks out, An Pong-gŭn is offered a full-fledged role in Männer müssen so sein, which would become a popular circus genre film. In March 1939 it comes into German cinemas and in May it opens in the U.S. under the title Men Are That Way. The female lead is played by the Austrian actress Hertha Feiler — soon to become Heinz Rühmann’s 62 second wife. She “is so attractive right in the first reel” that the New York Times finds her to be a “good and sufficient reason for seeing”63 the German movie. (A French version is produced later, after the Wehrmacht has taken Paris. It is released in early January 1941 under the title La femme aux tigres.) This prewar circus film is not political but instead seems strongly influenced by Hollywood: for example, some scenes are reminiscent of the water ballet scenes in many American movies of that time. One might well argue that it was produced as much for the U.S. as for the Ger62 63 Rühmann was likely the most popular German movie actor of the entire 20th century, last to be seen in Wim Wenders’ impressive Berlin movie In weiter Ferne, so nah! (English release title Faraway, So Close!, 1993). His role in here alludes to parallels with his own life and his political disengagement in the Third Reich. New York Times, 13 May 1939. 33 Frank Hoffmann man market. It may be seen as an important antecedent of the many postwar German circus films and TV series. This still being the shoeshine era when white actors are turned into black characters with black shoe polish, a Korean actor can be cast as an Indian (which applies just as much to Hollywood, where independence leader An Ch’ang-ho’s son Philip Ahn, for instance, is long promoted as a Chinese actor). The Korean An Pong-gŭn is thus cast as the Indian animal keeper Shing — not a heroic role, to say the least. Towards the end of the film, it turns out that he is being used as a tool by an insanely jealous and controlling circus shooter. Shing feeds his tigers cocaine to manipulate them. Well, at least, he runs and is never caught. We can never be sure if An had to run in real life, as well. In November 1936 Germans and Japanese sign the Anti-Comintern Pact, the precursor to the Berlin– Rome–Tōkyō Axis pact of September 1940. Meanwhile, the cooperation between the Third Reich and Nationalist China also continues to bear fruits. Some Chinese are being trained in the Nazi army and Chiang Kai-sheck’s 蔣介石 adopted son even commands a unit of tanks as a Lieutenant of the German Wehrmacht. Asians are simply absent in Nazi race ideologies and are not classified as racially inferior. 64 German Jews, Romani people, and several other ethnic, social, and political groups are forced into concentration camps step by step,65 but Koreans and other Asians, in 64 65 34 Hitler and large parts of the German population had rather ideologically ambiguous and unspecified racial ideas regarding East Asians. Still, racist idiocy does not discriminate. Contrary to popular belief, negative sentiments were since the mid-1930s even growing against their Axis partner, the Japanese. For details, see Eberhard Friese, “Das deutsche Japanbild 1944: Bemerkungen zum Problem der auswärtigen Kulturpolitik während des Nationalsozialismus” [The German image of Japan in 1944: Remarks on the issue of foreign cultural policy under National Socialism], in Deutschland – Japan: Historische Kontakte, ed. Josef Kreiner (Bonn: Bouvier, 1984), 265–284; Harumi Shidehara Furuya, “Nazi Racism toward the Japanese: Ideology vs. Realpolitik,” Nachrichten der Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens 65, nos. 1–2 (1995): 17–75; Kim Chun-Shik, Ostasien zwischen Angst und Bewunderung: Das populäre deutsche Ostasienbild der 1930er und 40er Jahre in Reiseberichten aus dem japanischen Imperium [East Asia between fear and admiration: The popular German image of East Asia during the 1930s and 40s in travelogues of the Japanese Empire] (Münster: LIT, 2001); Bill Maltarich, Samurai and Supermen: National Socialist Views of Japan (Bern: P. Lang, 2005). The year 1936 is also the year when most German Jews, social-democrats, communists, and others realized that Hitler was there to stay. A hundred thousand of the over 170,000 Berlin Jews living in the city in 1925 had by 1941 either gone into exile or were already forcefully deported to work and concentration camps. A brief look at the house in which An Pong-gŭn and his wife resided at Kantstraße 132 conveys some sense of what happened in An’s immediate neighborhood. A whole family of four, the Rosenthals, were arrested and deported to a concentration camp in Poland in 1941 (where they were murdered the following year). The German Jewish woman Hertha Falkenstein moved to Kantstraße 132 in 1940, after she had been arrested earlier in her hometown. She stayed there with relatives, but was finally deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp in August 1942, and miraculously survived. Another person from her hometown who also lived at Kantstraße 132 was not so lucky; neither was an older couple, Kunigunde and Alfred Deutschkron, who in October 1942 were deported to a concentration camp in Riga. The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s theory, have nothing to fear. The reality is more complex, however. Apart from official state-level relations, any personal, cultural, and educational exchanges with Asia, even between Japan and Germany, decline sharply during the 1930s. The number of students from Japan and its colony Korea studying in Berlin plummets. 66 With few exceptions those students remaining in Berlin in 1937 or 1938 leave when World War II breaks out. The climate towards Asians worsens during the war. In 1941 marriages between Chinese and Germans are declared invalid. For example, the Chinese–German couple Tung of the real-world circus, Circus Sarrasani, are chased out of their house in early 1945. The Chinese acrobat’s German wife is arrested, she is shorn of her hair, and she is put into the streets with a most humiliating sign hanging from her neck.67 Chinese now become subject to interrogations by the Gestapo (at a time when An may still be carrying a Chinese passport, and is a known as a former leftist activist). The Chinese had once formed the fourth largest group of foreign students. Many of the Chinese sailors living in Hamburg, like many of the Chinese studying in Paris, are indeed communist or anarchist in orientation and are very active politically. Of the more than 1,000 Chinese students in Berlin, a little over 300 remain until the early 1940s and are arrested in 1942 and sent to the Langer Morgen work camp because of their suspected political engagement (and also because their homeland, China, had joined the Allies and was now an enemy of the 66 67 For the Rosenthal family, see details by searching for “Kantstr. 132” at URL #6. For Hertha Falkenstein and another person from her home town, see Peter Simonstein Cullman, History of the Jewish Community of Schneidemühl: 1641 to the Holocaust (Bergenfield: Avotaynu, 2006), 215 and 261. For the Deutschkrons, see Wolfgang Scheffler and Diana Schulle, comps., Buch der Erinnerung: Die ins Baltikum deportierten deutschen, österreichischen und tschechoslowakischen Juden / Book of Remembrance: The German, Austrian and Czechoslovakian Jews Deported to the Baltic States (Munich: K.G. Saur, 2003), 366. Of the 656 Japanese students (not including the Koreans) who studied at Berlin University in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, only 126 were in Berlin during the Nazi period — a four-to-one ratio for about the same period of time. In all of Germany the number of students from the Japanese Empire (including Koreans) declined from 380 in 1925 to 92 in 1935. Even the number of Japanese students with the rank of military officer declined notably. The trend in the growth and decline of the number of Korean students matches that of the Japanese. Exact numbers, however, are not available. Hong Sŏn-p’yo’s article, see below, probably comes closest in getting to these numbers, but still includes a lot of speculation and unavoidable errors (the numbers are therefore not being reduplicated here). See Rudolf Hartmann, Japanische Studenten an der Berliner Universität 1920–1945 [Japanese students at the University of Berlin: 1920–1945], Kleine Reihe 22 (Berlin: Mori-ŌgaiGedenkstätte der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 1997), 9; Katō Tetsurō, “Personal Contacts in Japanese–German Cultural Relations during the 1920s and Early 1930s,” in Japanese–German Relations, 1895–1945: War, Diplomacy and Public Opinion, ed. Christian W. Spang and Rolf-Harald Wippich (London: Routledge, 2006), 123–126; Hong Sŏn-p’yo, “1920-nyŏndae yurŏbesŏŭi han’guk tongnip undong” [The 1920s Korean independence movement in Europe], Han’guk tongnip undongsa yŏn’gu 27 (December 2006): 435–437. Interview with Ingeborg Tung in the TV documentary by Guido Knopp et al., Das Gedächtnis der Nation [Memory of the nation], broadcasted on 16 October 2011 at 11:25 PM, ZDF TV station. The interview with Tung is at minutes 20:09 to 25:42; online at URL #7. 35 Frank Hoffmann Axis Powers). Other than concentration camps, this so-called work education camp in Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg is under Gestapo supervision.68 But An Pong-gŭn’s life during the last years of Nazi rule seems to have been quite different from those incarcerated Chinese: there is a single reference indicating that he might actually have started to work for the government of the Third Reich as an inspector or expert (Sachverständiger) of soybean agriculture in Germany right after the 1936 Berlin Olympics.69 During the 1930s soybeans came to be known as “Nazi beans”: the Third Reich starts to utilize soy products such as tofu to partially substitute for meat and other protein foods. Napoleon already knew that an army marches on its stomach; in preparing for war, developing soybeans that will grow in a northern European climate and thus guarantee food autonomy now becomes a high priority project. NS scientists develop such crops in Romania for a special company, the Soja AG, set up there by the IG Farben (well known today for its involvement in numerous war crimes). Starting in spring 1936, campaigns propagate soybean foods by packaging their ads with Nazi “natural good health” slogans. Between 1937 and 1944 soybean production increases by 14 times within the Reich territory alone.70 An Pong-gŭn survives the war, and apparently spends the last years of the war in Italy with his wife. A 1940 photo with his old friend Mirok Li in Bavaria (see fig. 1) shows that he can still travel during the early part of the war. In 1941 his name disappears from the Berlin address book though. His cousin An Chin-saeng 安珍生, the son of An Chung-gŭn’s brother in whose household he and Mirok Li lived while in Shanghai, studies in the early 1940s marine engineering at the University of Genoa in northern Italy. It appears as if An and his young wife join him there (see the photo of the three, fig. 9). Based on a list of the few Koreans still living, or at least registered, in Germany in 1943 received by a Korean newspaper from movie director An Ch’ŏl-yŏng (who works between 1940 and 1944 for the German Consulate in Yokohama), An Pong-gŭn’s actual physical residence at that time is in Italy.71 For the majority of people in Italy, the war ends weeks or months earlier than 68 69 70 71 36 See Erich Gütinger, “A Sketch of the Chinese Community in Germany,” in The Chinese in Europe, ed. Gregor Benton and Frank N. Pieke (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 202, and Dagmar Yü-Dembski, “Chinesenverfolgung im Nationalsozialismus: Ein weiteres Kapitel verdrängter Geschichte” [Chinese persecution under National Socialism: Another chapter of suppressed histories], Bürgerrechte & Polizei/CILIP 58, no. 3 (1997): 70–77. See Tonga ilbo, morning edition of 9 August 1936. The remark is in An Ik-t’ae’s second ˘ installment of his “Kuju umak yŏhaenggi” 歐洲音樂旅行記 [European music travels]. See the excellent study by Joachim Drews, Die “Nazi-Bohne”: Anbau, Verwendung und Auswirkung der Sojabohne im Deutschen Reich und Südosteuropa (1933–1945) [The “Nazi bean”: Cultivation, utilization, and implications of the soybean in the Third Reich and southern Europe (1933–1945)] (Münster: LIT, 2004), 81–117, and elsewhere. An Ch’ŏl-yŏng’s short note in the 20 July 1943 issue of the Maeil sinbo reads: “An Ponggŭn (Haeju) It’aeri sanggwa chol Paengnimsŏ cha’gwan 安鳳根 (海州) 伊太利商科卒 伯林서 自管 , which would translate as: “An Pong-gŭn (Haeju), Italian business administration The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s it does for Berliners. In July 1945, right after the war is over in all Europe, cousin An Chin-saeng receives his doctoral degree and returns to southern Korea. He later becomes a diplomat. Until 1970 An Pong-gŭn’s other family back in Korea has no information about his whereabouts. As a member of the An family and growing up without a father, his third and youngest son An Min-saeng 安民生 had a pretty rough life, seemingly suffering a great deal under the Japanese authorities and afterwards under the South Korean Park Chung Hee regime.72 Being critical of the regime and advocating the reunification of (Fig. 9) An Pong-gŭn (r.) with his wife and cousin An Chin-saeng, early 1940s. Korea, he was sentenced to a long prison term under Park. Now living in Taegu, he searches and finds some answers about what happened to his father. In January 1970 Father Joseph Wilhelm’s niece in Strasbourg sends the son a letter, informing him that his father had survived the war, and then, in 1945, traveled to Naples to embark on a ship to go “home” to Korea. But he never makes it home — he gets sick and dies in Naples.73 2. Kim Chung-se: A Chosŏn Scholar Comes to Prussia Kim Chung-se 金重世 (aka Kimm Chung Se, 1882–1946), like An Pong-gŭn, is another of the Berlin Koreans to have been lost in obscurity. In discussions about the history of Koreans in Berlin or Korean–German relations his name often surfaces as the first Korean student in Germany. Yet, the scanty research on Kim obscures the 72 73 [school] graduate, self-employed in Berlin.” All traces of An Pong-gŭn in Berlin end in 1941, and given that there is no indication of him attending any Italian school before then, we can surmise that he probably spent the last years of the war in Italy. As a side note: An Ch’ŏl-yŏng’s brother in law, the architect Kim Kyŏng-han 金景漢 (aka Kyunghan Kim, 1912–1985), son of another prominent Korean American leader, Charles Ho Kim (aka Kim Ho 金乎), is also on this list. Kim ends up being convinced by his friend Han, later known as “the father of North Korean archaeology,” to enter into a sham marriage with his friend’s lover (as Han is already married) as a means to save her from postwar Czech revenge attempts for the collaboration with the Germans. See Miriam Löwensteinová and Jaroslav Olša Jr., Han Hŭng-su — otec československé koreanistiky [Han Hŭng-su — the father of Korean studies in Czechoslovakia] (Prague: Nová vlna, 2013), 372–374, 383–384. See Kyŏnghyang sinmun, 9 August 1982, and Han’gyŏre, 28 October 2011. See Kat’ollik sibo, 22 March 1970, and Han’guk ilbo, 27 August 1970. As a further twist to the story, the then just retired first director of the Korean National Museum, once a student in Munich, offered an alternative plot. In his 1973 essay volume he claimed that An Pong-gŭn did in fact leave Italy — but for northern Korea. See Kim Chae-wŏn, Yŏdang sup’ilchip [Yŏdang’s essays], T’amgu sinsŏ 62 (Seoul: T’amgudang, 1973), 125. 37 Frank Hoffmann history of his activities and scholarship in several ways. 74 Kim’s case demonstrates the peculiarities, idiosyncrasies, and limits of early Korean modernization and westernization. Born in Kaesŏng as the son of a high-class, (Fig. 10) »The Only Korean in Berlin«, detail of a February 1916 newspaper low-profile aristocrat, article, with photos of Berlin University’s main building and Kim Chung-se. Kim was socialized mostly during the last years of the Korean Empire. In stark contrast to An Pong-gŭn and others we discuss here, he still seems guided by the ideals of the classic yangban scholar-official (whose practical function had ceased to exist in 1910) in pretty much every respect that we might imagine. Even living in Berlin, the final demise of the Korean monarchy still comes as a shock to him. His Berlin and Leipzig experiences over a period of two decades in Germany unquestionably shape his scholarly techniques (otherwise he would not have been able to finish his studies), but this does little to change his basic outlook. In other words: surveying all we have on Kim, it seems that his direct personal contacts with the European centers of science were no more of an influence on him than the usual “secondhand” scientific, cultural, and political modernizations (shaped upon the idealized European and American models that the Japanese introduced to Korea), experienced by scholars of his generation who remained in Korea. This is especially of interest if we generalize this observation. This leads to a different evaluation of the colonial modernization process within the larger project of 20th century modernization and westernization, which may then give us a better understanding and appreciation of early modern forms of art and culture. This is not the place to dig deeply into such issues. However, we want to keep in mind that examining the life and work of people like Kim Chung-se is not just so we can say that they were the “first” Koreans somewhere, but so we can 74 38 Kim is often mentioned as the first Korean to have received a doctoral degree in Germany, in 1923 (see e.g. Tonga ilbo, 25 April 2000). This is not the case; his degree is from 1927. The first and only academic attempt to write about Kim seems to be an article by Yi T’ae-u from 2007. Unfortunately, many of the facts Yi presents about Kim seem flawed in several ways. See Yi T’ae-u, “Ilche kangjŏmgi sinmun chosarŭl t’onghan han’guk ch’ŏlhakchadŭrŭi chaebalgyŏn: Kim Chung-se, Yi Kwan-yong, Pae Sang-harŭl chungsimŭro” [The rediscovery of Korean philosophers during Japanese colonial rule through the investigation of journalistic publications: With the focus on Kim Chung-se, Yi Kwan-yong, Pae Sangha], Inmun kwahak yŏn’gu 18 (December 2007): 302–306. The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s reflect on the always incomplete modernization processes in Korea and Europe in more detail and come up with contextually appropriate new understandings and evaluations of more essential issues. When Kim comes to Berlin in August 1909, Korea is still an independent nation, at least on paper; with his overseas education even as a 27 year old man, he would be guaranteed an exceptionally promising career in the administration of the Korean Empire. He had already taken the first steps by learning English from a certain Pak P’il-wŏn 朴弼遠, a very active member of the pro-Japanese reformer group Ilchinhoe 一進會 (Advance in Unity Society) while still in Korea and had then studied for two years in Japan. In his case, it was a single semester of mathematics and physics at the Tōkyō College of Science (Tōkyō Butsuri Gakkō 東京物理學校, which became Tōkyō University of Science after WWII) and several English language classes. Kim Chung-se would likely have come with documents issued by the Resident-General of Chōsen. Like him, most students with Japanese ID documents had studied in Japan before going to Germany. While taking German language classes at the university’s Böttinger-Studienhaus,75 a small language institute set up for the growing number of foreign students at Berlin University,76 Kim enrolls in the fields of philosophy and political science (Staatswissenschaften) in the summer semester of 1911.77 A longer piece on Kim, published a few years later in a Korean newspaper and entitled “The Only Korean in Berlin”78 (fig. 10), reports that one of his professors has arranged for him to get a parttime job at the East Asia Bureau of the German Foreign Office which, for the time 75 76 77 78 Kim was among the first group of students to take language courses at the institute, located in the Royal Library and officially known as German Language Institute (Deutsches Institut für Ausländer). The language institute was only established in 1911. See Wilhelm Paszkowski, Bericht über den ersten Kursus: Das Böttinger-Studienhaus (Deutsches Institut für Ausländer) in Berlin [Report on the first course: The Böttinger Institute (German Institute for Foreigners) in Berlin] (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1911). This was the Frederick William University (Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin), in 1949 to be renamed Humboldt University (then in the eastern sector of the city). There was one more university in Berlin where Koreans studied before 1945, today called the Berlin Institute of Technology (Technische Universität Berlin), from 1919 to 1945 it had the name Technical University Berlin (Technische Hochschule zu Berlin, then and now known as TU Berlin). For an overview of all such institutions at that time, see Wilhelm Paszkowski, Berlin in Wissenschaft und Kunst: Ein akademisches Auskunftsbuch nebst Angaben über akademische Berufe [Berlin in science and art: A guide to academic life, together with details of academic professions] (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1910). On 5 May 1911 Kim enrolls with matriculation number 5360 of the 101st Rectorate. When his matriculation expires four years later, he re-registers on 4 October 1915, with matriculation number 2939 of the 105th Rectorate. He finally finishes his studies at Berlin University on 2 February 1920. Information based on Kim’s archived university records: Archives of Humboldt University, UK, 101st Rectorate, Student Lists; and UK, 105th Rectorate, AZ 02/02/1920 Chung Se Kimm. Maeil sinbo, 8 February 1916. 39 Frank Hoffmann (Fig. 11) Kim Chung-se’s biographical sketch attached to his 1927 doctoral thesis. being, apparently covers his relatively low tuition and living expenses. After all, the cost of living in Berlin is known to be only a third of that in London and Paris. The newspaper portrait, without doubt based directly on information Kim sent, is most meticulous in listing necessary school and living expenses, describing general living conditions and problems with racism, and in praising the “royal” university as one of the top academic institutions in the world. Kim thus uses his vanguard position to assist fellow Koreans by providing an entry for Berlin to the virtual shopping list of foreign academic institutions that wealthy and well-established families back home would consider for their sons in the rapidly modernizing country. In the two-page vita (fig. 11) attached to his dissertation — written in a way that makes it appear as if his modern Western studies are the most natural continuation and expansion of his traditional Confucian training — he finds the need to point out that as a child, teenager, and young man, he had completed the obligatory classical training sons of yangban families would go through in dynastic times. In Kim’s own words: “At age five I received the first lessons from my uncle and was then taught further by a professional teacher. In 1888, my parents moved from Songdo [松都] to the current capital Seoul.” He continues: “Here, until 1894, and then until 1899 at our manor near Songdo, I received a very careful education by private tutors and also by modern teachers.” Noteworthy, and in line with Kim’s formal description of his classical studies, in an approach characteristic of his generation, he customarily refers to his hometown Kaesŏng as Songdo, which had been its official name 600 years earlier, then being the country’s capital. Seoul is referred to as the “current” capital; current for half a millennium, we might add, but in 1927 it bears the Japanese colonial name Keijō 京城 (Sino-Kor. Kyŏngsŏng). These details alone are indicative of the mental leaps of Kim’s generation and their inevitable struggles to come to terms with the 40 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s Korean mind, not just under colonial conditions but under 20th century modernity in general — even the Chosŏn era seems almost too current and profane. Kim goes on: “In the years 1900 to 1904 I concentrated on studying the Chinese Classics, history, and literature.” Not forgetting to emphasize his loyalty to his father, he adds: “In 1904 and 1905 I followed my father’s suggestion and engaged in Buddhist and Taoist studies, which he particularly loved, and also in the study of Song Dynasty philosophy.” He even became a classics licentiate by passing the lower examinations (saengjin-gwa 生進科) in the classics, the first step towards the elite civil service examination (kwagŏ 科擧 ) to enter the highest ranks of the Korean administration: “In 1906 I passed the preliminary test for the state examination in the Royal Confucian Academy Sång-gyun-kwan [Sŏnggyun’gwan] 成均館 in Seoul.”79 When he passes these first exams, the career rules are rewritten by the new Japanese administration in Korea. Entry into higher administrative office now requires a modern Western-style education. Consequently, he goes to Japan and later to Berlin. We cannot reconstruct Kim’s activities in these early years in Berlin. Yet, it is certain that, at the very minimum, he acts as a communications hub, sort of a one-man liaison office between the exiled anti-Japanese groups in Shanghai, Manchuria, Russia and the Russian Far East, Paris, and the United States, perhaps working for the Sinminhoe 新民會 (New People’s Association). For example, in the fall of 1911 he communicates directly through letters with An Ch’ang-ho in San Francisco, the co-founder of the Sinminhoe that had just been dissolved in Korea itself by the Governor-General of Chōsen. It combined the ideals of the Enlightenment movement with the military means to fight for Korean independence. Being a real Chosŏn-period gentlemen and a true Renaissance man, his letter to An is in Classical Chinese (see fig. 12). Ch’oe Kwang 崔廣 in St. Petersburg, on the other hand, writes An Ch’ang-ho in San Francisco on a May 1912 postcard, asking him to contact Kim Chung-se in Berlin when An reaches New York during his travels. We have several other preserved samples of such communication.80 Kim Chung-se had, in fact, already met with An Ch’ang-ho in August 1911 in Berlin on An’s return trip from East Asia to the US, via Russia, Germany, and England. At that time Kim arranges An’s accommodations at the small but exclusive Hoeltzl-Sheridan Pension at Potsdamer Straße 28 (today no. 72) in central Berlin. During An Ch’ang-ho’s stay, two other Koreans coming by way of St. Petersburg, like him, also pass through Berlin. Kim Chung-se houses these two young men at the 79 80 Chung Se Kimm, “Kuèi-kŭh-tzè, der Philosoph vom Teufelstal” [Kuèi-kŭh-tzè, the philosopher of the Devil Valley] (Dissertation, Leipzig University, 1927); advance publication offprint of published thesis in Asia Major 4 (1927): 108–146, with added title and imprint pages, and two-page vita, i–iv; here p. iii, the first page of his vita. Some of Kim Chung-se’s correspondence with An Ch’ang-ho can be viewed in digital format at the website of the Independence Hall of Korea (Tongnip Kinyŏmgwan) at URL #8 and at USC’s Korean American Digital Archive at URL #9. Search for “Kim Chung-se.” 41 Frank Hoffmann (Fig. 12) Berlin to San Francisco, a letter dated 25 September 1911: Kim Chung-se writes to An Ch’ang-ho. pension where he then lives, at Markgrafenstraße 59, close to what would much later become Checkpoint Charlie. The exiled independence activist Yi Kap 李甲, a close associate of An Ch’ang-ho and Ch’oe Kwang, had directed the two future students to Kim Chung-se.81 One is Chang T’aek-sang 張澤相 — viewed by many as fascist after liberation — who would become the notorious chief of the Seoul Metropolitan Police and a major figure in the brutal suppression of the South Korean Left. The other, Chang’s penniless travel companion Ch’oe, identifies the Berliner as a Sinminhoe associate.82 Much to his disdain (in being forced to rely on a German American couple’s charity to cover his passage after having been supported by Chang), he reports that it was solely the influence of Kim Chung-se, whom he labels “the right hand man of An-Chang-Ho [sic!]”83 that made Chang T’aek-sang go to study at the University of Edinburgh in Britain, instead of following him to Chicago. While political activism and networking are by no means at the top of Kim’s interests, it seems he always does what he can for the cause of the nation. But soon enough he must fight for his own personal survival in Berlin. 81 82 83 42 Yi himself spent two weeks in Berlin for medical treatment and had met with Kim Chung-se. See C.C. Joe (Chong Chin Joe), “This Life of Mine” (typescript), page 11, dated 15 August 1967, at USC’s Korean American Digital Archive at URL #10. The author refers to Kim Chung-se as “Kim Chul” (Kim Ch’ŏl, obviously). This may have been a pseudonym, but more likely it is just an error after the lapse of decades between 1911 and the time of writing. Ibid., 12. The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s When World War I breaks out, Kim Chung-se is in the middle of his studies in Berlin. Now, simultaneously, he faces the same problems as An Pong-gŭn: as a citizen of Japan and thereby an “enemy alien” of Germany, he gets arrested some time between the 20th and 25th of August 1914. His former employer, the German Foreign Office, orders his arrest and that of other Japanese citizens, as a letter by the Berlin Chief of Police shows. His new employer (we will come to that), the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, then promptly contacts the Ministry of Education and the police to ask for his release.84 Undersecretary of State Arthur Zimmermann sends the Foreign Office’s general evaluation regarding the protective custody of Japanese civilians to Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, suggesting an early release, as detention would in any case be “in violation of international law” and such practice may “endanger the good treatment that our [German] civilians and POWs are receiving in Japan.”85 To be sure, Undersecretary Zimmermann was likely not the least bit interested in international law, other than for strategic and tactical considerations. This is the same Zimmermann that bears heavy responsibility for the German loss of the war by having — inadvertently, and against President Wilson’s strong intentions — brought the United States into the war through one of his bold strategic plans (promising to return Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to the Mexicans) and a related secret telegram that the British intercepted and decrypted.86 On the advice of the Chancellor and Undersecretary Zimmermann regarding protective custody policy, an order is issued on 23rd September allowing Japanese civilians to leave for Japan. However, Kim Chung-se and Tsuji Takahira 辻高衡, for twelve years the Japanese lecturer at the Seminar for Oriental Languages at Berlin University, on special orders from the Foreign Ministry, are already being released by the 10th of September (see fig. 13).87 The documents from the Foreign Ministry do not always match up with information coming from other sources: according to other documents, Tsuji, for example, is held until February or March 1915 (possibly having been arrested again).88 And a 1924 article by Kim’s friend Yi Kwan-yong 李灌鎔, 1894?–1933)89 in the magazine 84 85 86 87 88 89 See letter from Berlin Chief of Police to Foreign Office, dated 27 August 1914, Federal Archives Berlin-Lichterfelde, folder R 901/83620. Telegram draft, Undersecretary of State Arthur Zimmermann at the Foreign Office to Chancellor [Bethmann-Hollweg] at headquarters, dated 13 September 1914, Federal Archives Berlin-Lichterfelde, folder R 901/83620. See Joachim von zur Gathen, “Zimmermann Telegram: The Original Draft,” Cryptologia 31, no. 1 (January 2007): 2–37. See release note from prison for Kim and Tsuji by Military Command of Berlin (Kommandantur der Residenz Berlin), copy for the Foreign Office, dated 10 September 1914, Federal Archives Berlin-Lichterfelde, folder R 901/83620. See Wippich, “Internierung,” 37. Also compare the report about Tsuji and Kim in Maeil sinbo, 24 October 1916. Yi Kwan-yong (alias Lee Kwan Yong and Kwanyong Lee, also known to have used these characters 李灌溶, 李瓘鎔, 李鑵鎔, 李冠鎔, 李灌龍, and Yi Yong-gwan 李鎔灌) had a brother, 43 Frank Hoffmann Kaebyŏk 開闢 talks about being the kaiser’s special guest for three months instead of three weeks, being sick the entire time and getting nothing to eat but stale, stone-hard bread with a big stamp on it, reading “KAISER.” The time following his release is still difficult for him. In school and (Fig. 13) Release note for Kim Chung-se and Tsuji Takahira, Military Command of on the streets of Berlin, 10 September 1914. Berlin, he hears “Cunning Japs!” curses when others walk by and even gets bullied out of the university library. Once the war is over, though, Kim is fully integrated in the academic program at Berlin University and even joins the German Oriental Society (Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft), the major scholarly organization in his field of study, while still a student, and would later participate in the first international German Congress of Oriental Studies in Leipzig in the fall of 1921.90 Still during the war, though, Kim re-enrolls at Berlin University in the winter semester 1915 and changes his secondary subject from political science to comparative philology. But he also takes classes in Sanskrit. His interests seem to have shifted from Greek philosophy back to his old interests, the Chinese Classics and Buddhist studies. A few years ago, a Spanish journalist and historian discovered diplomatic records regarding Kim Chung-se in the archives of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs 90 44 Yi Un-yong 李沄鎔, who studied at Berlin University. Yi Kwan-yong himself is also seen in a 1923 group photo of the Koryŏ Student Corps in Germany, but he had actually studied philosophy at Zurich University in Switzerland, where he received a doctoral degree in 1921. Yi had early on been an activist for Korean independence. In 1919 he went as a secretary of Kim Kyu-sik to the already mentioned League of Nations’ Paris Peace Conference at Versailles to lobby for Korean independence. Yi had close relations to all Korean students in Berlin. See Sinhan minbo, 5 November 1925; Chosŏn ilbo, 14 August 1933; URL #11. See Yi Kwan-yong, “Tongyang hakkyeŭi myŏngsŏng: Kim Chung-se-min” [Oriental Studies kudos to Mr. Kim Chung-se], Kaebyŏk 46 (April 1924): 79–80, and “Erster deutscher Orientalistentag in Leipzig” [First German Orientalist Conference in Leipzig], Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 76 (1922): xlvi–xlviii. The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s in Madrid.91 From summer 1914 to spring 1917, the United States, trying to stay neutral and willing to act as a mediator, represents both Berlin’s interests in Tōkyō and Tōkyō’s interests in Berlin. When the U.S. finally declares war on Germany and closes its embassy in Berlin, Switzerland takes on the German interests while Spain does the same for Japan in Germany. Based on a 1911 treaty between Spain and Japan, Spain represents Tōkyō in Berlin and Vienna (while those parties are still at war with each other). From the period of October 1917 to March 1920, when the Japanese reestablish their diplomatic mission in Berlin, we find 18 documents by or about Kim which provide a good sense of his social and personal circumstances. This is mostly communication between Kim and the Spanish Embassy in Berlin, the Spanish Ministry of State, and the Japanese Legation in Madrid. Kim tries to arrange financial support for himself through his relatives in Korea — all foreign financial transactions with Korea go through Japanese colonial authorities. Once he is released from the POW camp Kim immediately asks the Japanese, always by way of the Spanish Embassy, to convey to his relatives in Korea to send him money. For months the Japanese do not reply. Then the Spanish send another somewhat surprising note: “The Embassy regrets to inform you that because of his mental condition, caused by an anxiety disorder from overwork, Mr. Kimm has been admitted to a sanatorium. He is suffering from hallucinations and a mild form of insanity.”92 From the scarce reports in Korean publications, it seems likely that Kim’s condition was caused by hunger, stress, and the emotional abuse he experienced during the war. Two months later the Japanese reply, stating that “the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent 1,000 yen by cable for use by the said Korean, coming from a cousin of the name Kin-li-kan, who wants his cousin to return to the homeland soon, and therefore asks what the trip would cost.”93 Kim receives his cousin’s money at the end of September 1918 at the Spanish Embassy in Berlin, but just three months later that embassy forwards another request to the Japanese in Madrid. Kim writes that he intends “to stay yet another year in Germany at the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences,” and he asks his family to send another lump sum of money: 91 92 93 See Ernesto de Laurentis, Evangelización y prestigio: Primeos encuentros entre España y Corea [Evangelization and prestige: First encounters between Spain and Korea] (Madrid: Verbum, 2008), 202–205. The Archivo del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores (AMAE) is since 2012 integrated in the State Archives. Kim’s records are now archived there under “Legajo 2539, Japón (1904–1925): Carpeta Kimm Cheng-se.” Letter by the Spanish Embassy in Berlin to the Japanese Embassy in Madrid, dated 25 June 1918, AMAE, Legajo 2539, Japón (1904–1925): Carpeta Kimm Cheng-se. A German source also verifies this mental breakdown in summer of 1918: see Eduard Meyer, “Orientalische Kommission” [Oriental Commission], Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1919, no. 1 (January–June 1919): 76. Letter by the Japanese Embassy in Madrid to the Spanish Embassy in Berlin, 7 September 1918, AMAE, Legajo 2539, Japón (1904–1925): Carpeta Kimm Cheng-se. 45 Frank Hoffmann I wish to complete my studies here. The Academy of Sciences has awarded me supplemental financial aid that will allow me to get through the current times of food shortage. Yet, gradually, I also need to prepare my journey back to my country, [and] am therefore appealing to the Imperial Embassy of Japan to have the goodness to communicate this to my relatives in Korea, to ask 94 them to send me as soon as possible [another] 1,000 yen aid. As several other communications involving Kim’s brother in Korea indicate, Kim seems to have ceased any sort of communications by January 1919: for over a year his family in Korea does not receive any letters from him; nor does he check in with the Spanish Embassy in Berlin. Kim Chung-se finishes his program at Berlin University after the war. His final certificate is issued in February 1920 (see footnote 77). The university system at this point only offers two degrees: the doctoral degree and the habilitation (a kind of second doctoral degree that opens the way to a full professorship). Students would therefore not get any sort of degree in the modern sense, unless they finished their studies with a doctoral thesis and an oral exam. Although he takes two classes in Greek philosophy at the beginning of his education at Berlin University, Kim is hardly a student of philosophy, as some have claimed.95 (That again does not keep him from finding employment as a philosophy professor after returning to Korea.) At that time, choices regarding what courses to take are the student’s alone, as with the specialization one might pursue. In Kim Chung-se’s case, we can say that over time, not from the beginning, he specializes in Sinology, with Buddhist Studies and Sanskrit as minors. Kim continues to work for the Prussian Academy of Sciences, which, after the German Revolution of November 1918 and the abdication of the kaiser, drops the “royal” from its name. No more kaiser bread! For many people no bread at all — a large section of the urban population suffers from food shortages and hunger after Germany’s defeat and the imposition of harsh reparations under the Treaty of Versailles. The culturally exciting and politically chaotic Roaring Twenties in Berlin go hand in hand with severe economic conditions for workers. Students and junior scholars are suddenly not much better off either: having had elite status with exclusive benefits during the German Empire, in the Weimar Republic, they now face the new reality of being viewed as needy academics and social problem cases. 94 95 46 Letter by Kim Chung-se to the Japanese Ambassador in Madrid, forwarded via the Spanish Embassy in Berlin, received by the Ministry of State in Madrid on 19 January 1919, AMAE, Legajo 2539, Japón (1904–1925): Carpeta Kimm Cheng-se. See footnote 74. We need to clarify further that there were only four faculties at German universities, especially since this is commonly misunderstood in today’s scholarship about that period. These were: 1. Faculty of Theology, 2. Faculty of Law, 3. Faculty of Medicine, and 4. Philosophical Faculty (Philosophische Fakultät). The misunderstanding comes from the name of the last of these faculties. The Philosophische Fakultät is analogous to the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s While the Prussian Academy can take pride in its many great academic accomplishments — the most prominent being the membership of Albert Einstein and the publication of his general theory of relativity and many other works in the Academy’s Sitzungsberichte (proceedings) — the Weimar government is forced to reduce the funding for the institution. All of this has a direct, negative effect on Kim’s socioeconomic status and living conditions. At the time, being a wissenschaftlicher Hilfsarbeiter was by no means the same part-time “HiWi” job for students it would later become. Although an entry level academic position at various institutions and universities, it meant full-time employment and was a credible occupation, loosely comparable to a lecturer position today. Some of his German colleagues in the same position had already habilitated (and thus qualified for full professorships),96 while Kim had no academic degree at all. That certainly speaks for his other qualifications (e.g. his knowledge of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, English, some Sanskrit, and of course German) and shows how essential these are for the work on the collection of manuscripts he researches at the Academy. Altogether he works eleven years at the Academy, from March 1913 97 to April 1924. Kim “deals with Chinese Buddhist manuscripts from Turfan and edits a list of Sinico–Buddhist terms.”98 His main task in that research assistant position seems to be the work on an internal “dictionary of Sinico–Buddhist terms, where 4,500 new entries were added” 99 by him in 1916 alone. By early 1924 he has brought that terminological index to 35,000 cards.100 This particular index is a project he himself initiated.101 All terms he is defining and translating here are based on texts from the famous Berlin Turfan Collections. For many years Kim continues this work, and this would then also become the basis for his dissertation and the publication of an article.102 In a special summarizing report about the work of the Academy’s Oriental 96 That is at least in 1924 the case; see Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1924 (Philosophisch-Historische Klasse): viii. 97 See Eduard Meyer, “Orientalische Kommission” [Oriental Commission], Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1914, no. 1 (January–June 1914): 155. Kim replaces a Chinese assistant and is writing geographical and biographical index cards with transcriptions and brief explanations for names appearing in the Chinese version of the Tripitaka. 98 Second page of the vita attached to Kim’s dissertation. 99 Eduard Meyer, “Orientalische Kommission” [Oriental Commission], Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1917, no. 1 (January–June 1917): 94. 100 See Eduard Meyer, “Orientalische Kommission” [Oriental Commission], Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1924 (Philosophisch-Historische Klasse): lxxv. 101 See Eduard Meyer, “Orientalische Kommission” [Oriental Commission], Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1916, no. 1 (January–June 1916): 154–155. 102 See Simone-Christiane Raschmann, Tsuneki Nishiwaki, and Christian Wittern, comps., Chinesische und manjurische Handschriften und seltene Drucke: Chinesische Texte vermischten Inhalts aus der Berliner Turfansammlung [Chinese and Manchurian manuscripts 47 Frank Hoffmann Commission (formed in 1912), covering the past decade, Kim’s work is given full appreciation and his index described as an “indispensable tool for the identification and interpretation of the numerous Buddhist fragments in Sanskrit, Tocharian, [and] Uyghur.”103 Furthermore, the annual reports of the Academy of Sciences indicate that he completed most of the essential work of identifying and dating the original Chinese (and sometimes Sanskrit) manuscripts and puzzling together many of the several thousand text fragments belonging to the Turfan Collections, just without claiming much of the scientific honor — a quintessential museum research and assistant job, one might add. A typical entry, describing part of the work Kim does in 1917, reads: Furthermore, he put together all the compound words that the Tang period [priest] Hüan-ying [Xuanying 玄應] had already extracted from all the sacred texts available to him to compile them into a lexical, but unfortunately nonsystematic, fashion. About one quarter of the entire work has now been processed. The result of this compilation are 6145 flash cards, and these are now being arranged according to the Chinese radicals. He also supplemented the text of an Uyghur manuscript on 40 large leaves, identified as the Tsï-pei tau-è'ang ě'an-fa [Cibei daochang chanfa 慈悲道場懺法 (Penitential ritual of the shrine of compassion)] by F.W.K. Müller and considered for publication, 104 with the Chinese text from the Tripitaka. And the 1921 annual report for the prior year states that “16 major Chinese Buddhist manuscript rolls and 11 small fragments (between glass plates) were identified by Mr. Kimm according to their content, then found by him in the printed Tripitaka canon and compared”105 with it. And so it goes on and on. and rare prints: Chinese texts of mixed content from the Berlin Turfan Collections], Verzeichnis der orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland, 12, part 3 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 2001), 7. Kim’s terminology index and identification of Buddhist fragments and texts from the Turfan Collections provided a good part of the ground work for these three, much later published volumes (the first two were published in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall): Gerhard Schmitt and Thomas Thilo, in cooperation with Inokuchi Taijun, comps., Katalog chinesischer buddhistischer Textfragmente [Catalog of Chinese Buddhist text fragments], vol. 1, Berliner Turfantexte VI (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1975); Thomas Thilo, comp., Katalog chinesischer buddhistischer Textfragmente [Catalog of Chinese Buddhist text fragments], vol. 2, Berliner Turfantexte XIV (Berlin: AkademieVerlag, 1985); Kudara Kōgi and Hasuike Toshitaka, comps., Chinesische und manjurische Handschriften und seltene Drucke: Chinese Buddhist Texts from the Berlin Turfan Collections [Chinese and Manchurian manuscripts and rare prints: Chinese Buddhist texts from the Berlin Turfan Collections], Verzeichnis der orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland, 12, part 4 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 2005). 103 Eduard Meyer, “Bericht über die Orientalische Kommission” [Report about the Oriental Commission], Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1923 (Philosophisch-Historische Klasse): xxxv. 104 Eduard Meyer, “Orientalische Kommission” [Oriental Commission], Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1918, no. 1 (January–June 1918): 68. 105 Eduard Meyer, “Orientalische Kommission” [Oriental Commission], Sitzungsberichte der 48 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s One interesting detail to be noted is that, according to a fellow Korean student and political activist, in addition to translating into German and rendering Vedic Sanskrit script, Kim seemingly works on a Sanskrit dictionary where he uses Han’gŭl to indicate the pronunciation of words.106 While today that may not seem like such a great idea, it was certainly one that could have received some support from German scholars as well, given the many claims since the late 19th century that Han’gŭl derived from Indian script systems. The Oriental studies scholar F.W.K. Müller,107 Academy member and director of the East Asia Department of Berlin’s Ethnological Museum (Völkerkunde Museum), whose courses at the university Kim is attending, and whose own research benefits the most from Kim’s work, used Han’gŭl in the footnotes of some of his articles as early as 1916. 108 This was, without doubt, after consultation with Kim, given the close working relationship between the two. The Sinologist Erich Haenisch, Kim’s thesis advisor, later calls F.W.K. Müller a universalist and “another Humboldt”109 and thinks of him as the most eminent universal language scholar of his time. From November 1916 to April 1917, in the midst of war, two years after he himself had been held in internment, Kim Chung-se assists Müller with sound recordings of Russian Korean prisoners at German POW camps. These Koryŏ saram (literally people from Koryŏ), as they refer to themselves, are mostly second and third generation, naturalized Korean immigrants to the Russian Far East. The recording project itself is part of an extensive plan proposed and directed by Wilhelm Doegen, who was first a school language teacher but later became the founder and director of the first sound archive in Germany. Since 1916 he serves as the managing secretary (Kommissar) of the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission that he himself had initiated. Doegen’s project is a kind of museum of sound recordings incorporating as many local dialects and world languages as possible. With the many different nationalities involved, the war is an opportunity for him to make such recordings without having to travel around the world. Hundreds of sound recordings are made on a total of 1651 shellac records by over forty established scholars and their small teams. F.W.K. Müller, Kim Chung-se, and a technical assistant comprise one such team. During the war, the German Empire operates about 240 POW camps (175 of these are within Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1921, no. 1 (January–June 1921): 154–155. See Tonga ilbo, 19 February 1923. 107 For a concise biography of Friedrich W.K. Müller (1863–1930) in English, see the online Encyclopædia Iranica at URL #12. 108 See F.W.K. Müller and E. Sieg, “Maitrisimit und ‘Tocharisch’” [Maitrisimit and ‘Tocharian’], Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1916, no. 1 (January–June 1916): 417. 109 Erich Haenisch, “Zum Tode von F.W.K. Müller und A. von Le Coq” [On the death of F.W.K. Müller and A. von Le Coq], Litterae orientales 43 (1930): 2. 106 49 Frank Hoffmann German territory) 110 with two-and-a-half-million prisoners from over a hundred countries and ethnicities. Altogether, the Doegen teams record “about 215 languages and dialects.”111 Many of these recordings have survived to this day. In 2013 the collection received some attention in the Korean media when a musicologist pointed out that among the collection are two of the oldest existing recordings of the song “Arirang” 아리랑, Korea’s most popular folk song.112 The oldest such recording, by the way, was made overseas at the Washington home of the American ethnologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher twenty years earlier,113 as a favor for her friend Anna Tolman Smith, who was fascinated with Korean songs and soon later wrote an article about Korean nursery rhymes based on some of those recordings.114 Müller and Kim visit the three camps Königsbrück, Münster, and Hammerstein to record Korean songs, riddles, number series, and several short autobiographical statements of six Korean Russian soldiers and officers. 115 They go to Königsbrück, a camp near Dresden, on 22 November 1916 — at least all recordings are from that 110 After the war Doegen, who had visted over 70 POW camps for his sound recording project, published a book about German POW camps and the treatment of prisoners for the new Reich Defense Ministry, giving painstaking details on the organization and living conditions as well as descriptions of the various nationalities and their cultural life during captivity. See Wilhelm Doegen, with Theodor Kappstein, Kriegsgefangene Völker: Der Kriegsgefangenen Haltung und Schicksal in Deutschland [Peoples as prisoners of war: The attitude and fate of prisoners of war in Germany] (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1919). 111 Wilhelm Doegen, “Einleitung” [Introduction], in Unter fremden Völkern: Eine neue Völkerkunde, ed. Wilhelm Doegen (Berlin: Otto Stollberg, Verlag für Politik und Wirtschaft, 1925), 13. 112 See Han’gyŏre, 5 April 2013; “Ilche ch’iha 1910-nyŏndae ‘Arirang’ ch’oech’o konggae” [First release of colonial period Arirang from the 1910s], KBS TV News, 1 March 2013, URL #13; “Koryŏin p’oroŭi arirang” [Arirang song by Russian Koreans in captivity], MBC TV News, 3 April 2013, URL #14; Agnes Schönbeck, “Der Herzton Koreas” [The heartbeat of Korea], Humboldt: Die Zeitung der Alma Mater Berolinensis 57, no. 7 (8 May 2013), 3. We may further note that a German language publication from 2001 already dealt with the Berlin collections of 1916–17 Koryŏ saram recordings: Thomas Ulbrich, “Historische koreanische Aufnahmen im Lautarchiv der Humboldt-Universität und im Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv” [Historic Korean recordings in the Humboldt University Sound Archives and in the Berlin Phonogram Archives], Baessler-Archiv 49 (2001): 139–163. 113 In 1998 Robert C. Provine discovered the copy of these first recordings of Korean music, made in 1896, at the Library of Congress. You may watch his 27 January 2009 Library of Congress lecture, entitled “Revolutionaries, Nursery Rhymes, and Edison Wax Cylinders: The Remarkable Tale of the Earliest Korean Sound Recordings,” in webcast format online at URL #15. Interestingly, and completely coincidentally, the first musical notation of Arirang, published by American missionary Homer B. Hulbert, was also published in that same year; see H.B. Hulbert, “Korean Vocal Music,” Korean Repository 3, no. 2 (February 1896): 49–51. 114 Anna Tolman Smith, “Some Nursery Rhymes of Korea,” Journal of American Folk-lore 38 (July–September 1897): 181–186. 115 All these recordings at the Humboldt University Sound Archives (Lautarchiv) are listed at the Helmholtz-Zentrum online catalog, including those where the actual recordings have gone missing. See URL #16. 50 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s (Fig. 14) World War I POW camp Münster, 23 March 1917: on the right Kim Chung-se, across the table F.W.K. Müller, interviewing three Korean Russian prisoners. day — and to Münster, close to the French–German border, on March 22 to 24, 1917, and to Hammerstein, then part of the German Reich but today known as Czarne in northern Poland, on 17 April 1917. According to Doegen’s 1919 book, Camp Wünsdorf in the immediate neighborhood of Berlin had a “separated block of Asians consisting of Vietnamese and Koreans.”116 We have to assume that neither Doegen nor Müller and Kim are aware of this fact while preparing and working on the recording project; otherwise they would have saved a lot of time, energy, and stress by just visiting that one camp so close to Berlin. Königsbrück in eastern Germany is one of the camps where the majority of prisoners, over 55,000 of them, are from the Russian Army. Münster consists of four different camps and has fewer Russian soldiers than the other two camps but still the largest number of them in the western part of the country (in Camp IV). Over 30,000 prisoners of war are incarcerated at Hammerstein, almost all Russians. As F.W.K. Müller does not speak or understand Korean, beyond very rudimentary things, it is up to Kim to convince the prisoners to do the recordings, to interview them, and to write all of the notations, while translating everything into German, and also fill out the short personal records (Personalbogen) of speakers and singers. For example, the singer of the 1916 recording of “Arirang ssŭrirang” (Lautarchiv PK 555) is the farmer Grigori Kim (fig. 15) from Nikolsk-Ussuriysky, and Kim Chungse writes down his Korean name Kim Hong-jun, his year of birth (1889), his educational background, occupation, and other basic information. In addition to various songs and texts, a short autobiographical piece by Grigori Kim is also recorded (PK 564, lost); the same applies to the other five interviewees. Other than a kind “thank you” in Müller’s later publication (where his name is even misspelled) Kim Chungse receives no credit for what must certainly be recognized as co-authorship. Like 116 Doegen, Kriegsgefangene Völker, 30. 51 Frank Hoffmann the case of An Pong-gŭn and his work for Heydrich, we may clearly consider this to be a symptom of an abusive system deeply rooted in and informed by colonial thought. Other Korean students, whom we will come to later, use the system far more adeptly than Kim, with a quickin-quick-out approach, where 15) One of the interviewed and recorded Koryŏ saram in they study for usually three to (Fig. a German POW camp: Grigori Kim, who sang »Arirang«. five years, get their doctoral degree, and then return to Korea (or travel on to the United States, in the case of a few select ones in the third career stage after Japan and Germany). Those who stayed on in Germany for too long set themselves up for failure, becoming overly entangled in the German political situation, and failing to achieve successful academic careers as well. Back to the 1916–17 recordings: at the end of February 1919 F.W.K. Müller gives a talk about the completed Korean sound recording project at the Academy meeting (manuscript lost). 117 A published version, seemingly written for a rather general audience, not linguists, appears in the 1925 project volume Unter fremden Völkern [Among foreign peoples], edited by Doegen, together with the contributions of over twenty other scholars.118 Above all, those twenty pages by Müller demonstrate how uninterested and misplaced this otherwise highly educated, elegant, and scholarly erudite man is in this specific project. This is quite simply not his academic turf: he confronts a living language and script, sound recordings of poorly educated, low-class farmers and village people who produce lyrics and songs of evenly low quality and crude elegance, in terms of musical and textual quality. His assistant (or more truly, co-author) Kim Chung-se, another man from an upper-class traditional family with excellent educational background, who otherwise works professionally on the same kinds of elegant religious or literary texts as Müller, seems equally inept at finding any enthusiasm for this project. Kim himself had been imprisoned in such a camp and, as we know from the records in the aforementioned Madrid archives, has hardly any financial means even to buy food for himself at the time. The result is 117 The talk is referred to as “Hr. F.W.K. Müller sprach über koreanische Lieder” [Mr. F.W.K. Müller discussed Korean songs], Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1919, no. 1 (January–June 1919), 133. 118 F.W.K. Müller, “Die Koreaner” [The Koreans], in Unter fremden Völkern: Eine neue Völkerkunde, ed. Wilhelm Doegen (Berlin: Otto Stollberg, Verlag für Politik und Wirtschaft, 1925), 96–115. 52 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s a chapter with a beautiful, enlightening, passionate, and well composed introduction about the Korean language and writing system — but that consists of several long quotes taken from texts by the nineteenth-century scholar Georg von der Gabelentz, followed by some evenly well composed passages on the importance of Korean culture — quotes that are from the above mentioned Archabbot Norbert Weber of St. Ottilien (from his 1915 book on Korea). This is then followed by poor, completely unlyrical, rather amateurish translations of songs, riddles, and other recorded contributions, together with Müller’s short and not always well informed annotations. Of course, a hundred years later we are, nevertheless, happy that these “folk culture” recordings and notes made by Müller and Kim still exist, as they document the language of Koryŏ saram of the time and provide us with specifics about the history of songs such as “Arirang.” Ever since “Arirang” was popularized by Na Un-gyu’s 羅雲奎 1926 movie of the same title, it has been Korea’s most popular folk song (minyo 民謠). The generic term minyo itself is a translation of the German word Volkslied, a term and romantic, idealized concept that had been invented by Sturm und Drang philosopher and writer Johann Gottfried Herder. It was later also adapted into Japanese (min’yō) and then applied by colonial period Japanese ethnologists to Korean songs that eluded traditional genre classification. The version of “Arirang” that movie director Na Un-gyu listened to in his youth, and the song that he then composed for his movie based on these memories seem to be a mixture of traditional songs and already Westernized popularized songs, influenced by Christian hymns, etc. Yet, the trendy obsession with “historical roots” in Korea plays heavily on the interpretation of the history of this song as being “purely” Korean; and its inclusion on UNESCO’s intangible heritage list in December 2012 has given it an extra push. A recent exhibition at the Museum of Gugak (Kugak Pangmulgwan) thus counts another overseas recording, the aforementioned 1896 version from Washington D.C., as the first such “Arirang” recording. The basis of the claim that this song is a version of “Arirang,” however, is entirely textual (although, the museum’s director interestingly states otherwise in a TV interview 119 ): the melody does not resemble Na’s 1926 popularized “Arirang ssŭrirang” version whatsoever. So an “Arirang” song is defined and identified as such by having “arariyo” in the refrain and “arirang” recur repeatedly throughout such a song, not by obvious melodic similarities.120 As E. Taylor Atkins explains, “there are around fifty known melodies and more than 2,000 different lyrics” for the song. “With such fundamental differences between versions, it seems better to think of ‘Arirang’ less as a song than as a skeletal framework for musical and poetic 119 Watch the Yŏnhap News TV report of 31 August 2013, 3:54 to 3:57 PM, online at URL #17. 120 Many thanks to Rob Provine and Christian Lewarth for discussing issues related to these early “Arirang” recordings with me. 53 Frank Hoffmann articulation.”121 Talking about the 1941 English language novel Song of Ariran by Nym Wales (aka Helen Foster Snow) and Kim San (aka Chang Chi-rak 張志樂), Atkins finds it striking that only a decade after Na’s movie, the song “had already achieved mythic status: Its antiquity, its Koreanness, and its defiant spirit, all core elements of ‘Arirang’ discourse, were in place.”122 The Müller/Kim recordings of 1916–17 come in here as a little surprise in the sense that text and melody are already close to the version popular today, the one introduced by Na. In the lyrics of the 1917 recording of Stepan An (PK 749), however, the man, not the girl, sings, and he takes a ship down the Han River, rather than crossing over Arirang hill. Still, both melody and lyrics of this Berlin recording come close to the popular 1926 version and it conveys quite the same mood. Overall, we can conclude that the “Arirang” versions of the 1910s, a time without radio and cinema, were not quite as polished and ready for mass consumption on the Korean (and, as Atkins shows, Japanese) entertainment market; they were not yet the New Folk Songs (sin minyo 新民謠) of the 1920s. Still, they already were immensely popular and were associated with patriotic sentiments among Koreans everywhere. This is also demonstrated by some of the other songs these imprisoned soldiers sing to represent their people, mirroring the political stand and engagement of Koreans in the Russian Far East in the early colonial period. Müller states that the texts of two other recorded patriotic songs were written by national hero An Chung-gŭn himself, and the lyrics of both are translated by Kim and Müller and included in the 1925 chapter. One is “Meeting the Enemy” (Wŏnsu nŏrul mannattoda 원수 너를 만났도다, PK 840), the other is “This Is Our Nation” (Igosŭn uri nara 이것은 우리 나라, PK 751).123 When the Korean recordings in Berlin were rediscovered and described by Thomas Ulbrich in his 2001 article, South Korean publications and government-run historical archives instantly picked up on it and begun listing An Chung-gŭn as a songwriter, adding to the already extensive personality cult around him. However, it turns out that the lyrics to the first song (PK 840) were written by An’s friend and close associate U Tŏk-sun 禹德淳, the man who had helped plan Itō’s assassination and stood trial with An, but was only sentenced to a few years of imprisonment. The second song (PK 751) borrows its melody and its mood from “Comrades” (Senyū 戦 友 ), a typical and, at the time, exceptionally popular product of the early Japanese war song (gunka 軍歌) genre by composer Miyoshi Kazuoki 三善和気, originally with lyrics by Mashimo Hisen 真下飛泉.124 The 121 E. Taylor Atkins, “The Dual Career of ‘Arirang’: The Korean Resistance Anthem That Became a Japanese Pop Hit,” Journal of Asian Studies 66, no. 3 (August 2007): 650. 122 Ibid., 655. 123 See ibid., 105–108. 124 For further details, see Kim Po-hŭi, “1917-nyŏn togil p’oro koryŏini purŭn tongnip undong kayo” [Independence movement songs sung in 1917 by Korean Russian prisoners in Ger- 54 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s Japanese lyrics, of course, have been replaced by very patriotic Korean lyrics, full of national icons and landmarks such as Tan’gun and Paektu-san, while at the same time being custom–tailored for Koryŏ saram singers, including additional references to Koreans in Siberia. The author of the Korean text of this adapted Miyoshi song and the composer of the first mentioned song with U Tŏk-sun’s lyrics are unknown. What we can say is that these songs where all inspired by Anglo-American war songs such as “Yankee Doodle” and of course the many Christian hymns that missionaries had introduced to Korea from the 1880s. Müller already notes in his chapter that the performing soldiers seemed to sing all songs with the same or very similar tunes and would just replace the lyrics. This was indeed a common practice at the time. Thus it is not surprising that a similar practice applies to the lyrics, when text is sometimes just partially replaced, and lines from Christian hymns like “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy, have mercy” alternate with ones calling for the nation to “slash [our enemies’] throats with sharp knifes,” as in the Berlin version of U Tŏksun’s lyrics. In December 1923, several years after the World War I recording project, Kim Chung-se goes back to the Sound Archives and asks Doegen to record two sing-song recitations he himself performs. One is described in Kim’s Personalbogen as “Philosophical Discourses by Confucius” (LA 132) and is actually the recitation of the beginning of the “Studying” (Xue Er 學而) book, the opening text of the Lunyu 論語, also known as The Analects, one of the Four Books and Five Classics, the quintessential canon of Confucian writings. 125 The other consists of two chanted short Buddhist prayers (LA 133). These recordings are preserved to this day. The two Buddhist prayers turn out to be the first two of the so-called “Ten Small Mantras” (Shi xiao zhou 十小咒), put together by the monk Yulin (known as Yulin guo shi 玉琳 國師), a teacher of the Shunzhi Emperor 順治皇帝 (r. 1644–1661), which are chanted in the morning and have long been very popular among Buddhist devotees.126 Those more familiar with Christian culture may compare it to the practice and importance of rosary prayers in the Catholic Church, which are also often chanted. Like other Berliners chanting Indian mantras, Nina Hagen comes to mind, this does not entail being exclusively Buddhist: Kim sure has his own “Personal Jesus,” otherwise he many], Han’guk tongnip undongsa yŏn’gu 42 (August 2012): 75–106. Kim Po-hŭi proves that U Tŏk-sun’s authorship was already clarified in the issue of 8 May 1910 of the Taedong kongbo 大東共報, a Korean gazette from Vladivostok close to An and his cause. 125 Kim chants ch. I to VI of the Xue Er; cf. James Legge, The Chinese Classics: With a Translation, Critical and Exegetical Notes, Prolegomena, and Copious Indexes, vol. 1 (London: Trübner, 1861), 2–4. 126 The first is the “Wish-fulfilling Avalokiteśvara Dhāraṇī” (Sino-Kor. Yŏŭiboryunwang tarani 如意寶輪王陀羅尼, Sanskrit Cintāmani-cakra Dhāraṇī), the second one is the Dispersing Calamities and Bringing Auspicious Good Will Dhāraṇī” (Sino-Kor. Sojae’gilsangsinju 消災吉祥神咒, Sanskrit Jvāla Mahāugra Dhāraṇī). 55 Frank Hoffmann would not have filled in “Protestant” as his religion on the personal records sheet. Of further interest, as he does for the Lunyu text, he writes down Yulin’s Chinese translations of these Indian Sanskrit dhāraṇī, and then transliterates, and of course chants, the texts in Korean pronunciation, using his own romanization system: for example, he uses k for ㄱ, t for ㄷ, t‘ for ㅌ, ć for ㅈ, ć‘ for ㅊ, å for ㅓ, ăi for ㅒ, ï for ㅡ, ya for ㅑ, etc. He had already used this same system in 1916–17, and we may therefore assume that this is, after Georg von Gabelentz (1892),127 one of the first attempts to develop a systematic romanization system for Korean in Germany. At the same time this demonstrates Kim’s somewhat stoic and limited approach, being more concerned with alphabets and writing systems than languages, as it is once more just a transliteration system that is not concerned with phonemics. His specialty for the doctoral program matches what he does as a research assistant. His field is now Oriental studies, which at the time still includes the study of all cultures in the “Orient,” or Morgenland in German, the part of the world where, from the European point of view, the sun rises — therefore not just Far Eastern countries, but Middle Eastern cultures such as Egypt and Iran as well. He specializes on old Buddhist scriptures. Basically, what he does is early German-style Sinology, textual studies mostly, with some religious studies mixed in, which also happens to be one of his minors at the university. Kim’s doctoral thesis advisor, August Conrady, is a sinologist and professor of Tibetan and Sanskrit, and he teaches in Leipzig. In February 1924 Kim applies to be admitted to the doctoral degree exams. He sends this application (see fig. 16) to the Philosophical Faculty at Leipzig University, stating that his advisor Conrady has already received a copy of his completed doctoral thesis manuscript. (That helps explain why we often read that he received a doctoral degree in 1923 or 1924.) This first thesis manuscript deals with the Mahāyāna philosophy as reflected in the Heart Sūtra (Prajñāpāramitā Hṛdaya), the shortest of all sūtras, in Korea known as the Panya simgyŏng 般若心經.128 But something goes wrong. The Heart Sūtra thesis topic 127 The earliest transliteration attempt was done by Philipp Franz von Siebold in the Korea related parts (1833–1840) of his monumental Nippon publication. But the first complete and systematic transcription table was provided by Georg von der Gabelentz in his 1892 Academy paper. See Sven Osterkamp, “Selected Materials on Korean from the Siebold Archive in Bochum — Preceded by Some General Remarks Regarding Siebold’s Study of Korean,” Bochum Yearbook for East Asian Studies 33 (2009): 187–216; G. von der Gabelentz, “Zur Beurtheilung des koreanischen Schrift- und Lautwesens” [An appraisal of the Korean script and sound system], Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1892, no. 2 (June–December 1892), chart VI (following p. 600). 128 See Kim Chung-se’s application letter for the doctoral exam to the Dean of the Philosophical Faculty, University of Leipzig, dated 26 February 1924, Chung Se Kimm folder with 20 sheets, Phil Fak Prom 2282, Archives of the University of Leipzig (hereafter Kimm folder, Leipzig). 56 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s (and the thesis itself) “disappears” without further record of what happened. It seems that, originally, Conrady was supposed to act as Kim’s thesis advisor for Berlin University. Later, at Kim’s second run for the doctoral degree, Leipzig University even inquires at Berlin University if Kim’s Heart Sūtra thesis or other related work had been rejected in Berlin. 129 But Berlin University answers that Kim had never even applied.130 Kim begins to work on a new dissertation with a new topic as 16) Kim Chung-se’s February 1924 letter to the dean of the Philosophical early as 1924, still (Fig. Faculty, Leipzig University, when handing in his first dissertation, applying for with Conrady as his the oral exam. (The document is referenced in footnote 128). advisor.131 He even moves to Leipzig. Then his Doktorvater dies in June of 1925, and Kim takes on Conrady’s successor Erich Haenisch as his new thesis advisor. (The sinologist Haenisch, only two years older than Kim, is much later being described by one author as West Germany’s “only politically uncompromised scholar of East Asian 129 Letter by Dean Dr. F. Krueger, Philosophical Faculty, University of Leipzig, to the Dean’s Office, Philosophical Faculty, Berlin University, dated 23 December 1925, Kimm folder, Leipzig. 130 Letter by Dean Dr. H. Diels, Philosophical Faculty, Berlin University, to Dean Dr. F. Krueger, Philosophical Faculty, University of Leipzig, dated 31 December 1925 (and received 3 January 1926), Kimm folder, Leipzig. 131 See Kimm, “Kuèi-kŭh-tzè, der Philosoph vom Teufelstal,” 123. 57 Frank Hoffmann studies”132 after World War II.) Kim’s life still seems miserable. He is financially strained for all those years: he moves from one sublet room to another, likely not being able to pay the rent. Living alone between 1921 and 1927, he moves at least nine times.133 In December 1925 Kim hands in a new application134 and a new dissertation, an annotated and commented translation of the Guiguzi 鬼谷子 texts, several ancient Chinese texts from the Warring States Period. In the same year, 1925, Kim also sees his first academic article published in Asia Major, a still new East Asian studies journal published by Bruno Schindler, a former Conrady student, who had also been the main force behind the founding of the Jewish community of Shanghai.135 Dedicated to F.W.K. Müller who celebrates his sixtieth birthday, this issue of the journal is basically a Festschrift for Müller. The contribution by Kim, who at this point does not yet have his doctoral degree, is also an expression of the close cooperation between the two scholars and an acknowledgment of Kim as a serious scholar in Oriental studies. Kim passes the oral exams on 12 February 1926 (having only completed the first part of his later published thesis), and his completed dissertation is then accepted on the 20th of May the coming year. While at Leipzig University all the income he has comes from a part-time job at the library, preparing a catalog of the East Asian handwriting collection. (As a side note: before finally leaving Leipzig, Kim also helps translate a letter by King Kojong for Paul Georg von Möllendorff’s widow Rosalie who is preparing a book on her late husband’s life.136) Too poor to pay for the requested 150 special prints of his dissertation, Kim writes several letters to the Dean’s office to ask again and again for an extension of time to meet that require132 Martin Kern, summarizing a statement by Wolfgang Franke: Martin Kern, “The Emigration of German Sinologists 1933–1945: Notes on the History and Historiography of Chinese Studies,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 118, no. 4 (October–December 1998): 510, footnote 11. 133 He is not a regular renter, and his name does not appear in the Berlin and Leipzig address books, but he is listed in the university course catalogues and the membership list of the German Oriental Society. See the “Mitgliedernachrichten” [Membership news] sections in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 75 (1921): xvii: Kulmbacherstr. 7 in Berlin; vol. 76 (1922): xxxii: Wilhelmsaue 3 in Berlin; vol. 77 (1923): xix: Rotdornstr. 7 in Berlin; vol. 78 (1924): lxxxviii: Landauerstr. 9 in Berlin; vol. 79 (1925): xxxiv: Beethovenstr. 17 in Leipzig; vol. 80 (1926): lviii and c: first Kantstr. 13, afterwards Lampestr. 13, and later Landauer Str. 9 at Frau Prof. Rüfer in Leipzig; vol. 81 (1927): cxxxiii: Hardenbergstr. 16 in Leipzig. 134 See Kim Chung-se’s application letter for the doctoral exam to the Dean of the Philosophical Faculty, University of Leipzig, dated 10 December 1925, Kimm folder, Leipzig. 135 Chung Se Kimm, “Ein chinesisches Fragment des Prātimokṣa aus Turfan” [A Chinese fragment of the Prātimokṣa from Turfan], Asia Major 2 (1925): 597–608. 136 See Rosalie von Moellendorff, P.G. von Moellendorff: Ein Lebensbild [P.G. von Moellendorff: An account of his life] (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1930), 116. From 1882 to 1885 Möllendorff (aka Mok In-tŏk 穆麟德) had been an important adviser to King Kojong. 58 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s ment. Kim is already in London and on the way home to Korea when he writes the last application for an extension in August 1927.137 Ultimately, Asia Major publishes his dissertation in article format (see footnote 79) and produces the 150 special offprints for him; he thus receives his doctoral degree in late September 1927. In March 1928, after having stayed for several months in London, Kim is finally back in Korea. By now, he is 46 years old and has published only two shorter academic essays, but does have a German doctoral degree in hand and thus gets some welcome notes in the Korean dailies. 138 For the time being he settles at his family’s residence in Kaesŏng.139 Erich Haenisch, on the way from Japan to China, visits Korea at the time of Kim’s return and uses the opportunity to promote his former student with some kind words in a local magazine.140 We find Kim soon later working as a lecturer of philosophy at Keijō Imperial University (Keijō Teikoku Daigaku 京城帝国大学) in Seoul (resp. Keijō). From what we know of, he publishes nothing but a few newspaper articles, interviews about the situation in Germany, congratulatory remarks for a new philosophy journal, and similar short pieces. He lives a quiet, unobtrusive life, and only receives a brief mention in a Korean newspaper when he dies in July 1946.141 3. Socialist Activists: Berlin as a Testing Ground We now come to the group of Korean students that arrives in Berlin in the 1920s and then leaves after a few years. In the wake of the March First Independence Movement of 1919, the young generation of Koreans was politically diverted. Some still work toward national self-determination by means of self-strenghtening efforts in education and industry, while others plan and engage in military resistance (including terrorist means) through anarchist or communist movements. The situation is too complicated to even summarize here. We should note, however, that at the time a very young generation of people, mostly in their late teens and twenties, comprised the great majority of Korean activists inside and outside of Korea. It is the twenties generation that shapes the 1920s in Korea, the political, cultural, educational, economic, and military movements. The 1920s is the try-out decade, and Berlin is the testing ground for the various political systems and ideologies, all 137 See Kim Chung-se’s letter from London to the Dean of the Philosophical Faculty, University of Leipzig, dated 15 August 1927, Kimm folder, Leipzig. 138 See Chungoe ilbo, 15 March 1928; Maeil sinbo, 23 March 1928; Tonga ilbo, 23 March 1928; Chosŏn ilbo, 14 and 23 March 1928. 139 See Tonga ilbo, 5 April 1928. 140 See [Erich] Haenisch, “Oegugini pon chosŏnŭi charanggŏri: nae’ga chosŏnŭl ch’atkinŭn” [A foreigner’s view of Korean things to be proud of: What I am discovering in Korea], Pyŏlgŏn’gon 12–13 (May 1928): 78. This is actually a kind of interview article where the magazine editor renders statements by Haenisch. 141 See Tonga ilbo, 18 July 1946. Kim had died on 15 July. 59 Frank Hoffmann being tools to achieve the larger common goal of Korean independence. Tracing the paths of those activists, we observe many shifts from one ideology to another. It is this same generation that assumes power after liberation, most of them now in their mid-forties or early fifties and ideologically settled. The reforms implemented by the colonial government after the March First Movement, among many other changes, make it easier for the sons of well-to-do families to study overseas. We thus see more Korean students going to Germany with Japanese passports while others active in the exiled anti-Japanese movement start to embark from Shanghai with Chinese passports. In Germany, the Revolution of November 1918, an unfinished communist revolution, ends the war and turns the monarchy into a democracy, but that new democratic government of the Weimar Republic with its many parties and enemies on the right and left is not stable. As the new political freedom of the “Mad Decade” produces an unbelievably vibrant cultural life in the big cities, specifically in Berlin, the huge war reparation payments Germany is forced to pay to the victors and all the other costs resulting from the war brings down the German economy. The unemployment rate is very high and in the cities thousands of people regularly suffer from food shortages. (a) Koryŏ Student Corps in Germany Once at their destination, the already politicized Korean students take a 101 crash course in political ideology right in the streets of Berlin: they watch anarchists, Bolsheviks, social democrats, labor unionists, many remain- (Fig. 17) The Koryŏ Student Corps in Berlin, article and photo in the Tonga ilbo, 27 March 1922: on the left, front row, Yi Kŭng-no, behind ing loyalists and him stands Kim Chung-se, with Kim Kap-su positioned next to him. other reactionary conservatives, and of course the early fascists fighting with each other. This is going on through much of the 1920s. We will take a closer look at an October 1923 protest demo organized by the Koryŏ Student Corps in Germany (Yudŏk Koryŏ Haguhoe 留德高麗學友會 ) which, for good reason, has been repeatedly covered in South Korean publications about the overseas independence movement. The Koryŏ Student Corps had been established in January 1921 with Kim Kap-su as its Secretary 60 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s General and 10 other members.142 As has already been pointed out in the discussion of An Pong-gŭn, Kim had been a member of the Korean exile government in Shanghai before coming to Berlin. The student association’s office is at Kantstraße 122 in Berlin — the same street where An Pong-gŭn would later live at number 132. The association sublets that office space from the much larger left-wing Chinese Student Union. The subject of protest of the October 1923 demonstration initiated by the Korean students is the inhuman treatment and massacre of thousands of Korean residents in Japan the month before, right after the Great Kantō Earthquake. A Berlin art dealer, a Dr. Otto Burchardt, had been an eyewitness of the earthquake and had published a long and detailed article in Berlin’s leading newspaper, also giving an explicit description about the massacre of Koreans.143 Burchardt had also met with one of the Korean students directly. In an internal report by the Berlin Chief of Police (dated 24 January 1924) we later read that the Koryŏ Student Corps had organized a protest rally in Berlin under the title “Great Meeting of Koreans in Germany.” The rally takes place on 26 October, the anniversary of An Chung-gŭn’s assassination of Itō. The students produce two-page flyers entitled “Japan’s Bloody Rule in Korea” in German,144 English (see fig. 18), and Chinese, distributed in sets of 5,000 and 2,000 respectively, with a text that focuses on the brutal suppression of the March First Movement and the recent massacre of Koreans in the aftermath of the earthquake. A later newspaper report states that about 40 Koreans would now be living in Berlin, and that some from other cities had also attended that meeting, totaling about 60 in all. 145 According to a contemporary report by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, referencing the year 1925, there are 52 or 53 Koreans in Germany, two in Switzerland, two or three in Italy, about 150 in France, 40 in the Netherlands, ten in Great Britain, and a few more in eastern Europe: 258 Koreans all together in Europe as a whole.146 In 1923 the actual number of all Koreans living in Germany, whatever their passport identity, seems to be close to 90. Two years later, the number has already been reduced by about one third. The economic and political 142 See Tonga ilbo, 27 March 1922. See Vossische Zeitung, 9 October 1923. As a side note: Otto Burchardt was a prominent German Jewish art and Asiatica dealer with a gallery at the Kemperplatz in Berlin who promoted Dada and German expressionists. In 1935 his company was forced into liquidation by the Nazis, just like all other Jewish dealers between 1935 and 1938. 144 A facsimile of the German language edition of the flyer can be found in Kukka Pohunch’ŏ, comp., Haeoeŭi han’guk tongnip undong saryo [Sources on the Korean independence movement abroad], vol. 3, part 2 (Seoul: Kukka Pohunch’ŏ, 1991), 601–602. 145 See Berliner Volks-Zeitung, 24 November 1923. The Tongnip sinmun in Shanghai reported about the demo on 26 December 1923. 146 See Nihon Gaimushō, “Beikoku ryūgaku Chōsen hito ni kansuru ken” [On the Koreans studying in America], 20 March 1926, quoted in Hong, “1920-nyŏndae yurŏbesŏŭi han’guk tongnip undong,” 437. For the 1923 numbers see pp. 442–444 of Hong’s article. 143 61 Frank Hoffmann situation is so intimidating that many either try to move on to the United States or return to Korea after three or four years of study, at that time the usual length of study, in any case.147 A brief look into the morning and evening editions of the Berlin daily Vossische Zeitung of that 26 October 1923, the day of the Korean demonstration, conveys a good sense of that turbulent and explosive political environment. The morning newspaper reports that the current exchange rate is an astounding $1 to 65 billion Reichsmark (RM). Just a month later the RM will be worth 64 times less. In other words, a day’s wage received in the evening will not pay for bread the next morning. Several reports deal with the “Autonomous Pfalz Republic” that the separatists announce that day, in reaction to the French occupation of Rhineland and Pfalz in order to enforce high war reparation payments, and a related speech by Chancellor Stresemann in the evening edition addresses “the great German suffering.” Further, we read that the Chief of Secret Police has been arrested for refusing to follow an order to destroy the handguns of his forces; and in connection with a court hearing related to the assassination of German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau the year before, one of countless terrorist attacks by the right and the left, we learn that high military officers of the new Weimar Republic either remain loyalists or are already right-wing, obscure early fascists, but certainly not defenders of democracy. We also learn that multiple demonstrations were held in Berlin the day before, when a communist demonstrator who had been shot was buried. Extremely violent street fights are reported in Hamburg, with its thousands of harbor workers (among them many left-wing Chinese nationals), in the midst of a communist-organized general strike, which left over a hundred demonstrators and policemen dead. In this broader context, the protest actions of Korean students seem to have almost gone unnoticed in Germany itself. While that analysis might be correct, it focuses on the wrong context. We must look at what the news about such actions did to other overseas Koreans elsewhere and to their compatriots in Korea. Such an overseas protest action was, in this sense, an important piece of propaganda warfare that was quite effective back home. The networking exercises were also important: as we have already seen in the case of the Catholic Church and their missionary efforts, national and institutional interests were strong on both sites. That is certainly 147 62 The influx of foreign students to Weimar Germany directly correlated with the Republic’s inflationary markets. The highest numbers of Korean students arrived in Berlin at the height of Weimar’s hyperinflation in 1922–23. East Asian, American, and other foreign students and businessmen took full advantage of extremely low living expenses as they could exchange Japanese Yen or US dollars for Reichsmark at highly unreasonable rates. In the mid-1920s, with a new reparation payment agreement (Dawes Plan), the situation started to relax. Korean students, in addition, faced the obstacle of having to do all Korearelated financial transactions through the Japanese Embassy. The longer they stayed, the more would they get entangled into the local economic and political crisis. The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s not any different than the cooperation between European communists and Korean independence activists. Japanese government officials and others close to their government were well aware of this, as Mr. Ikeda — quoted below — exemplifies. An internal report of the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin about the October demonstration, dated 15 December 1923, reads: Mr. Ikeda, a Japanese reporter for Hochi [Hōchi shimbun 報知新聞], commented as follows about that ‘Great Meeting of Koreans in Germany’ that had produced the attached flyer: This group has around 60 Korean members in Germany. About 40 of them live in Potsdam. They are members of the ‘Giretsudan’ [Ŭiyŏltan 義烈 團 (Righteous Brotherhood)] (...). Their headquarters are located in Shanghai, and it is an organization that has committed many assassinations. The group is communist in character. Almost all of the 60 Koreans have come to Germany with Russian passports from Russia and Siberia. (...) Ikeda pointed out that their flyers had been printed by the Friedrichstadt-Druckerei (the print shop of the [KPD’s] ‘Rote Fahne’ [‘Red Flag’]). It was said to have been distributed to all the newspapers, larger factories, libraries, etc., and not just in German and English, but also in 148 French, Chinese, and in Korean versions. The quoted Japanese reporter in Berlin reacts to the Korean protest action with the manipulated agitprop that we might expect, claiming the Korean students were all communists, clearly indicating that they would be getting directives from Moscow, as members of the militant anarchist Ŭiyŏltan, and working closely with the Communist Party of Germany. He thus turns what seem to be civic protests by a seemingly innocuous student group into acts of a leftist, terrorist group which, in that case, might even pose a threat to their host city of Berlin (which was right in the middle of its own assassination wars and other violent political struggles). As is so often the case, the truth lies somewhere in between. The issue starts with evaluating the ideologies such militant groups using terrorist tactics subscribed to, e.g. Kim Wŏn-bong’s 金 元 鳳 Ŭiyŏltan or Kim Ku’s rather right-wing Korean Patriotic Corps (Fig. 18) Koryŏ Student Corps flyer, English version, Berlin, October 1923. 148 Facsimile of the original report in Kukka Pohunch’ŏ, Haeoeŭi han’guk tongnip undong saryo, vol. 1 (1991), 159. 63 Frank Hoffmann (Hanin Aeguktan 韓人愛國團).149 Labeling the Ŭiyŏltan “anarchist,” for example, while perhaps not wrong, is at least questionable. The group’s leader Kim Wŏn-bong himself would hardly be considered an anarchist. But others working with the Ŭiyŏltan at one point or another, e.g. the influential intellectual leader Sin Ch’ae-ho 申采浩, could well be labeled as such. Overall, and that explains many bewildering political turnarounds and unexpected alliances, before 1945 political ideologies often appear to be no more than loaned constructs that help foster strategic coalitions with more powerful political groups (e.g. in China) and governments (e.g. of the USSR). (b) Yi Kŭng-no Let us check a few facts to determine whether any of the Japanese journalist’s claims can be verified. The flyer that had been distributed for the October demo bears three signatures: “Ih Tsing Kao, C.J. Kim, Li Kolu.” The third name, that of the linguist Yi Kŭng-no 李克魯 (aka Li Kolu, 1893–1978), is the easiest to identify. Yi is basically the father of the first widely published Korean orthographic rule set for Korean and is, by now, a well known figure to Korean studies specialists for his role in the colonial period Han’gŭl movement and a leading researcher in the Korean Language Society (Chosŏnŏ Hakhoe 朝鮮語學會) with its Korean Dictionary Compilation Committee (Chosŏnŏ Sajŏn P’yŏnch’anhoe 朝鮮語辭典編纂會 ). Yi Kŭng-no is, in this writers mind, without doubt the most outstanding Korean scholar and political activist to have ever studied in Berlin. Most aspects of Yi’s work and his role in the Han’gŭl movement have already been covered in several recent books (alone three by or initiated by Ko Yŏng-gŭn 高永根) and plenty of new articles.150 In light of this significant material, our discussion of Yi here is shorter than he would deserve otherwise. Many of the claims the Hōchi shimbun reporter makes of all Korean students in the Koryŏ Student Corps do apply to Yi Kŭng-no: we may justifiably call him a representative of the Shanghai Ŭiyŏltan to Berlin, and indeed he did come from Moscow, where he also met with Lenin. 149 As a side note: Kim Wŏn-bong himself had also studied German during World War I and originally planned to study in Germany. 150 As general references on Yi Kŭng-no’s time in Berlin, see his own autobiography Kot’u sasimnyŏn [Fourty years of struggle] (Seoul: Ŭryu Munhwasa, 1947), 31-39; Sonja Häußler, “Frühe Koreaner in Deutschland: Studium und Aktivitäten von Yi Geungno (1893–1978)” [Early Koreans in Germany: University education and activities of Yi Kŭngno (1893–1978)], Kultur Korea (Winter 2012): 57–60; Cho Chun-hŭi, “1920-nyŏndae yurŏbesŏ Yi Kŭng-noŭi chosŏnŏ kangjwawa minjok undong” [Yi Kŭng-no’s Korean language courses in Europe and the national movement during the 1920s], Hanminjok yŏn’gu 5 (June 2008): 117–142; Pak Yong-gyu, “Ilche sidae Yi Kŭng-noŭi minjok undong yŏn’gu: han’gŭl undongŭl chungsimŭro” [A study about Yi Kŭng-no’s colonial period national movement: With special emphasis on the Han’gŭl movement] (Unpublished dissertation, Korea University, 2009), 28–53, and the impressive list of publications by Yi on pp. 193–200; Hong, “1920-nyŏndae yurŏbesŏŭi han’guk tongnip undong,” 447–448 and 456–469. 64 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s Yi wrote several booklets and pamphlets about the Korean independence movement, some of which even found their way to Vladivostok, where they were used in massive anti-Japanese mass demonstrations.151 In his publications, notably a 32-page booklet entitled Unabhängigkeitsbewegung Koreas und japanische Eroberungspolitik [Korean independence movement and Japanese policy of conquest] from 1924 and another small booklet three years later, Korea und sein Unabhängigkeitskampf gegen den japanischen Imperialismus [Korea and its independence struggle against Japanese imperialism], he provides elaborate descriptions of assassinations carried out by the Ŭiyŏltan.152 There is more, however. His background reveals the seeds of his patriotic and leftist engagement. The late North Korean dictator Kim Il-sŏng (aka Kim Il Sung 金日成) provides us with a short personal evaluation and biography of Yi: He was so modest and well-mannered that he never used the low forms of speech even to his juniors. Once I read his personal history [Kot’u sasimnyŏn, 1947], and it surprised me. He had been to many places and met many people. He had been to China, Japan, the Soviet Union, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. He had even met Lenin. He met Lenin when the Conference of Peoples of the Far East was being held in Moscow. Lee Kuk Ro [Yi Kŭng-no] went to Moscow from Shanghai and stayed together with Lee Tong Hui [Yi Tong-hwi] and Park Chin Sun [Pak Chin-sun 朴鎭淳]. He met Lenin twice in the Kremlin. (...) He knew (...) many others who were active in Northeast China. Wilhelm Pieck invited Lee to study in Germany when he was staying in Moscow. Lee entered Berlin University at his 153 recommendation, and obtained a PhD. In 1918, the previously mentioned Yi Tong-hwi had been responsible for setting up the first Korean communist party in Khabarovsk. That was the Korean Socialist Party (Hanin Sahoedang 韓人社會黨), which later changed its name to Koryŏ Communist Party (Koryŏ Kongsandang 高麗共産黨). And Wilhelm Pieck — becoming the first President of East Germany three decades later — had in the same year been a founding member of the KPD. Like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, he had been captured in January the following year by right-wing paramilitaries, but unlike the other two who were murdered, Pieck managed to escape. He meets with Yi Kŭng-no in Moscow in 1921 at the Third World Congress of the Comintern, and being a parliamentarian at that time, he has the authority to invite Yi to Berlin. Going back earlier in Yi Kŭng-no’s life, we find him in Manchuria. In the spring of 1911, when he was only 17 years old, he left his family in Korea to live in China 151 See Kukka Pohunch’ŏ, Haeoeŭi han’guk tongnip undong saryo, vol. 3 part 2 (1991), 604. See Li Kolu, Unabhängigkeitsbewegung Koreas und japanische Eroberungspolitik [Korean independence movement and Japanese policy of conquest] (Berlin: J. Sittenfeld, 1924); Li Kolu, Korea und sein Unabhängigkeitskampf gegen den japanischen Imperialismus [Korea and its independence struggle against Japanese imperialism] (Berlin: E. Ebering, 1927). 153 Kim Il Sung, With the Century, vol. 8 (P’yŏngyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1998), 378. 152 65 Frank Hoffmann for the next nine years. There he becomes a guest in the household of Yun Se-bok 尹 世復, one of the three leaders of the Tan’gun religion (Tan’gun’gyo 檀君敎, later known as Taejonggyo 大倧敎). Yun leads a secret military group fighting for Korean independence. In 1915 he establishes the Paeksan School (Paeksan Hakkyo 白山學敎, located in what is today Fusong County in Jilin Province, close to Paektu-san) in order to provide a general education to Korean settlers there, but also to prepare youth for military actions.154 Yi Kŭng-no works there as one of the teachers. Given Yi’s involvement with Yun Se-bok and the Taejonggyo, essentially the official religion of the armed activist groups of the independence movement, it is not surprising that “God and Men” (Sin’gwa in’gan 신과 인간) is among the sound recordings he made years later, in 1928, at Sorbonne University in Paris. This is a prayer that explains one of the eight equality doctrines (Tan’gun p’alchogyo 檀君八條敎 ) of the Taejonggyo religion, which was simultaneously religious and highly political. Equality was already one of the doctrines of (Fig. 19) Yi Kŭng-no’s recording of Sin’gwa ingan, record label, Paris 1928. Ch’ŏndogyo 天道敎 and the Tonghak peasant armies of the 1890s. Yi explains it as such in the Sorbonne recordings.155 The seemingly subtle distinctions between this and Kim Chung-se’s two Berlin recordings of 1923 actually reveal huge differences: The 1920s generation is politically aware and active, and often left-leaning. Yi’s understanding and Marxist training allows him to merge selected elements of Korean tradition with modern life, his own research and academic work. Unlike the prior Chosŏn generation, he actively uses all resources available to him to educate himself, to keep up with the latest modern sciences, and to do agitative political work even in his academic life. He and his generation understand the task of promoting the Korean language and the Korean alphabet, coming up with orthographic rules in order to modernize the writing system, and working on an extensive Korean dictionary, etc., as political work.156 154 For details, see Cho Chun-hŭi, “Tanae Yun Se-bogŭi minjok hakkyo sŏllip ilgoch’al [A study on Tanae Yun Se-bok’s establishment of a national Korean school], Sŏndo munhwa 8 (May 2010): 89–125. 155 Online at Bibliothèque nationale de France, URL #18. 156 It should be noted, however, that the most essential standardizations of orthographic rules of the Korean writing system were initiated, worked out, and published by the Japanese colonial government of Korea in 1912 and again in 1930; the 1933 reform by the Korean 66 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s In 1919, Yi moves to Shanghai where the Korean Provisional Government of Korea had been established. In 1921, he graduates from the German Medical and Engineering School for the Chinese in Shanghai, soon later to become Tongji University (Tongji Daxue 同濟大學 ). This academic link is his first connection with Germany. During his Shanghai years he acquaints himself with all of the important independence leaders, is involved in various actions, and is intellectually influenced mostly by Sin Ch’ae-ho and historian Pak Ŭn-sik 朴殷植. Naturally, he adopts their nationalist understanding of “Old Chosŏn” (Kojosŏn 古朝鮮), which shines through in many of his later publications. By 1919, Yi Kung-no and Sin Ch’ae-ho have already met in Shanghai. But in 1920 and 1921, Yi works closely with Sin in Beijing. Sin moves there after splitting from the Korean exile government, whose hope for foreign, especially American, assistance he no longer shares. At that time, he believes armed struggle is the only solution to acquire Korean independence. Thus, he cooperates closely with the Chinese anti-Japanese movement. As an intellectual leader rather than a military fighter, one of the things Sin does is publish a Chinese language magazine, Tiangu 天鼓 [Heavenly drum], and Yi Kŭng-no assists him in this. Sin is also the person who introduces Yi Kŭng-no to the socialist Yi Tong-hwi, Prime Minister and Minister of Defense of the Korean exile government from 1919 to summer 1921. Recommended as a secretary and interpreter because of his perfect Chinese and his good Japanese and English, Yi Kŭng-no gets to be part of the Korean delegation to the Third World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow, which finally gets him to Berlin. In January 1922 Yi arrives in Berlin. From the summer semester 1922 to 1927 he majors in political science and economics at Berlin University, also taking classes in philosophy, anthropology, and linguistics, and then earns a doctoral degree with a thesis on the silk industry of China.157 Being the active, enthusiastic, and forwardlooking scholar that he is, Yi convinces the university to let him teach an unpaid Korean language course in the winter semester 1923–24.158 That gets him a paid lectureship the next semester. From the summer semester 1924 to the summer semester 1927 (when he finishes his thesis) he works as a lecturer for Korean at the Seminar for Oriental Languages at Berlin University, teaching Korean language (and some literature within those courses). During those six semesters, 17 German students take his classes.159 This makes him (years before the better known Mirok Li Language Society, the Chosŏnŏ Hakhoe, is in essense a set of adjustments furthering the 1930 rules. 157 Yi’s thesis was published as Die Seidenindustrie in China [The silk industry of China], (Berlin: Wilhelm Christians, 1927). 158 See “Betrachtungen und kleine Mitteilungen” [Notes and short notifications], Die Umschau 27, no. 44 (3 November 1923): 701. 159 See Cho, “1920-nyŏndae yurŏbesŏ Yi Kŭng-noŭi chosŏnŏ kangjwawa minjok undong,” 126; “Seminar-Chronik für die Zeit von Oktober 1919 bis September 1929” [Seminar chro- 67 Frank Hoffmann and the former Benedictine missionary Andre Eckardt, both at Munich University) the first to teach Korean at a German university. Yi’s life and work, if we look closely, is that of a classical Marxist-Leninist scientist and agitator, topped off with a healthy portion of nativist nationalism à la Sin Ch’ae-ho and Pak Ŭn-sik: his aforementioned booklets on the Korean independence fight from 1924 and 1927 as well as his 1923 “Bloody Rule” flyer, for example, are well-crafted agitprop following a simplistic political action formula. In stark contrast is his published dissertation on the Chinese silk industry and two other heretofore overlooked German language articles: one has the title “Die chinesische Agrarverfassung” [The agricultural situation in China] dealing with the history of Chinese agriculture, landownership and tenure systems, agricultural education and research, as well as related finance and credit systems up to 1920; the other is a fivepage article introducing Korea to Germans.160 These two, and his dissertation, which reveal the mind of a trained Marxist economist, are far removed from direct political agitprop. Still, nativist tendencies creep into his scholarly works through the underlying idealization of traditional (or rather, ancient) East Asian economic structures, which the reader is left to conclude are superior to “modern” or “Western” systems. At the same time Yi Kŭng-no seems to be at the early stage of a search for non-social Darwinist developmental models (probably due to the influence of German Social Democrats and other contemporary European schools of thought). Some of his arguments in these texts, and more so what’s between the lines, seem to come close to the work of another brilliant mind, that of Cho So-ang 趙素昻, the long-term Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Korean exile government. Cho’s “Three Equalities Theory” (samgyunjuŭi 三均主義 ) is quite possibly the only convincing alternative East–West development model from all the years before liberation. In 1927, the year he completes his dissertation, Yi also publishes a partial translation of Yi Kwang-su’s 1924 novel Hŏ-saeng chŏn 許生傳 [The tale of Master Hŏ], a modern adaptation of the sarcastic and social critical novel of the same title by the 18th century Sirhak scholar and reformer Pak Chi-wŏn 朴趾源. It is published in German and Korean in the journal of the university’s Seminar for Oriental Languages.161 We can assume that it may also have served as a language textbook for his nicle for the period from October 1919 to September 1929], Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen an der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, Abt. 1, Ostasiatische Studien 32 (1929): iv and vi. 160 See Li Kolu, “Die chinesische Agrarverfassung” [The agricultural situation in China], Berichte über Landwirtschaft, n.s., 1, nos. 3–4 (1923–24): 217–222; Li Kolu, “Das unbekannte Korea” [The unknown Korea], Brücken zum Ausland 1, no. 5 (1928): 9–13, later reprinted in Deutsche Treue 15, no. 5 (1933): 125–129. 161 See I Goang-su [Yi Kwang-su], “Aus dem Leben eines koreanischen Gelehrten” [From the life of a Korean scholar], transl. Li Kolu, Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen an der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, Abt. 1, Ostasiatische Studien 30 (1927): 99–110. 68 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s (Fig. 20) Detail of Yi Kŭng-no’s partial bilingual edition of a 1924 novel by Yi Kwang-su, Hŏ-saeng chŏn [The tale of Master Hŏ], using Kim Tu-bong’s Han’gŭl typeset from Shanghai. own students. As mentioned toward the beginning of this chapter, the writer Yi Kwang-su (soon later he will collaborate with the colonial authorities) had worked with the Korean exile government in Shanghai at the same time as Yi Kŭng-no. Amazingly enough, Yi thus manages to place a politically potent work of a poster child for the Korean independence movement into a rather conservative German academic journal. An important detail is that in his 1947 autobiography (p. 33), Yi reports how he arranged to receive the Han’gŭl typeset used for printing the parallel Han’gŭl version of the text from Kim Tu-bong 金枓奉 in Shanghai. Kim is also a brilliant linguist involved with the Han’gŭl movement, a Taejonggyo member, and a Ŭiyŏltan supporter. After liberation Kim serves in several top offices in North Korea, as the Chairman of the Workers’ Party of North Korea (Pukchosŏn Nodongdang 北朝鮮勞動黨), the president of Kim Il Sung University, and even as the formal head of state (Chairman of the Supreme People’s Assembly). Like An U-saeng (see footnote 8) and several other notable politicians and intellectuals, Yi Kŭng-no decides to stay in the North after participating in the April 1948 Joint Conference of Representatives of Political Parties and Public Organizations in Northern and Southern Korea, is elected into the DPRK Supreme People’s Assembly four times (1948–1967) and holds various other important offices. Until the late 1950s Kim Tu-bong and Yi Kŭng-no are the leading decision makers in North Korean language policies. When we add all this information up, starting with the October 1923 demonstration in Berlin, we can establish what we might call an informal relationship between political activities of Koreans in Berlin and the militant anarchist Ŭiyŏltan in Shanghai. It is informal, because the relationship is based on dyadic relations of individual Koreans in Berlin and China, not so much between organizations. There is one additional Korean anarchist group in Shanghai that has connections to Berlin — which brings us back to the An family. While An Chung-gŭn and his cousin An Myŏng-gun (the one who unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Itō’s heir Terauchi Masatake) had been concerned with the restoration of a monarchist Korean state, An Chung-gŭn’s aforementioned younger brother Kong-gŭn uses the same militant means but has socialist leanings (in spite of cooperating with Kim Ku). Earlier he had flirted with communism and was affiliated with the Irkutsk faction of 69 Frank Hoffmann Yi Tong-hwi’s Koryŏ Communist Party while living in Siberia, but then went to Shanghai and got involved with anarchists. He becomes a member of the Korean Anarchist Federation in China (Chae Chungguk Chosŏn Mujŏngbujuŭija Yŏnmaeng 在中國朝鮮無政府主義者聯盟), a group originally founded in April 1924 in Beijing by Yi Hoe-yŏng 李會榮, Chŏng Hwa-am 鄭華岩, Yu Cha-myŏng 柳子明, and others. Sin Ch’ae-ho does not join the Federation but regularly contributes articles to their magazine. An Kong-gŭn joins the group when it is reestablished in February 1928 in Shanghai.162 Its journal T’arhwan 奪還 / The Conquest lists their German contact organization International Workers’ Association and its president Fritz Kater with the full Berlin address.163 The anarcho-syndicalist Kater is a close friend and comrade of the leading German anarchist Rudolf Rocker; he runs a small anarchist publishing house in Berlin. Nym Wales readers may in this connection also recall that she reports how the Ŭiyŏltan “once had in Shanghai twelve secret arsenals for making bombs, which were directed by a German” 164 whom she identifies as Martin, a member of the growing Jewish-German community165 in China, characterized as a man who “hated Germany and the Japanese,” who “were exactly alike.”166 And O Sŏng-nyun 吳成崙 (aka Quan Guang 全光, 1898–1947), a member of the Ŭiyŏltan who in March 1922 tries to assassinate Tanaka Giichi 田中義一, a figurehead of Japanese militarism and expansionism, picks Berlin as his place to hide (traveling there via Moscow and later returning to Moscow). O had accidentally killed an American woman unrelated to his cause, but Nym Wales shows us once more how to romanticize and make a hero out of just about anyone: “A Japanese girl brought a steel knife, and O cut a hole around the lock of the door” of his prison cell in the Japanese consulate in Shanghai, the author claims. “He escaped to Canton, where he forged a passport and went to Germany. In Berlin a German girl fell in love with him, and he lived with her family for a year.”167 Actually, his 1922 stay in Berlin lasts just six months. He goes on to Moscow, converts to communism, and then also studies for several years in the Soviet Union. 162 See Chŏng Hwa-am, Ŏnŭ anak’isŭt’ŭŭi momŭro ssŭn kŭnsesa [Modern history inscribed upon the body of an anarchist] (Seoul: Chayu Mun’go, 1992), 58–60, and 136 on An’s cooperation with Kim Ku; Pak Hwan, Manju hanin minjok undongsa yŏn’gu [A study of the Korean national movement in Manchuria] (Seoul: Ilchogak, 1991), 287–291. 163 See “Mujŏngbu kongdanjuŭiro kanŭn kil” [The way to anarcho-syndicalism], T’arhwan / The Conquest, inaugural issue (May 1928): 5. 164 Nym Wales, “Rebel Korea,” Pacific Affairs 15, no. 1 (March 1942): 37. 165 Chŏng Hwa-am identifies Nym Wales’ and Kim San’s “Martin” as “Machäll,” which is likely a misspelling of “Marcel.” He also identifies him as a Jew. See Chŏng, Ŏnŭ anak’isŭt’ŭŭi momŭro ssŭn kŭnsesa, 60–61. 166 Nym Wales (Helen Foster Snow), and Kim San, Song of Ariran: A Korean Communist in the Chinese Revolution, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Ramparts Press 1973), 125. 167 Ibid., 130. The American woman O shot had been standing next to Tanaka, his target. 70 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s (c) Kim Chun-yŏn Getting back to the 26 October 1923 demonstration in Berlin: the second signature on the demo flyer is “C.J. Kim.” This is Kim Chun-yŏn 金俊淵 (aka Kim Chun Jun, Kim Chun-yun, and C.J. Kim, 1895–1971). In the person of Kim, another MarxistLeninist activist and an important leader of the mid-1920s Korean communist movement is involved.168 Like most Korean students in Berlin, Kim had studied in Tōkyō and had already been politically active there as the president of the Tōkyō based Korean Student Corps (Tonggyŏng Chosŏn Yuhaksaeng Haguhoe 東京朝鮮留學生學友會). At the same time, he had been the only Korean member of Tōkyō Imperial University’s (Tōkyō Teikoku Daigaku 東京帝國大學) lefist student organization Shinjinkai 新人会. His passport for Germany was arranged by his law professor Yoshino Sakuzō 吉野作造, a key theorist of Taishō democracy, peoplecentrism, and liberal colonialism, who acted as an interlocutor between Korean students and Japanese intellectuals. Kim went through the political development that was typical of many young and patriotic Koreans at the time, first having hoped for support from Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations to free Korea from colonialism, he is later a socialist who translates the German edition of Stalin’s 1924 booklet O Lenine i leninizme [On Lenin and Leninism] into Korean.169 In Berlin University records, his name is romanized as Kim Chun Jun, and while Kim himself states in his autobiography that he studied in Berlin from 1922,170 in the beginning this may have been just a language course. The records show that he is only enrolled as a law student from the summer semester 1923 to 1924.171 From 1925 onwards he already works as a reporter for the Korean daily Chosŏn ilbo 朝鮮日報, being its first foreign correspondent to Moscow. Back in Korea, continuing to work as a reporter, he has an instrumental role in the reorganized communist party, mostly just called the ML Party (ML-tang) since December 1926, and also helps to organize the Sin’ganhoe 新幹會 (New Korea Society), an influential mass organization uniting nationalists and communists under one anti-Japanese ideological umbrella. He now moves to the Tonga ilbo 東亞日報 as its editor-in-chief, but is arrested soon later for his communist activities and ultimately serves a seven-year prison sentence. Once released, Kim is back at the Tonga Ilbosa but is forced out again in 1936 in connection with the Japanese flag incident (see footnote 58). From the 1920s to the 1940s Kim publishes many thoroughly modern and strikingly analytic journalistic reports and sociopolitical essays — e.g. his engaging 1927 essay on gender equality and inequality, comparing German (and British and Soviet) 168 For biographical details about Kim, see Hŏ To-san, Kŏn’gugŭi wŏnhun Nangsan Kim Chun-yŏn [Nangsan Kim Chun-yŏn, a founding father of the country] (Seoul: Chayu Chisŏngsa, 1998), and specifically pp. 46–56 for his time in Berlin. 169 See Robert A. Scalapino and Chong-Sik Lee, Communism in Korea, vol. 1, The Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 85, footnote 34. 170 See Kim Chun-yŏn, Naŭi kil [My way], 2nd expanded ed. (Seoul: Tonga Ch’ulp’ansa, 1967), 1. 171 See Hartmann, Japanische Studenten, 3. 71 Frank Hoffmann law to the situation in Japan and Korea. 172 In spite of his socialist engagement throughout the period of Japanese occupation, Kim manages to continuously take an active and influential role in South Korean politics immediately following liberation, by making a sharp political turn and quickly dropping his Leninist convictions. Two weeks after Truman’s speech announcing America’s “policy of containment” that promises full military and economic support for all smaller nations fighting communism (the Truman Doctrine), Kim puts a commentary about the changing international situation on the cover page of the Tonga ilbo, “directed to my old ML Party comrades.” In the column’s last installment he declares: “The road to Moscow and the way to Hanyang [Seoul] are two different ones. I take the way to Hanyang!”173 In hindsight, his earlier leftist engagement is thus reinterpreted as having been no more than a means of achieving Korean independence — the pragmatist’s logic of political survival. Over the years he associates with various, mostly right-wing opposition parties. Under Syngman Rhee he is appointed Justice Minister during the first year of the Korean War, and years later, in 1967, even becomes the presidential candidate for the small Populist Party (Minjungdang 民衆黨). (d) Ko Il-ch’ŏng The first of the signatories on the October 1923 flyer is a certain “Ih Tsing Kao.” Some Korean historians speculate that he might be a Chinese supporter of the Korean independence movement.174 Berlin University records, however, identify him as Korean. Listed as “Kao Ihtsing,” he is enrolled as a law student from winter semester 1922–23.175 Kao is none other than Ko Il-ch’ŏng 高一淸 (1886–?), living at Niebuhrstraße 71 in Berlin, and having come to Germany with a Chinese passport identifying him as three years younger to make it easier for him to enroll as a student. Indirectly his identity is also confirmed through American immigration records from Ellis Island, the immigrant inspection station for New York City. Arriving in New York by ship on May 18th, 1924, his passport lists his nationality as Chinese (based on the same Chinese passport he used in Germany), but that raises some suspicion.176 172 See Kim Chunyŏn, “Nations of Gender Equality and Gender Inequality,” in New Women in Colonial Korea: A Sourcebook, comp. and transl. Hyaeweol Choi (New York: Routledge, 2013), 39–41. 173 Kim Chun-yŏn, in Tonga ilbo, 30 March 1947 (the essay appeared in seven installments from March 24 to 30). For another fundamental debate on the reasoning behind his turn see his article “Minjokchuŭiwa kongsanjuŭiŭi changnae” [The future of nationalism and communism], Munhwa 1, no. 3 (October 1947): 1–8. 174 See e.g. Hong, “1920-nyŏndae yurŏbesŏŭi han’guk tongnip undong,” 465. 175 See Hartmann, Japanische Studenten, 3. 176 See “List of Alien Passengers for the United States Immigration Officer at Port of Arrival,” New York, 18 May 1924, S.S. Canopic (from Hamburg); “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States Immigration Officer at Port of Arrival,” New York, 18 May 1924, S.S. Canopic (left Hamburg on 3 May), Ellis Island Archive, Ellis Island 72 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s The contact person he gives in New York is a Dr. H.K. Rey, that again is the official English rendering for Yi Hŭi-gyŏng 李喜儆, a Korean American medical doctor who had just returned from Shanghai, where he had participated in the Korean exile government, setting up the Korean Red Cross organization in the name of the government. In 1923 H.K. Rey had visited Berlin in his professional capacity to study respiratory diseases at the Charité, but several facts seem to indicate that the main purpose for his Berlin visit was to network with the Korean students there.177 Ko Ilch’ŏng then attended one of the networking meetings that H.K. Rey had organized. At another meeting a month earlier (20 March 1924), Rey’s Korean American group in New York had already committed to undertake fund-raising activities to help the Koryŏ Student Corps in Germany and their activities; $270 are thus raised and sent to Berlin — a typical example of the operations of the Shanghai–Berlin–U.S. network of Korean independence movement activists.178 Let us look at Ko Il-ch’ŏng’s career. Before coming to Berlin Ko had studied law in Tōkyō and was involved in anti-Japanese activities from early on. In 1912 he was arrested in connection with what would be called the 105 Men Incident (Paeg’o in sagŏn 百五人事件), related to An Myŏng-gun’s 1910 attempt to assassinate Terauchi, the Governor-General of Korea, an act that the Japanese authorities tried to build up as a big conspiracy case. Ko had then moved to China and in 1919 he becomes a member of the Korean exile government in Shanghai, heading its Legislation Committee. He is also one of the signatories of the October 1919 Shanghai Declaration of Independence. Of course, from Shanghai, he knows Yi Kŭng-no, An Pong-gŭn, H.K. Rey (Yi Hŭi-gyŏng), and many others now in Berlin or the United States. In the early 1920s, when the exile government splits into moderate cultural nationalists and militant right- and left-wing groups, he also becomes active in the newly formed Pohaptan 普合團 (Activist Corps), a militant group employing guerrilla tactics to fight the Japanese. Once in Berlin Ko briefly studies law from 1922 to 1923 (or 1924) and is very active in the Korean students group there. But later, in the United States, his priorities change and his activism grinds to a halt: from 1926 onwards Ko studies mathematics at Princeton University, then returns to Korea in 1929. Back home the fiery guerrilla fighter and Japan hater turns into a smart business tycoon and collaborator. He tries his hand in gold mining, buys his own gold mine, works as a broker, and accrues enough wealth to buy a quarter of the stocks of the Chosŏn Ilbo Newspaper Publishing House in 1933, and later even becomes a high-ranking financial administrator for the Japanese Government-General in Korea. In the 1940s he even collaborates with the Japanese to support the Japanese war effort. Foundation, Inc. See Sinhan minbo, 22 November 1923. 178 See ibid., 1 May and 15 August 1924. 177 73 Frank Hoffmann Spring 1927, doctoral graduation photo of Yi Kŭng-no (left side), taken in front of the Helmholtz statue at the main building of Berlin University, now Humboldt University: on the left is Sin Sŏng-mo 申性模 (1891–1960, a close friend of Yi from teenage days who also worked for the exile government in Shanghai), in the middle Yi Kŭng-no, on the right An Ho-sang 安浩相 (1902–1999), then a philosophy student at Jena University in eastern Germany, having earlier graduated from Tongji University in Shanghai, as did Yi Kŭng-no. In 1942, An and Yi are both arrested and charged in the so-called Korean Language Society Incident (Chosŏnŏ Hakhoe sagŏn 朝鮮語學會事件), the Japanese colonial government’s reaction to Yi Kŭng-no and other scholars’ engagement in the Han’gŭl movement. Yi receives six years, the longest prison sentence, while the charges against An are later dropped. Twenty years after the Berlin photo, the left-wing linguist Yi and the right-wing Sin Sŏng-mo, having just returned to Korea, and An Ho-sang, now the ROK’s first Minister of Education, attend each other’s family celebrations and join the same academic societies. Another three years later (photo on the right), “Admiral” Sin Sŏng-mo, now South Korea’s Prime Minister and clearly a war hawk, stands next to John Foster Dulles (18 June 1950), looking across the 38th parallel into the North, while Yi Kŭng-no has left the South to already become a member of the DPRK’s Supreme People’s Assembly. And philosopher An Ho-sang, no less a hawk, is now the chief of the southern Taehan Youth Corps (Taehan Ch’ŏngnyŏndan 大韓靑年團), an extreme rightist paramilitary group with roughly two-million members. A week after the photo was taken, the Korean War breaks out. 74 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s (e) Brussels Conference For the Koryŏ Students Corps, participating in the anti-colonial conference in Brussels from February 10 to 15, 1927 is a very important political event. This is the first such “International Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism,” and it is initiated and organized from Berlin. The organizing committee, Ligue contre l’impérialisme et l’oppression coloniale (LAI), is in most publications treated as a front organization of the Comintern. But that is only half of the story. A close associate of Lenin, Willi Münzenberg, initiates and organizes the conference. He is a co-founder of the KPD and known as the “Red Millionaire” because he managed to create the second largest media company of the Weimar Republic for the communists by running several major newspapers and magazines. Moscow, however, only begins to support the conference after Jawaharlal Nehru, as president of the Indian National Congress, announces that he will participate. Despite the dominance of the Comintern, quite a number of liberals attend who are not associated with the communist movement. And when the organizing committee is (Fig. 23) Detail from a draft, German language version of the »Resolution of the Korean turned into Delegation« for the Brussels conference, 9 February 1927. a permanent organization with its main office in Berlin, independent intellectuals such as Albert Einstein are included among the organization’s honorary presidents. (By the way, Einstein, at the time, also teaches free physics courses at the Marxistische Arbeiterschule, the Marxist Workers School.)179 179 Einstein not only sent a congratulatory wire to the 1927 Brussels conference, later he also 75 Frank Hoffmann The Brussels conference comprises 174 mandatory delegates of 134 organizations from 21 countries and around 300 visitor participants. Kim Chae-wŏn 金載元, who like Mirok Li is a student in Munich and following liberation becomes the first director of the South Korean National Museum, notes in his memoirs that the two Lis — Mirok Li and Li Kolu — represented the Koreans in Germany.180 There are all together four official Korean delegates: because of the specific conference rules only Mirok Li represents the Koryŏ Student Corps in Germany, while the two Berliners Yi Kŭng-no and Hwang U-il 黃祐日 (aka Wooil Whang, Wovil Whang)181 officially represent the Korean Writers and Journalists Association of Korea. The fourth Korean delegate, Kim Pŏm-nin 金法麟 (aka Kin Fa Lin, 1899–1964), a former Buddhist monk and political activist from 1919, and also a student in Paris since 1921, represents the Union of Koreans in France.182 Kim delivers the speech for the Koreans.183 Apart from these four, Kim Chun-yŏn (whom we just discussed) and Hŏ Hŏn 許憲 participate as reporters. Hŏ Hŏn is a Japanese-trained lawyer and an important independence activist and communist leader. After liberation he becomes one of the main figures for the southern communists. When Yŏ Un-hyŏng is assassinated, he becomes his successor as chairman of the Workers Party of South Korea (known as Namnodang 南勞黨), and, like Yi Kŭng-no, settles in the North after the Joint North–South Conference of April 1948 fails to produce any results. One of two Korean delegation group photos of 1927 in the Tonga ilbo shows Katayama Sen 片山潜, a co-founder of the Japanese Communist Party (Nihon Kyōsantō 日本共産党), in the center; by then sent a note to the August 1932 “World Anti-War Congress” in Amsterdam, organized by Münzenberg on behalf of the Third International, expressing his protest against the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, while at the same time showing his sympathies for the Soviet Union: “It now becomes clear to everybody that behind the attack lies the intention to weaken Russia through a military attack and to prevent its economic development.” The original telegram draft, in German, that Einstein wrote on the back of the invitation telegram sent to him by Romain Rolland, Paul Signac, and Maxim Gorki, was auctioned off in 2010 and is reproduced in the auction catalog: Heritage Auction Galleries, Historical Manuscripts & Autographs: Heritage Signature Auction #6049, October 14-15, 2010, Beverly Hills (Dallas: Heritage Auction Galleries, 2010), 130. 180 See Kim Chae-wŏn, Pangmulgwan’gwa hanp’yŏngsaeng: Ch’odae pangmulgwanjang chasŏjŏn [The museum and my life: The autobiography of the first director of the National Museum] (Seoul: T’amgudang, 1992), 41. See also Yi Kŭng-no, Kot’u sasimnyŏn, 36–38. 181 Regarding Hwang, see Chungoe ilbo, 17 March 1929, and Tonga ilbo, 12 April 1929. 182 See Liga gegen Imperialismus und für nationale Unabhängigkeit, ed., Das Flammenzeichen vom Palais Egmont: Offizielles Protokoll des Kongresses gegen koloniale Unterdrückung und Imperialismus, Brüssel, 10.–15. Februar 1927 [The flame sign from Egmont Palace: Official records of the Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism, Brussels, 10–15th February 1927], (Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag, 1927), 234 and 253. 183 For the published German version of the speech, see ibid., 148–158. Kim Pŏm-nin and his speech are discussed in detail by Cho Chun-hŭi, “Kim Pŏm-ninŭi minjogŭisik hyŏngsŏnggwa silch’ŏn: 1927-nyŏn Pŭrwisel yŏnsŏrŭl chungsimŭro” [The formation and practice of Kim Pŏm-nin’s national consciousness: Focusing on the 1927 Brussels speech], Han’guk pulgyohak 53 (2009): 55–98. 76 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s he is living in exile in Moscow where Yi Kŭng-no had met him in October 1921.184 Katayama is the only Japanese representative and gives a speech entitled “The Fight of the Korean People against Japan.”185 While this is an event organized by the communists, the political outlooks of the Koreans and other delegates are mixed, although those with left-leaning views, if not strict Marxist-Leninist activists, clearly dominate the conference. It is also noteworthy that Münzenberg’s Berlin-based LAI has a branch office in Shanghai, and that the socialist leader Yŏ Un-hyŏng “is a member of the advisory board of the League Against Imperialism.”186 Mirok Li is not a socialist, and having been socialized in conservative and Catholic Bavaria, the rural and folkish “Deep South” of Germany, this could hardly have been expected. He participates as a delegate in the conference because no other political entity made the independence of colonial peoples an objective of their agenda. Mirok Li and Li Kolu were the ones who actively worked out a draft (fig. 23) of the Brussels conference pamphlet entitled “The Korean Problem” and the “Resolution” in German. What is interesting in this connection is that a draft version of the Korean delegation’s “Resolution” that states “we have no other option but to employ armed struggle to resist Imperial Japan”187 is rephrased in the later official resolution in more generic terms, omitting “armed struggle.” The term “Japanese people,” on the other hand, is replaced by “Japanese imperialism,” which is more in line with socialist rhetoric, while the reference to the Korean “Republican” government in Shanghai is also omitted from the final version, as it is not in accord with communist aims either. The documents show, however, that even more moderate Koreans such as Mirok Li still advocate armed struggle.188 (f) Yi Kang-guk and the Revolutionary Asians The political culture of the Weimar Republic predestines the political activities of Berlin students from colonized countries like Korea. On top of that, Moscow decides to make the German capital the center of its conspiratorial work beyond its own borders. A former Comintern/Gestapo double agent puts it this way: “Berlin was more than the center of German communism; from 1929, it had become the field headquarters for the whole of the Communist International.” He continues: “It was decided to let all threads end in Berlin, and to retain only a single line of communi184 See Tonga ilbo, 14 May 1927. Another report with a photo is in the 26 May 1927 issue. The German version of Katayama’s speech is published in Liga, ed., Das Flammenzeichen, 146–148. 186 Gertrude Binder, “The Student Revolt in Korea,” China Weekly Review 52, no. 7 (12 April 1930): 256. 187 “Resolution der koreanischen Delegation” [Resolution of the Korean delegation], typewritten and corrected draft, Brussels, 9 February 1927, League against Imperialism Archives, at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. 188 The final official version is published in: Liga, ed., Das Flammenzeichen, 261. 185 77 Frank Hoffmann cation between Berlin and Moscow. A Western Secretariat of the Comintern was therefore established in Berlin, whose jurisdiction reached from Iceland to Capetown.”189 We cannot go into detail here, but other available sources and a cursory look at other Asians and their political activities in Berlin both make it evident that exactly this was done. Among the Koreans already in the communist movement, some travel to Berlin with the primary aim of taking part in ideological training and conspiratorial work,190 assuming the personas of university students mostly as cover. Yi Kang-guk 李康國 (aka Lee Kang Kuk, Gang Kuk, also Yi U-han 李愚漢, 1906– 1956) is the best known of these cases (although there are at least two others). Anna Louise Strong, a well known American journalist whose unrestrained admiration for revolutionary heroes in Europe and Asia followed from an uncritical faith in the Gospel, would later meet Yi in P’yŏngyang in July 1947. She introduces him to her readers as the “head of foreign affairs” with a “trained legal mind” and — with a snap of her fingers — doubles his exotic sex appeal by designating him a member of “the Korean royal family, that Lee [Yi] dynasty that Japan overthrew in 1910.” Yi Kang-guk, she writes, “graduated at Seoul University [Keijō Imperial] in 1930, studied law in Europe, came home to practice and was jailed by the Japanese.” She continues: “After the surrender of Japan, Lee lived for a year in the American zone of South Korea, which had always been his home. Then he fled north because the Americans were going to jail him again.”191 The case of Yi Kang-guk shows that towards the late 1920s and during the early 1930s the small Koryŏ Student Corps is dominated by Marxist-Leninist activists. Yi is, together with his close friend Ko Yu-sŏp 高裕燮, the father of Korean art history, among the top graduates of his year at Keijō Imperial University. There is little doubt, however, that he goes to Berlin to receive further ideological schooling in order to become an underground fighter for the Comintern. Although he studies economics and law from May 1932 to November 1935, his real interest is Marxist theory. Running the day-to-day business of the headquarters of the League Against Imperialism and for National Independence in Berlin is Willi Münzenberg’s right hand man, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya (aka Chatto). He is a major figure in the overseas 189 Jan Valtin, Out of the Night: The Memoir of Richard Julius Herman Krebs alias Jan Valtin (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press/Nabat, 2004), 177. The account was first published in 1941. 190 Conspiratorial work was a most essential strategy of the Comintern during the 1920s and 1930s, both in Korea and in Europe, often within bourgeois institutions such as churches, etc. See e.g. the Korean section in the report from the First Congress of the Toilers of the Far East: Kommunistische Internationale, Der Erste Kongreß der kommunistischen und revolutionären Organisationen des Fernen Ostens: Moskau, Januar 1922 [The First Congress of the communist and revolutionary organizations of the Far East: Moscow, January 1922], ([Petrograd?]: Verlag der Kommunistischen Internationale, 1922), 5–11. 191 Anna Louise Strong, In North Korea: First Eye-Witness Report (New York: Soviet Russia Today, 1949), 15–16. On his arrest warrant, cf. Tonga ilbo, 8 September and 4 October 1946. 78 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s Indian independence movement and the man who ensured Nehru’s participation in the 1927 Brussels conference. Given the overwhelming force of circumstance, this writer has to assume that Chatto and Yi Kŭng-no worked together in Berlin — we just do not yet have any documentary evidence of that. Like Yi Kŭng-no he works closely with the Comintern, cooperates with leftist Chinese and Japanese students. Both live in Berlin and are engaged with the communist movement, and want to liberate their countries from colonialism; and both are very interested in linguistics and attended the 1921 Third World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow. Like Yi Kŭng-no, Chatto had met with Lenin and was a highly trained academic and an ardent patriot. As of the early 1920s, however, he had been neither an anarchist nor a communist. Emma Goldman, an iconic figure of the anarchist era, who met Chatto in Moscow, nails it when she writes: “He called himself an anarchist, though it was evident that it was Hindu nationalism to which he had devoted himself entirely.”192 For most years between 1914 and August 1931 Chatto lives in Berlin. During World War I he had been on the payroll of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the German Foreign Office, organizing a major global plot for his compatriots in India to initiate riots and a rebellion against British rule (and for the Middle East to unleash the kaiser’s very own jihad).193 His later lover and common-law wife, the now prominent leftist writer Agnes Smedley idealized Chatto in much the same romanticizing manner as Nym Wales casts Kim San. Smedley also happens to be on the kaiser’s payroll and “was amply compensated”194 working as an agent in the same plot while still living in New York. (Later she would work as an agent for two Soviet intelligence services in China while under cover as a journalist.195) Incidentally, Smedley also begins a doctoral program at Berlin University, strangely enough as a protégé of Karl Haushofer (who, by the way, spoke some Korean),196 one of the masterminds of Hitler’s race theories, and, above all, the architect of the military alliance with Japan. We cannot be sure about the details of the relationship between Chatto and Yi Kŭng-no, and Chatto and Yi’s compatriot Yi Kang-guk may never even have met in person (as the Indian had left Berlin before Yi arrived). Yet, Chatto and Katayama Sen’s influence on Yi Kang-guk is evidently very strong. Yi joins the KPD and, like Chatto and Katayama, is closely engaged with a Berlin group established by leftleaning Japanese students in 1926. The group had become politically radicalized through the Manchurian Incident and renamed itself Association of Revolutionary Asians (Vereinigung der revolutionären Asiaten, Jap. Kakumeiteki Asiajin Kyōkai 192 Emma Goldman, Living My Life, vol. 2 (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 905. For details, see Nirode K. Barooah, Chatto: The Life and Times of an Indian Anti-Imperialist in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 34–99. 194 Ruth Price, The Lives of Agnes Smedley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 65; and for related Grand Jury documents from the 1918 trials, see p. 440, note 37. 195 While just conjecture earlier, this is now an established historical fact. See ibid., 171–279. 196 See Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn of China (London: Victor Gollancz, 1944), 20. 193 79 Frank Hoffmann 革命的アジア人協会). It continues to exist until the Nazis come into power. Members of the group publish many articles in leftist Japanese magazines such as Kaizō 改造, discussing fascism in Europe and Japanese expansionism in Asia. On occasion they cooperate with German communists to stage political street theater plays and organize anti-imperialist demonstrations in Berlin. From March 1932 to January 1933, the group also publishes a German language magazine under the title Revolutionäres Asien: Das Organ der Vereinigung der revolutionären Asiaten [Revolutionary Asia: The publication of the Association of Revolutionary Asians]. The magazine mostly carries articles and short news items about colonial issues and socialism, and some regarding colonial rule in Korea, which are very likely based on Korean sources and must have been translated into German by Yi Kang-guk. A detailed study by the political scientist Katō Tetsurō 加 藤 哲 郎 , focusing on left-wing Japanese students in Berlin, indicates that left-wing Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans, as well as the Indian leader Chatto work together with German revolutionaries and party members, creating a world-wide information network that strongly resembles a spy network (while they themselves are closely being observed by Japanese, British, and German agents). Tetsurō also shows how for Japanese students, Berlin al(Fig. 24) Cover of the April 1932 issue of the leftist most exactly mirrors political developRevolutionäres Asien [Revolutionary Asia] magazine. ments in Tōkyō, where those politically engaged in anti-imperialist and anti-colonial protest in later years spilt up into all possible political directions, from extreme left to extreme right. 197 One Japanese member of the Revolutionary Asians group whom Yi Kang-guk works with, Miyake Shikanosuke 三宅鹿之助, goes to Korea and becomes a professor at Keijō Imperial University, but gets arrested in 1934 for anti-Japanese activities. The Japanese Embassy in Berlin had already informed the colonial authorities of his and Yi’s participation in the German Communist Party (providing all the details of their activities). 197 80 See Katō Tetsurō, Waimāru-ki Berurin no Nihonjin: Yōkō chishikijin no hantei nettowāku [Japanese in Berlin during the Weimar Republic: An anti-imperialist network of intellectuals abroad] (Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten, 2008); for Yi Kang-guk’s involvement in the group, see pp. 90–99 of Katō’s Berlin book, and about his later fate in Korea, see pp. 137, 270–272. The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s Back in Korea, Yi Kang-guk also finds himself in and out of prison and continues to do underground political work using various pseudonyms. After liberation, and while remaining in the South, he publishes a book about a future socialist Korea, whose themes and terminology today read much like a blueprint for Kim Il Sung’s immediate postliberation Korea. At the same time it reveals his intellectual limitations as a Stalinist apparatchik and party loyalist towards Moscow and the Comintern.198 Yi is now one of the three top leaders of the Southern Communists. He soon gets onto the “wanted” list of the U.S. Military Government in Korea, as Strong has indicated. Yi’s lover — or ex-lover — Kim Su-im 金壽任 uses the American Jeep of her other lover, John E. Baird, a high-ranking U.S. officer, to smuggle Yi to the northern border. He is able to escape to the North, while Kim Su-im is executed four years later as a North Korean spy.199 Yi Kang-guk has little luck in the North either. The labels are reversed, but the outcome is identical: the North Koreans excute him as an American spy in 1956. (His trial concludes in 1953, but he continues to be needed as a witness against Pak Hŏn-yŏng 朴憲永, the main leader of the Namnodang.) Because Popular Front politics, the union of communists with non-aligned workers and petite bourgeoisie democrats advocated by Yi, had already dissolved before the Korean War, Pak, Yi, and others were now in the way of Kim Il Sung. Others from the Revolutionary Asians group in Berlin, such as Virendranath Chattopadhyaya and several Japanese activists, after having been chased out of Berlin by the Nazis and relocating to Moscow, only survive until 1937, when Stalin has them executed. 4. Pae Un-sŏng: Becoming a Korean Artist in Berlin We now focus on the 1930s and 1940s, starting with a long term Berlin resident who comes to study economics in 1922 or 1923,200 but changes his mind even before he arrives.201 The printmaker and painter Pae Un-sŏng 裵雲成 (aka Unsoung Pai, rarely 198 See Yi Kang-guk, Minjujuŭi Chosŏnŭi kŏnsŏl [The construction of a democratic Korea] (Seoul: Chosŏn Inminbosa Husaengbu, 1946); Chŏn Myŏng-hyŏk, “1930-nyŏndae Yi Kang-gukkwa kŭŭi inmin chosŏnnon insik” [A study about Yi Kang-guk and his understanding of the Popular Front during the 1930s], Marŭk’ŭsŭjuŭi yŏn’gu 5, no. 3 (August 2008): 177–196. Bruce Cumings’ quick assertion in the first volume of his Origins, that Yi did not understand communist ideology (p. 85), that his book “bears only faint traces of Marxist or communist thought” (p. 480, footnote 85), seems not sustainable. 199 See related article in the Los Angeles Times, 7 September 2008. 200 Most pre-1945 Korean, German, and French articles (and Kurt Runge’s 1950 book), often based on interviews and meetings with Pae, give 1923 as his arrival year. But one 1943 Korean magazine and two newspaper articles from 1935 and 1947 mention 1922 as the year he came to Berlin. This writer also checked Humboldt University Archives for records regarding Paek Myŏng-gon 白命坤 (1905–?) whom Pae accompanied to Berlin, but it seems Paek was never accepted as a student; there is no information about Paek’s arrival either. 201 In the 1920s the colonial administration regulated the faculties where Korean students could enroll at overseas universities (and from 1924 even at Keijō Imperial University in Korea itself) — primarily medicine, law, and economics, while most liberal arts fields 81 Frank Hoffmann also Unsung Pai, 1900–1978) is the first Korean artist to study and work in Europe, and later becomes the first dean of the renowned Art Department at Hongik University (Hongik Taehakkyo 弘益大學校) in Seoul.202 Pae comes to Berlin as a man of twenty-two and later also lives and works in Paris for a few years. As an art student and artist he is in the center of it all. He arrives in Europe having had only rudimentary training in Korean or Japanese artistic techniques, seems almost free from socialized East Asian conventions in the arts, and has no professional tools and mechanisms to fall back on. He lives in Berlin throughout the Golden Twenties, the boom years of German modernism, with its unique mix of sharp sociopolitical criticism and expressionist aesthetics. Pae has German and international friends, is well connected to art circles and cultural life, and even gets his own Meisterschüler (master-class student) art studio in one of the two top academic institutions for modern art. The young artist acquires much of his “Asian” tradition in the arts at a distance from Asia. He employs a good deal of self-Orientalizing as a marketing strategy, finds a niche there, and then cultivates among his customers rich Japanese businessmen and diplomats in Berlin, even doing interior design for the Japanese Embassy. From were not permitted. Pae would unlikely have received a passport to study at an art academy in Germany, had he applied to do so. 202 For more detailed depictions of Pae Un-sŏng’s time in Berlin, listings of most of his exhibitions, works, and biographical chronologies, refer to following publications: Frank Hoffmann, “Ch’ŏt yurŏp han’guk hwaga Pae Un-sŏng: Perŭllin saenghwal sibyungnyŏn’ganŭi palchach’wi” [Pae Un-sŏng, the first Korean painter in Europe: On the track of his 16 years in Berlin], Wŏlgan misul 87 (April 1991): 43–48 and 55–67. This 1991 article also includes a longer interview with Pae’s good German friend Kurt Runge who later even wrote a book in his name. In a recent book chapter this writer also briefly discusses Pae’s time since 1950 in North Korea: Frank Hoffmann, “Brush, Ink, and Props: The Birth of Korean Painting,” in Exploring North Korean Arts, ed. Rüdiger Frank (Nuremberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2011), 156–159. Although there has hardly been any academic work about him, following the above 1991 article South Korean art journalists, in particular Kim Pok-ki 金福基 (aka Kim Bokki), have picked up on Pae as a topic and have since published a slew of articles on him. Kim also wrote his recent M.A. thesis about Pae: Kim Pok-ki, “Pae Un-sŏngŭi saengaewa chakp’um yŏn’gu” [A study about Pae Un-sŏng’s life and work] (Unpublished M.A. thesis, Sangmyŏng University, 2011). Also useful is another, earlier 2003 M.A. thesis that nicely sums up the previoius research and lists colonial period press articles related to Pae: Kim Mi-gŭm, “Pae Un-sŏngŭi yurŏp ch’eryusigi hoehwa yŏn’gu (1922–1940)” [A Study about Pae Un-sŏng’s paintings from his time in Europe] (Unpublished M.A. thesis, Hongik University, 2003); a shorter, less useful version of this thesis has been published in article format in Han’guk kŭnhyŏndae misulsahak 14 (2005). Furthermore, there is a very important exhibition catalog of 48 of Pae’s original works (47 of which had been rediscovered in 1999 in Paris) that had been on exhibit at the National Modern Art Museum’s Tŏksu Palace annex: Kungnip Hyŏndae Misulgwan, ed., Pae Unsŏng chŏn [Pae Un-sŏng exhibition] (Seoul: Kungnip Hyŏndae Misulgwan, 2001). The most detailed biographical sketch of Pae from North Korea can be found in Ri Chae-hyŏn, comp. Chosŏn ryŏktae misulga p’yŏllam [Handbook of successive generations of Korean artists], 2nd ed. (P’yŏngyang: Munhak Yesul Chonghap Ch’ulp’ansa, 1999), 234–237. 82 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s the point of view of a cultural historian or art historian, Pae Un-sŏng illuminates almost any subject regarding mechanisms of power, privilege, and market that characterize the dominant–subordinated system of colonial culture. His life and work, precisely because he lives for 18 long years outside of the colonial empire, also show very concretely what Japanese “secondhand” westernization in the colonies means vis-à-vis “firsthand” European art education. Remarkably, the differences are far less striking and of lesser significance than most of us might have expected. Some old German and Korean friends describe Pae as a polite, charming man and a lady’s man as well, who knew his way around. A young blond girl from Vienna who follows him to Berlin, uninvited, even undergoes cosmetic surgery on her nose to please him.203 He is a somewhat self-centered but charismatic man. These qualities continue to strongly shine through, amazingly so, in his later North Korean essays published in the magazine Chosŏn misul 조선미술 [Korean art]. Yet, he is someone without political ambition or interest in ideologies whatsoever. As a man who seems to know exactly what he wants (i.e. professional success as an artist, fame, a good comfortable life), a man who is free to do whatever he wants, his life and artwork takes some quite unexpected turns. He marries while still in Berlin but finally leaves his German wife and their daughter behind, returns to Korea in 1940 and ends up doing pro-Pacific War propaganda work there. If that were not enough, making a one-hundred-eighty degree turn after liberation, he finally marries a young left-wing activist and leaves Seoul for the North during the Korean War. Pae Un-sŏng first studies economics at Waseda University (Waseda Daigaku 早稲田大学) in Tōkyō. In Seoul he lives in the household of Paek In-gi 白寅基, a banker and colonial era profiteer who works closely with the Japanese authorities. Pae is supposed to accompany the banker’s young son Myŏng-gon to Germany as a sort of older friend and caretaker. Then, in late 1925, Myŏng-gon gets sick (so goes the official version) and returns to Korea while Pae stays on in Berlin. As soon as Pae had disembarked from their ship in Marseille, he visited a local museum there and reports later that he was so taken by Western art that he wanted to study art.204 In 1923 Pae already takes private tutoring lessons from Hugo Mieth, a Paris trained German genre painter. He then continues his training at the small private art school Lebensfunke, basically a remnant of the turn-of-the-century Lebensreform (life reform) movement. Willy Jaeckel, the expressionist painter and former 203 204 Details from an interview with Kurt Runge, 6 December 1990 (see author’s 1991 article). See Herbert Blanken, “Ein Künstler des Fernen Ostens: Der Koreaner Maler Unsoung Pai” [An artist from the Far East: The Korean painter Unsoung Pai], Illustrierte Zeitung 187, no. 4779 (15 October 1936): 502. A slightly different version of Pae’s decision-making process, where he is also said to have visited Paris and its museums and then made the acquaintance of a painter in Berlin, is given in “Unsoung Pai: Ein koreanischer Maler in Berlin” [Unsoung Pai: A Korean painter in Berlin], Die Dame 62, no. 16 (first August issue 1935): 8. 83 Frank Hoffmann (Fig. 25) A photographic reproduction of Pae Un-sŏng’s 1934 Mitsui woodcut from Berlin (see fig. 32), hanging in a 2004–05 South Korean traveling exhibition of pro-Japanese art (see footnote 232). Photo: Yi Ch’ang-gil. (Fig. 26) Pae’s drawing in the Maeil sinbo of 3 August 1943. The drawing appears above the poem »Honoring the Call of the Tennō« (here cut off) by Kanemura Ryūsai 金村龍濟, from his 1942 poetry volume Ajia shishū 亞細亞詩集 [Asia poems]. Kanemura is the Japanese name of the Korean poet and critic Kim Yong-je 金龍濟, who had until the mid-1930s been part of the communist and proletarian literature movements. Both, drawing and poem, are typical examples for propaganda materials aimed at advertising the enlistment of young Korean men into the Imperial Japanese Army by the Government-General of Chōsen. student of Otto Gussmann, is one of his early mentors here.205 Expressionism is at the time a highlight of the modernist art movement in Germany. And much of what Berlin’s stimulating culture has to offer relates directly to the dire collapse of the German economy. The visual arts, as well as theater and literature, are all highly intellectualized and politicized, with sociopolitical criticism (Brecht, George Grosz, John Heartfield, etc.) at the center. At the same time, we see new conceptual frameworks. The Bauhaus in Weimar and later in Dessau creates new impulses for art education and industrial production by bringing together crafts, the fine arts, and modern industrial design. Discussing Pae Un-sŏng forces us to dive into the still ongoing South Korean collaboration debate regarding colonial period artists (and another discourse does not presently exist, the interest in these artists is quite limited). Pae’s portrayal in South Korean publications exemplifies the generic problem of casting artists and other public figures as patriots and heroes or collaborators and traitors. First comes the national historical paradigm as the only legitimate template, then the historian merely stencils in the narratives and biographical details — all based on “the fantasy of genuine, anticolonial nationalism uncontaminated by either the contagion of the colonial epoch or capitalist penetration.”206 In Pae’s case, someone halfway around the world becomes a “pro-Japanese collaborator” (in the current South Korean clas205 206 84 See Chosŏn ilbo, 20 November 1927 and 18 January 1929; Tonga ilbo, 5 April 1935. Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 51. The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s sification). Applying the customary, ROK-style templates, basic assumptions, and historical paradigms that go with the collaborator label seems in his case especially forced and unconvincing. Part of that labeling always fits, of course, but overall there is just too much of Pae’s work that completely falls off the dissection table. The main obstacle in understanding and even explaining the work of Pae Un-sŏng (and that of other colonial period artists) — and the historical contextualization of Pae and his particular adaptation of both modern Eastern and Western styles — is that such attempts are based on uneven suppositions. An outdated, canonized discourse on democratic modernism meets another dated, nationalized, quasi-historical one on collaboration. An idealized, postwar image of a completed Western modernity project from the “heroic age” of modernism, supposedly a product of democratic systems and thus representing democratic freedom, is juxtaposed against the situation in a non-completed, non-democratic, off-center colonial culture. The case of Pae Un-sŏng, however, not the least because of his changing geographic, cultural, and political localities — Berlin and Paris, then Seoul, and then P’yŏngyang — shows that existing explanatory templates do not bridge the gaps. As one way to get to a better understanding of the situation, I suggest we start by having a critical look at the other side, at the idealized templates for that period’s Western — specifically European — modernism (klassische Moderne, in the German context, ca. 1900 to 1937) that served as the yardstick for modernism combined with political correctness for the rest of the world. Let us briefly look at the Bauhaus. Because of its social utopianist beginnings, the Bauhaus, and modernist arts in general, are still widely seen as expressions of political freedom and democracy. That, of course, is just a well-endowed myth. One of the well-known and exceptionally talented students of the Dessau Bauhaus, for example, was the Japanese photographer and architect Yamawaki Iwao 山脇巌 (better known as Iwao Yamawaki). We have all seen reproductions of his famous 1932 photo collage The Attack on the Bauhaus that has served as a cover image for many books on the institution and for exhibition posters. It shows jackbooted Nazis in their brown uniforms, marching diagonally through the picture space and stomping on the two main Bauhaus school buildings while other storm troopers stand by in the background. This work has truly become an icon of the supposedly anti-fascist character — and even the victimization — of institutionalized modernist arts. But the work’s creator later appropriates this particular modernist photomontage style unadulterated for use in Japan,207 where he works from 207 In 1999, forty of Yamawaki Iwao’s modernist war propaganda photomontages were put up as a virtual exhibition (with Janine Fron as the creative director) at the (Art) n Laboratory website at Northwestern University (see URL #19). Creating a laconic, minimalist modern style, the former Bauhaus student even reutilized in these 1944 works official U.S. military propaganda images (which are themselves in a modernist photographic style) and other photos published shortly before in Life Magazine — for example Myron Davis’ photo Troops Training with Bayonets from 1943. Yamawaki’s important role as a designer and 85 Frank Hoffmann the late 1930s for the Japanese Ministry of Defense to become one of the figures responsible for Japanese war propaganda art. Contrary to deep–seated popular belief, modernist art styles are not attached to democratic systems or convictions. Regardless, this construction of anti-fascist legitimacy in the visual arts does indeed serve both parts of Germany quite well after the war. The “reactionary modernists,” as Jeffrey Herf aptly labeled them three decades ago — artists, scientists, and scholars such as Oswald Spengler with his immensely popular book Untergang des Abendlandes [The decline of the West], but also Nazi leaders like Goebbels with his concept of “steel-like romanticism” — simultaneously promoted volkish ideology, irrational romantic ideals, and technological progress.208 When Hitler comes to power, the modernists, especially the architects and designers among them, are convinced that by adding minor ideological adjustments to their non-ornamental, high-tech, and pseudo-functionalistic works, they will generate the new style under the New Order. Modernism’s early promise of bourgeois revolution and transforming daily life had blatantly failed. In its essence, it had mostly just become a revolution of form and style (see this writer’s chapter on “Ultra-Right Modernism”). In order to adjust to the “reactionary modernists” now in power, key modernists such as Yamawaki do in fact shift patrons like anyone else. Xanti Schawinski, Swiss Jewish Bauhaus student and lover of Walter Gropius’ wife Ise, tries to open an Italian Bauhaus via Mussolini with a politically altered conception, easily transferring Bauhaus typography to fascist Italian posters. Once he has emigrated to the United States, he has no problem converting a 1934 poster he designed for an air show of Mussolini’s army to a wartime US air forces poster.209 Herbert Bayer, first a student at the Bauhaus, then director of its printing and advertising workshops and by then arguably Germany’s most talented designer, is prominently displayed at the Nazi’s Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) exhibition of 1937, and becomes a symbol and figurehead of the “democratic Bauhaus” after his emigration to the US (in 1938 he already organizes the legendary Bauhaus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York).210 what we might call artistic director for the military during the Pacific War has thus far been almost completely neglected in the literature about him. The only related work one of his biographers takes note of is his gigantic, 15-meter-high photo mural with a militaristic motif completed a year earlier for the Imperial Theatre (Teikoku Gekijō 帝国劇場) in Tōkyō; see Kawahata Naomichi, “Yamawaki Iwao no shōgai to sakuhin” [The life and work of Yamawaki Iwao], Déjà-vu: A Photography Quarterly 19 (Spring 1995): 78–79. 208 See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 209 Compare the two posters in Schawinsky’s exhibition catalogue from 1986: Peter Hahn and Bauhaus-Archiv, eds. and comps. Xanti Schawinski: Malerei, Bühne, Grafikdesign, Fotografie [Xanti Schawinski: Painting, stage design, graphic design, photography], Bauhaus Archiv, Ausstellung, Berlin, 22. März – 19. Mai 1986 (Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung Beuermann, 1986), 120 and 136. 210 See Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius, Bauhaus, 1919–1928 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1938). 86 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s Three years earlier, that very same Herbert Bayer had no qualms about designing various works for the infamous exhibition The Wonder of Life (Das Wunder des Lebens, 1935), beautifying the “heroic SS troops” for Hall No. IV, where the section on “race hygiene” (Rassenpflege) is housed, or designing an impressive collage that serves as the background for an explanation of Hitler’s race theory, the “eradication of antisocial elements and cripples” and the (forceful) “sterilization of those with mental deficiencies,” juxtaposing a medical drawing of the “healthy” human arterial system with a new “healthy” artery-like autobahn net.211 Gropius himself, while still in London preparing to leave for the United States, contacts Goebbels to ensure him via Hönig, president of the Reich Chamber of Culture: “I will also in the future behave loyally and understand my mission at Harvard as one of serving the German culture.”212 Even in 1938, already being Chairman of the Department of Architecture at Harvard University, is he still worried about keeping up with his tax payments back in the Reich and complains that although he is “a loyal German subject” he would “be treated as if [he were] a defector.”213 There is truly no end to this: the chief architect of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Fritz Ertl, had studied at the Dessau Bauhaus at the same time as Yamawaki under Mies van der Rohe. And who takes care of getting Mies invited to the United States? It is his colleague Philip Johnson, again an enthusiastic Nazi sympathizer, who at the time is even into creating his own American Nazi party.214 All this is not to say that at the time Gropius, Mies, Bayer, etc. are Nazis in an ideological sense — just that they do not care about politics as long as they can pursue with their work, pushing aside any sort of moral considerations and political responsibilities. We can certainly further extend this digression to German-occupied countries like France. For example, the great Le Corbusier, another father of modernism and a citizen of occupied France, was more than willing to accept a job from the Vichy regime that collaborated with Nazi Germany. 211 See Gemeinnützige Berliner Ausstellungs-, Messe- und Fremdenverkehrs-Gesellschaft, ed., Das Wunder des Lebens: Amtlicher Führer durch die Ausstellung Berlin 1935, 23. März bis 5. Mai [The wonder of life: Official guide to the exhibition, Berlin, March 23 to May 5, 1935] (Berlin: Ala, 1935), 149. Bayer continues his textbook career in the States. In a 1977 catalogue he does not even mind reproducing some of his 1935 propaganda work for this major Nazi “race hygiene” show, presenting it as “an exhibition of popular biology and health.” Herbert Bayer and Jan van der Marck, Herbert Bayer, from Type to Landscape: Designs, Projects & Proposals, 1923–73, Exhibition, Hopkins Center, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 21–February 27, 1977 (Boston: Nimrod Press, 1977), 26. 212 Letter by Walter Gropius to Eugen Hönig, Reich Chamber of Culture, dated 31 December 1936, Bauhaus Archive (at the Museum of Design in Berlin), Walter Gropius Archive, GN box 8, folder 269. 213 Letter by Walter Gropius to German Secretary of State Hartmut Frank, dated 13 March 1938, Bauhaus Archive (at the Museum of Design in Berlin), Walter Gropius Archive, GN box 41, folder 338. 214 Thanks to architectural historian Malcom Millais for the information about Fritz Ertl and Philip Johnson (email of 12 October 2008). 87 Frank Hoffmann We now return to Pae. The young man applies several times to study at the Unified State Schools for Fine and Applied Arts (Vereinigte Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Kunst)215, first for the summer semester 1924.216 The modern institution had been newly established that same year in Berlin-Charlottenburg, having been inspired by the Werkbund and the Bauhaus with their integration of fine arts, handicraft, industrial design, and architecture, and was later closed down by the Nazis,217 like the Bauhaus. It is unquestionably the most important interwar modernist art and design school in Germany, apart from the Bauhaus, and has the added advantage of being located right in the center of Berlin. Pae applies again the following semester, for a drawing class, but is rejected once more.218 He finally succeeds in the summer 1925, first being accepted as a student on probation for a painting class taught by Ferdinand Spiegel, 219 and then enrolling as a regular student later that year. The admission record (fig. 27) includes the names of a number of figures (Fig. 27) Admissions book, probation students, summer 1925, Unified State Schools for Fine and Applied Arts, Berlin. who come to fame. Ernst Wilhelm Nay, for example, listed right above Pae, studies under one of the most influential painters of Berlin, the expressionist Karl Hofer. Nay is later considered one of the top West German abstract painters. The name of the Japanese painter Wakita Kazu 脇田和 also appears farther down the list. Like Pae, he would later do some war 215 The Staatsschulen are mostly just referred to as “die Akademie” (the academy), and will not be addressed here in order to avoid any confusion with the Prussian Academy of Sciences. 216 The entry reads: “No. 11: Pae Unsoung — painter — Seoul (Japan) — b. 13 July 1900 — rejected,” Student Admissions Book, Summer Semester 1924, Archives of the Unified State Schools for Fine and Applied Arts, Berlin. 217 See William Owen Harrod, “The Vereinigte Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Kunst and the Mainstream of German Modernism,” Architectural History 52 (2009): 233–269. 218 See single, half-page sheet, “Winter Semester 1924–25, Mr. Pae, Unsoung,” Archives of the Unified State Schools for Fine and Applied Arts, Berlin. 219 See single sheet, “Admission Results for Students on Probation, Summer Quarter 1925, Dept. for the Arts,” Archives of the Unified State Schools for Fine and Applied Arts, Berlin. 88 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s propaganda art.220 Although an entire museum is dedicated to the works of Wakita, he is mostly known for his organizational role as the co-founder of the Shinseisaku Kyōkai 新制作協会 (New Creation Association), probably the most important postwar modernist Japanese art group. While Pae Un-sŏng remains the only Korean artist in Berlin over all those years, there are certainly plenty from Japan and China: Murayama Tomoyoshi 村山知義, for example, a Marxist, non-conformist, and strict opponent of Japanese colonialism, receives much intellectual inspiration and visual stimulation in exchanges with Herwarth Walden and other artists and dancers, such as Mary Wigman with her expressionistic dance. Immediately upon returning to Japan, Murayama founds MAVO, which is arguably the most remarkable Japanese avantgarde art group of the 1920s. Later comes the poet and modern “Taishō chic” painter Yumeji Takehisa 竹久夢二, among others, who teaches at the modernist Johannes Itten School. Lin Fengmian 林風眠, who comes over from Paris in 1923, is (just like Pae) known for his attempts to blend Eastern and Western motifs and styles; he would soon hold key positions at art schools in Republican China. Near the end of that same enrollment list we find the name Felix Nussbaum, a German Jewish student and excellent surrealist painter until his life ends tragically in 1944 at Auschwitz. Pae’s first professor at the Unified State Schools, Ferdinand Spiegel, would become his mentor all the way to his graduation in 1927 221 and years beyond that. During the winter of the same year, Pae already exhibits his woodcut Self-Portrait in the annual Salon d’Automne exhibition in Paris.222 In early 1929 he celebrates another smaller success when the French press gives him special coverage for several of his woodcuts at an international exhibition in Paris. One of them is A Drunk Outdoors / Ok oe ŭmju 223 屋外飮酒 (1928, fig. 28), a Beardsley for minors, where the exotic replaces the erotic. A German magazine gives Pae a chance to publish a series of watercolors with his story about wedding customs in Korea (see fig. 29) — a first Korean folklife series of images, in a style far removed from any 1920s avant-garde art.224 Spiegel likes Pae so much that he later makes him his master-class student for post-graduate training. This again is very telling, as it should have been the call of Käthe Kollwitz, who has been in charge of the post-graduation master-class program for graphics since 1928, and Pae’s specialty is graphics, not oil painting. Moreover, 220 See Hariu Ichirō et al., Sensō to bijutsu 1937-1945 / Art in Wartime Japan 1937–1945 (Tōkyō: Kokusho Kankōkai, 2007), 129. 221 See Chosŏn ilbo, 20 November 1927. 222 See Société du salon d’automne, Catalogue des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, dessin, gravure, architecture et art décoratif exposés au Grand Palais des Champs-Elysées du 5 novembre au 18 décembre 1927 [Catalogue of paintings, sculptures, drawings, printmaking, architecture, and decorative art exhibited at the Grand Palais des Champs-Elysees from November 5 to December 18, 1927] (Paris: Puyfourcat, 1927), 246. 223 See Chosŏn ilbo, 18 January 1929. 224 See Unsung Pai, “Hochzeit in Korea” [Wedding in Korea], Die Woche 33, no. 36 (5 September 1931): 1176–1177. 89 Frank Hoffmann (Fig. 28) Pae Un-sŏng, A Drunk Outdoors, 1928, woodcut, 16.5 x 14 cm, with a dedication to Kurt Runge. Private collection. (Fig. 29) The first page of Pae’s article »Hochzeit in Korea« [Wedding in Korea] with his watercolors, 1931. (Fig. 30) Pae’s oil painting The Bride as a cover illustration of the magazine Die Dame, first August issue of 1935. the socialist artist, the first-ever female member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, has a special and strong affinity with China and East Asia. Setting Pae up for oil painting with special privileges thus makes him Spiegel’s dependent. Whether this is an intentional political move by his Nazi mentor or just coincidental is hard to say. From 1930 onwards, when the master-class system is introduced, that status provides Pae with his own art studio in one of the school’s two towers. Pae, who knows how to stretch rules to his advantage, stays there until 1934, twice as long as school policy allows. 225 His close German friend Kurt Runge remembers that “Pae lived and cooked in his studio at the school. Neither was allowed.”226 In this sense, he is well taken care of by his mentor. It is just that Spiegel, the one and only right-wing bloodand-soil (Blut und Boden) believer among all the professors at the school, is already painting blue-eyed blond, robust and “racially pure” “Aryan” peasants years before the Nazis would gain power. Even the cows in his paintings look somehow Aryan. That is his forte, and he makes it into the history of art for that exact specialty. Pae Un-sŏng’s former classmate Hans Scholz, who jokes about Pae mistaking this and related palliative, folky, thick and oily Naturalist styles as representative of Western arts, also reports that Spiegel even had himself placed in Luftwaffe bombers attacking Britain — seemingly to better depict battle scenes.227 225 School director Bruno Paul limited the time a studio could be used by the same Meisterschüler to two years. See “Announcement from Director Professor Dr. Bruno Paul, 1 December 1930,” folder VIII, Sp. 1, vol. 2, Archives of the Unified State Schools for Fine and Applied Arts, Berlin. 226 Kurt Runge, interview, 6 December 1990, Berlin. 227 Scholz refers to the impression the works of Arthur Fischer, a similarly bizarre painter, had made on Pae. See Hans Scholz, ‘Berlin, jetzt freue Dich!’ Betrachtungen an und in den 90 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s Rather unimpressed by blue-eyedblond-haired Nordic Teutons, Pae still survives all this nicely. However, as one of the foremost art critics of the time, Max Osborn (the Nazis would burn his books within the coming year) notes, “the Korean, having-turned Berliner”228 shows no influence of Karl Hofer, in contrast to most other students at the school. Pae’s lack of connection with Hofer means no expressionism and no experimental styles. In his depictions, we detect hardly any interest in the speed and dynamism of modern technology that now define metropolitan life in Europe and the New World; nor does he reject traditional Western perspective, or (Fig. 31) Pae Un-sŏng, Self-portrait in Shaman Costume, early 1930s, oil on canvas. (One of two versions in oil; photo courtesy Michael Menke.) (Fig. 32) The first page of a 1935 magazine article in Die Dame with Pae’s 1934 Mitsui print and a self-portrait of the artist in a Korean shaman costume beside it. Photo on top: Pae paints in the traditional East Asian style. (Fig. 33) Cover of the Pae Un-sŏng exhibition catalogue from 2001, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, South Korea, with a self-portrait in oil (early 1930s, 54 x 45 cm). Grenzen der deutschen Hauptstadt [‘Berlin, now rejoice!’ Reflections at and within the limits of the German capital] (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1960), 289 and 558. 228 Max Osborn, in a review of the school’s (“the academy’s”) exhibition, in Vossische Zeitung, evening edition of 30 March 1932. 91 Frank Hoffmann experiment with liberation from color, or work with sociopolitical topoi so characteristic of modernist artists in interwar Berlin. Then again, an oil painting by Pae from the early 1930s, first published in the aforementioned two-page article about the artist in the chic fashion and society magazine Die Dame (see footnote 204), seems to suggest otherwise. And a painting from the same series reproduced on the cover of the 2001 South Korean National Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition catalog also well demonstrates Pae’s mastery of avant-garde styles. The artist playfully represents himself as a Korean shaman, with his paksu 博 數 hat and the kollyongp’o 衮龍袍 (king’s robe) that displays the yongp’o 龍袍 belt, with a dragon motif reserved for the king. In his colorful costume and with a witty come-I’ll-tellyou-in-private gesture, Pae the shaman displays his theatrical side, as both the painter of the scene and the principal actor in it. And for a contrast, he installs this Korean parody against European backgrounds. In one case (see fig. 31) this looks like one of the devastated landscapes into which surrealists like Giorgio de Chirico or René Magritte placed their figures. In the other (see fig. 33), Pae depicts a typical 1920s or early 1930s Berlin dancehall scene as it might have been captured on canvas by expressionist painters like Emil Nolde or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner — on the right side that is, while on the left we see two Chinoiserie figurines that seem to have sprung right off some tea pot. In that dancehall image, we see part of the ODEON Dance Orchester logo, indicating that it was painted before 1933. This is very likely the Kakadu Bar (which translates into Cockatoo Bar), one of the three or four largest bars and dance halls in the Weimar capital, the main hall being decorated in a mixture of “exotic” Tahitian and Samoan décor — just as the expressionists liked it — and, of course, live cockatoo birds. This is a place where American jazz and swing is played every night until 3 AM, a place also favored by Asian students and businessmen, as we know from diaries, novels, and other sources. These two paintings (and a third one, a variation of figure 31 with yellowish hat, see frontispiece, now at the Berlin Ethnological Museum) are extraordinary beautiful and powerful examples of 1920s and early 1930s modernist experimentation in the European avant-garde, playing with the displacement and replacement of foreign cultural icons such as “exotic” masks and costumes. Japanese modernists, expectably, sometimes also utilize their new colonies as sources for the exotic by referencing traditional Korean or native Taiwanese costumes. When Korean artists do the same, the result can indeed be seen as an act of selfexotism. To evaluate such works, it is essential to understand that the orientalism and exotism of (Fig. 34) Magazine ad for the Kakadu Bar [Cockatoo Bar], Berlin, the East (of and within the new 1931. 92 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s colonial Japanese Empire) are not quite of the same nature as those in the West. Early on, from the turn of the century, a few cultural leaders and artists such as Okakura Kakuzō 岡倉覚三 (aka Okakura Tenshin 岡倉天心) and his student Yokoyama Taikan 横山大観 even have direct contact with and strongly influence major Indian figures, such as the poet and later Nobel Prize laureate Rabindranath Tagore and his nephew, the influential painter Abanindranath Tagore, who then becomes the inspiration for modern (Fig. 35) A scene in the Cockatoo Café, Seoul (Keijō), painting in India. When Okakura writes illustration by An Sŏk-chu, published on 9 February 1934 in the Chosŏn ilbo. in his Ideals of the East of “the Chinese, with their communism of Confucius, and Indians with their individualism,”229 he surprises his contemporaries with the claim that what is widely understood as an East–West cultural and philosophical divide is a myth, that the virtues the West might have to offer are in fact redundant with those already present in the East (i.e. individualism in India). The West is now made dispensable! What looks at the time like a revolutionary and radical anti-colonialist philosophy within longstanding British colonies like India or Java, certainly appears to be just the opposite in Taiwan, then already a Japanese colony, or Korea, soon later to become one. Pan-Asianism with its orientalism and exotism can have profoundly different political connotations in different localities. Korea, as a Japanese colony, a special region (chiiki 地域) of Japan, given its political dissolution as a state, is now faced with the dilemma of having to define its identity entirely in terms of culture. It is a dilemma because the template for such identification derives from colonialist ideology, a template whose two main categories are Pan-Asianism and “the local.” This identity discourse seems to automatically equate “the local” with the cliché of a folkish hinterland culture of depravity, which is then again fully integrated into the wider Japanese cultural discourse and well accepted by the colonial authorities. In the case of Pae’s two self-portraits, however, we see how elusive easy labels and generalizations like “local” or “local color” can be: the portrayed artist faces the beholder, gazes directly at us, while he appears (mostly because the middle ground is missing) as if he inhabits yet another layer of illusory space outside the picture plane. In both cases background and portrait of the artist in the foreground do not seem to share the same illusionistic space. While still being works of figurative art, these are 229 Kakasu Okakura [Okakura Kakuzō], The Ideals of the East: With Special Reference to the Art of Japan (London: John Murray, 1903), 1. 93 Frank Hoffmann outstandingly fine examples of the modernist version of Greenberg’s later dogma of preserving the integrity of the picture plane — a core quality of modernist painting and the pendant to the Brechtian alienation-effect (Verfremdungseffekt) in theater: Pae brings in his own ethnic and cultural (and if you like folkloristic) identity, while simultaneously obscuring and distancing himself from it through his modernist style. Despite bringing in a local motif (Pae himself is cloaked in Korean shaman garb), Pae’s works are far from an imitated colonial gaze that frames the subaltern subject as the “exotic” and “primitive” Other. These works rather open a discourse that leaves space for many questions and interpretations. Except for a very few drawings still with his school and in private collections, though, these three oils seem the only works by Pae that truly deserve the label avant-garde. We might add that, in terms of motifs, icons, and style, we can easily find parallels to the still nascent avant-garde back in Korea. Let’s have a brief look at another Cockatoo then, back in Korea. An Sŏk-chu 安碩柱, an established newspaper illustrator and cartoonist (also a writer, art critic, and movie director), typically sketches dancehall and tabang 茶房 (coffee house) scenes of modern life in colonial Korea.230 The 1934 drawing here reproduced (see fig. 35) shows a man and other guests in elegant Western suits in the first Korean-owned modern café in the center of the Korean capital. Coincidence or not, the café is also named Cockatoo (K’ak’adyu). It is a place where intellectuals would meet to talk, listen to Western music, and enjoy small art exhibitions. Interestingly, apart from the mix of Western and Indian interior design, masks are hung on the pillars and walls. The playfulness that this drawing and the Cockatoo Café itself attest to — the mix of Western and non-Western foreign, of modern and traditional, of high culture and low culture — this same playful mix corresponds to Pae’s oil paintings and how the Berlin painter represents the ”exotic” and “the Other” in those self-portraits. In that Korean café, however, the masks are Indian and possibly Hawaiian — nothing too close to home. Unlike Pae’s works, the sketch and the actual Cockatoo café in the Korean capital that it depicts evoke no confrontation with one’s own culture and self. We see the same in, for example, a 1933 still life by Yi Chong-sun 李鍾舜, on display at the annual Chōsen Art Exhibition (Chōsen Bijutsu Tenrankai 朝鮮美術展覽會), where the Korean artist depicts what might be a South Indian or Indonesian mask, rather than a Korean one. 231 European artists exoticize Japan, Japanese exoticize Koreans (and more so Taiwanese natives), and Koreans then either exoticize themselves as a rural “local culture” 230 For information on colonial period dance halls and other modern entertainment establishments and related culture, see Kim Chin-song’s well researched book Seoule ttansŭhorŭl hŏhara: Hyŏndaesŏngŭi hyŏngsŏng [Permit dance halls in Seoul! The formation of modernity], Munhwa yŏn’gu 10 (Seoul: Hyŏnsil Munhwa Yŏn’gu Yŏn’gusil, 1999). 231 The painting refered to is “Still Life on a Board.” See Chōsen Sōtokufu, Chōsen Bijutsu Tenrankai, Chōsen Bijutsu Tenrankai zuroku [Illustrated catalog to the Chōsen Art Exhibition], vol. 12 (Keijō: Chōsen Shashin Tsūshinsha, 1933), 56. 94 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s or pass on the short end of the stick to Southeast Asia and Oceania. Such exoticization is quite diverse and seems therefore by no means to follow a Pan-Asian template in every case. While the self and “the exotic Other” may merge or be interchangeable, they are never simply depicted as subjugated people, as today’s mainstream South Korean scholarship wants to make us believe. And as Pae’s self-portraits show, this can well be a highly complex and honest identity quest. Since Pae is not just a Berliner but also a Korean, though, we cannot ignore current discourses in Korea itself. As already hinted at above, seven or eight decades after these oil paintings were produced, the context provided is reduced to that of collaboration, which is in the realm of today’s conformist ROK-style nationalism then again being contextualized within the “settling the past” (kwagŏ ch’ŏngsan 過去 淸算) campaign. The application of “local color” techniques in colonial Korea mostly means the incorporation of subject matter from traditional popular culture (non-court, non-yangban) such as depictions of shamans (as in this case), kisaeng 妓生, Buddhist dance, etc., and often also renderings à la Gauguin that can be understood as selfexotism. Within the narrow scheme of circular reasoning that informs mainstream Korean art journalism, such works can only be labeled “pro-Japanese” art, as they are said to represent the country and its culture as backwards. In cleansing and nationalizing its past arts, the Southern solution to this conundrum (of aestheticallypleasing-but-politically-unacceptable artwork) is, as discussed, a very simplistic good/bad compartmentalization of artists and works, while the Northern solution is simply to cut out such works from public memory altogether. Having said this, the fact is that Pae serves Japanese interests (as do many, if not most of the Korean artists and intellectuals from the mid-1930s onwards — just that Pae does so halfway around the world through his own initiative and without any direct pressure): being sensitive to symbols but not an intellectual, his artistic solutions are often as simplistic as the Japanese propaganda on such issues. Two details, taken from the two artworks displayed on the same page of Die Dame, the page that is reproduced above, clearly demonstrate this. On a scale in the lower right of the Mitsui woodcut, a seated Buddha is balanced against a Christian crucifix on the other (see figs. 31 and 35). In Pae’s self-portrait as a shaman, on top of his (Fig. 36) Two details: left, from Pae Un-sŏng’s Mitsui woodcut, 1934; right, from yongp’o belt two one of Pae’s self-portraits as a shaman, an oil painting, first half of the 1930s. (Cf. framed rectangles figs. 31 and 32.) 95 Frank Hoffmann are horizontally juxtaposed to each other, one with the t’aegŭk 太極 emblem in blue and red colors, a strong reminder of the Korean flag, the other looking much like the red and white Japanese national flag (see figs. 30 and 35). Not surprising, reproductions of Pae’s just discussed (and some other) works could be found in a 2004–05 South Korean traveling exhibition of colonial period pro-Japanese artists. The exhibition was structured in the very same way that the issue of collaboration has been dealt with in Korean academic and media discourse; that is, it showcased reproductions of his artworks in the exact same way they were first published in Die Dame, with no attempt to provide any art historical context.232 Next to the self-portrait with Korean shaman costume, we see Pae’s 1934 233 woodcut of the German educated Japanese industrialist and philatelist Mitsui Takaharu 三井 高陽, at the time also the chairman of the Japanese–German Society (Nichi–Doku Kyōkai 日独協会), later responsible for the death of many POWs and considered to be a war criminal.234 Below that in the show is a photo of the artist’s oil portrait of Mitsui’s wife (which is on the second page of the 1935 Dame article). Mitsui and his wife had their portraits taken by Pae in several versions and in several media. By that time, the Korean artist is already somewhat prominent, having won an international graphics competition with one of his woodcuts back in 1929. Ever since then, he has been, and continues to be, mostly known as a woodcut artist in both Koreas. In 1933, he finishes a woodcut entitled World Map with some exotic fairytale qualities. (Pae’s friend Runge would later use bits and pieces of this work to illustrate his book of Korean fairytales.) The woodcut of Mitsui is now the capitalist pendant to that, a world map of a special kind, a pictorial map of the industrialist’s conglomerate around the world. In 1925 Mitsui opens a branch company in Berlin, the Mitsui Bussan AG, and Mitsui Takaharu is therefore in Berlin on a regular basis during the 1920s and the 1930s. Pae repeatedly tells Runge and his other German friends how much he despises the Japanese. Yet, Runge also notes that politics was 232 We also find the same arrangement in the exhibition catalog: Minjok Munje Yŏnʼguso, ed., Singminji chosŏn’gwa chŏnjaeng misul: chŏnsi ch’ejewa chosŏn minjungŭi sam [Colonial Korea and war art: exhibition system and the life of the ordinary people] (Seoul: Minjok Munje Yŏnʼguso, 2004), 187. 233 In several publications the year is given as 1935, yet the inventory card for a copy at the Ethnological Museum Hamburg, at its Fischbek external storage facility, records the date of receipt as 29 April 1934. Information thankfully received by Katharina Kosikowski, 9 June 2010. 234 Mitsui played the same role as an important sponsor in Vienna. See the study by Ogawa and Shigemori Bugar about To Yu-ho 都宥浩 (aka Do Cyong-Ho, 1905–1982) in volume two of this series. (To, married to a German, had studied in Beijing, then in Frankfurt am Main, and finally earned a doctoral degree at Vienna University. From early on, he had been a avowed communist. After liberation he became one of the leading archaeologists in North Korea where he also served as a member of the Standing Committee of the Third Supreme People’s Assembly.) 96 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s not a topic for Pae. In Runge’s own words: “He also told me that he had created silk paintings for the entrance hall of the Japanese Embassy. I think I can say that all his efforts were aimed at becoming rich. With portraits commissioned by Mitsui or the famous film actor Gustav Fröhlich his reputation of course grew quite drastically.” Runge recalls the circumstances of the portrait sittings as rather entertaining: “For the Mitsui portrait Pae actually used my studio. He must at that time — in 1934/35 — probably just have sublet a small room somewhere (...). In order for Mitsui to buy into this, Pae’s name tag was attached to the front door. (...) Mitsui’s impressive full dress uniform then remained between sessions hanging in my closet.”235 The silk paintings finished by (Fig. 37) Sketch of Pae’s 1937 silk paintings in the new Japanese Embassy in Berlin, one showing Korean Kayagŭm players. 1937 for the Japanese Embassy, (Fig. 38) Minami Jirō, Governor-General of Chōsen, with his are first hung in the old embassy, granddaughter, 1941, both in Korean attire. but are then transferred to the new one. These consist of two silk paintings for the stairway hall and two more for the reception room, one of which shows the Korean court orchestra with Kayagŭm 伽倻琴 players (only preserved as a sketch; fig. 37).236 Japan and Japanese culture represented Korean culture and Korean artists in much the same way as British upper class culture, for example, would make references to India and Indian culture. Since the Cultural Rule (bunka seiji 文化政治) period of the 1920s Korean culture is not suppressed anymore; rather, it is “streamlined” under the auspices of modern efficiency, 235 236 Kurt Runge, interview, 6 December 1990, Berlin. See “Unsoung Pai: Ein koreanischer Maler in Berlin,” 9; “Aus der japanischen Botschaft in Berlin / L’Ambasciata giapponese in Berlino” [From the Japanese Embassy in Berlin], Berlin Rom Tokio 2, no. 3 (15 March 1940): 27; Erich Voß, “Der Neubau der Kaiserlich Japanischen Botschaft in Berlin” [The new Imperial Japanese Embassy in Berlin], Die Kunst im Deutschen Reich 7, no. 2, B edition (February 1943): 29. 97 Frank Hoffmann and it gets compartmentalized into traditional–folklorist and Japanized modern. It is therefore not surprising to find artwork with Korean subject matters on display in Japanese embassies or photos of Governor-General Minami Jirō 南次郎 (in office 1936–1942) and his family members posing in colorful traditional Korean attire reproduced in mainstream publications (see fig. 38).237 The new Japanese Embassy in Berlin that most postwar architectural historians would call a piece of textbook Nazi architecture, was constructed because the old legation was in the way of Hitler and Speer’s planned “World Capital Germania.” It first opens in late 1940 and is completed in 1942. Two years later, the new embassy is already heavily damaged by Allied bombing, but it is reconstructed in the late 1980s according to — amazingly! — the original late 1930s design. So original, authentic, and local, the interior architect, just as fifty years earlier, is once more Cäsar Pinnau, who was originally handpicked by Albert Speer. The building is thus a twice realized small piece of a monumental Hitler–Speer Germania daydream that otherwise would have ended in a heap of rubble. In 1987 His Imperial Highness Prince Naruhito was present for the re-opening; only Pae missed it for the second time. During the late 1920s and the 1930s, Pae travels all over Europe. He participates in many group shows and has several solo exhibitions in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Paris, Warsaw, Prague, Brno, Bologna, Geneva, and other cities. Contemporary Korean newspapers inform the readership at home about many of these successes, and often make them appear bigger than they are, and always cut out any information about Japanese sponsorship. In November 1932 his first one man show opens, which is at the Fritz Gurlitt Gallery, one of the best known galleries for avant-garde art in the capital (another show follows at the same gallery in 1935).238 Others follow: in 237 See Hyung Gu Lynn, “Fashioning Modernity: Changing Meanings of Clothing in Colonial Korea,” Journal of International and Area Studies 11, no. 3 (2004): 82, and elsewhere. Even many of the wartime picture postcards released by the Army Relief Department (Rikugun Juppeibu 陸軍恤兵部 ) of the Imperial Japanese Army paid tribute to Korean culture and customs. See James P. Thomas, “Negotiating the Past and Present in Historical Memory: Whither Violence in the Picture Postcards of early 20th Century Korea,” unpublished paper, presented at The State, Violence and the Rule of Law in Korean– Japanese History, International Workshop 28–29 June 2013, LIAS, Leiden University. 238 See the art review by Curt Glaser, a well respected art historian and one of the first scholars in the German speaking world to have published academic books on East Asian art: Curt Glaser, “Junge Künstler: Bei Gurlitt — Unsoung Pai” [Young artists: At Gurlitt — Unsoung Pai], Berliner Börsen-Courier, 11 December 1932. About the February 1935 exhibit at Gurlitt, see “Ausstellungen” [Exhibitions], Die Weltkunst 9, no. 5 (3 February 1935): 3, Tonga ilbo, evening edition of 5 April 1935, and Chosŏn ilbo, 11 August 1935. As a side note: The Fritz Gurlitt Gallery was run by Wolfgang Gurlitt, the gallery founder’s grandson and a cousin of Hildebrandt Gurlitt, someone who is now (winter 2013–14) in the media daily with his son Cornelius, for creating the greatest art looting case in history. Wolfgang Gurlitt was also into selling expropriated Jewish art collections for his own profit as well as for that of the Goebbels ministry, and he cooperated with Hildebrandt Gurlitt on this. The heirs of the above art historian and collector Curt Glaser, 98 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s September and October 1935 Pae has another exhibition in Vienna, for example, at the Palmenhaus for the Vienna Art Club (Kunstgemeinschaft Wien).239 While only very few of his works can be considered avant-garde stylistically or by their subject matter, their exotic qualities make up for that and meet his customers’ aesthetic needs. The self-exotising niche he has created for himself works just fine for him. Once he abandons that, he is much less successful. Max Osborn, in a short review about the 1932 exhibition at Gurlitt, praises the works that relate to Korea and Koreans, using East Asian painting techniques, but, in his own humorous way, also states that “as soon as Pai becomes entirely disloyal to his own roots and tries to be European, Korea retaliates.”240 While the reports about all of Pae’s later exhibitions in Germany lack any sort of critical spirit after the Nazi’s seizure of power (and from 1935 onwards, throughout Europe Pae represents Korean culture as part of Japanese culture), the art critics in the many German language presses in a still independent and democratic Czechoslovakia are less interested in giving Pae any special credit for just being East Asian. “Unsoung Pai lost at least as much through European painting as he has won,”241 writes one critic in response to Pae’s one-man show in February and March 1936 in Prague. Another is just as unimpressed: “We have to judge a Korean artist who paints in a European style according to European standards; it would be inappropriate and insulting to want to admire him for having learned these European skills.” And he goes on: “In the exhibition one gets handed a printed essay about the painter. There is talk of a lightness à la Frans Hals and Unsoung Pai’s gracefulness. Such bon mots are better left unsaid, as this cannot be meant to be serious.”242 Yet another critic notes: “If Pai might be seeking a fusion of the artistic traditions of his homeland with European artistic life, then that has not been achieved in any of his works.”243 Many of his works show how his intellectual approach is not what we might expect from an Asian artist working in one of the two centers of the European avant-garde, but indeed close to that of Korean artists in colonial Korea or the immediate postliberation period. Pae operates with an amazwho later emigrated to the United States, are among those with claims to Cornelius Gurlitt today. 239 See the calendar entry under “Nachrichten ferner” [Further news], Die Kunst und das schöne Heim 73 (1935): 414; Wiener Zeitung, 12 September 1935; Wiener Neueste Nachrichten, 13 September 1935. 240 Max Osborn, in Vossische Zeitung, evening edition of 19 November 1932. 241 I.R.J., in Die Zeit, 20 February 1936. 242 J.P., in Prager Presse, morning ed. of 29 February 1936. 243 Ld., in Sozialdemokrat, 4 March 1936. According to Ambassador Jaroslav Olša Jr. who kindly shared his collection of some thirty contemporary clippings from Czechoslovakian newspapers in Czech, German, and Slovak with this writer, all related to Pae’s exhibition in Prague and Brno, the Czech reviews are just as critical as the quoted ones in German. Further details will be discussed in his forthcoming article “Unsoung Pai v Praze a Brně: První korejské výstavy v Československo v roce 1936” [Unsoung Pai in Prague and Brno: First Korean exhibitions in Czechoslovakia in 1936]. 99 Frank Hoffmann ingly simplistic transposition of ideas about an even coexistence of East Asian and Western cultures, as exemplified by the Buddhist and Christian (Pae is a Lutheran) icons in some of his artworks. The ways he depicts Korean folk customs are no more sophisticated, challenging, or otherwise any different from what we see being done in Korea at that time (with the discussed self-portraits as a shaman being rare exceptions). While the Japanese artists in Berlin are part of the latest European avant-garde (think of Yamawaki Iwao or Murayama Tomoyoshi), which also enables them to directly relate to the avant-garde movements in Japan, Pae as a Korean artist indeed relates to and fits into the art scene on the Korean peninsula (despite his 18 year-long physical absence). So familiar are his “Western-style” paintings in technique, style, and sentiment, it is as if Pae never left Korea. While everyone in Korea wants to be “Western,” Pae becomes Korean in Berlin. However well he might connect with Berlin society, the East Asian and Korean art he represents, and that is what he mostly tries to do, is a part of the new culture of the Japanese colonial empire. Runge, who had studied Sinology for several semesters, with a strong interest in East Asian calligraphy and brush painting, writes a longer treatise for Pae — that is, in his name and without taking credit. Pae then uses his friend’s essay as his basis for lectures on East Asian painting all over Germany and in Austria and other countries.244 In Hamburg, for example, he has a one man show in March and April 1935 with 87 woodcuts, drawings, watercolors, and oil paintings which gets good coverage in the new regime’s press.245 The show is not in an art museum but at the Ethnological Museum, underlining his special niche again, as some sort of ethnic representative of an “exotic” country, rather than a member of the contemporary European art scene. An inventory of thousands of works that had been evacuated during the war shows that the only piece Pae had donated to the museum in Hamburg is again the Mitsui woodprint (which continues to be exhibited after he leaves Berlin for Paris). Newspaper reports confirm that the Consulate General of Japan is involved in the event. Most obviously, the Japanese authorities officially sponsor all or most of his one-man exhibitions in all the European cities.246 244 By early 1934, Pae had already started packaging Runge’s slide lecture with either an East Asian ink painting course that he would teach — see, for example, the announcement for such at the Contempora Art School in Berlin, in Ostasiatische Zeitschrift, n.s., 9 (1933): 246 — or he would use it to open his solo exhibitions: see e.g. a related program entry in Ostasiatische Zeitschrift, n.s., 12 (1936): 75, listing Pae’s lecture “Vortrag und Demonstration: Die ostasiatische Malerei und ihre Technik” [Lecture and Demonstration: East Asian painting and its techniques] at Cologne’s Kunstverein on 5 May 1935. The same lecture is being presented in Hamburg, Vienna, Prague, and elsewhere. The lecture was published under Pae’s name as “Die Tuschmalerei Ostasiens” [East Asian ink painting] in Adolph Donath’s journal Die internationale Kunstwelt 3, no. 3 (March 1936): 54–56. 245 See the thorough review by writer Ernst Sander in Hamburger Nachrichten, 21 March 1935, or the positive appraisal by a certain M.K.R. in Hamburger Fremdenblatt, 22 March 1935. 246 The Hamburger Anzeiger of 22 March 1935, notes that the Japanese Deputy Consul General 100 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s Pae socializes with other Korean students in Berlin; and after he has finished his own education and is self-supporting by working as an artist, he still goes to meetings of the (Fig. 39) From left to right: Matthias Matthies, Gundel Bab, Pae Un-sŏng, Kurt Runge, Koryŏ Student and Karl Kolbus, 1934 in Borkwalde. Corps and meets socialist leaders like Hŏ Hŏn and business tycons such as Kim Sŏng-su 金性洙 . He bonds with anyone of influence, while carefully keeping his German and his Korean friends apart from each other. Neither Kurt Runge nor Matthias Matthies ever meet any of his Korean compatriots.247 Pae’s apt socializing skills are a big part of his professional success. Among his German friends are Runge, who then works as editor and exhibition manager for the artists association Porza (shut down by the Nazis in the year 1934). 248 Another is Matthias Matthies, who at that time and for his entire life worked as a production designer and art director for movies and later TV. Then there is Gundel Bab, a German Jewish friend from school (where she studies sculpture and graphic design until 1929); in 1937 she leaves for Stockholm, which saves her life.249 invited guests at the exhibition opening to a breakfast at the Uhlenhorster Fährhaus. A note in an East Asian studies bulletin about Pae’s Prague exhibition and lecture in 1936 also hints at official Japanese sponsorship of these events: “The society was in touch with Japanese teams visiting Czechoslovakia, a series of social evenings were arranged, the work of the Korean painter Mr. Unsoung Pai was exhibited and the exhibition was opened by the Minister of Education, Dr. J. Krčmář. A special public lecture on the technique of painting in the Far Eastern countries was given by this artist.” Quoted from: “The Japanese Society of the Oriental Institute,” Bulletin of the Czecho-Slovak Oriental Institute Prague 2 (August 1938): 57. 247 Interview with Kurt Runge, 6 December 1990, Berlin, and telephone conversation with Matthias Matthies, August or September 1991 (from memory, exact date not recorded). 248 The Porza was founded by Werner Alvo von Alvensleben and included Albert Einstein and other prominent intellectuals on the board of directors; between 1927 and 1934 it organized around 650 exhibitions in Germany alone, but also offered social services to artists and assisted Jewish artists to leave Germany when the Nazis took power. See Elena Spoerl’s article “Echi da ‘La Porza’ ottant’anni dopo” [Echoes from ‘The Porza’ eighty years later] in an Italian language newspaper from Switzerland, La Regione Ticino, 2 June 2012. 249 See Rainer Papendik, “Gundel Bab: Eine Bildhauerin in Schweden” [Gundel Bab: A sculptress in Sweden], Die Kunst und das schöne Heim 81, no. 1 (January 1969): 6–9. 101 Frank Hoffmann Ewald Hoinkis is another friend helping Pae with press and society contacts. Probably the most wanted German fashion photographer, he is a hobby painter and also a close friend of George Grosz and other prominent modernists.250 Even Erich Engel, a celebrated theater and film director close to Bertolt Brecht, photographs Pae for society magazines. Maybe through Matthias Matthies (he himself could not remember when asked) or actor Gustav Fröhlich does Pae take side jobs like being an extra in Der Kurier des Zaren — together with An Pong-gŭn. (Kurt Runge also has relations to the movie industry, and while still a teenager he appeared in the famous expressionist horror movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.) As mentioned earlier, Pae even manages to market his and An’s tiny roles as movie extras to the Tonga ilbo back in Korea as an act of propagating Korean dance and costumes (which it clearly was not). During the 1936 Winter and Summer Olympics, he also takes on jobs for Korean newspapers, guiding and interpreting for reporters around the GarmischPartenkirchen Alps and Berlin. On 8 April 1937 Pae marries the “writer Madlonka Baroness von Wrede,” identified as born 1906 in St. Petersburg, Russia — “birth certificate missing.” The couples’ best men and witnesses are Ferdinand Spiegel and An Pong-gŭn (Han Fongkeng; fig. 40).251 Runge recalls: “We all disliked the woman he introduced to us. (...) (Fig. 40) Certificate of Marriage for Pae Un-sŏng and Madlonka von Wrede We all took her for an (detail), Berlin-Charlottenburg, 8 April 1937. impostor. None of us attended the wedding.” He further notes how Pae’s artistic style had changed. “No trace of Asian delicacy anymore, instead European, thickly-layered, dark oil paints — and everywhere portraits of his wife, in a pose that reminded me of a hip-swinging, 250 Details of their friendship were discussed in an interview with Hoinkis’ daughter Marion, now director of the Hoffmann Museum (“Struwwelpeter”) in Frankfurt am Main, on 27 January 1991. See related photos in this author’s 1991 article about Pae (footnote 202). 251 See Certificate of Marriage, no. 312, Marriage registry index book no. 228, Une Song Pai and Madlonka Baroness von Wrede, 8 April 1937, Berlin-Charlottenburg Registry Office (today Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf Registry Office). (The writer obtained a certified copy, dated 24 September 1991.) 102 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s castanet-clacking Carmen.”252 At the time, some of these Carmen-style oils make it into various newspaper and magazine articles, and two are among those works rediscovered in Paris. The French art critic Assia Rubinstein intuitively brings it to the point by choosing to juxtapose reproductions of Pae’s portraits of his wife and his mother as the only two images in her review.253 The von Wrede family, by the way, is completely unaware of any family member by the name of Madlonka. Pae’s marriage would not last long. In the late summer of 1937, the couple leaves for Paris. The situation in the Third Reich has just gotten too scary. In 1938 the Parisian-turnedBerliner from Seoul has a one man show at the prestigious Galerie Charpentier and participates in the annual Le Salon and Salon d’Automne exhibitions.254 Everything is as before: the Charpentier show is sponsored by the Comité Franco–Japonais; the person doing the inviting for the vernissage is the Japanese Ambassador to France; and Pae presents himself as “un artiste exotique” in the invitation booklet, with half of the subject matter in his works being what we might call Korean folklife. This demonstrates quite well how the South Korean postliberation claims (still persisting today) regarding colonial pressures to become Japanese imperial subjects are in many ways confusing, and serve a process of cleansing history. As the Japanese sponsorship of exhibitions with Korean cultural content shows, expressions of Korean cultural identity, as such, were in post-March First Movement Korea not seen as obstacles to becoming or making imperial subjects, which is what Japanese colonial policies mostly aimed at — not turning Koreans into Japanese. Maintaining his Koreanness while being a citizen of the Japanese Empire seems not at all contradictory to Pae. On 11 June 1940, when the German Wehrmacht gets ready to march into the city, Pae leaves Paris for the artist village La Ruche at the southwestern outskirts of Paris; he lives here several weeks under German occupation, then travels alone to Bordeaux, to board the Japanese ocean liner Haruna Maru that takes him to Japan. From 252 Kurt Runge, interview, 6 December 1990, Berlin. See Assia Rubinstein, “Unsoung Pai,” Gazette des beaux-arts 75, no. 284 (10 June 1938): 4. Also see Kungnip Hyŏndae Misulgwan, ed., Pae Un-sŏng chŏn, 47–49. 254 See the eight-page invitation booklet Expositon du peintre coréen Unsoung Pai, du 11 au 23 Juin 1938 [Exhibition of the Korean painter Unsoung Pai, from June 11 to 23, 1938] (Paris: Galerie Charpentier, 1938); Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, 17 June 1938; Société nationale des beaux-arts, Catalogue des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, dessin, gravure, architecture, arts décoratifs exposés au Grand Palais (Champs-Elysées) du 11 mai au 19 juin 1938 [Catalogue of paintings, sculptures, drawings, engravings, architecture, and decorative arts exhibited at the Grand Palais (Champs-Elysées) from May 11 to June 19, 1938] (Evreux: Hérissey, 1938), 128–129; Société du salon d’automne, Catalogue des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, dessin, gravure, architecture et art décoratif exposés au Palais de Chaillot du 11 novembre au 18 décembre 1938 [Catalogue of paintings, sculptures, drawings, printmaking, architecture, and decorative art exhibited at the Palais de Chaillot from November 11 to December 18, 1938] (Paris: Puyfourcat, 1938), 197; Tonga ilbo, evening editions of 21 June 1938 and 8 January 1939, and the morning edition of 9 February 1939. 253 103 Frank Hoffmann there, he later travels on to Korea. He leaves behind his wife, his daughter, and 167 watercolors and oil paintings in Paris. Like Kim Chae-wŏn and other compatriots, he returns home on the recommendation of the Japanese Embassy.255 Once back in Korea, Pae joins the new Hoehwa Ponggong 繪畵奉公 [Painting as Public Duty], a wartime art organization producing war propaganda, and he also works as illustrator and theater stage designer to support himself financially. One of his bigger jobs is that of art director for Yi Sŏ-gu’s 李瑞求 musical A Song of Remembrance for Puyŏ (Puyŏ hoesanggok 夫餘回想曲, 1941–42), more or less the same work his friend Matthias Matthies does at the same time in Berlin, overseeing and directing all related design and costume work. In Paris Pae had already met and portrayed the show’s lead male dancer Cho T’aeg-wŏn 趙澤元, together with Ch’oe Sŭng-hŭi 崔承喜, the top Korean dance star; both were on a tour to promote Korean culture as an integral part of Japanese culture.256 The Puyŏ play was one of two or three huge musical dramas with large crews, much like major Broadway productions today, aimed at propagating Japanese–Korean unity under the slogan naisen ittai 內鮮 一體 (“Japan and Korea as one body”), by establishing their “blood relation” through the ancient Puyŏ kingdom 夫餘 (2nd century BC to 494). If there was anything like an aesthetic of fascism in Korea, this is its product (which is not to say that Pae himself is convinced of anything he helps to propagate). 257 In his private life, things work out fine: On 25 November 1941 Pae marries again, this time to Ch’oe Ok-hŭi 崔玉禧, director of the Hagyesa 學藝社 publishing house and quintessential model of the independent New Woman (sin yŏsŏng 新女性). Like Pae, she works closely with the Japanese and is an active member of the Society for the Imperial Way (Hwangdo Hakhoe 皇道學會), which strives to propagate the naisen ittai ideology in literature and the visual arts. Interestingly, the left-wing linguist and his old friend from Berlin, Yi Kŭng-no officiates their wedding.258 Pae would not be Pae if he were to miss a chance like this to market himself — like a modern Pop star — as both the creator of a product and the product itself; and so he does. He pub255 Pae gives a vivid description of these circumstances in a December 1940 group interview — even his German food stamps from La Ruche are reproduced (interviewer is Kim Tonghwan 金東煥): Pae Un-sŏng, Kim Chae-wŏn, Chŏng In-sŏp, and Kim Tong-hwan, “Paengnim, P’ari, paegiŭiŭi chŏnhwa sogesŏ ch’oegŭn kwigukhan nyangssiŭi pogogi” [Reports by recently returned scholars from war-ridden Berlin, Paris, and Belgium], Samch’ŏlli 12, no. 10 (December 1940): 102–114, but especially pp. 103–105, and 107. 256 See Tcho Takugen, “Sur la danse coréenne” [About Korean dance], France–Japon 30 (15 June 1938): 274. Tcho Takugen is the Japanese pronunciation of the dancer’s name. He later adopted a different, specifically Japanese name. 257 See Mun Kyŏng-yŏn, “Ilchemalgi ‘Puyŏ’ p’yosanggwa chŏngch’iŭi mihakhwa: Yi Sŏkhun’gwa Cho T’aeg-wŏnŭl chungsimŭro” [Representation of ‘Puyŏ’ and the aestheticization of politics in the later years of Japanese colonialism: With emphasis on Yi Sŏk-hun and Cho T’aeg-wŏn], Han’guk kŭgyesul yŏn’gu 33 (2011): 189–224. 258 See Kim, Pangmulgwan’gwa hanp’yŏngsaeng, 40. 104 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s lishes a longer article about his own traditional Korean wedding and the supplementary, modern Western honeymoon trip to Inner Kŭmgang-san 金剛山, the new colonial standard package, all of which he describes as a modern spectacle of experiencing traditional folklore.259 But that marriage is not the final verdict. Discovering that the third time is a charm, he divorces Ch’oe and remarries again in 1945. After the German Russian noblewoman in Berlin and the pro-Japanese writer and publisher during the last years of Japanese rule, revolutionary times now call for revolutionary measures, so Pae falls in love with Yi Chŏng-su, a leftist activist 17 years his junior. The young woman had graduated in English Literature at what is today Ewha Woman’s University (Ihwa Yŏja Taehakkyo 梨花女子大學校), then briefly studied sociology in Japan. Their daughter, born shortly before Christmas 1945, is today a successful writer in the North, and their oldest son, born in 1948, is a painter and printmaker just like his father. After liberation Pae’s wife Yi Chŏng-su works as a secretary to Kim T’ae-jun 金 台俊, who in 1947 is put in charge of cultural activities for the already mentioned Namnodang, the party of the southern communists. In late 1948 Pae is made the first dean of the Hongik University’s Art Department, a key position in South Korea’s contemporary art scene, then and for several decades thereafter. But Pae leaves this new important post for the North. It must have been because of his wife’s political involvement with the communists that the family had no other chance but to go north during the Korean War, when the Northern troops withdrew from Seoul in September 1950. Meanwhile, back in Berlin, at the same time Pae leaves Seoul for P’yŏngyang, his old friend Runge publishes a Korean fairytale book on the Western side of the Iron Curtain, which, thought it is in Pae’s name, the artist never gets to see.260 Pae’s career as an artist and senior lecturer at P’yŏngyang Art University (P’yŏngyang Misul Taehak) is not all that exciting. In the early 1960s he even spends a short time in jail on accusations of being an American spy, because he had received a camera from an East German professor he had earlier done some interpretation work for.261 When the period of political purges is over, Pae and his family find themselves “exiled” to Sinŭiju 新義州 at the Korean–Chinese border. Years after the war, in the early 1960s, a North Korean diplomat sits in a coffee shop in Potsdam, East Germany, when a German woman approaches him. She asks if he is Korean. They have a chat, and she then tells him that she has a daughter in 259 Pae Un-sŏng, “Naŭi kyŏrhon’gi” [My wedding], Ch’unch’u 3, no. 1 (January 1942): 151– 155. The article includes a photo of the wedding ceremony. 260 See Kurt Runge, Unsoung Pai erzählt aus seiner koreanischen Heimat [Unsoung Pai tells stories from his Korean homeland], with illustrations after originals by Unsoung Pai (Darmstadt: Kulturbuch-Verlag, 1950). 261 Information received in a conversation, Prague, 23 April 1994, from Professor Ingeborg Göthel, now Emeritus, Humboldt University, Berlin. 105 Frank Hoffmann her twenties whose father is the Korean painter Pae Un-sŏng.262 Ironically enough, both Un-sŏng and Madlonka with their daughter all ended up on the communist side of the two divided countries. One of Pae’s sons contacted this writer a few years ago to inquire about his father’s assets in Berlin and Paris. However, most of the artworks not sold and left behind in 1940 with a Korean friend in Paris were rediscovered in 1999 by a South Korean doctoral student in France, Chŏn Ch’ang-gon 田 昌坤 (aka Jeon Chang-Gon), and are now with him in South Korea (see footnote 202). (Fig. 41) A note by Pae’s family in North Korea (via a lawyer) to author, July 2009: looking for assistance to reclaim the artist’s assets. 5. “Nazi Honors” Beginning in the mid-1930s, Koreans in Germany clearly benefit from the “honorary Aryan” (Ehrenarier) status that the Hitler regime assigns to the entire Japanese “race” — with no distinctions made between Japanese and Koreans. Some of the mostly third generation Korean students and professionals coming to Berlin, however, are especially close to and involved with the regime and its institutions. Under the umbrella and protection of the Axis Tripartite Pact, they are all allowed to select their own incentives, receive their Nazi honors, are offered opportunities without having to compete for them, and enjoy their staged prominence, degrees, and rather luxurious lifestyle. Their activities show how they work for Japanese interests (or, perhaps more to the point, how they no longer distinguish between Japanese and Korean interests) and, on top of that, also become entangled with the NS regime — by choice, actively and willingly. Thus, on the one hand, these cases demonstrate how the Korean elite is by the mid-1930s perfectly integrated into the Japanese Empire; on the other hand, such puzzling biographies of Korean Nazis reveal the tip of the iceberg (i.e. the mythologized exclusively Germanic character of Nazism). The Berlin 262 Information received from Professor Helga Picht, now Emeritus, Humboldt University, Berlin; letter dated 11 December 1990. The North Korean diplomat prefers not to be named. 106 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s Koreans indicate how international, in fact, the NS regime was all the way to the end, attracting and accommodating other Europeans, Asians, and just about anyone willing to cooperate within or outside the Reich. The first of the last five Berlin Koreans to be discussed is An Ik-t’ae 安益泰 (aka Ahn Eak-tai, Eaktay Ahn, and Ekitai Ahn, 1906–1965), the composer of the national anthem of the Republic of Korea, the Aegukka 愛國歌 (a generic term meaning patriotic song). The old Korean national anthem, by the way, could almost be called a product of Berlin as well: it is Franz Eckert who is known to have composed the country’s first (Fig. 42) Royal Prussian music director national anthem in 1902 upon going to Korea, Franz Eckert, Kaiserlich koreanische Nationalhymne [National Anthem of the immediately after having given up his appoint- Korean Empire], cover of score, 1902. ments at the Berlin Philharmonic and as music director for Kaiser Wilhelm II; and the Japanese Kimigayo 君が代 that Koreans had to sing after annexation had been one of Eckert’s compositions as well. The Koreanborn dancer Kuni Masami 邦正美 (aka Ehara Masami 江原正美 , birth name Pak Yŏng-in 朴永仁, 1908–2007), who came to Germany soon after An, is one of the few who stayed in the Berlin area until the Second World War was over. After the war, Kuni played a decisive role in the world of modern dance in Japan. The third Berlin latecomer to be discussed is Chang Kŭk 張剋 (aka Paul Keuk Chang, usually just Paul K. Chang, 1913–2008), an aeronautics scientist and the younger of two brothers of Chang Myŏn 張勉 (the first Korean Ambassador to the United States after liberation and the head of the new democratic government after the fall of the Syngman Rhee government in 1960). Together with Chang, we discuss the eugenicist Kim Paek-p’yŏng 金伯枰 (aka Baeckpyeng Kim and later Baeck Pyeng Kim, 1900– 1990). The last one is Kang Se-hyŏng 姜世馨 (1899–1959?), a student at Berlin University in the first half of the 1930s who also worked as a lecturer for Korean language at the same university and then started a career as an influential and extreme right-wing parliamentarian in post-colonial South Korea. (a) Composer An Ik-t’ae and Dancer Kuni Masami For a state that only regained its independence in 1948, the creation of mythology around the life of An Ik-t’ae as the composer of its national anthem is not too surprising. These stories are part of a process of creating a collective memory, form national identity, and foster social cohesion that former colonial countries, now new nation-states, typically go through. What is surprising is only the choice of icons for 107 Frank Hoffmann such symbolic identification on a national level. The T’aegŭkki 太極旗, the South Korean national flag today, creates its own iconic subset of Korean identities, as it uses purely Chinese symbols from the ancient Yijing 易經, the Book of Changes, and as it was created in 1882 by Pak Yŏng-hyo 朴泳孝, also known under his Japanese name Yamazaki Eiharu 山崎永春, who spent a large part of his life in Japan, hiding from Korean officials and others who wanted to assassinate him for his role in the pro-Japanese Kapsin Coup (Kapsin chŏngbyŏn 甲申政變) of 1884. Pak later became “a royal minister in the cabinet of Yi Wanyong [李完用]” (who signed the Japan–Korea Annexation Treaty and is seen as the quintessential traitor in Korean historiography), was then “given a marquisate and became a member of the Japanese House of Peers,” and in colonial Korea, “between 1919 and 1935, he was Kyŏngbang’s first resident”263 and the president of the Chōsen Industrial Bank (Chōsen Shokusan Ginkō 朝鮮殖産銀行). The Korean modernization project seems intertwined with that of Japan in so many ways that the postliberation project of historical purification and sanitization already reaches its limit with the profane realities of actual biographical data. An Ik-t’ae is indeed a good example of this. Until 2006, the conventional biographical sketch of An’s life reads just like this: “After fleeing a death sentence during the Japanese occupation (1910–1945) for using his music as a political statement for Korea’s freedom, Ahn spent the rest of his life abroad, performing his music in concert halls worldwide and starting a family on the Spanish island of Mallorca.”264 In March 2006 an article in the Chosŏn ilbo about a concert An had given in Berlin in 1942 is changing that, and even some major European newspapers have covered this story. 265 A Korean music student had rediscovered a seven-minute newsreel at the German Federal Film Archive in Berlin. It features An Ik-t’ae’s 18 September 1942 concert commemorating the 10th anniversary of the foundation of Manchukuo 滿洲國 at the Berliner Philharmonie, showing An conducting the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, which is joined by the Singgemeinschaft R. Lamys choir.266 He also conducts the same concert again with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra,267 on 11 February 263 Carter J. Eckert, Offspring of Empire: The Koch’ang Kims and the Origins of Korean Capitalism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 97. Kyŏngbang refers to the Kyŏngsŏng Spinning and Weaving Company, the largest Korean-run modern manufacturing company in colonial Korea. For a full biographical sketch of Pak, see pp. 97–99. 264 Reporter Todd Thacker summarizes An’s life this way in a 2005 interview article with the composer’s grandson Miguel Eaktai Ahn in the online newspaper OhmyNews, 18 March 2005, URL #20. 265 See Chosŏn ilbo, 7 March 2006 (digital ed. URL #21); Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 16 May 2006. 266 That is the following news report: “Festliches Konzert zur zehnjährigen Reichsgründungsfeier Mandschoutikuo” [Festive concert for the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the Empire of Manchukuo], German Federal Film Archives, Koblenz, MAVIS 574081 (Deutsche Wochenschau GmbH), entry registration no. K40075-1, archive signature 1282. A two-minute clip from this newsreel is accessible online at URL #22, minutes 7:02 to 8:47. 267 See URL #23. Also see Das Kleine Blatt and Neuigkeits-Welt-Blatt of 13 February 1943. 108 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s the coming year, organized by the German–Japanese Society. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany’s recognition of Manchukuo as a state had been part of the package deal with Japan to form the Axis pact. An’s wartime propagandistic contributions do therefore serve all three Axis powers. His Manchukuo memorial concert is just the tip of the iceberg. Additional published research, mostly by the musi(Fig. 43) Housemates with Baton & Sword, or Going to Bed with cologist Yi Kyŏng-bun 李京粉 the Enemy — all the predictable spy novel images seem to be confirmed in this story: An Ik-t’ae (left) on the train from (aka Lee Kyungboon), has Budapest to Rome, and Ehara Kōichi, Councillor of the Embassy helped form a picture of An Ikof Manchukuo in Berlin, early 1940s. t’ae that completely obliterates the earlier patriotic hero legend.268 If it were not enough that the Manchukuo concert celebrates the tenth anniversary of the foundation of the Japanese-run puppet state Manchukuo, celebrating Japan’s aggressive expansionism and colonialism, or that he conducts the orchestra before high-ranking Nazis and Japanese diplomats with huge Japanese and swastika flags hanging on the walls, the highlight of the concert is An’s very own composition: Mandschoukuo, Symphonische Phantasie für großes Orchester und gemischten Chor (Manchukuo, symphonic fantasy for orchestra and mixed choir). The choir’s lyrics, here the third of four stanzas, go like this: With Japan we are firmly tied, Like one heart with a sacred aim, 268 At the time the orchestra’s name was Vienna City Symphony Orchestra. For detailed studies see: Yi Kyŏng-bun, Irŏbŏrin sigan 1938–1944 [Lost time, 1938–1944] (Seoul: Hyumŏnisŭt’ŭ, 2007); Yi Kyŏng-bun, “An Ik-t’aewa Riharŭt’ŭ Syut’ŭrausŭ: Charyorŭl t’onghae chŏpkŭnhan sŭsŭnggwa chejaŭi kwan’gye” [Richard Strauss and An Ik-t’ae: The relationship of master and pupil through source materials], Nangman ŭmak 19, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 33–60; Yi Kyŏng-bun, “Nach’i togilgwa ilbon chegugŭi ŭmak munhwa kyoryu” [Music in the cultural exchange between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan], Ilbon pip’yŏng 2 (2010): 316–343; Lee Kyungboon, “Japanese Musicians between Music and Politics during WWII: Japanese Propaganda in the Third Reich,” Itinerario 38, no. 2 (August 2014): 121–138; Hŏ Yŏng-han, “Chap’il kiroge ŭihan An Ik-t’aeŭi yurŏp hwaltong chaegusŏng” [Reconstruction of An Ik-t’ae’s career in Europe from his own performance records], Nangman ŭmak 19, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 5–31. An’s close involvement with the Nazis had already been pointed out several years earlier in a study published in German. See Manfred Permoser, Die Wiener Symphoniker im NS-Staat [The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in the NS state] (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 2000), 72, 189. 109 Frank Hoffmann For eternal peace, strive, 269 Germany — and Italy — for great things aim. An had already qualified himself for this important commission arranged by the German–Japanese Society through his job as the conductor of Richard Strauss’ Japanische Festmusik (Japanese festival music) in Vienna and elsewhere.270 It is a piece Strauss had composed and dedicated to the Japanese Tennō, for good pay, of course, and with the additional condition to have the Japanese Embassy in Berlin talk to the Germans and make sure his Jewish daughter-in-law Alice stays safe (since he himself had already fallen from grace with the Nazis). Although An would conduct the piece in Vienna, it had been conducted by Helmut Fellmer in an earlier official concert in December 1940 in Tōkyō for the “26th Centennial of the Foundation of the Japanese Empire.” It should be noted, in this connection, that foreign conductors and musicians, even those from Germany and Italy in the Axis alliance are not as welcome in Japan during the war years as they were before. International agreements do not end racism, not in Germany and not in Japan. The German Embassy had to remind the Japanese government of specific cultural exchange clauses in the 1938 German–Japanese Cultural Convention to have German conductors and musicians perform in Japan.271 An Ik-t’ae travels extensively, yet spends lots of time in Berlin in the late 1930s and in 1940, while living the other half of the time in Budapest. From 1941 to 1943 he lives permanently in Berlin though. For two years he resides at the luxurious villa of a Japanese national, Ehara Kōichi 江原綱一 272, at Gustav-Freytag-Straße 15 in Berlin-Grunewald, as Ehara’s permanent house guest. Ehara also happened to author the above quoted lyrics for An’s Symphonic Fantasy Manchukuo. We seem not to know too much about the diplomat, other than him being a “Councillor of the Manchurian [Manchukuo] Embassy in Berlin”273 (his title in German is Gesandt269 A German version of the lyrics for all stanzas are on the later Vienna concert flyer, reproduced in Yi Kyŏng-bun, Irŏbŏrin sigan 1938–1944, 173. The author of the lyrics is given as “Koichi EHARA.” A contemorary review of the concert in the local Volks-Zeitung of 13 February 1943, however, states that the Vienna State Opera Chorus (Wiener Staatsopernchor) sang Ehara’s song in Japanese. A review by Otto Steinhagen in the evening edition of the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung of 19 September 1942 confirms the same for Berlin. 270 See Yi Kyŏng-bun, Irŏbŏrin sigan 1938–1944, 87–89, 176–177. 271 For details, see Detlev Schauwecker, “Musik und Politik, Tōkyō 1934–1944” [Music and politics, Tōkyō 1934–1944], in Formierung und Fall der Achse Berlin–Tōkyō, ed. Gerhard Krebs and Bernd Martin, Monographien aus dem Deutschen Institut für Japanstudien der Philipp-Franz-von-Siebold-Stiftung 8 (Munich: Iudicium, 1994), 224–230, and 245–251. 272 In contemporary publications referring to Ehara we find three variations of the first character of his given name Kōichi: 綱一, 鋼一, and 耕一. His signatures on two documents from Berlin and his postwar publications show that the first variation is the correct one. 273 See American Historical Association, Committee for the Study of War Documents, comp. Records of Nazi Cultural and Research Institutions, and Records Pertaining to Axis Relations and Interests in the Far East, Guides to German Records Microfilmed at Alexandria, 110 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s schaftsrat, until 1945 a position that comes right below that of an ambassador) and him being officially in charge of economic and cultural exchanges between Manchukuo and Germany. Ehara had studied law in Tōkyō before becoming a diplomat. The An Ik-t’ae specialist Yi Kyŏng-bun speculates that An and Ehara may well have known each other from Tōkyō.274 That seems not very likely, however, as Ehara is ten years older than An and already works as a government employee, while An is still a student. More likely, they met e.g. through the German–Japanese Society in Berlin or at some social or cultural event — although there is no evidence of this. (Fig. 44) Ehara Kōichi entry in a listing of Japanese Intelligence Service personal in Europe according to German knowledge during the Third Reich. (From a 1949 U.S. Army intelligence report; see footnote 275). Ehara is not just a diplomat. The chief of Japanese espionage operations in Europe at that time is General Onodera Makoto 小野寺信 in Stockholm. All communications between Europe and Tōkyō, though, always go through Berlin. As this writer found out, in Berlin it is An Ik-t’ae’s friend and host Ehara Kōichi who is in charge of Japanese intelligence operations. (As early as 1941, both Americans and Soviets decrypt the code the Japanese use for such transmissions to Tōkyō, so that Ehara unknowingly delivers essential military intelligence about Nazi Germany to the Allied forces.) A postwar U.S. Army intelligence report, based on interviews with former German and Japanese intelligence officers, confirms that Ehara “was considered head of the Japanese I[ntelligence] S[ervices] in GERMANY.”275 Ehara has at his fingertips “in Berlin Va., 6 (Washington, DC: The National Archives, 1959), 55, item GD 886. Furthermore, see Le Petit Parisien, 6 November 1942. 274 See Yi Kyŏng-bun, Irŏbŏrin sigan 1938–1944, 194–195. 275 U.S. Army, European Command, Intelligence Division, “Wartime Activities of the Ger- 111 Frank Hoffmann for the time being about 300 agents of the most different professions” — of various nationalities, including Germans and Koreans, and even some scholars and artists, such as the renowned dancer Kuni Masami, “one of the most clever agents,” who “appears from time to time in different capitals of Europe, always being charged with special duties which he covers with his profession.”276 The small man’s ability to flaunt that kind of position easily explains his mysterious sex appeal for An Ik-t’ae and his power in arranging all of An’s concerts throughout Europe. This also helps explain what might otherwise seem a rather obscure decision by a cultural heavyweight like Richard Strauss, former president of the Third Reich State Music Bureau (Reichsmusikkammer), to accept an invitation to the villa of some diplomat (not even the ambassador) of the Embassy of Manchukuo. An Ik-t’ae may have been Ehara’s special agent (like Kuni), or his significant other, or both — we may never know for certain. (Fig. 45) Excerpt from an American OSS report from Istanbul, 1944 (see footnote 276), describing dancer Kuni Masami’s (Pak Yŏng-in’s) role as “special agent.” Kuni Masami and his school would become the leading modern dance group in postwar Japan. Kuni was born and lived his childhood as Pak Yŏng-in 朴永仁 in the southeastern Korean harbor city Ulsan. His father, a former pro-Japanese Kaehwap’a reform and Westernization activist, turned businessman, had sent Yŏng-in off to Japan as a teenager to attend a high school in Matsue 松江, Shimane Prefecture. Later, after graduating at the prestigious Tōkyō Imperial University, Pak becomes a Japanese citizen and adopts the name Ehara Masami 江原正美 for his passport, while becoming known under his stage name Kuni Masami. His choice of the kanji kuni 邦 for his stage name is telling, as it means “nation” or “state.” Picking this particular character, no doubt, makes him a self-declared cultural representative of Japan.277 His father, man Diplomatic and Military Services during World War II,” 1949, U.S. National Archives, IWG, Records of the Central Intelligence Agency, Record Group 263, RC Box #08, RC Location 230/902/64/1 (declassified and released by the Central Intelligence Agency Sources Methods Exemption 3828 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, 2007), 80. 276 Office of Strategic Services, SI Istanbul, “Japanese Intelligence and Propaganda in Turkey,” 15 January 1944, document 0004 of folder “Japanese in Europe (WWII),” U.S. National Archives, IWG, Records of the Central Intelligence Agency, Record Group 263, RC Box #39, RC Location 230/86/25/06 (declassified and released by the Central Intelligence Agency Sources Methods Exemption 3828 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, 2005), 5. 277 I am grateful to Dr. James P. Thomas for pointing me to this otherwise overlooked insight. 112 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s having seen his son’s dance performance while he was on a tour in Korea, even sends Korean shaman accessories to him in Japan for future performances. Yet, according to his brother, Kuni’s relationship with the family continued to be strained.278 As was not unusual at the time — and even very recently — for someone in his occupation and with his implicit sexual orientation, Kuni keeps a distance from his family after leaving Korea and avoids all contact in his later years. However much he is of service to Japanese power brokers, Kuni sees Tōkyō, the modern metropolis, and later Berlin, as his escape, promise, and fulfillment, as cities that would provide the space for him to be ‘different’ and to follow his professional calling. In stark contrast, an artist like Pae Un-sŏng, while interested in modern Western art and culture, always identifies himself as Korean. For Kuni, becoming Japanese, and much later American, is far more than just a political move, more than collaboration in order to advance his career; for him, it is an act of finding and transforming identity. Korean media, then and now, have mostly ignored all of this. Beginning in February 1937, when he arrives in Berlin, Korean newspapers refer to him as the Korean dancer with the Japanese stage name Kuni Masami, and as the third internationally renowned modern Korean dancer (the other two being Ch’oe Sŭng-hŭi and Cho T’aeg-wŏn). In Japan, Europe, and later the United States, however, he very consistently keeps his Korean roots to himself. In his 1993 book Berurin sensō ベルリン戦争 [The Berlin war]279 Kuni portrays himself as politically naïve, having expected to find the Berlin that he had read about and his teachers had told him about — a Weimar culture with an energetic avantgarde, political freedom, and internationalism. While Kuni’s book may appear “politically correct” by even today’s standards, in the 1930s and 40s he embodies the smooth operating agitprop fighter role until the very last days of Nazi rule in Germany and Japanese rule in Korea. He studies and works in Berlin, living a luxury life with a servant, a car, a villa and a countryside home, and stays until the war is over. Like other elite foreigners, he is urged to move away from the city to avoid the bombing raids toward the end of the war and relocates to Groß Glienicke, a village in Berlin’s suburbs. In his book he does not omit describing how even there, in the village, Uzbek soldiers of the Soviet Army plunder and rape right in front of his eyes. 278 For a spotty vita of Kuni, see Sŏ Tae-hyŏn, “‘Segyein’ŭl p’yobanghan K’uni Masami: Pak Yŏng-inŭi yesulgwa insaeng” [The convinced ‘global citizen’ Kuni Masami: Pak Yŏngin’s art and life], 2 parts, Ch’umgwa tamnon 1 (Fall 2006): 67–72, and 2 (Spring 2008): 16–20. In Japan a long obituary focusing on his contributions to art dance and his publications was published by Professor Yoshida Yukihiko, “Kuni Masami o shinonde: Kuni Masami to 30-nendai no Doitsu, soshite sengo no buyōkai” [In memory of Kuni Masami: Kuni Masami and Germany in the 1930s and later in the postwar dance world], Corpus 6 (February 2009): 54–63. 279 Kuni Masami, Berurin sensō [The Berlin war], Asahi sensho 473 (Tōkyō: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1993). 113 Frank Hoffmann Lucky to survive, Kuni then joins a group of 25 Japanese whom the Soviets repatriate. They board a Trans-Siberian Railway train, which takes them all the way through Soviet territory to East Asia.280 Because of this unusual train ride in May 1945, he indeed experiences the unconditional surrender, occupation, and disarmament twice. Ten days after his arrival in Korea he publishes a report as a witness of the German surrender in the Maeil sinbo, calling it the “ultimate disgrace” (ch’oedaeŭi oyok 最大의 汚辱 ), at the same time celebrating the German Volk’s “fight to the last man” and urging his compatriots to keep on fighting in the Pacific War.281 As is so often the case with Third Reich memoirs, the omissions and manipulations of information, more than factual errors, are characteristic of its style and content. This begins with Kuni’s mantra-like repetitive references to Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman as his teachers and later colleagues and it continues with the misrepresentation of the New German Dance (also German Expressionist Dance, or Ausdruckstanz) that Laban is said to have developed as some sort of free and democratic expression, which would therefore contradict fascist ideologies. What is more, a brief biographical sketch in a University of Southern California student newspaper — with only minor variations many times published like this in other places — reports that “Dr. Kuni is a graduate of the Tokyo Imperial University with a doctorate in aesthetics, and the Berlin University where he studied history of art. He graduated from the German Dance College under Mary Wigman, Rudolf Laban and Max Terpis.” The sketch continues with his work experience, stating that “he toured Europe as a solo concert artist” and speaks of him as the “director of his own dance school in Berlin.” 282 Yet, when Kuni teaches at what is now Cal State Fullerton between 1964 and 1975 and chairs the Faculty in Dance, his credentials reversely indicate a B.A. from Tōkyō Imperial and a doctorate from Berlin University. 283 But Fullerton cannot find any information about such degrees, not to mention a copy of Kuni’s dissertation or a doctoral degree certificate. 284 The dancer’s bio is quite telling regarding colonial and fascist power mechanisms and 280 This unusual journey is confirmed by a report in the Maeil sinbo of 30 May 1945 that notes the circumstances of Kuni’s arrival in Korea. It was three full months after Germany surrendered and following the Yalta Agreement that the Soviets declared war against Japan. As of May 1945, Japan was not yet a formal enemy of the Soviet Union. 281 See Maeil sinbo, 9 June 1945. In his 1993 Berurin sensō book, however, Kuni not only avoided any and all mentions of his Korean origins and his upbringing in Ulsan, he also carefully omitted anything about his 1945 train ride that ended in Korea. Instead, he just noted having returned to Tōkyō by way of Manchuria (see p. 339). 282 Daily Trojan, 22 April 1963. 283 See PDF document at URL #24, in here page 631. 284 This writer contacted various offices and the university archive at CSUF. The final reply was that they searched but “do not have any substantive information” (Associate VicePresident for Faculty Affairs, 29 May 2014) on Kuni’s doctoral degree. 114 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s institutional setups. No more than a bachelor degree from Tōkyō can be verified, and it is established that he has never even been a guest student at Berlin University. Instead he was affiliated with the university’s Japan Institute, an (Fig. 46) Kuni Masami outgrowth of the (aka Pak Yŏng-in, aka Ehara Masami) and new state-level Alexander von Swaine German–Japanese in Berlin, 1938. relations and of (Fig. 47) Kuni with concerted propa- Harangozó Gyula, ganda efforts by Budapest 1938. both countries. Kuni works exclusively for Japanese and German propaganda and (Fig. 48) Kuni in costume intelligence ser- and pose for his »Ignition« dance, performance in vices and is well the large domed hall, taken care of. In- Haus des Deutschen Sports, Olympiapark deed, he can tour (then Reichssportfeld) all through Eu- Berlin, 30 May 1937. rope while supporting the war effort and fascist multi-national cooperation. Such legends of fictitious pupil-teacher relations and a bachelor’s degree that seems to have been inflated to a doctorate are all part of a package deal that would even become the basis for post-1945 careers. To start with, the Korean Japanese dancer could hardly have seen enough of von Laban to call himself his pupil, much less to have worked with him. He clearly meets Laban’s pupil and colleague Max Terpis who remains in Germany until 1939. But Laban no longer teaches in Berlin when Kuni arrives and leaves the country altogether soon later; Kuni only seems to have met him in England years after the 115 Frank Hoffmann war. Laban had been commissioned to choreograph a monumental mass dance event for the pre-Olympic dance festival with 1,200 performers and multiple orchestras in around 30 cities. Then Goebbels, who had supported him until then, storms out of the final dress rehearsal in an outburst, instantaneously putting an end to his career in Germany as the man in charge of all dance related institutions. In August 1936 Laban enters a sanatorium for health related reasons, and leaves for Paris later in 1937. Then, when his last attempt to continue to work for the Propaganda Ministry fails the coming year, he moves to England, knowing that the charges he faces for homosexuality and Freemasonry will not go away. This does not mean that he opposes the Nazis. To the contrary, he and Mary Wigman (like the majority of other German dancers, artists, writers, and intellectuals) wholeheartedly support the new regime and its ideology.285 The dance historian Marion Kant poignantly summarizes how these leading modernist dancers and choreographers personally cooperated with NSDAP functionaries: Laban and Wigman “thought they could use the Nazis to fulfill their agenda, a Jew-free renewal of the German conservative traditions.” (They had indeed early on implemented racist policies and dismissed their Jewish dancers and “non-Aryan” children from their ballet schools.) “They were wrong,” Kant states, “the Nazis were radicals, radical racists who were modern, scientific and ruthless in their determination to carry out their program and prepare Germany for the racial war” and “for the truly great figures like Heidegger, [Carl] Schmitt, Laban, and Wigman the sudden fall from grace and favor was an awful shock and disappointment.”286 The Nazis, on the other hand, do not appreciate the personalities behind the 285 The 1934 program brochure of the German Dance Festival Laban has much praise for Wagner and Hitler who would lead the way (p. 5), and Mary Wigman shows her dismissive attitudes towards jazz and other international trends and genres in music and dance, at the same time constructing the Ausdruckstanz with small pompous words like “true art,” “forever” and “original” as the only legitimate modern expression of the Volk that had found its own roots (p. 9). See Rudolf von Laban, ed., Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934 unter Förderung der Reichskulturkammer [German Dance Festival 1934, promoted by the National Chamber of Culture] (Dresden: Carl Reißner, 1934). 286 Marion Kant, in Lilian Karina and Marion Kant, Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich, transl. Jonathan Steinberg (New York: Berghahn, 2003), 127. This study and documentation was first published in 1996 under the title Tanz unterm Hakenkreuz [Dancing under the swastika]. It was taken as a provocative account at the time. In spite of various shortcomings that have been pointed out in many, often also enlightening reviews, the main argument about the relationship of the modernist dance establishment with the Social Nationalists is sustained. The history of modernist dance then again matches the developments in the world of modernist art and architecture during the same period, which really calls for a more radical rewrite of the history of modernism in both Europe and Asia, since these are closely related, as already seen in the small example case of Kuni Masami. We cannot push our modernist idols off of their pedestals on one continent and expect them to remain at their perch on another. Quite the contrary: such insights into European modernism lead us to an understanding that can replace the many inept explanations masterminded from Western concepts of highly idealized modernist culture, on what historic modernism in Korea has been. 116 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s movement, yet they embrace the Ausdruckstanz for its mass appeal as a neat modernist tool that can and will be used to stage fascist mass spectacles. In any case, both movements share many of the same spiritual and intellectual roots: in terms of aesthetics, human body, and social utopia, that is most importantly the Lebensreform movement. We might assume that the fresh, expressionist, experimental dance of the Roaring Twenties would have been forced into extinction during the Third Reich. Yet, the grotesque and mesmerizing dance scene with Harald Kreutzberg287 in G.W. Pabst’s 1943 movie Paracelsus serves as an impressive example of how the finest form of modernist dance functions perfectly as an integral part of the standard NS propaganda package promoting the superiority of Germanic, non-intellectual culture.288 Kuni, incidentally, had already met Kreutzberg in 1934, when the German dancer performed at his school in Tōkyō. The German’s spectacular performance had been decisive in the young man’s determination to go to Berlin.289 Moreover, like Ch’oe Sŭng-hŭi, Kuni had studied with Ishii Baku 石井漠, the father of the Japanese modern dance movement, who had been a gleaming admirer and supporter of Mary Wigman and her Ausdruckstanz. Here, in many different ways, we are touching on some of the essential ingredients of modernism, as Mary Wigman had then again adaptated movements, gestures, costumes and masks, concepts of the relation of the individual movement of actor/dancer to theatrical space, and even instrumentation and music from Japanese Nō and Kabuki, and from Chinese, Indian, and Thai theater forms. A short segment of the 1926 version of her most influential Witch Dance (Hexentanz) — where Wigman dons a carved mask by Nō mask maker Victor Magito — leaves no doubts or questions in this regard.290 In a way, the relationship between the dance worlds of Germany and Japan in the 1930s can very well be described as a form of “reverse export” on both sides, as the Asahi shimbun 朝日新聞 puts it at the time.291 Though Wigman is the most prominent and artistically significant female modernist dancer, the inclusion of “Oriental” motifs, costumes, and movements — real and imagined — has already become a widespread stylistic phenomenon by the time of World War I. We have all seen reproductions of Otto Dix’s stunning verist portrait 287 Kreutzberg was another highly talented, absolutely amazing, major figure in the New German Dance movement around Laban and Wigman who dutifully supported the Nazis. 288 Film scene accessible at URL #25. For a astute analysis of the movie and the tavern dance scene, see Sheila Johnson, “Ideological Ambiguity in G.W. Pabst’s Paracelsus (1943),” Monatshefte 83, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 104–126. 289 See Kuni Masami, “Odori: Japanische Empfindungen — deutsche Eindrücke” [Odori: Japanese sensations — German impressions], Der Tanz 10, no. 7 (July 1937): 2–3. 290 A short excerpt from a 1929 film (based on her revised 1926 choreography), is posted at the Centre Pompidou website, URL #26. Her 1914 version is only documented in photographs: see figure 4 in this writer’s “Ultra-Right Modernism” chapter in this volume. 291 See the article “Seiō buyō o gyaku yushutsu” [Reverse export of Western European dance] in the Asahi shimbun of 17 September 1936. 117 Frank Hoffmann The Dancer Anita Berber (now at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart) in magazines or on book covers. Considered one of the most iconic images of the Flapper Era, it portrays the rebellious and highly decadent dancer (for instance in the edgy and surreal dance sequence in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis), (Fig. 49) Anita Berber, »Korean Dance« (Koreanischer Tanz), March 1917. Photo: Alexander Binder. actress, poet, and (Fig. 50) Anita Berber’s Korean Dance as hand painted Rosenthal porcelain prostitute with red figurine, designed by Constantin Holzer-Defanti in 1919, molding since 1920 hair and clad in all(this object 1927) at Selb-Bavaria, height 41 cm (detail). red attire, revealing every curve of her body. The openly bisexual nude dancer, whose expressionist performances in Berlin cabarets and variétés are always highly provocative, also becomes Berlin’s fashion queen, an early Lady Gaga, sporting, for example, a boyish haircut, a monocle, and a tuxedo, constantly setting new trends for the capital’s “New Women.” Anita Berber’s breakthrough success has already come years earlier, however, in her debut as a solo performer, with her own choreography and performance of a piece she titles “Korean Dance” (fig. 49). The two fashion magazines Die Dame and Elegante Welt both cover Berber’s solo performances at the Apollo Theater in March 1917, right in the middle of the First World War, focusing on her captivating “Korean Dance.” The articles are accompanied by photos of Berber in her shiny costume. Her dazzling, exotic dance and outfit enthrall audiences. “There was an unusually beautiful and tasteful treatment of the costume. Especially in ‘Korean Dance’, gestures, appearance, and costume were in harmony with one another, which can truly be called exemplary,”292 states one of the highly positive reviews. Berber’s “Korean Dance” also inspires other artists. The illustrator Walter Schnackenberg draws her in her costume, and sculptor Constantin Holzer-Defanti designs two porcelain figurines (see fig. 50) for mass-production at the Rosenthal Manufactury in Selb two years later. Of course, looking at the photos of Anita Berber in her costume, it is immediately evident that there is hardly anything 292 “Anita Berber: Eine neue Tänzerin” [Anita Berber: A new dancer], Elegante Welt 6, no. 3 (March 1917): 15. 118 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s Korean about it! Her silky pajama-like pants, her vest, and her fantastically styled headdress makes for a complete fantasy costume. If anything, it might remind 1917 audiences of the highly popular collectable trading cards from Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company (Korean motifs set issued in 1904) that also depict Korean girls and women in silky fantasy costumes.293 Japan is as hungry for the powerful German expressionist melodramas as is the German avant-garde for Oriental stereotypes and exotica that could be filtered out of Japanese and Oceanian cultures. In Korea, though, all through the colonial period, the modern visual arts consistently favor impressionist styles and thick 19th century naturalist oils over everything else. 294 Accordingly, in dance, Kuni’s choreographies attract interest from the Japanese avant-garde, even during the war, while the Korean media mostly only use him as a token representative of Korean national culture. Korean newspaper reports about Kuni Masami’s first big solo performance on 30 May 1937 (see fig. 48; a second is scheduled four days later, see fig. 51) at the Haus des Deutschen Sports’ new large domed hall, a central point of Berlin’s Olympic Park (named “Reichssportfeld” at the time), refer to Kuni by his birth name Pak and stress that “the Korean folk dances Monk Dance (sŭngmu 僧舞) and Farmer’s Dance (nongbuŭi ch’um 農夫의 춤)”295 had been part of his show. Readers are thus made to believe that Kuni is introducing Korean culture to Germans. Nothing could be more misleading. On the morning of Kuni’s second performance, Goebbels, who was a Japanophile — but much less so than Himmler — has a long and intense meeting on German–Japanese cultural relations with the special Japanese emissary for culture, the Shintō ultranationalist Fujisawa Chikao 藤沢親雄. 296 Fujisawa impresses the Reich Minister as a “clever and energetic head [who] thinks very modern, nationalistic and anti-parliamentarian.” 297 Although later he annoys the young Nazi students attending his guest lecture at Berlin University when he informs them that “pure Nazism was really a manifestation of the Japanese spirit on German 293 See figure 1 in this writer’s “Modular Spectacle” text in this volume. In Korea, of course, expressionist art was also produced during the colonial period, but expressionism and other later art movements and styles such as cubism or abstract art were never as strong and popular as in Japan. 295 Tonga ilbo, morning ed. of 8 June 1937. The Maeil sinbo of 7 June 1937 reports the same. 296 See Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, afternoon and evening eds. of 3 June 1937. 297 Joseph Goebbels, diary entry of 4 Juni 1936, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels [The diaries of Joseph Goebbels]. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001 (URL #27). 294 119 Frank Hoffmann soil.” 298 The second dance event on June 3rd was organized in connection with Fujisawa’s visit and lecture. A week earlier, Hitler had already received high-ranking Japanese Navy officers. Together with Fujisawa, they had come to Kiel on the navy’s flagship Ashigara, and then, with most of their crew, they visit Berlin and take part in public festivities in their honor. Kuni’s dance performances, Judo and Kendo martial art demonstrations, are all organized by the German–Japanese Society and serve as related cultural umbrella events that promote the two nation’s close cooperation and reinforce the already strong image of the Japanese as “honorable Aryans.”299 Reportedly, Kuni’s first performance is part of the farewell celebration for these Japanese Navy officers and sailors. The rare inclusion of certain movements and accessories from Korean folk dance should be understood in the context of avantgarde Japanese dance according to Ishii and is therefore no different in approach than Wigman’s adaptation of Japanese movements and objects into her dance, only Korea replaces Japan as the source of exotica. Unlike Kuni, his female colleague Ch’oe Sŭng-hŭi, by then the brightest modern dance star on the horizon of the Japanese Empire, does in the 1930s indeed work on modernized choreographies of Korean folk dances while also utilizing Indian and other “Oriental” motifs. At her performances and in interviews within the Empire and internationally, she emphasizes her Korean heritage and thereby knowingly departs from Ishii’s understanding of modern expressionist dance (which was never about reinvigorating and modernizing traditions or anything else from the past, but all about authentic expressions of the present, which then again sometimes include some ethnic elements such as typical movements and cloth; these are then disrupted, displaced, and recontextualized). Kuni Masami, on the other hand, approximates Ishii’s conceptualization and adds defamilarization and alienation effects. Conceptually, this is very close to Ishii (or Wigman, for that matter) but far removed from Ch’oe’s modernized Korean dances or her use of folk motifs. In fact, “Korea” or “Korean” is never mentioned even once in connection with Kuni over the years in any European press releases. Thus, his work according to Korean print media appears to be a nationalist display of Korean folk culture by a Korean dancer, is later presented by Kuni himself as a very successful avant-garde solo show with loans from traditional Kabuki and other Asian forms of dance and theater; yet, it can also be understood as a well-organized political propaganda event 298 Fujisawa Chikao, quoted in Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 96. 299 See Berliner Illustrierte, evening ed. of 24 Mai 1937; Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, midday ed. as well as afternoon and evening eds. of 24 May 1937, midday ed. as well as evening ed. of 25 May 1937, afternoon ed. of 26 May 1937, midday ed. as well as evening ed. of 27 May 1937, evening ed. of 28 May 1937, first midday ed. of 29 May 1937, night ed. of 31 May 1937; Günther Haasch, ed., Die Deutsch–Japanischen Gesellschaften von 1888 bis 1996 [The German–Japanese Societies from 1888 to 1996] (Berlin: Ed. Colloquium, 1996), figure 11 (between pp. 162 and 163). 120 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s staged by NS and Japanese authorities. 300 Quite some Rashomon effect, and the missing fourth interpretation might be discerned with little effort. Berlin, which for Koreans could be considered as a “social space” of colonial modernity (in Lefebvre’s terms), is by 1937 transformed into what seems more like a political extension of the Japanese Empire. When Kuni Masami arrives in Berlin in late February 1937 and begins to study soon later, he does this on a scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Education.301 The “German Dance College” mentioned in the earlier quoted USC newspaper, where Kuni studies and later finds employment as an instructor, refers to the German Master Workshops for Dance (Deutsche Meisterstätten für Tanz). Organized by the National Socialists the previous year, Laban is the school’s director, initially. Yet, he is replaced almost immediately by Rolf Cunz, the Advisor for Dance at the Propaganda Ministry. By this time, the institutional Nazification and Gleichschaltung (forcible coordination) are in full swing,302 and the Master Workshops, as well as all other dance related institutions, are under direct control of Section VI of the Goebbels’ Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Although Kuni could hardly have done anything with Laban, he did participate in some courses that Wigman taught as a guest lecturer at the Master Workshops in Berlin after her fall from power between 1937 and March 1942, when she was still teaching in Dresden. (Much later, Kuni writes a book about her.) He studies and performs as a dancer at the Berlin Volksbühne, the Berlin State Opera, works with Harangozó Gyula in fascist Hungary at the Royal Opera House, dances at the Italian National Theater, and on and on. As the U.S. wartime intelligence report quoted above suggests, his travels and activities had multiple purposes serving multiple masters. One of Kuni’s close friends and colleagues is Alexander von Swaine (fig. 46), an absolutely stunning dancer and choreographer, who was an openly gay, which brought him an eight months prison sentence and a permanent ban to perform in public by the Berlin magistrate’s court for a violation of Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, the socalled gay paragraph.303 These and other incidents must certainly have signaled Kuni to seek protection. His deep involvement with Japanese secret services and his status as foreign journalist provided that.304 From the start, Kuni not only studies and works as a dancer, he also works as a dance and theater critic for Japanese newspapers and magazines, and is often introduced as such.305 He writes in Japanese magazines about 300 Oddly, Kim Ho-yŏn (2015) argues that it is Kuni, not Ch’oe, who departs from Ishii’s concept. See Kuni, Berurin sensō, 19–20; Chosŏn ilbo, 7 May 1937; Maeil sinbo, 7 June 1937; Tonga ilbo, morning edition of 16 July 1937. 302 See Alan E. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 32–37. 303 See Karina and Kant, Hitler’s Dancers, 40, 261–262. 304 But Kuni also married at least twice, last in 1972 to the 28 years young Tomiyo N. Nagahashi. 305 See e.g. the end of the article by O Pyŏng-nyŏn 吳炳年 about Kuni, part of his “On Parade” series on modern Korean dancers in the Tonga ilbo, morning edition of 10 September 1937. 301 121 Frank Hoffmann the New German Dance306 and in German magazines he begins to publish articles on Japanese dance, theater, and related arts.307 As in the case of Pae Un-sŏng and An Ikt’ae, it is once more the German–Japanese Society with its branch offices, apart from the Propaganda Ministry, that organizes many of his appearances around Europe, e.g. in Magdeburg, Karlsruhe, Colmar, Linz, Prague, Königsberg (Kaliningrad), and Istanbul.308 Among those commissioned jobs is also the translation of and choreography for a modernized Kabuki (shin kabuki 新歌舞伎) play that Kuni himself adapts and co-produces with a German director for German audiences, which premieres as late as July 1944 when Japanese Ambassador Ōshima Hiroshi 大島浩 — a man so devoted to Nazism that Japanese officials back home nickname him “the German Ambassador to Germany” — receives an honorary doctorate from Leipzig University.309 As a willing token for the propagandists of German–Japanese relations and a cultural representative of the new, modern, fascist Japan, Kuni himself gets regular coverage in propaganda publications such as the NSDAP’s Illustrierter Beobachter and Ribbentrop’s Berlin Rom Tokio through the end of the war. Apart from the German–Japanese Society, Kuni regularly works for Kraft durch Freude (meaning “Strength through Joy,” KdF), the Nazi’s state-instituted leisuretime organization that organizes vacations and after-work events to ensure National 306 But Kuni’s paramount publication from that period was a book: Geijutsu buyō no kenkyū [A study on art dance] (Tōkyō: Fuzanbō, 1942). The book’s focus is Laban and Wigman’s Ausdruckstanz. He also presented a Japanese view on the same topic for the offical propaganda magazine of the Reich Theater Chamber (Reichstheaterkammer): Kuni Masami, “Gedanken eines Japaners über die deutsche Tanzkunst von heute” [Thoughts of one Japanese on contemporary German dance], Deutsche Tanz-Zeitschrift 3, no. 12 (1938): 5–7. 307 See, for example, Kuni Masami, “Tanzkunst in Japan” [The art of dance in Japan], Der Tanz 10, no. 12 (1937): 9–10; a longer academic version appeared in a journal that was the result of the new German–Japanese state-level cooperation and the implementation of Gleichschaltung policies: Nippon: Zeitschrift für Japanologie 4, no. 2 (April 1938): 73–82, plate. Further see: Kuni Masami, “Die zwei Gesichter des japanischen Tanzes” [The two faces of Japanese dance], Die Musik 31, no. 10 (July 1939): 657–660; Kuni Masami, “Die Grundbegriffe und das Wesen des Ukiyoe” [The basic concepts and the nature of ukiyo-e], Nippon: Zeitschrift für Japanologie 5, no. 3 (July 1939): 129–138; Kuni Masami, “Japanisches Theaterleben” [Japanese theatrical life], Nippon: Zeitschrift für Japanologie 6, no. 2 (April 1940): 65-74. As someone who bridged the gab between artistic performance and academia, Kuni became involved with the Japanese studies program at Berlin University. For exmple, he also presented the last mentioned paper on Japanese theater as a lecture at the Japan Institute in Berlin (on 8 March 1940), and he served as a contributor for the most important NS period lexica on Japan, the Japan-Handbuch (Berlin: Steininger, 1941), edited by Martin Ramming, then the director of the Institute. What appears to be a big success at first glance only occurred because of the application of new Nazi policies across all institutions and because of Kuni’s role as a symbol of German–Japanese collaboration. 308 See Königsberger Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 and 28 September 1942; Kolmarer Kurier and Marburger Zeitung, 26 November 1943; Peter Funk, “Karlsruhe,” Musik im Kriege 2, nos. 1–2 (April–May 1944): 25; Haasch, ed., Die Deutsch–Japanischen Gesellschaften von 1888 bis 1996, 428 and 430. 309 See ibid., 269 and 413; Marburger Zeitung, 11 and 21 July 1944. 122 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s (Fig. 52) Pae as General (detail), ca. 1934, crayons on paper, a small portrait of graphic artist Pae Un-sŏng with a Kabuki performer’s pointy tate eboshi hat by the Polish–Swiss artist Marei Wetzel-Schubert. (Fig. 53) Kuni Masami (aka Pak Yŏng-in), early 1940s, giving a Kabuki performance (likely in Vienna), with pointy hat — a photo published in the April 1943 issue of the Nazi propaganda magazine Berlin Rom Tokio. 123 Frank Hoffmann Socialist ideology is enforced at all times. By the late 1930s the KdF organizes over 140,000 events with a whopping 54 million participants,310 and having dramatically lowered prices for what counted as high culture (Kultur) — theater, opera, and ballet — it quadrupled attendees there as well, creating a mass culture that puts modern entertainment into the focus of fascist modernity. The Nazi organization also gains special attention among some leading Japanese intellectuals. Gonda Yasunosuke 權田保之助, a well established sociologist, critic, and researcher of popular culture and modern life publishes an entire book about it.311 As has convincingly been argued, specifically in theater and dance, Japan emulates these Nazi cultural organizations and programs from the late 1930s.312 A Japan Recreation Association (Nihon Rekuriēshon Kyōkai 日本レクリエーション協会), modeled after the German KdF, is set up in 1938. Kuni’s activities are therefore completely in line with the developments back in Japan. In April 1940 Kuni gives a performance of what he simply refers to as modern Japanese dance (exclusively featuring his own choreographies) at the Urania in Vienna, an institution which was integrated into the KdF organization under the politics of Gleichschaltung. A local newspaper report about this “German–Japanese Cultural Evening” — with Austria now part of Germany — tries to impress its readers with the dancer’s alleged star status: “Dr. Masami Kuni (...) gave most recently a guest performance in Sweden. Following his appearance in Vienna, he will dance in Mecklenburg, then choreograph a Japanese ballet in Copenhagen.”313 Though this gives the impression of big personal successes, all these wartime performances and activities are without exception state-organized. Denmark, with its capital Copenhagen, had been invaded and occupied by the Nazis earlier that month, and Sweden is only neutral on paper during World War II, having had its own very strong National Socialist movement. 314 A brief communication exchange between the KdF’s central office in Berlin and the Deutsche Volkstheater in Vienna well demonstrates that it is Kuni himself who actively tries to use the Nazi’s cultural propaganda institution’s power to further his career. The Berlin KdF informs the Vienna theater that Kuni has contacted their office and is interested in being invited for a matinée (see fig. 54).315 310 These are at least the official numbers for the year 1938; see Der Umbruch, 1 August 1942. See Gonda Yasunosuke, Nachisu Kōseidan (KdF) [Kraft durch Freude (KdF)] (Tōkyō: Kurita Shoten, 1942). 312 See the studies by Sang Mi Park. A concise summary is given in her article “Wartime Japan’s Theater Movement,” Waseda Daigaku Kōtō Kenkyūjo kiyō 1 (March 2008): 61–78. 313 Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 18 April 1940. Also see Neuigkeits-Welt-Blatt, 17 April 1940. 314 Ironically, ultra-right thought and culture of the sort propagated by Kuni continued to have a strong influence on East Asian studies (including Korean studies) in Sweden because, as an ostensibly non-aligned state, it was never subject to denazification. See Tobias Hübinette, “Asia as a Topos of Fear and Desire for Nazis and Extreme Rightists: The Case of Asian Studies in Sweden,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 15, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 403–428. 315 See letter by Rudolf Sonner at the Kraft durch Freude (KdF) Central Office in Berlin to 311 124 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s (Fig. 54) Letter by the Berlin Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) office to Deutsches Volkstheater in Vienna, informing the theater that Kuni Masami has contacted their office to express his interest in a performance in Vienna; letter dated 18 September 1940. The Berliners’ “politically correct” Nazi enthusiasm for German–Japanese relations, though, meets with a lack thereof at the theater, teaching the “Prussians” a lesson in how efficiently political the proverbial Viennese snugness can be. After taking a good half year to reply, the theater’s Administrative Director Lehmann states that he does not really know how to organize a matinée and that hardly anyone would come unless the local KdF office pre-purchases a large contingent of tickets (as giveaways for soldiers, school classes, etc.).316 Deutsches Volkstheater in Vienna, dated 18 September 1940, Vienna City Library (Wienbibliothek im Rathaus), Manuscript Department, folder ZPH 619/23 (hereafter Vienna CL, ZPH 619/23). 316 See letter by Administrative Director Otto Lehmann at Deutsches Volkstheater in Vienna to Rudolf Sonner, KdF Central Office Berlin, dated 8 April 1941, Vienna CL, ZPH 619/23. 125 Frank Hoffmann Beginning in 1941, the KdF closely cooperates with the Wehrmacht; its main task is now providing wartime troop entertainment. In this context, Kuni works on a regular basis for the KdF in the Wehrmacht’s troop entertainment section, traveling around in occupied territories. In early 1942 “Reich Minister Dr. Goebbels, the President of the Reich Culture Chamber” invites “the Japanese Dr. Masami Kuni” and about 50 other known performers, representing thousands of actors and entertainers, to receive the Reich Minister’s special thanks for their dedication. But the only one to show up and thank them is the lower-ranking Hans Hinkel (a name familiar to us from Chaplin’s The Great Dictator), the “De-Jewing” (Entjudung) specialist in the cultural sector.317 Kuni uses his travels and contacts with the SS, SA, and Wehrmacht as opportunities to spy on the situation for the Japanese, reporting to Ehara Kōichi and to his direct boss Ejiri Susumu 江尻進 at the well-staffed Berlin office of Domei News Agency (Dōmei Tsūshinsha 同盟通信社), his official affiliation as an accredited journalist. Domei tries to look like a news and propaganda agency to the Germans that would collect, filter, and translate foreign news and then inform its government — a simple open-source intelligence operation paired with propaganda. In reality, it is into human intelligence collection as well. The earlier quoted U.S. intelligence report from 1944 (see footnote 276) shows that all of the parties involved are well aware of these multitasking operations, including Kuni, Ehara, and Ejiri’s specific roles.318 Although all civil theaters stop operating in 1943, those KdF special jobs and performances continue to generate income for Kuni. The troop entertainment shows bring him to places like Lodz (Łódź) in occupied Poland, which Hitler had renamed Litzmannstadt. Just when the 40,000 remaining Jews and Romani then surviving in the Lodz Ghetto had been brought to the Auschwitz and Chełmno death camps for “liquidation” in August 1944, Kuni dances for the guards and murderers there.319 While Kuni Masami and An Ik-t’ae work for the Japanese, the 1949 intelligence report that mentions An also includes a reference to Han Hŭng-su 韓興洙 (aka Han Hung Soo, 1909–?), generally considered the father of North Korean archaeology. Han had been studying and working in Berne, Fribourg, Vienna, and later Prague, but from March 1941 to late August that year he lives in Berlin and is listed in the 317 See Marburger Zeitung, 13 January 1942. Ehara Kōichi and Ejiri Susumu, the two high-level intelligence officials, also survived the war and returned to Japan. Ehara now enjoyed writing about his acquaintance with Richard Strauss and spent his later days translating Eduard Mörike’s romantic poetry. Ejiri, the press censorship and propaganda specialist, rose to become Secretary-General of the Japan Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association (Nihon Shimbun Kyōkai 日本新聞協会); his favorite essay theme became press freedom and responsibility. See e.g. Ehara Kōichi, “Rihiaruto Shutorausu ō no omoide” [Memories of the venerable maestro Richard Strauss], Rekōdo ongaku 20, no. 11 (November 1950): 31–35; Ejiri Susumu, Characteristics of the Japanese Press, NSK Asian Programme Series 11 (Tōkyō: Nihon Shimbun Kyokai, 1972). 319 See Litzmannstädter Zeitung, 26 October 1944. Kuni had already performed in Lodz in the spring of the same year; see ibid., 29 April 1944. 318 126 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s report as an active “intelligence agent” for the German side, heading a small amateur spy “study group” that gathers information for the Third Reich about their Axis partner Japan.320 In the summer of 1939 the Germans break the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan by signing the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with the Soviets, and in December 1941 the Japanese surprise the German leaders when attacking Pearl Harbor without having informed their ally. It seems therefore sensible that both powers watch each other’s moves closely. Like Pae Un-sŏng, An Ik-t’ae, or Kuni Masami, and a few other Koreans who stay on in Europe during the Third Reich, Han Hŭngsu manages to get himself privately and professionally entangled into the quagmire of Nazi favoritism and profiteering. As Zdenka Klöslová hints in her chapter on Han in Prague (in volume two of this series), Han and his lover Huberta benefit from their collaboration in being able to live in the beautiful Dobrovský Villa (now renamed the Werich House and included in every tourist brochure). Its former resident, Zdeněk Wirth, the renowned art historian, had been forced out of the villa and his teaching position by the Nazis. The Germans had occupied Kampa Island in its entirety and had set up their local NSDAP headquarters right next door at Liechtenstein Palace. And Kim Kyŏng-han, Han’s friend and later the sham husband of his Czech-German girlfriend (see footnote 71) does his part by enrolling in one of the SA’s Napola boarding schools for the ideological training of young Nazi cadres, as Christian Lewarth reveals in his chapter on “Sound Recordings” (also in vol. 2). All of the spy novel clichés and stereotypes are well furnished; Han and other Koreans assist the Japanese, Nazis, and Soviets to spy on each other and step into every trap there is. Let us now return to composer An Ik-t’ae. Both Ehara and An Ik-t’ae’s letters to Strauss in the early 1940s leave little room for interpretation in terms of the nature of their relationship. In sharp contrast to the legend that An built, or allowed to be built, around himself as a Korean patriot who “worked (...) with Richard Strauss in Vienna and Munich for 12 years,” 321 it seems perfectly safe to conclude that An had never even met Strauss before 11 or 12 March 1942. The letter that An writes to Strauss less than two weeks later is obviously the first letter he has ever written to the famous composer. That invitation letter is, other than his postwar letters, still highly formal: “Mr. Ehara and I would very much like to welcome you and your wife as our guests in our home during your Berlin stay in June.”322 It is only thanks to Ehara and the 320 See U.S. Army, European Command, Intelligence Division, “Wartime Activities,” 94 and 127. For further details on Han Hŭng-su, see the detailed study by Andreas Schirmer, “Ein Pionier aus Korea: Der fast vergessene Han Hung-Su — Archäologe, Völkerkundler, Märchenerzähler, Kulturmittler” [A pioneer from Korea: The almost forgotten Han HungSu — archaeologist, ethnologist, storyteller, intermediary between cultures], Archiv für Völkerkunde 61–62 (2013): 261–318; about his Berlin stay, see pp. 268–269, note 20, and pp. 277–279. Also consult the book by Löwensteinová and Olša about Han of the same year. 321 Los Angeles Times, 2 February 1958. 322 Letter by An Ik-t’ae in Berlin to Richard Strauss in Vienna, dated 24 March 1942, repro- 127 Frank Hoffmann German–Japanese Society that An and Strauss meet at all. The organization takes care of most cultural propaganda regarding German–Japanese relations, sponsoring artists, musicians, youth programs, and more. And it is Ehara, as An’s friend, who promotes him and his career within that organization. As in the case of Pae Un-sŏng’s exhibitions, every single concert An conducts in the first half of the 1940s seems to have been arranged and sponsored by the German–Japanese Society. 323 The only reason An gets to meet the acclaimed composer is that the society asks him to direct Strauss’ Japanische Festmusik as “Ekitai Ahn,” the “Japanese conductor.” It is then again Ehara who initiates the invitation to have Strauss stay at his villa in Berlin.324 The Korean composer and conductor could not be more integrated into the world of Japanese Imperial politics and cultural propaganda: all the sponsorships, all the concerts, and all the contacts for An are either arranged by Japanese authorities or by the German–Japanese Society. The lyrics of the patriotic Aegukka had been sung in Korean churches in the United States, where An had studied, to the tune of the Scottish folk song “Auld 55) An Ik-t’ae at a rehearsal, conducting the Berlin Radio Symphony Lang Syne.” An starts (Fig. Orchestra in 1942. working on a new melody while still in Philadelphia and later modifies and completes the composition while staying in Berlin in 1936, at the time of the Olympic Games. He then also meets with Pae Un-sŏng, An Pong-gŭn, and with Korean students (only seven to ten Koreans remain living in Berlin at that time).325 Sometime during the coming two duced in Yi Kyŏng-bun, Irŏbŏrin sigan 1938–1944, 199. See Yi Kyŏng-bun, “An Ik-t’aewa Riharŭt’ŭ Syut’ŭrausŭ,” 46–54. The author proves that the timeline given by An himself in later interviews and writings does not match the actual, rather late meeting of the two musicians. An predated (or allowed others to predate) his contacts with Strauss in order to claim to have been a “student” of the famous composer. 324 See Ehara’s 1942 letters to Strauss, reproduced in Yi Kyŏng-bun, Irŏbŏrin sigan 1938– 1944, 197, 201, and 204. 325 See Tonga ilbo, 8 and 9 August 1936. 323 128 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s years, he adds this melody to the ending of his composition Korea Fantasia. His Aegukka composition (with the old patriotic lyrics), which he first sends from Berlin to Koreans in San Francisco, becomes immediately very popular in Korean communities around the world. The lyrics are at that time believed to be from An Ch’ang-ho. Only in the last few years have we learned that the true author is Yun Chi-ho 尹致昊, whose political career is somewhat similar to that of Pak Yŏng-hyo, the creator of the national flag mentioned earlier.326 Also having his roots in the late 19th century reform and independence movement, Yun becomes an ardent propagandist of naisen ittai and a supporter of the Japanese war effort in the late colonial era.327 An’s Aegukka, which was first adopted by Kim Ku’s Shanghai exile government in October 1945 as the Korean national hymn, has several issues. The earlier 1902 national anthem by that other Berliner by choice, Franz Eckert, as we now know, seems in fact not the Prussian’s own composition but his adaptation of a Korean song, “The Wind Is Blowing” (Parami punda 바람이 분다). 328 But An’s anthem, Western choral music in G major, shows no trace of any influence of traditional Korean music genres. The other major issue is that An’s Korea Fantasia piece, and thereby the Aegukka, seemed at the time to have been sponsored by the German– Japanese Society for their cultural propaganda programs. Although An scholar Yi Kyŏng-bun seriously doubts that An Ik-t’ae had 20 performances of Fantasia Korea in various countries,329 mostly fascist or German–occupied European ones, as both An and, later, his widow claimed, we should remember that he got the same kind of sponsorship that Pae Un-sŏng received for his woodprints and paintings of Korean folk life. Pae’s works served as icons of Korean culture no less than An’s Korea Fantasia. It seems quite possible, then, that An (even if in post-1945 interviews he inflated the actual number of such performances) had blended Korean pseudo-folklore for Western orchestras with the work of Beethoven and Wagner. More attention was certainly given to his modernized classical Japanese pieces, mostly modern interpretations of eighth-century court music, Etenraku 越天樂. In fact, Etenraku is 326 See Sinhan minbo, 21 September 1910; Chosŏn ilbo, 16 December 2003 and 18 June 2013. Among other activities, Yun acted as the president of the Special Volunteer Soldier Support Association (Tokubetsu Shinganhei Kōenkai 特別志願兵講演会) and gave speeches that encouraged young Korean men to enlist as soldiers for the Imperial Japanese Army. The switch from a volunteer service system to compulsory conscription for Koreans came in December 1944, only eight months before the end of the war. 328 Yi Kyŏng-bun, following Hermann Gottschewski’s findings, argues that Eckert based his Korean national anthem on the song’s musical notation given by Homer B. Hulbert in his 1896 essay on “Korean Vocal Music” (p. 52), the same text that introduced a notation of “Arirang” to Western readers (see footnote 113). See Kyungboon Lee, “Die erste koreanische Nationalhymne: Ihre Quelle, Franz Eckerts Bearbeitung und die Frage der TextMusik-Relation” [The first Korean national anthem: It’s source, Franz Eckert’s adaptation, and the question about the relationship between lyrics and melody], OAG-Notizen, no. 12 (December 2013): 30–39; a Korean version appeared in Yŏksa pip’yŏng 101 (Winter 2012). 329 Cf. Yi Kyŏng-bun, Irŏbŏrin sigan 1938–1944, 127–133. 327 129 Frank Hoffmann the central piece in his standard repertoire and figures prominently in many of his concerts in Europe. Other than his Berlin colleague Konoe Hidemaro 近衛秀麿, the half-brother of Konoe Fumimaro 近衛文麿, Japan’s Prime Minister and signer of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, An relies entirely on Western instrumentation for his version of Etenraku. On 18 August 1943, for instance, the only time he gets to conduct the Berlin Philarmonic Orchestra, Etenraku is in the program together with Wagner, Mozart, and Dvořák. The program flyer for this concert also demonstrates that it is the Nazis who construct or help to construct the legend of An as a pupil of their very own German Richard Strauss, while his American education goes unmentioned.330 An does not differentiate between Japanese and Korean cultural representation. All the while, from the commentaries and small articles he writes in newspapers, one gets the feeling that he thinks (or pretends to think) of his role as some sort of uninvolved onlooker or cultural tourist. In actuality, however, he clearly benefits from the situation no less than those among the Nazi cultural elite. An moves from the United States (where he had already started a career as cellist and given solo concerts 331) to Germany and makes his debut there at a time of unprecedented barbarism, the very moment in time when the majority of his more distinguished composer and conductor colleagues had one-way tickets to travel in the other direction. Even Paul Hindemith, admired by An and praised in one of his 1936 articles, who tries everything to reconcile with the Nazi Party, leaves in 1938 for Switzerland and emigrates later to the United States. An thus helps fill the huge cultural void left by the departure of Hindemith, Schoenberg, and so many others, while serving as a willing tool for Japanese and Nazi propagandists. In 1943, when the Allied bombing of Berlin worsens, German military officials send An to occupied Paris, where he works for them at the Orchestre de Radio-Paris. He is now one of the major figures of German cultural propaganda in Pétain’s Vichy France, often making the front pages of the few remaining newspapers. As this writer found out with some amazement, after the Mandschoukuo concerts in Berlin and in Vienna, he now gets to delight the Parisian public with the same piece at a live concert on 30 March 1943 at the Palais de Chaillot in front of the Eiffel Tower, directing the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. The otherwise press-shy Ehara Kōichi is with him this time (see fig. 57).332 Coda: An and his work must have made quite an impression, as France declares him persona non grata even while World War II is still going on; and the United States prohibits him from entering the country for two years,333 considering him an 330 The original program flyer is reproduced in ibid., 139. See New York Herald Tribune, 20 October 1933, 19 November 1933, and 29 July 1934. 332 See Le Matin, 22 and 30 March 1943. 333 An also worked together with the otherwise much celebrated Franco–Swiss pianist and conductor Alfred Cortot, a member of the Vichy regime’s Conseil national who, after lib331 130 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s (Fig. 56) Ehara Kōichi with Richard Strauss in Salzburg, August 1944. (Fig. 57) An Ik-t’ae and Ehara Kōichi before the Mandchoukouo (Manchukuo) concert in Paris; detail of a front page article in Le Matin, 30 March 1943. avowed Nazi. When Paris is liberated in August 1944, he travels on to Spain, the only other country in all of Europe that would retain its ruthless and brutal fascist dictator for three more decades.334 He marries a Spanish woman there and gets his own orchestra, the Orquesta Sinfónica de Mallorca. (b) Aeronautical Engineer Chang Kŭk and Eugenicist Kim Paek-p’yŏng The first Korean artist trained in Europe is Pae Un-sŏng, whom we discussed earlier; the first in the United States is Chang Pal 張勃, the younger brother of later South Korean Prime Minister Chang Myŏn; and there is a third brother. At their hometown the brothers are simply known as the Inch’ŏnŭi samjang 仁川의 三張, the Three Changs from Inch’ŏn. The Chang family is, just like the Haeju Ans, another old Catholic 334 eration, was declared persona non grata as well. See ibid., 19 April 1944. We may take note that even in non-aligned Spain, An seems to have eagerly promoted his Mandschoukuo piece. The internal work schedules for broadcasts of Radio Barcelona for 1944 show that the Vienna concert recording of the piece was aired in two parts, on 30 October and on 11 November 1944 (and again in December that year). It seems also telling that it took An years to finally say ‘hasta la vista’ to his Japanized forename Ekitai and reKoreanize his name to Eaktay. For the original radio broadcast schedules, see URL #28, a and b (both times pp. 2, 6, and 17), and c (pp. 5 and 14). 131 Frank Hoffmann family that had close contact with the Benedictine missionaries from early on. Never mentioned in any studies on modern Korean art, Chang Pal, as it turns out, actually learns the skills of Western oil painting from the German Benedictine missionary Andreas Eckardt O.S.B., who was later to be- (Fig. 58) Chang Pal in 1927 while working on the Fourteen Apostles for Myŏngdong Cathedral. The photographer is Father Andreas Eckardt, who come the Koreanist has a creative way of signing a picture: an oil portrait of himself appears in the Andre Eckardt. 335 Since lower right corner as a signet, making sure to convey that Chang is one of his. Eckardt’s father was a painter, Andre had been sufficiently exposed to art to be able to teach painting with some proficiency himself. The ex-missionary is later drafted into the OKW’s Cypher Branch, and his private life becomes equally worldly during the war when he marries a woman 18 years his junior. The Nazis, though, show little appreciation for his work as a scholar. Claiming that his research would be entirely useless, NSDAP member Fritz Jäger rejects his habilitation,336 while Karl Haushofer personally interferes to stop the former missionary from any engagement at Munich University that would help his academic career.337 Pointless distrust! Eckardt himself, in his later memoirs about his time in Korea, avoids any and all mention of his missionary identity. Instead, he reinvents his past self to be that of an independent scholar, colonial government advisor, and adventurer who, in roaming Korea with his native servant, pontificates on Buddhist inscriptions to local abbots, outwits bandits in nearmortal ambushes, and bags man-eating tigers with his heavy Browning pistol.338 335 Eckardt himself states that Chang Pal learned oil painting from him “for several months” before going to Japan and the U.S. to study art there: Andreas Eckardt, “Ludwig Chang und die christliche Kunst in Korea” [Ludwig Chang and Christian art in Korea], Die christliche Kunst 25, no. 6 (March 1929): 180. 336 Jäger served as the referee for Eckardt’s habilitation. See letter by Fritz Jäger to Andre Eckardt in respect to the habilitation petition, dated 20 November 1939, in Hartmut Walravens, “Aus der Arbeit der Hamburger ostasiatischen Lehrstühle: Gutachten von Fritz Jäger, Karl Florenz und Wilhelm Gundert” [From the work of the East Asian Studies programs in Hamburg: Referee letters by Fritz Jäger, Karl Wilhelm, and Florence Gundert], Nachrichten der Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens 181–182 (2007): 171–172. 337 See Haasch, ed., Die Deutsch–Japanischen Gesellschaften von 1888 bis 1996, 397. 338 See Andre Eckardt, Wie ich Korea erlebte [How I experienced Korea] (Frankfurt am Main: August Lutzeyer, 1950), 44, 91, 101–113, and elsewhere. 132 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s (Fig. 59) Morning edition of the Tonga ilbo, 9 February 1939, page 2, with an article about Chang Kŭk in Berlin. (Fig. 60) Cover of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games booklet for the special gliding demonstration sports discipline. Speaking of painter Chang Pal, at one of her wonderful Christmas parties, Maya Henderson, a Berliner Mädel, widow of the U.S. cultural attaché and later Korea historian Gregory Henderson, and an acquaintance of the Chang family, suddenly mocked an attacking airplane with her arms and mouth when the discussion hit upon the third brother. Her little gesture pretty much sums him up: Chang Kŭk is trained as an aeronautical engineer in Nazi Germany and spends his entire working life as such, mostly for the military. The morning edition of the Tonga ilbo newspaper of 9 February 1939 features a sketch of Chang Kŭk under the rather odd headline: “Nazi Honors Obtained” (Nach’isŭ yŏngye hoektŭk 나치스 榮譽獲得, see fig. 59). Chang Kŭk comes to Berlin to study engineering, more specifically aeronautical engineering, at the Technical University Berlin, today the Berlin Institute of Technology, or TU Berlin for short. He is, according to his own grandiose self-description, driven by the shining example of An Ch’ang-nam 安昌男, Korea’s first pilot, who emigrates to China after the antiKorean riots following the Great Kantō Earthquake to join the anti-Japanese movement by running a military flight school there.339 Typically, Berliners would counter 339 In 1986 Chang published his own memoir in book format. In addition, we have one long interview with him and his wife and son. In both sources, many crucial issues and questions regarding his time in Germany are cut short or blended out: Chang Kŭk, Segye kwahak kihaeng: han igonghaktoŭi palchach’wi [World science journey: In the footsteps of one student of engineering] (Seoul: P’ŏmyangsa, 1986), see especially the first chapter; 133 Frank Hoffmann such platitudes with the witty phrase “Ham Ses nich’ ‘ne Nummer kleener?” — Ain’t you got it in a smaller size? And as Chang Kŭk rearranges the aims of his ambitions, it seems he learns this lesson quickly. Despite his noble nationalist aims, Chang jumps headlong into arms construction for the Third Reich the first chance he gets. In 1937 the Nazis start to create a so-called Defense Industrial Faculty V (Wehrtechnische Fakultät V). (Today’s Teufelsberg, the “Devil’s Mountain,” was piled up with part of the rubble from that project.) All this is supposed to be part of Hitler’s “Germania” city. Chang’s timing and his specific subject of study, airplane technology, gets him right in the middle of this, into the hard core of Germany’s wartime technology development. Chang arrives in Berlin in the summer of 1935 and starts at TU Berlin the following year, at the very time when most other Koreans are leaving and no more new students are coming from Korea. Chang Kŭk’s brothers and sisters either reside in the United States or have been there, and he is the only one left in Korea without any overseas education. In preparation for his study, Chang regularly visits Tŏkwŏn Abbey of the German Benedictines to learn some German. In mid-July 1935 he departs Korea by train, travels through Manchukuo and the entire Soviet Union. As one of three Korean engineering students, he studies seven and a half years in Berlin, according to his own information, which brings us to the end of 1942. Chang says in an interview (see footnote 339) that he graduated TU Berlin in 1940, but that he lost his university diploma and related documents later when leaving for Switzerland. Be that as it may, the “Nazi state exam” for engineering, already reported in the “Nazi Honors Obtained” newspaper article (for his being the first Asian to pass it in January 1939), is the regime’s newly introduced state certification and is valued more highly than the traditional university diploma by NS institutions.340 Later, of course, after the lost war and the regime’s end, this degree becomes null and void. Chang is now a full member of the Japanese–German Aviation Society (Nichi– Doku Kōkū Kyōkai 日獨航空協會) and is thus, specifically after the Tripartite Pact, automatically involved in the military research and war effort projects that concern both countries. Technological cooperation between Germany and Japan is very close, and thoroughly to Japan’s advantage, in that Japan is granted numerous licenses for Chang Kŭk, Min Hwa-sik, Chang Chin, and interviewer Chi Yong-t’aek, “Inch’ŏni naŭn ch’oegoŭi sŏkhak, Chang Kŭk paksa” [Inch’ŏn’s top-class scholar, Dr. Chang Kŭk], Hwanghae munhwa 5, no. 4 (December 1997): 206–231. 340 The TU Berlin campus was completely destroyed by Allied bombing in 1943, and there are hardly any student files left. The student admissions books from 1936 to 1943, however, have survived, but there is no trace of “Paul Keuk Chang” to be found in there, also no academic degree certificate, while the remaining files at the university’s central administrative office (Zentrale Universitätsverwaltung) do not show any sort of record regarding Chang’s internship in the defense industry or elsewhere either. Most of this information was received from the University Archive, TU Berlin, letter dated 10 September 2013. 134 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s the reproduction of the latest German wartime technologies. This cooperation is especially close in aeronautical research and aircraft production. Japan has even before signing the Anti-Comintern Pact about 20 scientifically trained Army officers working and doing research in Berlin, several of whom are involved in aeronautical engineering. The British Military Attaché in Tōkyō, for example, identifies a Major Takase Kenji who is transferred in fall of 1936 directly from the army’s Air Technical Research Laboratory (Kōkū Gijutsu Kenkyūjo 航空技術硏究所) at Tachikawa 立川 to Berlin.341 By 1943 the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force has 14 officers stationed in Berlin, the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service has eight such technical specialists there, and another 15 engineers had been sent from other Japanese institutions, all of them strictly engaged in aircraft related technology transfer. Kawasaki, for example, designs its Army bombers around BMW engines, and the blueprints for and samples of the Daimler-Benz DB 603 fighter motors that Chang would work on reach Japan immediately after going into production in Genshagen.342 During the 1936 Berlin Olympics, when Chang has been in Berlin for only a year, he and three other Korean students participate at the Games in the gliding demonstrations. At the time, gliding was not an Olympic discipline (nor is it now); but the rules allow Olympic host countries to introduce one of their national sports to the world, and the Germans chose gliding (see fig. 60). That first time, gliding only has the status of a “demonstration sport,” so there is no competitive contest and no gold or other medals are given, just awards.343 The demonstrations take place at BerlinStaaken Airfield (where the Zeppelin airships had once been built). Seven nations participate, and Chang’s team receives special awards for both flying skills and mechanical engineering.344 Chang Kŭk and Kim Sŏng-gong 金成功 are in charge of engineering while Yu Chae-sŏng 劉在晟 and Kim Paek-p’yŏng pilot their glider. Like Chang, Kim Sŏng-gong studies aeronautical engineering at TU Berlin.345 Yu Chaesŏng is the third of the three Korean engineering students at TU Berlin. He is married to a German, and in 1940, after ten years in Berlin, returns to Korea with a doctoral degree in hand, accompanied by his wife Monika and their two offspring.346 Chang Kŭk would meet Yu again in the 1950s at the University of Notre Dame in the United States, where Chang earns a PhD in aeronautics.347 341 See the report by F.S.G. Piggott, British Embassy, Tōkyō, “Report No. 23, confidential,” dated 8 December 1936, 4–5, The National Archives (TNA), file FO262/1928. 342 Cf. Hans-Joachim Braun, “Technology Transfer under Conditions of War: German Aerotechnology in Japan during the Second World War,” History of Technology 11 (1986): 1–23. 343 Gliding might have become a regular Olympic sport at the Helsinki Games in 1940 had they not been cancelled because of World War II. Also see “Olympiade-Flugveranstaltungen” [Olympic Flight Events], Flugsport 28, no. 17 (19 August 1936): 402–405. 344 See the morning edition of the Tonga ilbo, 12 July 1936. 345 See Yonghŭnggangin (pseud.), “Kujuesŏ hwalyakhanŭn inmultŭl,” 82. 346 See Chosŏn ilbo, 30 September 1939; Maeil sinbo, 15 April 1940 (with a family photo). 347 See Maeil kyŏngje, 19 July 1999. 135 Frank Hoffmann The fourth crew member, Kim Paek-p’yŏng, whom Chang would also meet again after the war in the United States (in the mid-1950s both live in Maryland), works in a field unrelated to technology. But an entry in a 1940 issue of the aviation magazine Flugsport lists Kim as a recipient of the Glider Proficiency Badge (Segelflieger-Leistungsabzeichen),348 which, given the year, tells us that he is a member of the National Socialist Flyers Corps (Nationalsozialistisches Fliegerkorps, or NSFK), a paramilitary Nazi organization. After studying sociology in Japan for two years, Kim had gone to Berlin in 1925. There he takes the usual German language classes at the Böttinger Institute, passes some supplementary examinations equivalent to a Prussian Realgymnasium degree, and then studies physical anthropology (including courses in biology) from winter 1927, obtaining a doctorate in that field in 1933. Having been active in the 1919 March First Movement, Kim had even been imprisoned for a year, and is said to have worked with Yi Kŭng-no in 1925 to publish the political exile magazine Haebwa 해봐 [Try it!] for the Koryŏ Student Corps.349 As a March First Movement activist, his remains were transferred from the U.S. to South Korea in 2009 for a national hero’s burial, with a presidential eulogy and the state’s highest honors (fig. 61).350 At the time of the Berlin Olympics, when he participates with Chang Kŭk and the other two students in the sailplane gliding competition, Kim is already steeped in a second degree program in medicine. In June 1939 he takes his state exam in medicine at Berlin University and receives his approbation as a physician. Kim Chae-wŏn, the later director of the South Korean National Museum introduced earlier, states in his memoirs, written in the late 1980s, that Kim Paekp’yŏng emigrated to the United States after World War II and still lives there.351 And indeed, Kim left long after the war. As late as 1943, the Berlin address directory lists him as “Dr. phil.” (his 1933 doctorate in anthro- (Fig. 61) Chungang ilbo newspaper of 14 April 2009, with a photo showing the remains of Kim Paek-p’yŏng and five other Korean American pology) and medical phy- how patriots are being solemnly escorted from Incheon International Airport sician (his 1939 degree) to the Korean National Cemetery. 348 Kim received the badge in February 1940. See “Inhaber des Segelflieger-Leistungsabzeichens” [Recipients of the Glider Proficiency Badge], Flugsport 32, no. 23 (6 November 1940): 397. 349 See Yonghŭnggangin (pseud.), “Kujuesŏ hwalyakhanŭn inmultŭl,” 82; Hong, “1920-nyŏndae yurŏbesŏŭi han’guk tongnip undong,” 447. But Hong misconstrues the source of the transcription ヘ―バ― in a late 1925 Special Higher Police (Kōtō Keisatsu) report as Heba 헤바. 350 This received extensive media coverage; see Tonga ilbo and Chungang ilbo, 14 April 2009. 351 See Kim, Pangmulgwan’gwa hanp’yŏngsaeng, 40. 136 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s residing in a villa at a most exclusive address in Berlin-Grunewald 352 — the former primary residence of the industrial magnate and Siemens director Alfred Berliner. Kim’s own salary at the time would not cover buying or even renting such a villa, so some of the funds would most likely come from his family back in Korea. The third son of Kim Han-sŭng 金漢昇, Kim Paek-p’yŏng has no financial worries. A big landowner from Yŏsu 麗水, South Chŏlla Province, his father is also influential in regional politics and the region’s fisheries industry and further enriches his estate during the 1930s by acting as an official advisor to the Government-General of Chōsen. The only Berlin Korean who stays on in Germany after the war, Kim earns a second doctoral degree in medicine from Göttingen University in 1947. Not a word of Kim’s postwar vita mentions the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWIA) in Berlin-Dahlem;353 yet, it is there that he finishes his first, 1933, doctoral degree with a thesis on racial differences in embryonic pig skulls.354 His thesis adviser is the institute’s founding father and director Eugen Fischer, who in May 1933 is also elected president of Berlin University. That makes Kim’s adviser and promoter the most powerful man in Berlin academics. In the 1910s Fischer had made a name for himself with his studies on “bastards” and miscegenation in humans in colonial German Southwest Africa. As is well documented, Hitler had been a great admirer of Fischer’s work (and that of Fritz Lenz). It was through reading their book on human heredity and eugenics 355 during his imprisonment in Landsberg that Hitler became familiar with the concept of the “final solution,” transferring its application from the “Negro problem” to the “Jewish problem.” Fischer’s coauthor made sure to claim the intellectual paternity of Hitler’s anti-intellectual outbursts on race and biological “purity” as early as 1931 when he writes that terms and passages from their own “work are reflected in Hitler’s phrases” and that Hitler “embraced the essential ideas of race hygiene and their importance”356 352 On Beymestraße 23; after a street renaming in 1955, this became Furtwänglerstraße 23. See the CV attached to Baeckpyeng Kim, “Der hohe Geradstand in vergleichend geburtshilflicher und phylogenetischer Betrachtung” [The posterior position from a comparative obstetric and phylogenetic point of view] (Unpublished diss., Göttingen University, 1947). 354 The KWIA had Kim’s thesis published in the format of a research article: Baeckyeng Kim, “Rassenunterschiede am embryonalen Schweineschädel und ihre Entstehung” [Racial differences in embryonic pig skulls and their origins], Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie 32, no. 3 (1933): 486–523. 355 Hitler read the second edition of what was then already considered the standard textbook on racial hygiene, and after the NS takeover this work, usually referred to as the “BaurFischer-Lenz,” was used as the “scientific” basis for the Nazi’s eugenic mass sterilization programs: Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz, Grundriß der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene [Foundations of human heredity and eugenics], 2nd expanded ed. (Munich: J.F. Lehmanns, 1923). British and American readers were no less interested in the topic — the English edition appeared 1931 in London and New York. And in volume one of its 4th edition (1936, p. 172) Fischer now also refers to Kim Paek-p’yŏng. 356 Fritz Lenz, in a 1931 book review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf [My struggle], quoted in the 353 137 Frank Hoffmann as they had been defined in their book.357 As Hans-Walter Schmuhl points out in his meticulously researched and enlightening work on the KWIA, institutionalized racism, and the role of the sciences, Fischer even styles himself in a July 1933 speech on “The Concept of the Volkish State, Considered Biologically” “as the mastermind who paved the way”358 for the new NS state. Soon after the war, a former colleague, now in the United States, urges that Fischer “be put on the list of war criminals.”359 But that never happens. As Hitler is impressed by Fischer, Fischer is no less impressed by Kim. In his first annual activity report for the institute under the Nazi government, Fischer introduces and summarizes Kim’s published dissertation on its very first page (see fig. 62).360 Later, in a 1940 letter to Otmar von Verschuer, Fischer points out how Kim’s work (and that of Rita Hauschild) on race differences helped him come up with concepts and practical strategies for “breeding embryonic material”361 in experiments, a major step in the development of genetics. As the historian of the KWIA points out, “[t]hese two works were of particular importance for the future development of the institute” since “Fischer used the works by Kim and Hauschild as important building blocks in the formulation of his newly conceptualized research program in 1938.”362 From 1933 onwards, while studying medicine at Berlin University, and probably even monograph by Hans-Walter Schmuhl, The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, 1927–1945: Crossing Boundaries. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 259 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 152. 357 The main sources informing Hitler’s race ideology, however, were rather international ideas based on prevalent beliefs in social Darwinism, and not just some particular 1920s publications by physical anthropologists from Germany. Hitler had little to fall back on as a concrete model for his folkish state and a program of racial purification. The closest thing to a model — however incomplete in his view — was, in fact, the United States, with its immigration policies based on health and race, as he clearly pointed out in the “Subjects and Citizens” chapter of Mein Kampf. Among the sources of his anti-Semitic conspiracy theory was Henry Ford’s The International Jew. And when the German edition of The Passing of the Great Race by the American Eugenics Society’s director Madison Grant came out in 1925, this became “his Bible” — as he told Grant in a letter. Even Hitler’s “Nordic race” concept seems little more than a copy of the American eugenicist’s “nordisizing” agenda. For further details, see Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2009). 358 Schmuhl, The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, 134. 359 Franz Weidenreich, “On Eugen Fischer,” Science, n.s., 104, no. 2704 (25 October 1946): 399. 360 See Eugen Fischer, “Tätigkeitsbericht des Kaiser Wilhelm-Instituts für Anthropologie, menschl. Erblehre und Eugenik” [Activity report of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics], [1933], I. Abt., Rep. 1A, Nr. 2404-2, KWIA documents, Archives of the Max Planck Society, Berlin. 361 Letter by Eugen Fischer to Otmar von Verschuer, dated 8 March 1940, quoted in Schmuhl, The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, 248, footnote 19. Fischer also referenced Kim’s work in the same fashion a year later in a DFG application of 13 March 1941; see page 300, footnote 238, in the same book. 362 Schmuhl, The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, 173. 138 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s (Fig. 62) Eugen Fischer’s 1933 annual KWIA activity report, summarizing Kim Paek-p’yŏng’s work on racial distinctions suggested by the developmental stages of the skulls of 11 pig breeds. © Archives of the Max Planck Society, Berlin. (Fig. 63) The skull specialist for Nazi race research Kim Paek-p’yŏng (standing) at the KWIA, with a colleague who measures plaster casts of human hands, ca. 1933/34. © Archives of the Max Planck Society, Berlin. (Fig. 64) Kim Paek-p’yŏng standing in the center of a group of eugenics researchers with KWIA director Eugen Fischer (front), family, and his son Hermann in SS uniform, 5 June 1934. © Archives of the Max Planck Society, Berlin. 139 Frank Hoffmann before that, Kim works at the KWIA as its skull specialist (see fig. 63). A careful look at Fischer’s official, heretofore unpublished, photograph of his 60th birthday gathering (see fig. 64) gives us a good idea of how close he is to the institute’s director and university president. The unlikely arrangement of the group in the photo, uniting his family with his academic kin, is fittingly the work of a eugenicist: the godfather of eugenics and his youngest descendants take the front row, while the protection-seeking female members of his extended family flock around him, his two most important academic colleagues (and former students) Fritz Lenz and Verschuer (Josef Mengele’s thesis adviser and Fischer’s later successor as director) are positioned on the extreme left and right respectively, flanking the blood-line and intellectual offspring — his own son Hermann in SS uniform and the young researcher Kim Paek-p’yŏng — who stand next to each other at the center of the group, while those of seemingly less importance are set in the back. The KWIA is by design a fairly international institution. Established during the Weimar Republic, it reaches somewhat farther back to colonial times ideologically and was co-financed by the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. Apart from Kim there are other international scholars, such as Fleury Cuello from Venezuela, and at least nine or ten others.363 The same international setup applies to other KWI institutes during NS times, such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research, where the famous Soviet biologist Timoféeff-Ressovsky, a specialist of radiation genetics, continues to work until the end of the war. Some of these international researchers stay on while others leave Germany during the 1930s, like Tao Yunkui 陶雲逵 (aka Yun-Kuei Tao), who had written a thesis about Chinese Male–European female hybrids (“Chinesen-Europäerinnen-Kreuzung,” 1935). The last we see of him is in a group photo of a September 1937 congress in Tübingen, together with many other eugenics experts, among them Josef Mengele.364 Tao returns to China; but Kim stays to help “purify” the “master race.” While the eugenicists at the KWIA fully embrace the new state of “applied biology,” the regime makes very sure to clarify the relationship between politics and applied science from early on. The propaganda magazine Illustrierter Beobachter leaves no doubt about what is expected of the KWIA: “Here is where the need to preclude humans with hereditary diseases from reproducing is scientifically justified. (...) Here is where the disastrous consequences of miscegenation are studied,” reads the text of a most unambiguous and impressively illustrated article, showing photos of Fischer studying human X-rays and other re363 364 See ibid., 55. See image #17 (“Fischer_Eugen_17”) of Eugen Fischer photo folder, KWIA documents, Archives of the Max Planck Society, Berlin. During this 9th congress in Tübingen, the German Society for Physical Anthropology (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Physische Anthropologie) renamed itself the German Society for Racial Research (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenforschung). 140 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s searchers measuring skulls and ears, comparing hand prints, and more. “To preserve and to purify the lives of our German blood community of all harmful influences, that is a political task. Gathering the empirical knowledge to do so, that is a preliminary task for scientific research.”365 From beginning to end, Kim is part of Fischer and Verschuer’s inner circle, which is verified in a postwar private letter from Fischer to Verschuer366 that indicates the names of the former top KWIA researchers and their “hiding” places — public hiding places such as hospitals and psychiatric clinics, to be sure, as none of the participants is ever searched out or criminally charged. We know well that Mengele had sent hundreds of blood samples and body parts from Auschwitz back to Verschuer at the KWIA, and that the institute’s researchers then used them to conduct their experiments. We also know that Kim, apart from working at the Gynecological Clinic of the Charité from 1939 to the end of May 1942, while also continuing his embryonic research at the KWIA (both tasks may well have been linked), was, according to his own CV, active at the Gynecological Clinic in Cracow in German occupied Poland from June 1942 to May 1944. Anyone can imagine what a eugenicist and physician specializing in embryonic development in connection with race differences who works for the top NS race research facility would do there; but this cannot be reconstructed, and not just because that was fated. Two months before the Soviets take Berlin, Verschuer burns the physical evidence and compromising paperwork and flees west, and most of the remaining documents are destroyed in the late 1960s.367 In 1953, Kim (now transcribing his name Baeck Pyeng Kim, in three parts) lands in the United States, apparently having been granted a special work permit by way of a congressional “bill of relief” (bill S. 585), introduced by Senator Frank Carlson, the former governor of Kansas.368 The hospital that becomes Kim’s employer could not be determined. Kansas only stops forced sterilizations in 1961. After 1945, many former NS eugenicists find employment in German hospitals or psychiatric clinics as doctors or pathologists, while very few (those who worked as camp doctors, like Mengele) 365 “Das Rassenbild im Stammbaum: Aus der Arbeit des Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituts für Anthropologie” [Racial determinism in the pedigree: From the work of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology], Illustrierter Beobachter 8, no. 31 (5 August 1933): 989. 366 See handwritten letter by Eugen Fischer to Otmar von Verschuer, dated 10 February 1947, III. Abt., Rep. 94, Nr. 69-6, KWIA documents, Archives of the Max Planck Society, Berlin. 367 This is reported by the first historian of the KWIA, the biochemist Benno Müller-Hill. His 1984 book Tödliche Wissenschaft [Murderous science] was, in his own words, “greeted by silence” in German science circles. In a later article, he points out that many boxes of extant KWIA correspondence and documents were destroyed many years after the Nazi period at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics. See Benno Müller-Hill, “The Blood from Auschwitz and the Silence of the Scholars,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 21, no. 3 (1999): 358–359. 368 United States Congress, Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 83d Congress, First Session, vol. 99, part 1 (January 3, 1953 to February 25, 1953) (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1953), 513. 141 Frank Hoffmann emigrate to South America. But, other than Kim, no one chooses to go to the U.S., which is by no means hostile to eugenicists and their experiments and forced sterilizations during the 1940s and 1950s. Or, as the authors of a recent history of (Fig. 65) Kim Paek-p’yŏng’s 1960 Petition for U.S. Naturalization card with his eugenics in North current employer listed as Belchertown State Hospital (the official name was Belchertown State School). © U.S. National Archives and Records Administration America put it: (NARA). “whereas Germany ended coerced eugenic sterilization in 1945, the United States did not. Indeed, in some states, it was just then reaching its peak.”369 A little later, in the mid-1950s, Kim finds employment as a doctor at the Crownsville State Hospital,370 an overcrowded psychiatric hospital for African-American patients. In his postwar medical dissertation from Göttingen, now having moved from pig embryos to human embryos, he had already highlighted his sustained eugenicist views and research interests.371 The “Hospital for the Negro Insane of Maryland,” as it is called at the time, thus seems to offer an inviting experimental playground for a former Fischer student. George Phelps, at least, a black 369 Randall Hansen and Desmond S. King, Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 162. For more about this point, written as an unsettling political history of German–American relations, see Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 370 In May 1955, the Crownsville State Hospital sent a request to Berlin University for the academic records of their future employee. Due to the Cold War environment, that letter was delivered to West Berlin, where it was received by the Free University of Berlin, better known as FU Berlin, just established in late 1948 (while Berlin University, now renamed Humboldt Universiy, was located in East Berlin). FU Berlin nevertheless did confirm Kimʼs medical approbation of 1939. See letter by personnel manager Charles L. France at Crownsville State Hospital to Dean of Berlin University [sic, no faculty specified], dated 11 May 1955, Free University of Berlin, Archives, Presidentʼs Office, signature 378. 371 Although it is worded with remarkable caution, in response to the new political climate, Kim’s 1947 thesis (see e.g. p. 79) suggests that a sexual crossing of members of two different “races” (generating human genetic admixture) could lead to birth complications if the hereditary size and shape of a male skull is at variance with the female pelvis. (Many thanks to Hans-Walter Schmuhl for discussing this and other issues with me.) 142 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s deputy sheriff who used to escort African-Americans from the courthouse directly to the Crownsville’s C Building for the criminally insane, was “convinced that doctors subjected live patients to gruesome medical experiments akin to those practiced in Nazi concentration camps.”372 “Driven by curiosity, Phelps broke a lock on a building in the 1950s and entered a basement laboratory where he found jars of skulls and parts of women’s bodies. ‘I saw them with my own eyes, you understand? I was fascinated but disgusted.’”373 From 1958 to 1960 Kim is the resident pathologist at Carney Hospital in Dorchester (just south of Boston). He stays in Massachusetts, but his 1960 U.S. naturalization application (see fig. 65) now indicates his employer as Belchertown State School, a most infamous psychiatric clinic for its inhumane treatment of patients. This is well documented in the tellingly entitled book Crimes against Humanity, which was written by the parent 374 of a patient at Belchertown who successfully sued the school on behalf of his son. Let us now return to Chang Kŭk, the Berlin gliding competition, and aeronautics. (The Kims and the Changs, by the way, are closely interconnected: in 1960 Kim’s older brother Kim U-p’yŏng 金佑枰 works for Chang’s older brother, the ROK Prime Minister, as Minister of Reconstruction.) The strong German interest in gliding sports, first during the Weimar Republic and then later during the Third Reich, is not quite as benign and nonmilitary as it might seem. This can only be explained in connection with the outcome of the First World War. While the Treaty of Versailles imposed several regulations preventing German companies from manufacturing aircraft and even having an air force, it was mostly the search for alternatives that pushed Germany to become the leading nation in glider technology. It is this same Treaty of Versailles, interestingly enough, that also opens the door for the Japanese to get a close look at advanced German aviation technology. As one of the victorious powers of World War I, Japan participates in the international inspection team of Germany’s early aviation industries and is therefore provided with unrestricted access. What is more, “as part of Germany’s war reparations, Japan was to receive scores of German aircraft” and “German engineers as key figures”375 would many years later be of crucial assistance in developing both the navy and army’s air forces in Japan. The restrictions on technological activity in the new German state after the war are in any case less stringent than history textbooks lead us to believe. As early 372 Daniel de Vise, in an article about Crownsville, Washington Post, 12 August 2005. The quote is from Tom Marquardt’s appalling article “Tragic Chapter of Crownsville State Hospital’s Legacy” in The Capital of 5 June 2013. 374 This was Dr. Benjamin Ricci, with his book Crimes against Humanity: A Historical Perspective (New York: iUniverse, 2004). For a recent study about Belchertown, see Robert Hornick, The Girls and Boys of Belchertown: A Social History of the Belchertown State School for the Feeble-Minded (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). 375 Juergen Paul Melzer, “Assisted Takeoff: Germany and the Ascent of Japan’s Aviation, 1910–1937” (Unpublished PhD diss., Princeton University, 2014), 11. 373 143 Frank Hoffmann as 1921, Foreign Minister Rathenau signs a secret treaty with the Soviets that allows the Germans to manufacture aircraft in Soviet territory, and thus the actual rearmament of Germany and related aeronautical research begins almost as soon as the First World War is over. Even the mass-produced Olympic Games booklet about gliding states quite clearly that sailplanes are instrumental to the technical development of motorized airplanes as well as for other technical innovations (of course, by then the Versailles conditions are no longer in force).376 Gliding is one sport that receives massive state sponsorship from the NS regime. From 1940, Chang Kŭk is in a doctoral program that requires some internships. Aside from his theoretical training at TU Berlin, his internship soon becomes a parttime job at the German Experimental Institute for Aviation (Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt, DVL) in Berlin-Adlershof.377 The DVL, run by Göring’s Ministry of Aviation (Reichsluftfahrtministerium), serves as an inter-institutional interface of war-related knowledge production and is the place for all aeronautical research and development projects. As early as 1938 Göring boasts that the personnel working on aviation research increased more than ten fold since the Nazi’s seizure of power.378 The technical and research capabilities Chang finds there are better than anywhere else in the world. The war begins, the rules change, Chang goes along. He finds fulltime employment in the arms industry, testing and helping to develop motors for the Luftwaffe’s Messerschmitt and Focke-Wulf fighter planes. In his own words: “Eventually I worked in the arms industry at a company in Genshagen that produced military aircraft engines. This enabled me to enter the doctoral program, working at the factory during the day and preparing my doctoral thesis on internal combustion engines at night.”379 What the hard working engineering student who toils away for the greater good of his academic credential omits from the story is that the mentioned company is the Daimler-Benz Motoren GmbH, and that Genshagen, in the neighborhood of Berlin, is its top secret aircraft manufacturing and research facility, where (at the time he left) half of the labor is carried out by concentration camp prisoners: “In Genshagen, 6,828 workers produced 1,427 aircraft engines in 1938, and by 1939, the workforce had increased only very little (6,860), it was already 2,249 engines. (...) By end of 1942 there were 6,011 foreigners among the 13,146 376 See Propaganda-Ausschuß für die Olympischen Spiele Berlin 1936, Segelflug [Gliding], Olympia-Heft 24 (Berlin: H.A. Braun, [1936]), 14–15. The four sailplanes presented at the Olympics are variations of the famous Habicht model. Later in the war a modified version of it, the Stumpy Hawk, is used to train pilots to land the Me 163 rocket-powered fighter. 377 See Chang Kŭk et al., “Inch’ŏni naŭn ch’oegoŭi sŏkhak,” 215. 378 See Hermann Göring, “Luftfahrttechnik und Luftfahrtforschung: Rede vor der Akademie der Luftfahrtforschung am 1. März 1938” [Aeronautics and aerospace research: Speech to the Academy of Aviation Research, 1 March 1938], in Hermann Göring: Reden und Aufsätze, ed. Erich Gritzbach (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1940), 304. 379 Chang Kŭk, in Chang Kŭk et al., “Inch’ŏni naŭn ch’oegoŭi sŏkhak,” 217. 144 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s employees in Genshagen, of which 2,778 were Russian forced laborers.”380 Later, in 1944, a special labor detachment camp for female prisoners, a subcamp of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the KZ-Außenlager Genshagen, would be built at the Genshagen plant. Chang does not finish his doctoral degree. His autobiography goes like this: he gets sick, and his German friend Karl Kahsnitz, the compiler of an English–German dictionary for special terms in aeronautics, introduces him to a well-known professor at the Charité who uses his authority to send him to Switzerland for treatment. There he again gets support from the Benedictines, this time through the Swiss-born Father Zeno Bucher, a scientist and monk otherwise associated with St. Ottilien Abbey who deals with modern nuclear physics and its lessons for philosophy and publishes a book on the problem of matter in modern atomic physics in 1939. Bucher spends the war years in Switzerland — whether he works there for the Nazis or is there in exile cannot be satisfactorily determined. He assists the Korean in communicating with his father in Korea and receiving financial support from his family. After recovering, so goes his story, Chang works for the Swiss company Brown, Boveri & Cie, better known as BBC. The firm is a major engineering company that produces, among other things, advanced electric motors and generators.381 One wonders, though, how a Charité physician can, in 1942, in the middle of the war, send a highly trained engineer with very special, strategically important and classified information about German weapons development to a neutral, foreign country. On the other hand, it is interesting to note that the mentioned Swiss company BBC Chang starts working for is known as a supplier of turbines, depth controls, and other technology for German U-boats and warships. This seems strange only if we buy into the notion of “Swiss neutrality.” But such neutrality did not exist, as has been established by a $13 million independent history project commissioned by the Swiss Parliament. It determined that the cooperation between Nazi Germany and Switzerland went far beyond connections in the banking and financing sector, and that Switzerland’s role was more like that of an economic satellite for the Axis, providing Germany with, among other things, Swiss-made military technology. It points out that one of the German subsidiaries of BBC, Chang’s employer, BBC in Mannheim, in March–April 1943 uses 1,693 slave workers (that comes to 30% of their total workforce at that location); and Stotz-Kontakt, another BBC subsidiary, “employs” at the same time prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp. 382 380 Helmuth Bauer, “Genshagen,” in Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. 3, ed. Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2006), 184. 381 See Chang Kŭk et al., “Inch’ŏni naŭn ch’oegoŭi sŏkhak,” 217–218. 382 See Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland — Second World War, Switzerland, National Socialism, and the Second World War: Final Report (Zürich: Pendo, 2002), 313– 314. 145 Frank Hoffmann BBC, both in Switzerland and through its subsidiaries in Germany, is part of the regular supply network of wartime weapon technology and electronics for the German Luftwaffe and the Navy (Kriegsmarine).383 It might be a little too naive to think that Chang Kŭk, in the middle of the war, would have been sent to Switzerland for the good mountain air and then end up working at the BBC headquarters. Two years after the war is over, Chang moves on to the United States (where his brother should soon be the South Korean Ambassador). In 1949 he earns two Master’s degrees, one at New York University, the other one from Harvard University. He stays in the United States to move on with his academic career instead of returning to Korea. Only later, in 1978, after his retirement in the U.S. when he is about sixty, does he return to become a professor at KAIST. Chang proves to be a very hard working, almost obsessed, and no doubt, also a highly talented scientist. His special research topic in aeronautics becomes the control of flow separation, obviously a very essential research area in aeronautics and a topic he also writes a well-respected book about.384 Even in his 1960s publications we still see how much of his research relates to his wartime Berlin research when seeing him quoting early 1940s DLV publications on the flow separation control theme. Of course, like Wernher von Braun and other top Nazi engineers and war criminals in the aeronautics sector, many of those quoted DLV scientists do by then anyway enjoy the benefits of postwar “technology transfer” and work now under brighter skies in Arizona or California. A final obscurity that quite well illuminates Chang’s no-matter-what attitude is how he finishes up with his Nazi past. In 1951 he earns a PhD degree from the University of Notre Dame with a thesis entitled “The Wave Resistance of the Ship.” But then, already a professor of mechanical engineering at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., while working on one of his many projects for the U.S. military, in this case for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), he travels to Europe in 1962. The result is a quite impressive survey on “Research Flow Separation in Western Europe”385 based, in part, on his personal visits to all of the major research institutes. The actual bewildering thing though, is that he now, twenty years later, still feels compelled to finish his doctoral degree at TU Berlin with a second doctoral thesis.386 383 Of special interest in relation to Chang might be the development of the Messerschmitt Me 264 long-range maritime aircraft, which was being developed at full speed at the time he moved to Zürich. One of the options for the Me 264 under discussion had been pusher turboprops developed by BBC. 384 Paul K. Chang, Separation of Flow (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1970). 385 Paul K. Chang, “Research Flow Separation in Western Europe,” unclassified report AFOSR 4854 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America and United States Air Force, Office of Scientific Research, 1963). 386 The bibliographic details are: Paul K. Chang, “Analyse der aerodynamischen Ablation einer Metallkugel” [Analysis of the aerodynamic ablation of a metal ball] (Unpublished dissertation, Berlin Institute of Technology, 1963). 146 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s (c) Kang Se-hyŏng, a Propagandist of Blood-and-Soil Tribalism We now move from the cold scientist to the hot ideologist, looking briefly at the career of Kang Se-hyŏng, an uncle of the three-time conservative presidential candidate Yi Hoe-ch’ang 李會昌 and a Berlin student who openly identifies himself with Nazi ideologies and propagates those to Korean youths during the late colonial period. He continues to do so in postliberation Korea as a member of Syngman Rhee’s Liberal Party (Chayudang 自由黨, founded 1951), and as a Parliamentarian he is given the nickname “Korea’s Hitler” (Han’gugŭi Hit’ŭllŏ)387 for good reason. The better known personality openly advocating herrenvolk Nazi ideologies in postliberation Korea is of course An Ho-sang, who — coming from Shanghai — studied philosophy at Friedrich Schiller University Jena from 1925 to 1929. (Jena is a small city in eastern Germany with a strong academic tradition, especially in philosophy: Hegel, Schiller, Fichte had all been professors there. It is seen as the center of German idealism, which is again understood as the root of German Nazism. The Nazis in fact pointed to Fichte and other philosophers in the idealist school to build their own legitimacy. That might explain some of An Ho-sang’s views, considering he was a graduate in philosophy at Jena.) Apart from his German training An, like others discussed here, is heavily into the Tan’gun myth and Taejonggyo. Bruce Cumings provides a concise and entertaining portrait of this “homespun fascist” in the second volume of his Origins of the Korean War that nicely sums it up.388 As for Kang Se-hyŏng, he has only very recently been “rediscovered” in Korea as a colonial period Korean fascist and one of the major figures of the postliberation Korean National Youth Corps (Chosŏn Minjok Ch’ŏngnyŏndan 朝鮮民族靑年團, in 1948 to become merged into the Taehan Youth Corps) — leading the organization that closely follows ideological and organizational details of the Nazi Brownshirts together with Yi Pŏm-sŏk 李範奭 and An Ho-sang.389 During the first half of the 1930s, fascism has a strong hold on Korean culture — that is Italian fascism, however, with its leader Mussolini being depicted as heroic in Korean magazines.390 This trend is perfectly in line with social Darwinism and other popular Darwinian modes of 387 This is even mentioned in his short vita at the National Institute of Korean History: URL #29. 388 See Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2, The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 211–215. 389 It is Fujii Takeshi 藤井たけし, the current head of the Institute for Korean Historical Studies (Yŏksa Munje Yŏn’guso 歷史問題硏究所) in Seoul and the author of a book on Korean fascism, who analyzed Kang’s role and pointed out his importance in post-1945 ROK right-wing politics. See [Fujii Takeshi] Hujii Tak’esi, “Chosŏn Minjok Ch’ŏngnyŏndanŭi kiwŏne taehan chaegŏmt’o” [Reconsidering the origins of Korean National Youth Corps], Yŏksa yŏn’gu 23 (2012): 149–181, and here specifically pp. 174–176. 390 For a summary, see Kim Hyo-sin, “Han’guk kŭndae munhwawa It’aria p’asijŭm tamron: 1930-nyŏndaerŭl chungsimŭro” [Discourse on modern Korean culture and Italian fascism: Focus on the 1930s], Pigyo munhak 42 (2007): 161–198. 147 Frank Hoffmann thinking that have found their way into all ideologies, local or international, that are of influence in Korea. Mussolini’s fascism appeals through its smooth packaging of the desire for a mythic, pre-capitalist past, together with a technological, self-determined future — nationalism, heroism, modernization, technology, and an artistic and literary avant-garde (mostly futurism). On the other hand, what Kang Se-hyŏng and An Ho-sang propagate from the 1930s to the 1950s is the German National Socialist version of fascism, which pairs nationalism, technology, and progress with radical traditionalism while blatantly emphasizing ethnic racism and anti-Semitism. Then again, beginning in the mid-1930s, An and Kang are not alone with their admiration for German-style fascism: here and there we find articles with titles like “I worship Hitler”391 in Korean publications. Much of the organizational setup and, interestingly enough, the ideological outview of the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth, HJ for short), the NSDAP’s paramilitary youth organization, is at that time emulated in Japan and then also applied to youth education projects in Korea.392 Even a Korean Eugenics Society (Chosŏn Usaeng Hyŏphoe 朝鮮優生協會) is being established a few months after Hitler comes to power in Germany. The driving force behind it is its co-founder Dr. Yi Kap-su 李甲秀 (aka Kap-Soo Lee, 1899–1973), a physician and 1924 Berlin University graduate in medicine. Yi had actually been the first Korean to receive a doctorate from a German university, followed later that same year by two other students of medicine at the University of Freiburg. He also edits the society’s journal Usaeng 優生 [Aristogenesis], were he publishes his partial translations and summaries of the new Nazi “race hygiene” laws which inspire him to push for (somewhat milder) eugenic legislation in colonial Korea. 393 After liberation the society changes its name but survives. Yi Kap-su now works with and is supported by Syngman Rhee and the ultra-right-wing leaders Yi Pŏm-sŏk and An Ho-sang, and when in 1957 an attempt fails to introduce a National Eugenics Law (modeled in good part on late colonial policies towards lepers), he is utterly disappointed.394 391 Kwŏn Sŭng-nak, “Nanŭn Hit’ŭllŏrŭl sungsanghanda” [I worship Hitler], Haktŭng 14, no. 3 (March 1935): 5–7. 392 Consult the new, detailed case study by Sayaka Chatani about the history of the Japaneseimplemented youth organization and one of its former members in a village in South Ch’ungch’ŏng Province. The entire setup, the organizational structures, activities, physical and also ideological training, and many of the details (such as particular slogans) are strikingly similar to those of the Hitlerjugend, far more than the author indicates: Sayaka Chatani, “Nation-Empire: Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea 1895– 1945” (Unpublished PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014), 248–329. 393 See Usaeng 1 (September 1934): 6–9, 47, and elsewhere. For further details, see Sin Yŏngjŏn, “Singminji chosŏnesŏ usaeng undongŭi chŏn’gaewa sŏnggyŏk: 1930-nyŏndae Usaengŭl chungsimŭro” [The development and nature of the eugenics movement in colonial Korea: Focusing on the 1930s Usaeng], Ŭisahak 15, no. 2 (December 2006): 140– 142. 394 See the interview article with Yi and his wife in the Tonga ilbo, 8 April 1957. 148 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s (Fig. 66) »The Hitlerjugend’s Second Visit: German Youth Keeps Up the Fight!« — Just days before Germany invades Poland, Kang Se-hyŏng publishes his Hitler Youth article in the Kokumin shinpō (27 August 1939), the weekend supplement to the Japanese-language daily Keijō nippō. He discusses the government sponsored youth movement in Japan and Korea that (from 1938) emulates the German HJ under the naisen ittai slogan. For a little over two years, from November 1931 to January 1934, Kang Se-hyŏng is enrolled as a student at Berlin University.395 He witnesses Hitler’s seizure of power in early 1933, but experiences just the first year under the new regime. Reading through Kang’s many newspaper and magazine articles, one immediately notices how most contain a good portion of boastful remarks on his own inflated role as selfdeclared cultural mediator between Nazi politics, Nazi culture and Koreans, especially the Korean youth. He does not loose time to make contact with the Hitlerjugend and other party organizations. And in times of revolution his ardent unremitting pursuit to become a Korean Aryan bears fruit: as noted in his student records, from 1932 until he leaves in early 1934 he is given a job as lecturer for Korean language at the Oriental Seminar of Berlin University.396 Interestingly, in his article on cultural exchange between Korea and Germany, Kang gives much praise to the Marxist Yi Kŭng-no for having taught Korean language at Berlin University during the 1920s — another expression of patriotism that clearly outweighs political ideology — and then he builds his own legitimacy by emphasizing how he follows Yi’s footsteps by teach395 Kang is enrolled as a student under the name Se-hyong Kang with matriculation number 2261 of the 122nd Rectorate from 8 November 1931 to 24 January 1934. No academic degree has been recorded, and there is also no later re-enrollment noted. Information based on Kang’s archived university records (all records between 1931 and 1942 were searched): Archives of Humboldt University, UK, 122nd Rectorate, Student Lists. 396 The Oriental Seminar’s annual journal notes that “the Korean Kang left the services of the Seminar” at the end of the winter semester 1933–34 and returned to Tokio: “Chronik für die Zeit vom 15. Oktober 1933 bis 15. Oktober 1934” [Chronicle for the period from 15 October 1933 to 15 October 1934], Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen an der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, Abt. 1, Ostasiatische Studien 37 (1934): i. 149 Frank Hoffmann ing Korean language and literature.397 He states that he teaches at Berlin University after graduation, and after his return “home” (referring not to Korea but to Tōkyō, where he had lived between 1919 and 1931, and whereto he had returned after his stay in Germany), he usually gets introduced as a doctor of philosophy with a degree from Berlin. We see from the student records that his language teaching was actually done while being a student, and a graduation document or any other academic degree cannot be located at the Berlin University Archives,398 nor have this writer and the staff at the university library been able to locate a doctoral thesis by Kang or any hint of an earlier existence of such a work (which, if it ever existed, there should at least be a record of it).399 The historian Fuji Takeshi argues that, when visiting Berlin in spring of 1933, the anti-Japanese military leader Yi Pŏmsŏk met with Kang, whom he simply refers to as the person teaching at Berlin University in his extensive 1971 memoirs.400 Given Yi Pŏm-sŏk’s close association with the fascists, politically at least, and identification with their ideologies and organizational structures, and later his positions as the leader of the Korean National Youth Corps and Syngman Rhee’s Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, he may well have been further influenced by Kang’s Nazi agitations. On the other hand, an experienced independence activist and military leader like Yi (operating from China and at times for (Fig. 67) Entrance of an Imperial Japanese Army training camp for Korean volunteer soldiers near the Chinese nationalists, who also directly Seoul (Keijō), 1939, with NS swastika and Japanese cooperated with the Hitlerjugend, by the national flags, awaiting the visit of travel writer Colin Ross, a former Haushofer student and a close friend way) certainly would not fall for some of Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach. ideology in a snap. What is important is 397 See Kang, “Chosŏn munhwawa togil munhwaŭi kyoryu,” 117. Yi Kŭng-no, on the other hand, does not mind co-founding the International Philosophy Society (Kukche Ch’ŏrhakhoe 國際哲學會) with Kang in 1947 and seeing him become its president. This is at a time when Kang is at the height of power as a right-wing youth organization leader, while Yi is constantly engaged on the left. See Kyŏnghyang sinmun, 20 June 1947. 398 Confirmed by email by University Archive, Humboldt University, 14 October 2013. 399 Information confirmed by the head of the Search Support Team, University Library, Humboldt University, 6 January 2014. 400 See [Fujii], “Chosŏn Minjok Ch’ŏngnyŏndanŭi kiwŏne taehan chaegŏmt’o,” 175. 150 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s that Kang from now on has his place in Yi Pŏm-sŏk’s political organizations and always works closely at his side after liberation. That he can do this is again quite amazing, given that he had been a true believer in and an agitator for the virtues of Japanese Pan-Asian paternalism toward its colonial peoples, for the construct of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Dai Tōa Kyōeiken 大東亜共栄圏) that promises equal opportunities by emphasizing the universal brotherhood (isshi dōjin 一視 同仁 ) of Japanese and Koreans, said to stem from a common racial and cultural heritage (dōbun dōshu 同 文 同 種 , literally: same script, same race). While the Japanese at the time are not at all enthusiastic about all aspects of Nazism, they do adopt quite a number of institutional setups (the KdF was named as a model earlier) and some racial concepts about the Volk (culturally and racially bonded community) and related “blood-and-soil” slogans.401 After his return to Tōkyō, Kang is for some time the Director of Operations (shunin 主任) of the Japanese–German Cultural Institute (Nichi–Doku Bunka Kyōkai 日獨 文化協會 ), in German the Japanisch–Deutsches Kulturinstitut. Actually more of a research institute, it has a sister institute in Berlin, the Japan Institute (Japaninstitut), which was already mentioned when discussing Kuni Masami. At both organizations, Mitsui Takaharu, whom we already know is a model and patron for Pae Un-sŏng, becomes the most important financial and political benefactor. Mitsui also directly sponsors various related events and activities, such as the filming of a German Hitlerjugend delegation traveling throughout Japan, which Kang helps to organize for the association.402 For his years of “dedicated service,” Kang later receives special honors by the Hitlerjugend leader Baldur von Schirach, who, in his second function as Gauleiter of Vienna, deported 65,000 Viennese Jews to camps in Poland. While other former students returning from Berlin present their doctoral degrees to local newspapers, Kang proudly has a photo taken and published that shows him with a mass-produced yet autographed photo of Schirach (see fig. 68), making him an honorary Aryan.403 401 The German historian and Japanologist Gerhard Krebs argued that it was the Japanese moderates who won the power fight with the pro-fascist “totalitarian” wing of government around 1940/41. But, ironically enough, the moderates then still felt forced into war with the United States because of the American oil embargo. Thus, actual Nazi ideology continued to be popular only among right-wing factions of government. See Gerhard Krebs, “The German Nazi Party: A Model for Japan’s ‘New Order’ 1940–1?,” in Japanese–German Relations, 1895–1945: War, Diplomacy and Public Opinion, ed. Christian W. Spang and Rolf-Harald Wippich (London: Routledge, 2006), 180–199. 402 See Annette Hack, “Das Japanisch–Deutsche Kulturinstitut in Tōkyō in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus: Von Wilhelm Gundert zu Walter Donat” [The Japanese–German Cultural Institute in Tōkyō in the era of National Socialism: From Wilhelm Gundert to Walter Donat], Nachrichten der Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens 65, nos. 1–2 (1995): 91–93. 403 See Maeil sinbo, 24 July 1939. Kim Chae-wŏn also points to Kang’s media popularity as a intermediary for Schirach; see Kim, Pangmulgwan’gwa hanp’yŏngsaeng, 73. 151 Frank Hoffmann It still gets worse. Kang’s time truly comes when all ordinary cultural events, research, publishing, etc. are all replaced by the most barbaric propaganda. In the institute’s annual proceedings of 1939, for example, he coauthors a piece with the visiting scholar Otto Koellreutter, one of An Ho-sang’s (Fig. 68) Kang with his signed photo of Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach: former professors at »Honors for the Bright Korean Youth — Appreciation by the Chairman of the Jena University and German Hitlerjugend for Kang Se-hyŏng«, Maeil sinbo, 24 July 1939. a NSDAP member who would become one of the Freisler type of notorious Nazi judges and legal scholars whose writings are rightly removed from public libraries and circulation after 1945.404 Kang publishes many articles in the newspaper Maeil sinbo 每日申報 and the magazines Ch’unch’u 春秋, Chogwang 朝光, and Samch’ŏlli 三千里, the few mainstream, uncritical Korean language periodicals that are still allowed to publish in 1940 and afterwards. (The last regular issues of the Tonga ilbo and the Chosŏn ilbo come out on 10 August 1940.) That is Kang’s time! His articles deal with the Hitlerjugend, Nazi German literature, music, education, philosophy, sports, military, blitzkrieg, Kraft durch Freude, and all the race and blood-and-soil propaganda one can possibly imagine. Many articles read just like translations of clippings from the NSDAP paper Völkischer Beobachter, which they may well be, at least in part.405 At the same time, he celebrates Korean culture and cultural history and transfers Nazi icons and mythology one-to-one to Korea. The Holy Rhine River turns into the Holy Amnok-kang 鴨 綠 江 (Yalu River), Germanic knights turn into ancient Korean hwarang 花郞 warriors, and on and on.406 The special form of German racial fascism, 404 See Kang Se-hyŏng and Otto Koellreutter, “Nachisu Doitsuhō no tokushitsu ni tsuite — Das Wesen des deutschen Rechtes” [On the nature of the German Nazi law], Nichi-Doku bunka koenshu 12 (1939): 13–20. 405 This is well illustrated in Kang Se-hyŏng’s “‘Nach’isŭ’ŭi munhwa chŏngch’aek” [The cultural policy of the ‘Nazis’], Chogwang 7, no. 6 (June 1941): 86–90. 406 The best example for this one-to-one transfer is probably his gushing Ch’unch’u article from 1942: Kang Se-hyŏng, “Chosŏn munhwa manbo” [A stroll through Korean culture], Ch’unch’u 3, no. 2 (February 1942): 132–151. 152 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s Japanese colonialism, and Korean patriotism coalesce into a smooth combination because the Pan-Asianist, late colonial concept of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere seems to offer Kang (and many other Koreans at the time) some form of political and cultural equality — albeit a fascist version of equality, to be sure. While the whole construct is certainly more sick than slick, the inclusion of Nazi racial ideologies in this union has the effect of forcing Japanese and Koreans into the same ethnic boat vs. the white “Aryan” Westerners. After World War II and the liberation of Korea, Kang can put many of his weird ideologies into practice with the Korean National Youth Corps, but after the Korean War even politicians from his own party find his open continuous Nazist views shameful and an embarrassment to Korea, and he is publicly criticized.407 Still, he is able to keep his position as a Parliamentarian and, in 1957, even gets promoted to become Chairman of the National Assembly’s Foreign Affairs Committee. Conclusion The early history of the Berlin Koreans, apart from being fascinating in its own right, is important because it brings up a whole set of new questions about the modernization process in colonial Korea itself. Halfway around the globe, far from the Japanese Empire, developments in Berlin seemed to mirror those within the Korean communities in Tōkyō and on the Korean peninsula, replicating colonial space right in the German capital. Until the mid-1930s all this occurred without any actual extension of Japanese colonial power. The first Korean to arrive in Berlin did so as a citizen of the Empire of Korea. Then, with the change of legal citizenship as a result of Korea’s forceful annexation by Japan and the outbreak of World War I, he and the few other compatriots who lived in the German Empire at that time were turned into enemy aliens. The case of the two Koreans living in Germany during the period from 1909 to the German Revolution of 1918–19 reveals, on the one hand, the general German colonialist sentiment and the framework that defined the two men’s experiences; on the other hand, it demonstrates the limitations prescribed by their own internalization and socialization back home. In one case, a traditionally trained Chinese Classics scholar — at the center of a crumbling German Empire and later surrounded by the ubiquitous, fastpaced modern life of the Roaring Twenties — in fact retreated from his Western education and everything going on around him, cloistering himself away in an academic enclave to carry on the exact specialization of his training back home. In the other case, a family member of a militant independence fighter and assassin, the 407 See, for instance, the unusual direct and disapproving commentary in Kyŏnghyang sinmun, 6 November 1955. 153 Frank Hoffmann most famous anti-Japanese national hero then and now, lowered himself to be no more than an aide to a degraded former missionary in the remote countryside. This case also revealed a sense of the mutual interests between Korean independence movement activists and individual German missionaries with their diverse personal, nationalistic, and religious agendas that extended from aggressive colonialist ideologies to social climbing and exotic adventurism. Most Koreans going to Berlin arrived in the 1920s, either as political émigrés coming via Shanghai or Moscow, or as students with prior experience studying in Japan who carried passports issued by the Japanese colonial government of Korea. In terms of social status, all of the Koreans in both of these groups came from an elite background, with very few exceptions. The Berlin Koreans in this period, who were largely students and often socialist leaning, engaged in various political activities mostly aimed at Korean independence and closely mirrored the political and cultural life of their compatriots back in Korea in amazing detail (while in the “center” they still reduplicated the modes and cultural patterns of discourse of the “periphery”). After completing their studies in Germany, the students, academics, and some professionals either continued their careers in the United States (or, in a minority of cases, other European countries) or returned to their homeland. Those who stayed on in Berlin for long, during World War I, or later during the Third Reich, all became deeply drawn into local German politics and conflicts. Abandoning the patriotic and leftist activities that aimed at Korean independence during the 1920s in favor of straight-forward cooperation with both Japanese diplomats and NS institutions during the Nazi period, the few Koreans who had stayed on in Berlin, and others who had joined them later, were now voluntarily living under a blatantly fascist regime. In terms of major sociopolitical and cultural trends, the situation in Japan and Korea (unlike that in the United States) closely paralleled many key political and intellectual characteristics of Germany during the 1920s and early 1930s: a strong emphasis on social criticism in literature and arts, a mix of ideas concerning cultural and ethnic purity that was not always attached to political ideologies or even parties, and ultra-right nationalism and early fascism that were all mixed with the machineage concepts of modernity à la Henry Ford on the one hand and with romanticism and utopian socialism on the other. We note that the Koreans in Berlin found familiar political groupings quite similar to what they had known in Korea, Tōkyō, or Shanghai, and thus organized and networked among themselves naturally along the lines of those sociocultural similarities. Another parallel with the Far East is the changing situation around 1932–33, when militarists and fascists began to gain popularity and to take control in Japan, as in Germany. As a result, and against popular expectations, hardly any young people came to Berlin to replace those who left. By the late 1930s, only a few Koreans remained living in the German capital and stayed till the war was over. Back in Korea, 154 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s specifically after the beginning of the Pacific War, a large cross-section of intellectuals and the general public now identified with Pan-Asianism and its aims, putting their trust into the strength of the new, expanding Imperial Japanese Empire, with the promise of advancing from colonial subjects to partners in empire. In Berlin, during the same period, the Koreans worked closely with both the Japanese and the Nazis, on a voluntary basis, and by their own initiative (although this has been obscured in later memoirs and interviews). These individuals always had a choice: for example, the graphic artist and painter we discussed left Berlin for Paris (although still cooperating with the Japanese) at a decisive moment in history — summer 1937 — when German culture became all too barbaric; whereas the dancer, as well as the conductor and composer, and also the aeronautics specialist we discussed, all came to NaziGermany on their own initiative, wholeheartedly embracing package deals to work for and support Japanese and German fascism and its barbarism in exchange for a few scraps of their own. Some even used remanufactured success stories of their Berlin years as foundations to launch their post-1945 careers. These findings have several implications for current approaches toward the culture and the process of modernization in colonial Korea itself. Yet, due to the overpowering character of present-day South Korean historiographical discourse, it is easy to either get swept up in it or in opposition to it. Such streamlined institutional historiography puts personalities and biographies into pre-fabricated frames of colonial suppression, resistance, and collaboration. While our Berlin case demonstrates in concrete detail how inapt these interpretative frames are (aside from their usefulness as nationalist propaganda), this writer — and readers familiar with Korea — cannot ignore how deeply lodged in our consciousness such views are, and how difficult it is to abandon them. The most interesting result of this case study is indeed the striking parallel between what was going on among Koreans in Berlin and what occurred in Korea proper — despite the fact that the geographic borders of colonial empire were by no means the same as the borders of colonial space, a socially and culturally produced space (“social space” in Henri Lefebvre’s terms). It was only from the 1930s onward that elite Koreans started acting like citizens of the Japanese Empire rather than as a subjugated class demanding the independence of their colonized homeland. At about the same time, from 1935/36, because of the NS–Japanese cooperation, the German– Japanese Society in conjunction with the Japanese Embassy and the NS Propaganda Ministry, now organized all cultural and educational activities for Koreans in Berlin. The most telling insight, though, is that it was not alone in implementing a locally extended arm of Japan’s institutions and their patronizing dominance. A look at the earlier years of the political engagement, and intellectual and artistic production of Korean community members, from the 1910s to the mid-1930s, already suggests a close emulation of and integration with cultural discourses back home. 155 Frank Hoffmann The last five of the twelve sketches compel us to accept a double revisionist take to explain all of this. Along with our flat-out rejection of the traditional nationalist three-panel triptych of suppression, resistance, and collaboration, we must also question wartime and postwar mainstream notions of how the NS regime operated. Only if we manage to avoid casting the Berlin Koreans addressed here as some historical freak show can we acknowledge what they show us about how modern, effective, and international the NS regime was, how seamlessly it continued to use the institutional frames and research projects already established during the Weimar Republic, and how researchers, intellectuals, and artists from many other countries participated in such diverse institutions and functions of the regime, be it in exchange for the various incentives the regime had to offer, or because they believed in select scraps of Nazi ideology. As we saw in the case of the eugenicist and his Berlin research institution, this international arrangement even applies to the very key institution that provided much of the “scientific” backing for Nazi race ideology. From the late 1930s, the Berlin Koreans — who were considered “honorary Aryans” as citizens of an Asian, yet allied, nation — enjoyed a mostly luxurious lifestyle and were fully supportive of and supported by the regime. Yet, they are far from exceptional. Indeed, they exemplify countless other international scholars and intellectuals who voluntarily contributed to the NS regime and its institutions. The exclusively Germanic character of Nazism — as it was constructed at the time (based on Allied propaganda reacting to NS ideology) and as it is still conceived today — was not that exclusive after all. Returning to the history of colonial Korea, this case of unpressured, voluntary cooperation outside the physical confines of empire makes us question the extent to which the institutional structure of colonialism and its attendant systems of control are responsible for the particularities of the modernization process (specifically cultural modernization) seen in Korea itself. In other words, to what degree are the forms and styles of e.g. colonial period fine art, dance, architecture, or literature — of transcultural modernism in Asia — directly linked to (or arguably products of) colonial institutions and the implementation of colonialist cultural policies and restrictions? Such direct links have been forcefully asserted for decades and are even essential to the established definition of colonial modernity. Moreover, reinforcing the problematics of linking cultural production directly to Japanese colonialist structures, we may need to have a closer look at the (essentially non-isolated and pluralistic, yet stage-specific) cultural modernization process in other Asian nations and regions beyond the purview of Japanese colonialism during the period under discussion. We then see that many cultural centers very closely followed and emulated Japan (as, for example, Aida Yuen Wong and others have convincingly demonstrated was the case in modern Chinese painting), producing results much like those we find in Korea, but without the institutional framework of colonialism. 156 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s References Books, Theses, Chapters, Articles: 1917 1919 1921 1922 1922 1923 1923 1924 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1933 1933 1933 1934 1935 1935 1935 1936 1936 1938 “Anita Berber: Eine neue Tänzerin” [Anita Berber: A new dancer]. Elegante Welt 6, no. 3: 15. “Hr. F.W.K. 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San Francisco: Ramparts Press. Walravens, Hartmut 2007 “Aus der Arbeit der Hamburger ostasiatischen Lehrstühle: Gutachten von Fritz Jäger, Karl Florenz und Wilhelm Gundert” [From the work of the East Asian Studies programs in Hamburg: Referee letters by Fritz Jäger, Karl Wilhelm, and Florence Gundert]. Nachrich- 172 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s ten der Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens 181–182: 149–186. Weber, Norbert 1915 Im Lande der Morgenstille: Reiseerinnerungen an Korea [In the land of the morning calm: A Korea travelogue]. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herdersche Verlagshandlung. Weidenreich, Franz 1946 “On Eugen Fischer.” Science, n.s., 104, no. 2704 (25 October): 399. Wippich, Rolf-Harald 2007 “Internierung und Abschiebung von Japanern im Deutschen Reich im Jahr 1914” [Internment and deportation of Japanese in the German Reich in 1914]. Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 55, no. 1: 18–40. Wittenbring, Theresia, comp. 2006 Schriftsteller vor dem Mikrophon: Autorenauftritte im Rundfunk der Weimarer Republik 1924–1932, eine Dokumentation [Writers before the microphone: Radio appearances of writers during the Weimar Republic 1924–1932, a documentary]. Berlin: Verlag für BerlinBrandenburg. Wong, Aida Yuen 2006 Parting the Mists: Discovering Japan and the Rise of National-Style Painting in Modern China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Yi Kang-guk 李康國 1946 Minjujuŭi Chosŏnŭi kŏnsŏl 民主主義 朝鮮의 建設 [The construction of a democratic Korea]. Seoul: Chosŏn Inminbosa Husaengbu. Yi Kŭng-no 李克魯 (Li Kolu) 1923–24 “Die chinesische Agrarverfassung” [The agricultural situation in China]. Berichte über Landwirtschaft, n.s., 1, nos. 3–4: 217–222. 1924 Unabhängigkeitsbewegung Koreas und japanische Eroberungspolitik [Korean independence movement and Japanese policy of conquest]. Berlin: J. Sittenfeld. 1927 Korea und sein Unabhängigkeitskampf gegen den japanischen Imperialismus [Korea and its independence struggle against Japanese imperialism]. Berlin: E. Ebering. 1927 Die Seidenindustrie in China [The silk industry of China]. Berlin: Wilhelm Christians. 1928 “Das unbekannte Korea” [The unknown Korea]. Brücken zum Ausland 1, no. 5: 9–13. 1933 “Das unbekannte Korea” [The unknown Korea]. Deutsche Treue 15, no. 5: 125–129. 1947 Kot’u sasimnyŏn 苦鬪四十年 [Fourty years of struggle]. Seoul: Ŭryu Munhwasa. Yi Kwan-yong 李灌鎔 1924 “Tongyang hakkyeŭi myŏngsŏng: Kim Chung-se-min” 東洋學界의 名星: 金重世民 [Oriental Studies kudos to Mr. Kim Chung-se]. Kaebyŏk 開闢 46: 79–80. Yi Kyŏng-bun 이경분 (Lee Kyungboon) 2006 “An Ik-t’aewa Riharŭt’ŭ Syut’ŭrausŭ: Charyorŭl t’onghae chŏpkŭnhan sŭsŭnggwa chejaŭi kwan’gye” 안익태와 리하르트 슈트라우스: 자료를 통해 접근한 스승과 제자의 관계 [Richard Strauss and An Ik-t’ae: The relationship of master and pupil through source materials]. Nangman ŭmak 낭만음악 19, no. 1: 33–60. 2007 Irŏbŏrin sigan 1938–1944 잃어버린 시간 1938–1944 [Lost time, 1938–1944]. Seoul: Hyumŏnisŭt’ŭ. 2010 “Nach’i togilgwa ilbon chegugŭi ŭmak munhwa kyoryu” 나치독일과 일본제국의 음악문화 교류 [Music in the cultural exchange between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan]. Ilbon pip’yŏng 일본비평 2: 316–343. 173 Frank Hoffmann 2013 2014 “Die erste koreanische Nationalhymne: Ihre Quelle, Franz Eckerts Bearbeitung und die Frage der Text-Musik-Relation” [The first Korean national anthem: It’s source, Franz Eckert’s adaptation, and the question about the relationship between lyrics and melody]. OAG-Notizen, no. 12: 30–39. “Japanese Musicians between Music and Politics during WWII: Japanese Propaganda in the Third Reich.” Itinerario 38, no. 2: 121–138. Yi T’ae-u 이태우 2007 “Ilche kangjŏmgi sinmun chosarŭl t’onghan han’guk ch’ŏlhakchadŭrŭi chaebalgyŏn: Kim Chung-se, Yi Kwan-yong, Pae Sang-harŭl chungsimŭro” 일제강점기 신문조사를 통한 한국철학자들의 재발견: 김중세, 이관용, 배상하를 중심으로 [The rediscovery of Korean philosophers during Japanese colonial rule through the investigation of journalistic publications: With the focus on Kim Chung-se, Yi Kwan-yong, Pae Sang-ha]. Inmun kwahak yŏn’gu 인문과학연구 18: 297–323. Yonghŭnggangin 龍興江人 (pseud.) 1936 “Kujuesŏ hwalyakhanŭn inmultŭl: Paegŭiinjaedŭrŭi pinnanŭn chach’oerŭl ch’ajŏ” 歐州에서 活躍하는 人物들: 白衣人材들의 빗나는 자최를 차저 [Individuals active in Europe: Tracing the splendid footsteps of the white-dressed people]. Samch’ŏlli 三千里 8, no. 2: 80–83, 89. Yoshida Yukihiko 吉田悠樹彦 2009 “Kuni Masami o shinonde: Kuni Masami to 30-nendai no Doitsu, soshite sengo no buyōkai” 邦正美を偲んで: 邦正美と三O年代のドイツ、そして戦後の舞踊界 [In memory of Kuni Masami: Kuni Masami and Germany in the 1930s and later in the postwar dance world]. Corpus 6: 54–63. Yu-Dembski, Dagmar 1997 “Chinesenverfolgung im Nationalsozialismus: Ein weiteres Kapitel verdrängter Geschichte” [Chinese persecution under National Socialism: Another chapter of suppressed histories]. Bürgerrechte & Polizei/CILIP 58, no. 3: 70–77. 2007 Chinesen in Berlin [The Chinese in Berlin]. Berlin: Bebra. Newspapers: Asahi shimbun 朝日新聞 Berliner Börsen-Courier Berliner Börsen-Zeitung Berliner Illustrierte Berliner Volks-Zeitung Capital (Annapolis, Maryland) Chosŏn ilbo 朝鮮日報 Chungang ilbo 중앙일보 Chungoe ilbo 中外日報 Daily Trojan Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro Hamburger Anzeiger Hamburger Fremdenblatt Hamburger Nachrichten Han’guk ilbo 한국일보 Han’gyŏre 한겨레 174 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s Journal des débats politiques et littéraires Kat’ollik sibo 가톨릭 시보 Keijō nippō 京城日報 Kleine Blatt, Das Kokumin shinpō 國民新報 Kolmarer Kurier Königsberger Allgemeine Zeitung Kyŏnghyang sinmun 京鄕新聞 Litzmannstädter Zeitung Los Angeles Times Maeil kyŏngje 每日經濟 Maeil sinbo 每日申報 MailOnline (http://dailymail.co.uk) Mainichi shimbun 每日新聞 Marburger Zeitung Matin, Le Neue Zürcher Zeitung Neues Wiener Tagblatt Neuigkeits-Welt-Blatt New York Herald Tribune New York Times Nyusŭ sŏch’ŏn 뉴스서천 OhmyNews (http://english.ohmynews.com/index.asp) Petit Parisien, Le Prager Presse P’yŏnghwa sinmun 평화신문 Regione Ticino, La Sinhan minbo 新韓民報 Sozialdemokrat (Prague) Tonga ilbo 東亞日報 Tongnip sinmun 獨立新聞 (Shanghai) Umbruch, Der (Vaduz) Volks-Zeitung (Vienna) Vossische Zeitung Washington Post Wiener Neueste Nachrichten Wiener Zeitung Zeit, Die (Prague) Interviews: Kurt Runge, interview, 6 December 1990, Berlin. Marion Herzog-Hoinkis, interview, 27 January 1991, Frankfurt am Main. Matthias Matthies, telephone conversation, August or September 1991. 175 Frank Hoffmann Archives: Archives of Humboldt University (Berlin) Archives of the Max Planck Society (Berlin) Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Archivo del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores) (Madrid) Archives of the Unified State Schools for Fine and Applied Arts (Berlin) Archives of the University of Leipzig (Leipzig) Bauhaus Archive (at the Museum of Design in Berlin), Walter Gropius Archive (Berlin) Bavarian State Archives, Section IV: War Archive (Munich) Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf Registry Office (Berlin) Digital Archives, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Barcelona) Ellis Island Archive, Ellis Island Foundation, Inc. (New York) Federal Archives Berlin-Lichterfelde (Berlin) Free University of Berlin, Archives, President’s Office (Berlin) German Broadcasting Archives (Frankfurt am Main) German Federal Film Archives (Koblenz) Historical Archives Cologne (Cologne) Humboldt University Sound Archives (Berlin) League against Imperialism Archives, International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam) The National Archives (TNA) (Kew, Great Britain) University Archive, TU Berlin (Berlin) U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) (College Park) Vienna City Library (Wienbibliothek im Rathaus), Manuscript Department (Vienna) Videos & TV Broadcasts, Webcasts, Sound Recordings, Other Online Resources: (Unless specified otherwise, all sources are referenced as of 15 October 2015.) #1, Korean History Information Center DB: http://koreanhistory.or.kr/ #2, National Institute of Korean History: Sidaebyŏl yŏnp’yo (kŭndaesa) 시대별연표 (근대사) [A chronology by period: Modern times]: http://db.history.go.kr/item/level.do?itemId=tcmd&levelId=tcmd_1919_10_99_0140 #3, Joseph Wilhelm (aka Hong Sŏk-ku 洪錫九, 1860–1938), official biography by his order: http://archives.mepasie.org/notices/notices-necrologiques/wilhelm-1860-1938 #4, Kaiserslautern Alcatraz Prison Hotel article in MailOnline, 9 October 2013: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2450777/German-Alcatraz-hotel-prison.html #5, Prskawetz, Dieter. “Blasewitzer Schulgeschichte” [History of the Blasewitz School], 1996: http://www.blasewitz.de/schulgeschichte/buch/schulkomplex1.htm #6, Stolpersteine Movement: http://stolpersteine-berlin.de #7, Interview with Ingeborg Tung in the TV documentary by Guido Knopp et al. Das Gedächtnis der Nation [Memory of the nation], broadcasted on 16 October 2011, at 11:25 PM, ZDF TV station. The interview with Tung is at minutes 20:09 to 25:42 of that film, online at: http://zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/beitrag/video/1463392/Das-Gedaechtnis-der-Nation #8, Website and archive of the Independence Hall of Korea (Tongnip Kinyŏmgwan 독립기념관): http://search.i815.or.kr/ #9, An Ch’ang-ho, Letters, 1909–1911, at Korean American Digital Archive, USC Digital Library: http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15799coll126/id/1211/rec/6 176 The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s #10, C.C. Joe (Chong Chin Joe), “This Life of Mine” (typescript), at the USC Digital Library: http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15799coll126/id/11417/rec/11 #11, Yi Kwan-yong 李灌鎔 (1894?–1933), matriculation #25081, student records, U of Zurich: http://www.matrikel.uzh.ch/active/static/12947.htm #12, Friedrich W.K. Müller (1863–1930), biographical sketch at Encyclopædia Iranica: http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/mueller-friedrich-w-k #13, “Ilche ch’iha 1910-nyŏndae ‘Arirang’ ch’oech’o konggae” 일제 치하 1910년대 ‘아리랑’ 최초 공개 [First release of colonial period ‘Arirang’ from the 1910s], KBS TV News, 1 March 2013: http://news.kbs.co.kr/news/NewsView.do?SEARCH_NEWS_CODE=2620780 #14, “Koryŏin p’oroŭi arirang” 고려인 포로의 아리랑 [‘Arirang’ song by Russian Koreans in captivity]: MBC TV News, 3 April 2013, online at: http://goo.gl/yJsmUZ #15, Provive, Robert C., “Revolutionaries, Nursery Rhymes, and Edison Wax Cylinders: The Remarkable Tale of the Earliest Korean Sound Recordings.” Library of Congress webcast, at: http://loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=4511 #16, Humboldt University Sound Archives (Lautarchiv), Index of Korean language recordings: http://www.sammlungen.hu-berlin.de/schlagworte/6878/dokumente/ #17, Yŏnhap News TV report of 31 August 2013, 3:54 to 3:57 PM, online at: http://www.news-y.co.kr/MYH20130831007400038/ #18, Yi Kŭng-no’s 1928 recording of “God and Men” (Sin’gwa in’gan 신과 인간) in Paris, online at Bibliothèque nationale de France: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1292527 #19, Fourty of Yamawaki Iwao’s war propaganda photomontages, done for the (Japanese) Ministry n of Defence in 1944: virtual exhibition at the (Art) Laboratory website at Northwestern University, 1999 (Creative Director: Janine Fron): http://www.artn.nwu.edu/~janine/WWW/ASIA/IMPERIAL_ARMY.html (2 March 1999). (Note: The entire website is offline now. Some of these images have been reposted without proper credits at various Chinese blogs, e.g.: http://bbs.tiexue.net/post2_5270082_1.html) #20, OhmyNews, 18 March 2005; Todd Thacker’s interview article with Miguel Eaktai Ahn: http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=216153&rel_no=1 #21, Korean and English digital editions of a Chosŏn ilbo article of 7 March 2006, reporting about the rediscovery of a NS newsreel showing excerpts from An Ik-t’ae’s Mandschoukuo concert on 18 September 1942 in Berlin: http://www.chosun.com/culture/news/200603/200603070507.html (Korean) http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2006/03/07/2006030761023.html (English) #22, Ekitai Ahn’s (An Ik-t’ae) Mandschoukuo concert, a two-minute clip at minutes 7:02 to 8:47 of the Descheg-Monatsschau (The Descheg monthly newscast), no. 7, September 1942): https://archive.org/details/1942-09-xx-Descheg-Monatsschau-07 #23, Ekitai Ahn’s (An Ik-t’ae) Mandschukuo concert listing for February 1943 in Vienna: http://www.wienersymphoniker.at/archiv/concert/pid/000000e9h58h00010b2b #24, Educational background, Kuni Masami Ehara; CSFU (Fullerton), Emirati Faculty: http://goo.gl/zzKwsF #25, “Dance of Death” (Totentanz) scene with Harald Kreutzberg in G.W. Pabst’s 1943 Paracelsus: http://goo.gl/TtN91f #26, Mary Wigman, Witch Dance (Hexentanz), short sequence (1929) based on 1926 choreography: http://traces-du-sacre.centrepompidou.fr/exposition/oeuvres_exposees.php?id=29 177 Frank Hoffmann #27, Joseph Goebbels, diary entry of 4 Juni 1937, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels [The diaries of Joseph Goebbels]. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001: http://www.degruyter.com/view/TJGO/TJG-3582 #28, Internal work schedule for broadcasts, Radio Barcelona, in the Digital Archives, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona: (a) 30 October 1944: http://ddd.uab.cat/pub/guiradbcn/1944/guiradbcn_a1944m10d30.pdf (b) 11 November 1944: http://ddd.uab.cat/pub/guiradbcn/1944/guiradbcn_a1944m11d11.pdf (c) 10 December 1944: http://ddd.uab.cat/pub/guiradbcn/1944/guiradbcn_a1944m12d10.pdf #29, Kang Se-hyŏng’s biographic file at the National Institute of Korean History: http://db.history.go.kr/url.jsp?ID=im_101_20100 178 2 Modular Spectacle: The 1904 Liebig Trading Card Set on Korea Frank HOFFMANN (Fig. 1, left to right, top to bottom: a – f) Bilder aus Korea [Pictures from Korea], recto, all six cards of the Liebig trading card set #766, German ed., issued in 1904, twelve-color chromolithograph prints, each card 7.1 x 11 cm. 180 Modular Spectacle Liebig’s “Korea” trading card series still seems as captivating today as it must have been back in 1904 when the set of collectible images was first issued. One reason is the careful attention to detail and unusually high print quality of twelve-color chromolithographs (plus gold and silver) — seldom seen again in advertisement prints after the early 1940s. Another is the appealing display of exotica. Originally, this “exotic” quality was primarily due to the geographic and cultural distance from the depicted motifs and the intensely visualized “otherness” of a foreign culture, while the exotic appeal today (perceived as such even in Korea itself) derives from our historical distance from the century-old costumes, customs, and general scenery delineated in the cards; they are now a visual stimulation of nostalgia for the goodold-days. Between 1875 and the 1940s (and in Italy until 1975) Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company issued 1,138 sets; altogether over 7,000 single trading cards and images were produced. These cards were enormously successful. A set such as the one on Korea had a run of about a million copies. This means six million beef bouillon glasses were sold with this one series alone, a gigantic commercial success promoted mostly by the appeal of these advertisement cards. Free add-ons to Liebig products, these cards were sought after by middle-class children (and soon, also by adults) who were affluent enough to afford those goods and assembled their card collections in albums. There is much more to these cards than just nostalgia. A large part of the allure of these images today is the surprise — even irritation — that they conjure among contemporary viewers who find that the caption “Korean” far from explains the hybridization of fashion and ethnicity, even unintentional androgyny, that these collage-like assemblages represent. Stilt walking or jumping, for instance, as presented in one of the cards (fig. 1f), was just introduced to Korea in the mid-1880s from Japan (see Culin 1895: 8–9) and never became popular on the peninsula like it was in China and Japan. It had been popular in Europe, however, and stilt walking scenes from France and other locales are shown in other card series issued by the Liebig Company (see Lebeck 1980: 28 and 116). To reinforce the expectations of European viewers, the female stilt walkers in their silky Chinese dresses are jumbled together with male figures in Korean garb. The colors are not rendered realistically, and as a result, one man at a hurdle almost comes across as wearing cowboy jeans. No doubt, the scene was freely invented, forming a modular spectacle, where the general layout of the costumes seems copied from various photos from China and Korea, or taken from templates in one of the popular 19th-century costume books (more on that later) in order to then be reassembled as a new, supposedly Korean location. The main template for the stilt walking image can actually be traced to a source from three years earlier, a print by Louis Rémy Sabattier, an engraver and painter mostly working for the French revue L’Illustration. The same print also ap- 181 Frank Hoffmann (Fig. 2) Louis Rémy Sabattier, Divertissements populaires en Chine: Saut d’échassiers [Popular entertainment in China: Stilt jumping], wood engraving, 1901. The print was published in the French revue L’Illustration (13 July 1901) and three weeks later in the British magazine The Sphere (3 August 1901). (Fig. 3) Same as fig. 1f,“WeiblicherSport: Das Stelzenspringen” [Female sports: Stilt jumping], recto, from the Liebig set #766, Bilder aus Korea, issued in 1904, chromolithograph print, 7.1 x 11 cm. (Fig. 4) Verso of Liebig’s stilt walking card (figs. 1f and 3 above). The explanatory text for the image reads as follows: “The most popular game for Korean women, who are, by the way, still held in great seclusion, is stilt walking. Like so much else in this country it is a custom imitated from the Chinese. At all the folk festivals and other occasions sporting events in the form of jumping competitions take place with subsequent prizes being awarded to the winning women.” 182 Modular Spectacle peared in the British magazine The Sphere. Sabattier’s Saut d’échassiers [Stilt jumping] (fig. 2), not surprisingly, shows male Chinese performers near the sea port Tianjin 天津 during the spring festival, all clad in female costumes, as the magazines explain in an extended caption. The Liebig card designer — who may well have been Sabattier himself — colored the whole scene (see fig. 3), cropped out two of the stilt walkers to make the image less crowded, and replaced the Chinese bystanders with Asians wearing Korean clothing. For instance, the dubious yangban-cowboy by the hurdle, who is assisting the lady that is no lady, indeed looks more convincing in his original Chinese attire. The explanatory text on the card’s verso (fig. 4), informing us that stilt walking is “like so much else in this country (...) a custom imitated from the Chinese,” immediately takes on a very different quality once we discover the original source of this Liebig image. The fortune-teller in another card (fig. 1d) seems just as perplexing. He wears anything but a Korean costume or headdress, while his customer, a mother with her child, is clad in rural European attire. The two-story stone houses with red brick roofs, a half-timbered house with a greenish roof, what seem to be high-hanging public street lights, as well as the rickshaw, are all likely to have been inspired by photos or sketches of the French Concession in Shanghai. In another card, the main, single-roof building of the small complex supposed to be the Imperial Palace (fig. 1c) somewhat resembles Tŏksu-gung 德壽宮, but there were no such side-buildings flanking it, and no such hill could be seen either. Costumes like that worn by the “Korean gentlewoman” in figure 1a, with a richly ornamented dress and fanciful headdress with a gold diadem worn as an ornamental headband, as well as large, colorful pompoms, were seen at court, as a wedding gown, and, during the 19th century, as costumes of the Peking Opera — all in China, but never in Korea. Moreover, the particular even mix of green, blue, and red colors in the pompom headgear which perfectly correspond to those of her dress, seem neither a pictorial representation of a historic costume nor one from the Peking Opera, both of which tended towards a monochromatic or dichromatic color scheme, with every color symbolizing rank, or, in theater, age and the general mood of a certain character. These vibrant multi-color combinations, as with the sandals that the depicted human figure is wearing, are typically found in travel accounts from the second half of the 19th century and seen in picture postcards showing customary weddings or street theater actors of the large Chinese immigrant communities in South East Asia — i.e., in what today is Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Singapore, Indonesia, or Malaysia. Throughout most of the 19th century, the first encounters Westerners had with actual Chinese people and costumes often took place in the colonial harbor cities of Asia, such as Penang (in the case of sea captain Basil Hall and writer Karl May, for example) and other British, French, or Dutch colonial outposts. Over time, the increasing preference for more colorful and less ceremonially 183 Frank Hoffmann LEFT, top to bottom: (Fig. 5) Chinese street theater performers from Java, then Dutch East Indies, detail from a postcard, early 1900s. (Fig. 6) Two actors, hand-colored wood engraving, detail from an illustrated broadsheet #92, Chinese in the East Indies, by Braun & Schneider in the Münchener Bilderbogen [Munich illustrated broadsheets] series, ca. 1880, and republished in the mid-1890s in a book. (Fig. 7) Two Korean gentlemen, a Mandarin and a Military Officer in Rainy Weather costume are flanked by two ladies from Siam wearing silky sampots, detail from a color plate in volume 6 of Racinet’s Le costume historique of 1876 (in volume 2 of the later German edition of 1888, Geschichte des Kostüms). CENTER: (Fig. 8) Korean Mandarin, 13 x 8 cm, and (Fig. 9) Military Officer with a waxed, papery rain hat overseeing a high official’s transport in a sedan chair (kama), 11.5 x 15.8 cm, detail; wood engravings after drawings by Henri Zuber from 1873 in Le Tour du monde (pp. 401, 404) and in its German clone Globus (pp. 132, 147). RIGHT, top to bottom: (Fig. 10) Corean Chief and His Secretary (detail), illustration by William Havell in Basil Hall’s 1818 Corea book (color plate between pages 16 and 17). (Fig. 11) A Korean, color illustration in Wahlen’s 1843 second volume of Moeurs, usages et costumes de tous les peuples du monde (plate following p. 318). (Fig. 12) A Korean Businessman, illustration in the 7th section of Siebold’s Nippon, first 1852? (from the 2nd ed., vol. 2, 1897, p. 323). 184 Modular Spectacle reserved costumes in South East Asia brought about subtle changes toward the more festive costumes worn within the Chinese communities there. Indeed, images of these costumes regularly appeared in Europe in early 20th-century postcards (see fig. 5), and the highly popular Münchener Bilderbogen [Munich illustrated broadsheets] series from around 1880 titled Chinese in the East Indies, also show “Chinese actresses” (fig. 6) from Penang. Of course, these actresses were, in fact, male actors. Liebig’s “Korean gentlewoman,” as it turns out, was thus modeled after a handsome Chinese male entertainer, most likely from Penang, Cambodia, or possibly Bali. Just as East Asian professional and gentlemen painters were utilizing painting manuals such as the Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden (Jieziyuan huazhuan, SinoKor. Kaejawŏn hwajŏn 芥子園畵傳) to fill their landscape paintings with a scholar’s hut, fences, rocks, and trees — as if putting together a modular puzzle from preconfigured parts — so did European artists (and the designers of the Liebig cards) make heavy use of templates from various fashion and architecture manuals. The age of modern art movements had already begun — by Édouard Manet and others — but a large majority of artists and designers continued to practice illusionistic realism. All of the designs followed the same naturalist style. Liebig’s success demonstrates that many advertisers — at a time when the modern movement was in full swing — did perfectly well without utilizing modernist depictions of reality. That lesson was duly noted by other product advertisers and by political propagandists. As in modernist art, however, the customized naturalist style that these mostly anonymous trading card designers developed relied heavily on mixing stylizations and exotic elements. This was in large part because they only had access to a relatively small pool of images, photographic and otherwise — images depicting geographic regions and distant cultures that would be thematized in these cards. Books documenting costumes, designs, customs, and architecture of distant peoples were true bestsellers among the upper middle-class and upper-class families of the 19th century. Giulio Ferrario’s spectacular 17-volume work Le costume ancien et moderne [Ancient and modern costumes] with its many colorful illustrations, also published in Italian, was for a long time the most outstanding of such works. Four volumes are dedicated to the Asian continent alone. But while Korea was relatively well covered in the text which summarized the period’s lexical knowledge of the peninsula’s history, culture, government, and economics (Ferrario 1815, 1: 367–382), not a single image of it was included, in stark contrast to China and Japan. Shortly thereafter, Captain Basil Hall presented an account (Hall 1818) that — putting aside the Persian carpet one gentlemen sits on and other minor details — presents fairly representative images of Korean men (see fig. 10). Yet, three decades later, Auguste Wahlen’s Mœurs, usages et costumes de tous les peuples du monde [Manners, customs, and costumes of all peoples of the world] still portrays a “Korean” (fig. 11) who, if anything, resembles a dwarf or some gnome from a European fairytale. The 185 Frank Hoffmann complete seclusion of the “Hermit Kingdom” until 1876 and subsequent lack of information was partially responsible for the existence of these bizarre and obnoxious descriptions. Scholars like Philipp Franz von Siebold, after meeting Korean fishermen and merchants, did their best to study and describe Koreans and Korean culture. But artists and graphic designers who were interested in commercial success tended to emphasize cultural difference, since it was most likely to succeed in the art market: portraying the Other as an extreme exotic Other, a sensational Other, and thus coming up with often strange and sometimes derogatory descriptions. The foremost 19th century German painter of Orientalist subjects, for example, an experienced world traveler who had, like Siebold before him, encountered Korean traders at Japan’s foreign enclave Dejima in 1863, ended up describing them as “dirty and impoverished, ape-like humanoids I had not thought existed” (Hildebrandt 1876, 2: 114). Four decades later, at the time of the creation of Liebig’s Korea series, the country was still regularly described as “a barbaric peninsula” (Stettenheim 1904: 53). In fact, a volatile mix of romanticized, exoticized, grotesque, and derogatory descriptions, both textual and visual, was created around the imaginary “Korean” until Japan won the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 and assumed de facto control over Korea, at which point the new “colonial Korean” was presented. This new colonial “subject” was then fully researched, folklore-ized, and visualized, and otherwise made ready for the civilizing task that Japan had taken on, as a proxy of the West. The whole concept of barbarism, of course, is closely linked to old-school colonial discourse. And when many ultra-right Japanese bloggers today make reference to and quote such old descriptions about late Chosŏn Korea from European and American travelogues, they give new life to these colonialist perspectives. As early as 1950, Aimé Césaire (see Césaire 1950) pointed out how the labeling of not-yet-colonized, non-white peoples as “barbaric” would turn Europe itself into a barbaric place, how Hitler had actually extended the application of the concept of barbarism (which was previously reserved here for non-white ethnicities) at home in Central Europe — the birth of “Barbarope,” as Albert Ehrenstein would call it. While already colonized peoples were still considered half-barbaric and in need of further “civilizing,” those other still independent countries were often just cast as barbaric territories. Equating the barbarian with the Other and both with ethnos, is an age-old practice from the Greeks and from the Roman and Chinese empires. As for the European colonizers, “Siam” serves as a good example of such a concept. The name itself is an English exonym that gained currency for various countries and territories in South East Asia that had not yet been colonized by any European power — the Shan states in today’s Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, parts of what is now Malaysia, and other areas. “Siam” and the “Siamese” as such never existed. In many 18th- and 19th-century accounts, Korea — as a secluded culture and still-independent country — was often 186 Modular Spectacle associated with “Siam,” regardless of the geographic and cultural distance between them. Consequently, texts and images of Korea and Koreans were often placed right next to sections on Siam and the Siamese in encyclopedias and travel accounts dealing with Asia. The Liebig trading card set on Korea is another example of this. The “Rice Harvest” card (fig. 1e) shows two young women and a young man in colorful, silky cloth that never would have been associated with Korean peasants at work. None of their clothing is of Korean design. The cut of the cloth, the colors, the patterns, and the women’s headscarves and how they are tied, and the simple fact that the man is wearing a red headband, not to mention the house with the Western roof in the background and the fence in the middle ground, all indicate that the designer’s templates for the figures were most likely taken from Bali (or possibly elsewhere from “Siam”). Like Korea, Bali was still independent in 1904, and was generally referred to as an utterly barbaric, bloody, and highly dangerous place — best avoided. But, after the Netherlands had turned it into a colony, it would now be described as the most exotic, peaceful, aesthetically pleasing, culturally intriguing, and sexually gratifying Asian paradise for Westerners to visit. In 1906, when a card from another Liebig series features the “Korea Strait” (fig. 13) as an example for Non-European Waterways (set #868), the young woman portrayed has hardly any ethnic Korean features. Instead, the image shows an amazingly close resemblance to the Siamese woman depicted in a Types of Asian Women series (#622) from 1900 (see fig. 14), who, again, looks more Indian than anyone from a “Siamese” territory. (Fig. 13) “Strasse von Korea” [Korea Strait] card, Liebig trading card set #868, German ed., 1906, 7.1 x 11 cm. (Fig. 14) Detail of the “Siam” card, Liebig trading card set #622, German ed., 1900, 7.1 x 10.4 cm. In 1876 another major, multi-volume costume book, Auguste Racinet’s Le costume historique [The historical costume], had produced images of two Korean gentlemen (see fig. 7) that appear historically accurate, except for some minor details such as the red shoes worn by the yangban. As we see, the two, highly fashionable gentlemen are by no means flanked by Korean dames in figure-hiding tangŭi 唐衣 or 187 Frank Hoffmann ch’ima chŏgori, but — as we might almost expect — by two ladies from Siam, in this case from Bangkok. These Siamese ladies are most noble yet scantily dressed, wearing only silky sampots; the one on the left having one of her breasts exposed. A few other realistic renderings of Korean men, e.g., in Siebold’s Nippon (see fig. 12), had meanwhile made their way into many European libraries. But far into the 20th century, artists, advertisement artists, and opera and theater costume designers continued to utilize the wonderfully illustrated and highly popular Racinet reference as a source to follow. Many of the later images that appeared in the aforementioned Münchener Bilderbogen, for example, are modeled on Racinet’s images. In 1888, Wilhelm II’s inauguration year and just a few years after Germany had become a colonial power, Racinet’s book also appeared in German translation, serving the new colonizer as a kind of visual lexica of all the “barbarians” as well as already-colonized peoples. The Liebig cards then enabled every middle- and upper-class boy and girl in the Reich to playfully enjoy Germany’s new place under the sun by having his or her own collection of exotic “natives,” right in their hands. (Of course, the Liebig cards also covered many other themes from areas such as the natural sciences, technology, and European history.) Although Liebig’s Korea cards do not directly use templates from Racinet, every French and German designer dealing with Oriental subjects would have had that reference at his fingertips, and the Korean-men-Siamese-ladies assemblage most likely would have taken off from there. The two Korean gentlemen in Racinet’s compendium, by the way, are not original designs. The yangban comes from a wood-engraving done by xylographer Henri-Théophile Hildebrand (his signet is engraved on the lower left; see fig. 8) and the original of the Korean military officer was done by Adrien Marie (see fig. 9), both following drawings by the talented French navy cartographer and artist Henri Zuber. In every detail, except for the added coloring, they were adapted from Zuber’s 1873 report “Une expédition en Corée” [An expedition to Korea] in the illustrated magazine Le Tour du monde. The 1866 French Navy expedition to Kanghwa-do on which Zuber reported was in fact the first bloody European–Korean military encounter, the first effort to colonize Korea or at least “open” the peninsula for trade — which was justified by the archetypical colonialist rhetoric of revenging the deaths of some Christian missionaries. At the same time, if not a month earlier, the exact same prints had also appeared in the magazine’s German clone Globus. A contemporary author referring to the pre-colonialist 1870s Globus has pointedly described it as a middle-class magazine that “evoked German colonists without colonialism,” a periodical that reported on German globetrotters and expatriates “who erected the signposts of Heimat and bourgeois sociability everywhere they went” (Naranch 2005: 27). Such illustrated magazines and trading card illustrations, even before Germany had joined the colonial powers, thus were instrumental in shaping the new national self that now began to overpower local identities. As the same scholar of pre-colonial 188 Modular Spectacle Germany puts it: “The tension between familiarity and difference (...) produced a conflicted national identity that was [already] defined in colonial terms” (ibid.). As early as 1824, Paris had twenty daily newspapers publishing art columns and roughly the same number of largely illustrated revues and pamphlets that were entirely devoted to art and art criticism. The number of art gazettes and illustrated magazines soon reached the hundreds. London and Berlin never approached these numbers. Paris was the Europe-wide source for woodcuts and other engravings that publishers in London and Berlin bought for their own publications, with Berlin, which also extracted images from the British, being at the short end of the chain more often than not. Along with these images, texts were being copied just as relentlessly, in part or in entirety, and were reproduced in German translation, with and without the original sources provided. From the 1890s in both magazines and advertisements, illustrations occupied the center of attention, with texts often serving as pure decoration: in most cases “the corresponding German text was ‘written around’ whatever illustration was available” (Ciarlo 2011: 70). The aforementioned report in Globus well illustrates this practice. Towards the last years of the 19th century, an increasing number of American reports and photographs (e.g. Korea photos based on stereoviews distributed by Underwood & Underwood and later by the Keystone View Company) were also reproduced in German periodicals. Even American product advertisement campaigns were imitated. This included harsh racist and offensive visuals involving “negroes,” producing clear-cut views of a “race” concept then still unfamiliar to the wider German public. European and American visual imagery had at that time literally become transcultural, not just because images and related text — and therein racial stereotypes — were copied, exchanged, and traded, leading to major changes in visual and ideological conventions, but also because more and more companies now operated on an international scale, and their advertisement campaigns were accordingly aimed at international customers. Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company itself was headquartered in London. The extract, however, was produced in Uruguay and what is today Namibia, while the company’s customers were scattered throughout Europe and the United States. The trading cards, therefore, were mostly produced in separate editions in English, German, French, Dutch, Italian, and sometimes two or three other languages. The advertising trading cards that had made the company known and successful were at first produced in France. Later, during the 1890s, with the formidable development of German printing technologies and modern presses, production was increasingly assigned to printers in Germany. The names of card designers are generally not recorded. We only know of a very few names, such as the German graphic artist, painter, and heraldist Gustav Adolf Closs, or the well-known Italian-born French costume designer Alfredo Èdel and his American wife Florence. Considering some of their work, both of the latter two could have easily been the creators of Liebig’s 189 Frank Hoffmann LEFT, top to bottom: (Fig. 15) Detail of Liebig’s trading card, see figure 1a, 1904, “Strasse in Seoul” [Street in Seoul], view from a balcony of Seoul’s Namdaemun (South Gate) to the north-east, in the background Myŏngdong Cathedral still under construction, without tower. (Fig. 16) “A street in Seoul,” photo from 1897 by Jean-Jacques Matignon that first appeared in his travel account L'orient lointain (p. 195). In 1904 it was also published in the German edition of Angus Hamilton’s Korea book (p. 25). A close comparison of street life reveals that the Liebig card designer must have used this very photo as a template. (Fig. 17) Again a photo with a very similar view from Namdaemun, taken during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, with Myŏndong Cathedral completed (1898) and electric power lines strung up and one of the later two lines of the electric street cars operating. This photo thus shows how the center of Seoul actually looked when the Liebig card was produced and published in 1904 — with all the signs of modern life already in place: electrification, a means of modern public transportation, and construction of the first multi-story buildings. RIGHT, top to bottom: (Fig. 18) Detail of Liebig’s trading card, see figure 1b, 1904, “Hafen von Chemulpo” [Chemulp’o Harbor], view from a hill towards the bay where the first decisive battle of the Russo-Japanese War was fought on 9 February 1904 and won by the Japanese Navy. (Fig. 19) Detail of a photo from about 1890, the same view as the image on the Liebig card, matching up in every detail, including the positions of ships and boats, with the smoke of a steamship on the left. Just the hanging laundry from the photo is missing on the above Liebig card image. 1904 Korea series. We just do not know. Starting in the early 1890s, German product advertisement shifted from text-only ads to a text-image combinations, with a strong emphasis on the workings of visuality. While the popularity of colonial imagery was 190 Modular Spectacle immense in these years, there are no indications that advertisers had any political vision related to colonialism. As David Ciarlo has pointed out, the imagery that advertisers preferred was usually not directly linked to any particular framework of colonial ideology: “‘the colonial’ can be detached almost entirely from actual colonialism, and emerge instead from a dynamic internal to the practice of advertising itself” (Ciarlo 2012: 40). Ciarlo even argues that “advertisers and colonialists would emerge as competitors in the 1890s, at least indirectly in the cultural realm, over who would become the masters of the modern exotic” (Ciarlo 2011: 114). We should therefore not think of advertisers like an executive branch of government, but as capitalist entrepreneurs, often operating as multinationals, who followed their own interests — selling their products to generate profits. The Liebig cards avoided making visual references to any direct colonial interventions or policies. The pre-colonial and colonial landscapes (and distant territories in Asia and Africa are only presented as either of the two) and the de-personalized, objectified exotic Other in these landscapes that those collectible cards present are already part of a new, extended pattern of consumption. They promise product authenticity and exotic pleasures, and added-on, the sensual gratification and empowerment of being part of a group that has access to and controls far-away peoples and cultures. A whole new visual culture developed around advertising in these years, which again led to changes of the meaning of consumption within society. The invention of tin and paperboard chromolithography now made the printing of the Liebig cards very inexpensive, and this and other printing technologies were most advanced in Germany. By the fin de siècle card production had almost entirely been moved to German printers, with half of the graphic works still mostly coming from Paris and London. The exchange, trade, and publication of images, including photographic images, by then had become a completely transnational venture. Also starting in the 1890s, a growing number of journalists, graphic designers, and adventure globetrotters contracted with magazines and companies all around Europe. Their work would be published simultaneously in various publications and countries. Such was the case during the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, when many of the drawings and cartoon postcards by the amazing French cartoonist and illustrator Georges Bigot often appeared concurrently in various leading European periodicals reporting about the war. Magazine editors back in Europe, however, all had different concepts of how to caption Bigot’s works: in Paris, one of his sketches shows a group of Korean peasants looking on as Japanese troops march by on their way to P’yŏngyang (Le Monde illustré, 8 December 1894, p. 364); in London, under the exact same illustration, British readers are informed that “our special artist” in Korea has sketched troops marching towards Seoul and that “the usually phlegmatic natives” watch the spectacle with “open-mouthed astonishment” (The Graphic, 22 December 1894, p. 709). 191 Frank Hoffmann Both advertisers like Liebig and publishers close to their governments, present a “cleansed” and romanticized colonial imagery. It does not seem to make any difference here who the actual colonizer is — French, British, Dutch, German, or Japanese. For example, we can compare the two landscapes presented in the Korea Liebig cards of 1904, figures 15 and 18, with a cover illustration from a French newspaper supplement of the same year, published at the beginning of the RussoJapanese War of 1904–05 (figure 20, with related photos reproduced here). The timing for the appearance of the Liebig cards under discussion relates, without any doubt, to the outbreak of the war and the growing interest in related imagery among the wider public. The Liebig cards, though, have utilized photo templates that are several years old and do not yet show any sign of Korea’s nascent modernization process. The changes in those years may not have been enormous, but comparing an actual photo from 1904 (fig. 17), the same year the cards were produced, with the depicted street scene in Seoul (fig. 15) indicates that significant signs of ongoing, rapid modernization are clearly evident before Japan’s forceful takeover. These signs are completely absent in the Liebig cards. The Liebig images present the peninsula as pleasant, peaceful, folkloristic, colorful, and at the same time archaic and backward, untouched by the modern world, a country worthy of and ready to be “colonized” and “civilized.” Let us just imagine for a moment that the Liebig designer had chosen the aforementioned contemporary photo from 1904 (fig. 17) with the same north-east view from Namdaemun towards Myŏngdong Cathedral (then still called Chonghyŏn Cathedral) as a template. Instead of what must have looked like African straw huts to most European viewers — or, as a Hungarian church official and Vatican-sanctioned globetrotter put it, like “an immense cemetery, and the mean little flat-roofed houses graves” (Vay 1906: 241), with some happy and colorful “natives” in medieval dress in between, one would have seen a less exoticized and picturesque landscape, a tangled and garbled and somewhat messy Asian city with electric wires blocking the view, street cars moving along, and a soaring Gothic cathedral in the background — a place without much exotic appeal or need for a Western or Japanese “civilizing mission” in the name of promoting progress and modernity. The French newspaper supplement illustration from early 1904 that seems to present a very similar cityscape, a view from one of the Tongdaemun (East Gate) balconies looking westwards (fig. 20), makes evident that the graphic designer applied the same basic imaginary gimmicks in order to present readers with a cleansed, exotic days-gone-by image of Seoul. The cover image, as it appears at first, seems based on a two-decades-old photo as a template (fig. 21). A look at the Korean bystanders (fig. 22) indicates that the designer used the same popular historical world costume and ornament sourcebooks (e.g., Racinet’s) that the Liebig card designers used: the yangban hat, the kat, shows an elongated conical form that was fashionable until the 1860s or 1870s; one Korean man seems to wear Western boots and carries a 192 Modular Spectacle LEFT: (Fig. 20) Cover illustration of the illustrated supplement (Supplément littéraire illustré) to the French newspaper Le Petit Parisien of 7 February 1904, the issue that announces the forthcoming outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. The caption reads: “In Korea: French Legation Guard and Russians in a main street of Seoul.” RIGHT, top to bottom: (Fig. 21) Detail of a photo from the 1880s, often reproduced (see e.g. Hagen 1904: 151), showing the same view as the 1904 French illustration (fig. 20 on the left), but without the large three-arched gate in the background and the big single-arched gate on the right. Some details, however, such as the small collapsing house ruin on the right, the vendor stands, and the conditions of the roofs find their exact matches in this 1880s photo. It is a view from one of the balconies of Tongdaemun (East Gate) looking westwards. Kwanghwamun, the only such three-arched gate of that size in Seoul, the main gate of the royal palace, would be close to the location it occupies in the French magazine illustration above, but it is to the right of what is today Chongno Street, and from that distance it could not be seen in any case. The other, single-arched and pyramid-shaped gate in the illustration, also missing in this photo, was clearly inspired by Yŏngch’umun, the West Gate of the Royal Palace, which was out of view from Tongdaemun as well. (Fig. 22) A detail from figure 20, showing marching Russian naval infantry troops followed by French legation guards, with Korean bystanders of various social ranks, and a huge red-brownish pot. (Fig. 23) The main template for the 1904 cover illustration above (fig. 20): two facing pages (92 and 93) in a tenyear-old issue of the popular French magazine L’Illustration (vol. 52, no. 2684, 4 August 1894). The view from Tongdaemun on the left page is a woodcut by Emile Tilly who must have used the above 1880s photo (fig. 21) as a template. The view of Yŏngch’umun at the top of the right page is another engraving by Tilly, so is the Kwanghwamun view at the bottom. 193 Frank Hoffmann swagger cane with what might be a leather strap, the sort of stick native police officers would carry in French colonies; and yet another person behind him with a walking stick appears to be wearing what looks like a Persian or North African costume and a turban. Behind that man we see a huge red-brownish jar, whose small lid makes it look like a fusion of a Middle Eastern pot and a Korean onggi jar. Besides, such a vessel would not have been placed right on the street. What is more, in the middle ground, he presents the oversized image of the three-arched main palace gate, Kwanghwamun 光化門, and on the right the one-arched, pyramid-shaped West Gate of the Royal Palace, Yŏngch’umun 迎 秋 門 , towering over all other buildings. Not only is this presented in incorrect linear perspective, they are much too large for the placement within the picture space; the designer actually installed these tropes in erroneous geographic locations in order to cast his cityscape as East Asian. In fact, he retrieved images from a ten-year-old magazine article (see fig. 23) related to the First Sino-Japanese War, and then merged and appropriated three different engravings on two facing pages into his new colored graphic. Even the turban bearer now seems explainable, as the 1894 article in L’Illustration bridges Korean and Arab cultures through its assertion that Korean women wear haik-like costumes “analogue à celui des femmes arabes” (p. 91). And by including the impressive Ming-style gates, icons of a major city and of royalty, he also attached importance to this scene which would be missing had he produced a more realistic landscape. Transformed, it is certainly a place worthy of marching in. At that point we can summarize that advertisement designers as well as the press and government organs all applied the same mechanisms and used the same mixed toolbox for their imagery: an Oriental potpourri of images and fashion designs from all over Asia and elsewhere, jigsawed together to create fantasy places with real– world names that needed “civilizing.” But, since France was an old and major colonial power — setting the international advertiser’s images apart from national press images — the French newspaper needed to signify that France was present at the spectacle and somehow even in charge by visualizing the nation’s purported dominance. It did this through pure invention, by implanting in the image French legation guards following behind the Russian naval infantry troops who were marching through Seoul. The large caption reads: “In Korea: French Legation Guard and Russians in a main street of Seoul.” It makes no mention of the third group of military troops marching behind the French whom the graphic artist dutifully included. Based on their uniforms, one author identified them as American guards (Shin 1986: 87). Yet, their headwear looks rather like the rounded-top military hat (chŏllip 戰笠) with a red wooden knob cinched on top that late Chosŏn palace guards wore. Through simplistic but effective compositional gimmickry, the Russian troops are outnumbered by the French guards (who truly had no military role in that war, as France and Germany had pledged neutrality) and seem to have almost entirely marched out of the picture plane. All major French 194 Modular Spectacle presses and individual journalists, in fact, were soon after induced to report positively about the Russian war efforts, because it was mostly France that financed the Russian forces with huge loans, big chunks of which ended up at Krupp and other major German steelmakers and arms manufacturers. When the Japanese were victorious in the first important battle, that of Port Arthur, Prussian Kaiser Wilhelm II was even astute and business-minded enough to congratulate both the winning Japanese general Nogi Maresuke 乃木希典 as well as the losing Russian general Anatoly Stessel, by presenting them with a Pour le Mérite order (details in Reventlow 1906, 2: 468–470). From an art historical viewpoint, what is especially intriguing is the discrepancy between the colonizers’ modern scientific teachings and their actual daily practice of visualizing colonialism. Enlightenment, modernity, and modern science are said to have brought about colonialism. When it comes to the techniques of visualizing the pre-colonial and colonial Other, though, the beholder confronts neither Cartesian perspectivalist tradition, with its visual hierarchy and mathematically calculated proportions (an expression of universalist assumptions and a scientific world view), nor modernist disruption or multi-perspective techniques (as developed by Paul Signac, Jean Metzinger, and later Picasso and Braque). Interestingly, the world view of the Enlightenment, science, and the modern world system that colonizers and their agencies propagated and foisted upon the colonies was visualized utilizing technical means that do not fall into any of the categories of an enlightened world. Martin Jay, in his refreshing discussion of Cartesian perspectivalism, may give the most convincing explanation for the surprisingly non-Cartesian and non-academic colonialist imagery in his insight that “the scopic regime of modernity may best be understood as a contested terrain, rather than a harmoniously integrated complex of visual theories and practices” (Jay 1988: 4). Modulating images the way these Liebig cards and illustrated magazine covers do, by merging symbols, ethnicities, costumes, and customs, reveals a pragmatic — if not street-smart — approach that does not neatly fit into any philosophical world view of that time. Much of this reminds us of the woodcuts of Dürer’s teacher Michael Wolgemut in Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, from the time of Columbus, the beginning of the age of colonialism, when the different, culturally and visually diverse medieval cityscapes of Damascus, Milan, Ferrara, and Mantua were all represented by the same familiar image of the artist’s hometown, just bearing different captions — applying a technique of “adapted stereotype” to familiarize and utilize the Other (see Gombrich 1960: 68–69). As the visual realm of the Liebig cards (figs. 1 a–f, 13, and 14) and the cover design (fig. 20) of the French newspaper supplement demonstrate, in daily practice the colonizer deployed hardly any of the advanced sciences and enlightened artistic innovations taught in his own institutions. At the core colonizers themselves, whether European or Japanese, maintained no more than just a narrow lead in the modernization race and, like the colonized, were still just embarking on the long and never completed modernity project. 195 Frank Hoffmann References 1873 1894 1894 1901 1901 “Die Halbinsel Korea und die Koreaner” [The Korean Peninsula and the Koreans]. Globus: Illustrirte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde 24, no. 9: 129–135, and no. 10: 145–152. “Straßenleben in der Hauptstadt Koreas” [Street life in the capital of Korea]. Illustrirte Zeitung 103, no. 2678: 476–478. “La Chine et le Japon en Corée” [China and Japan in Korea]. L’Illustration 52, no. 2684 (4 August): 91–93. “Divertissements populaires en Chine” [Popular entertainment in China]. L’Illustration 59, no. 3046 (13 July): 24–25, and 32. “How the Chinese Amuse Themselves.” The Sphere: An Illustrated Magazine for the Home 6, no. 80 (3 August): 127. Braun, Louis, and Wilhelm Diez, comps. 1895? Zur Geschichte der Kostüme: 125 Bogen, enthaltend 500 Kostümbilder aus verschiedenen Jahrhunderten nach Zeichnungen von Louis Braun, W. Diez, Ernst Fröhlich, J. Gehrts, C. Häberlin, M. Heil, Andr. Müller, F. Rothbart, u.a. [The History of Costume: 125 sheets, containing 500 images of costumes from different centuries after drawings by Louis Brown, W. Diez, Ernst Fröhlich, J. Gehrts, C. Haberlin, M. Heil, Andr. Müller, F. Rothbart, et al]. Munich: Braun & Schneider. Captain Marin (pseud.) 1894 “La guerre sino-japonaise” [The Sino-Japanese War]. Le monde illustré 38, no. 1967: 363– 366. Césaire, Aimé 1950 Discours sur le colonialisme [Discourse on colonialism]. Paris: Réclame. Ciarlo, David 2011 Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany. Harvard Historical Studies 171. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2012 “Advertising and the Optics of Colonial Power at the Fin de Siècle.” Volker M. Langbehn, ed., German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory. New York: Routledge, 37– 54. Culin, Stewart 1895 Korean Games: With Notes on the Corresponding Games of China and Japan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Ferrario, Jules [Giulio Ferrario] 1815–27 Le costume ancien et moderne [Ancient and modern costumes]. 14 tomes in 17 vols. Milan: de l’Imprimerie de l’Editeur. [Note: An Italian edition was simultaneously published under the title Il costume antico e moderno.] Gombrich, E.H. 1960 Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. New York: Pantheon Books. Hagen, A. 1904 “Un voyage en Corée” [A trip to Korea]. Le Tour du monde, n.s., 10, no. 12: 133–144, and no. 13: 145–156. Hall, Basil 1818 Account of a Voyage of Discovery to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island. London: John Murray. 196 Modular Spectacle Hamilton, Angus 1904 Korea: Das Land des Morgenrots [Korea: The land of the morning calm]. Leipzig: Spamer. Hildebrandt, Eduard, and Ernst Kossak 1876 Professor Eduard Hildebrandt’s Reise um die Erde: Nach seinen Tagebüchern und mündlichen Berichten erzählt [Professor Eduard Hildebrandt’s voyage around the world: Narrated after his diaries and oral reports]. 5th ed. 3 vols. Berlin: Otto Janke. Jay, Martin 1988 “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” Hal Foster, ed., Vision and Visuality. Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture 2. Seattle: Bay Press, 3–23. Kim Kwang-Joong, ed. 2003 Seoul, Twentieth Century: Growth & Change of the Last 100 Years. Seoul: Seoul Development Institute. Lebeck, Robert, ed. 1980 Liebig’s Sammelkarten: Eine Auswahl von 166 Bildern [Liebig’s trading cards: A selection of 166 images]. With an afterword by Gerhard Kaufmann. Dortmund: Harenberg Kommunikation. Lorenz, Detlev 1980 Liebigbilder: Große Welt in Kleinformat [Liebig’s trading cards: Big wide world in miniature]. Kleine Schriften der Freunde des Museums für Deutsche Volkskunde 3. Berlin: Verein der Freunde des Museums für Deutsche Volkskunde. 2000 Reklamekunst um 1900: Künstlerlexikon für Sammelbilder [Advertising arts around 1900: Encyclopedia of Trading Card Artists]. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer. Matignon, J.-J. 1903 L’orient lointain: Chine, Corée, Mongolie, Japon [The Far East: China, Korea, Mongolia, Japan]. Lyon: A. Storck. Naranch, Bradley D. 2005 “Inventing the Auslandsdeutsche: Emigration, Colonial Fantasy, and German National Identity, 1848–71.” Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal, eds., Germany’s Colonial Pasts. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 21–40. Pai, Hyung Il 2015 “Gateway to Korea: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Reconstructing Ruins as Tourist Landmarks.” Journal of Indo-Pacific Archaeology 35: 15–25. Racinet, A. 1876 Le costume historique [The historical costume]. 6 vols. Paris: Firmin-Didot. 1888 Geschichte des Kostüms in chronologischer Entwicklung [History of costume in chronological development]. Edited and transl. by Adolf Rosenberg. 5 vols. Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth. Reventlow, E. zu, with H. Döring 1905–06 Der Russisch-Japanische Krieg: Nebst einer Beschreibung von Japan, Korea, RussischAsien u. einer Geschichte dieser Länder [The Russo-Japanese War: With a description of Japan, Korea, the Russian Far East, and a history of these countries]. 3 vols. Berlin: Internationaler Welt-Verlag. Richards, Thomas 1990 The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 197 Frank Hoffmann Shin Yong-suk 1986 “Exposition: Les événements en Corée et en Extrême-Orient vus par les journalistes” [Exhibit: The events in Korea and the Far East as seen by journalists]. Revue de Corée 18, no. 2: 84–98. Short, John Phillip 2004 “Colonialism and Society: Class and Region in the Popularization of Overseas Empire in Germany, 1890–1914.” Unpublished PhD diss., Columbia University. Siebold, Philipp Freiherr von 1897 Nippon: Archiv zur Beschreibung von Japan und dessen Neben- und Schutzländern jezo mit den südlichen Kurilen, Sachalin, Korea und den Liukiu-Inseln [Nippon: Archive for the description of Japan and its neighboring and protectorate countries, now with the Southern Kuriles, Sakhalin, Korea, and the Ryūkyū Islands]. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Würzburg: Leo Woerl. Son, Min Suh 2008 “Electrifying Seoul and the Culture of Technology in Nineteenth Century Korea.” Unpublished PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Stettenheim, Julius 1904 Wippchens Russisch-Japanischer Krieg und andere Beiträge Wippchens zur Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts [Wippchen’s Russian-Japanese War, and other contributions by Wippchen on the history of the 20th century]. Berlin: Demcker. Vay, Péter [Monsignor Count Vay de Vaya and Luskod] 1906 Empires and Emperors of Russia, China, Korea, and Japan: Notes and Recollections by Monsignor Count Vay de Vaya and Luskod. New York: E.P. Dutton. Wade, Susan House 2009 “Representing Colonial Korea in Print and in Visual Imagery in England 1910–1939.” Unpublished PhD diss., University of Brighton. Wahlen, Auguste 1843–45 Mœurs, usages et costumes de tous les peuples du monde [Manners, customs, and costumes of all peoples of the world]. 4 vols. Brussels: Libraire historique-artistique. Zeller, Joachim 2008 Bilderschule der Herrenmenschen: Koloniale Reklamesammelbilder [Image education of the master race: Colonial advertisement trading cards]. Berlin: Ch. Links. 2012 “Harmless Kolonialbiedermeier? Colonial and Exotic Trading Cards.” Volker M. Langbehn, ed., German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory. New York: Routledge, 71–86. Zuber, H. 1873 “Une expédition en Corée” [An expedition to Korea]. Le Tour du monde 25: 401–416. 198 3 Ultra-Right Modernism, Colonialism, and a Korean Idol: Nolde’s Missionary Frank HOFFMANN (Fig. 1) Emil Nolde, The Missionary, 1912, oil on canvas, 79 x 65.5 cm. Private collection. © Nolde Stiftung Seebüll. 200 Ultra-Right Modernism, Colonialism, and a Korean Idol Modernism was, on the one hand, a protean bundle of incoherent cultural reactions to late 19th century academic and historicist traditions and, on the other, a response to the dramatic changes wrought by the sociopolitical, scientific, and technical developments that came with modernity’s industrialization and urbanization. Using a social Darwinist framework, modernism conceptualized humankind, historical progress, and civilization as biological mechanisms of survival and extinction, while bolstering laissez-faire capitalism and colonialism. The complicity of modernism with social Darwinism and colonialism ― modernism being an imperialist project and a bastion of aesthetic conservatism ― is well established. However, in Germany and Austria, and probably elsewhere in Central Europe, the role of social Darwinism was always hotly contested, whereas in other na- (Fig. 2) Village guardian post (changsŭng) from Chemulp’o Port (Inch’ŏn), wooden sculpture with polychrome pigments, height 291 cm, late 19th century. A donation from Moritz Schanz in 1897. Collection and copyright Ethnological Museum, National Museums of Berlin, Inv. No. I D 16399. Photo: Dietrich Graf. tions and locales, such as the United States, the social Darwinist movement led directly into Fordist economics, with its streamlined assembly-line production and the resulting aesthetics that undermined the craftsmanship of workers. In German-speaking countries, aesthetic movements associated with the Enlightenment, and later with social Darwinism, faced competition from late influences of the Sturm und Drang movement (which put intuition and emotion before rationalism), from German idealism (Fichte, Hegel, Schelling), and of course from romanticism. The values of German idealism and romanticism clashed with those of the Enlightenment and social Darwinism, and that clash is seen in modernist arts. This is evident in the work of Emil Nolde (1867– 1956) who was clearly the most popular figure in the history of German expressionism, 201 Frank Hoffmann which again initiated the modernist breakthrough in Germany and became a longlasting style. Although Nolde’s association with Korea was only brief, his very highly acclaimed, influential, and exceptional 1912 painting The Missionary (fig. 1), prominently depicts a Korean idol (fig. 2). While the East looked to Wilhelmine Germany as a supposedly completely enlightened, military and educationally potent, perfectly modern nation-state, the primitivist aesthetic adopted by Nolde and other German expressionists transformed how Germans saw the East. Tainted as backward and as mired in a state of “Oriental stagnation,” what had formerly appeared to be “[t]he ‘primitivism’ of the East had become a positive virtue, and the Orient no longer seemed weak or weird. It was now the West that was degenerate and idolatrous, abandoned by God and the Weltgeist” (Marchand 2001: 472). Cosmopolitan Ultra-Right to Ultra-Right National The early expressionist who spent summers with his wife Ada in a small farmhouse on the German–Danish border and winters frequently in Berlin, Emil Nolde is today internationally recognized mainly for his energetic brushwork and powerfully expressive use of vibrant colors, as seen in his immensely popular oil painting Candle Dancers, reproductions of which can be found on the covers of countless books (fig. 3). Like a large segment of German modernists, he responded to industrialization, urbanization, and the overpowering new sciences from what I would, retrospectively, call a cosmopolitan ultra-right position, which developed for him and many (Fig. 3) Book cover with Nolde’s popular oil painting Candle Dancers of 1912; others over the course cover of a 1973 exhibition catalog at the Kunsthalle in Cologne. 202 Ultra-Right Modernism, Colonialism, and a Korean Idol of the 1920s and early 1930s into an ultra-right nationalist position. It was the extremes that set the agenda in the early modern age. Thus, romanticism, reform, revolution, and ultra-right agendas often coexisted. Richard Wagner, later to be Nietzsche and Hitler’s favorite composer, a virulent antiSemite like so many of his day, for instance, was at the same time a close friend of Bakunin, the anarchist, and was active in making hand grenades for the revolutionaries of the May Uprising in Dresden, which was part of the German Revolutions of 1848–49. Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) — an aspiration to create a perfect society where the work of art and man would harmonize, as he believed they had in ancient times — influenced most modernist artists around the turn of the century. The whole Lebensreform (life reform) movement, the various arts and crafts movements, the expressionist group Die Brücke (The Bridge), later the Bauhaus, and many others were all greatly concerned with creating or, in their understanding, re-creating, an environment that ensured that all the arts could come together to form the Gesamtkunstwerk, the perfect society. Many of these romantic modernists thus saw themselves as quasi-priests and craftsmen rather than as artists. (Fig. 4) Mary Wigman, “priestess of high dance,” performs the Witch Dance (version I), 1914. Photo: Hugo Erfurt. © Mary Wigman Archive at the Academy of Arts, Berlin. 203 Frank Hoffmann Likewise, the modernist dancer Mary Wigman talked about her former teacher Rudolf von Laban as a magician and priest of an unknown religion, and referred to herself as a priestess of high dance and a missionary of her own new religion. Theo van Doesburg, the Dutch De Stijl artist who was later active in Weimar, saw the artist as a messianic figure, a priest-artist. Johannes Itten, a Swiss expressionist painter and core member of the Bauhaus faculty, was a self-described lonely romantic warrior who went so far as to dress as a priest. His artist-as-high-priest vision later clashed with the enlightened artist-engineer-and-mass-production-manager concept that Walter Gropius embodied. Like his competitors Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, and many other expressionists, Nolde had a highly idealized and romantic concept of primitivism, the primeval man, the noble savage, whose uncorrupted culture he wanted to portray in an atavistic order to convey a strong, renewed spirituality. Nolde desired to produce artwork in a new formal style that would draw upon Grünewald and Dürer through sentiment and creative power. This romantic search for a unity with nature marked a German identity crisis nourished by the awareness of a lack of such vivid national traditions found in France and Great Britain. After the Thirty Years’ War (1618– 1648), avoiding further religious and political confrontations and stopping to paint in either a Catholic fashion or a Protestant style, artists’ orientations had moved toward classical Greece, Rome, and, more recently, Paris. By the fin de siècle, any relation to Dürer had been long cut off (cf. Belting 1997: 15–16). Nolde’s paintings and drawings during this period constituted both an attempt to overcome late 19th century cultural pessimism — to escape mediocre academic plaster-cast-classicism and naturalistic representation — and a romantic revolt against a modernizing, mechanizing, and rationalizing society. For him and other ultra-right, reactionary modernist artists such as Mary Wigman, who along with Nolde incorporated tribal motifs, race did not play any role whatsoever. (It was Nolde, by the way, who in 1912 proposed and encouraged Wigman to meet her later teacher and then-boss Rudolf von Laban at his Monte Verità Cooperative to study what would become Ausdruckstanz; see Wigman 1975: 55; see also fig. 4.) Their ideas about purity, authenticity, and originality, which were certainly constructed atop an ethnic subtext, were nonetheless cosmopolitan and internationalist in character. The reduction to a particular, constructed ethnicity of the so-called “Nordic race” only came along years later, with Hitler’s movement and rise to power. It was not until the 1930s that Nolde’s incoherent political views on colonialism and ethnic identity shifted to what by then had become a seemingly compulsory racist perspective focused on “cultural decay.” He then also softened his intermittent criticism of Japanese colonialism, downplaying Japan simply as a “hybrid culture” that imitated the West. The clear disapproval of social Darwinist models, however, continues in his writings during the Third Reich. Here in a quote from the third 204 Ultra-Right Modernism, Colonialism, and a Korean Idol volume of his memoirs, finished in 1936 but published almost three decades later, he refers to Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinist phrase “might makes right” (meaning much the same thing as “survival of the fittest,” also coined by Spencer): ‘Might makes right’, how it exists as the law of nature in animal and plant life — for us humans, with our animal welfare organizations, the humanist teachings and the Christian faith, it is love that will be comforting, if it can be comforting. One thing is certain: we white Europeans are the source of misfortune for the colored peoples — and the Japanese loyally follow our tracks. (Nolde 1965: 58) We may thus understand the German romantic and cosmopolitan (later nationalist) ultra-right as a modernist cultural movement and ideology (which, ironically enough, is partially based on anti-modern tendencies), where idealism and romanticism compete and coexist with notions of social Darwinism. This explains perfectly how a modernist like Leni Riefenstahl, a dancer, actress, artist, filmmaker, and Nazi propagandist, who claimed to never have been a Nazi, could years after World War II continue with her work where she had ideologically and thematically left off in the early 1930s. She photographed the Nuba tribes in northeastern Africa, documenting the stunningly beautiful bodies and culture of “primeval people” with their painted faces and tattooed bodies — a largely yet-to-be corrupted culture, in her view. The continuation of these idealist and romantic, cosmopolitan ultra-right, modernist no- (Fig. 5) Germany’s very own noble savage hero and totem pole: (a) cover image of Karl May’s 1904 edition of part III of Winnetou, the nude noble savage hero’s death and ascension in a symbolist, homoerotic depiction, designed by Sascha Schneider, who was strongly influenced by the Lebensreform (life reform) movement and anarcho-naturism (both advocated nudism, polyamorism, vegetarianism, and outdoor recreation); (b) a 1939 poster for the annual Karl May Festival in Rathen, Saxony, showing Winnetou with his German “blood brother” (Blutsbruder) Old Shatterhand — the Nazis, of course, turned the story’s bad guys, the railroad bosses who come to modernize and colonize Apache Indian territory, into Jews; (c) a still shot from the 1965 joint Kraut–Spaghetti Western Winnetou III, showing Pierre Brice as Winnetou, with a familiar looking totem pole in the background. 205 Frank Hoffmann tions of supposedly uncorrupted culture were even tolerated later in communist East Germany, as shown by the pseudo-underground, cult-like status of Karl May, a late-19th century author who peopled his many popular novels with invented North American Indian noble savage heroes (see fig. 5). The same can be said about the strong stand of the nudist movement FKK — the last “K” stands for Kultur, meaning “culture emphasizing practical efficiency and individual subordination to the state,” as Merriam-Webster’s pointedly defines it. FKK, of course, was also a direct product of the Lebensreform movement with its Gesamtkunstwerk Mensch. References to the pre1945 expressionist movement became one of West Germany’s few saving graces, following on the Nazi past. Beginning in the late 1960s, for instance, high school history textbooks included a reproduction of a 1932 etching by A. Paul Weber (see fig. 6). That print, an expressionist caricature, titled A German Disaster (Deutsches Verhängnis), is today one of Weber’s most widely known works. It (Fig. 6) Historiographical appropriation of an image: a page with A. Paul shows a mindless crowd Weber’s 1932 caricature A German Disaster (Deutsches Verhängnis) in the 2005 German school textbook Geschichte und Geschehen [History that marches under Nazi and events] (Ernst Klett Schulbuchverlag), originally meant to criticize flags to its own mass Hitler as being insufficiently radical from an ultra-right position, now being utilized to represent anti-fascist resistance of German artists. grave, a huge coffin in the ground that is also decorated with a swastika — a self-explanatory, polemic image, or so it would seem. Such an image encouraged a whole generation of German youth to distance themselves from the beliefs and actions of their parents’ generation, with their often continuing, barely-hidden Nazi ideologies, and to see that there had also been “others” who had resisted. A. Paul Weber books appeared with increasing frequency in plenty of student and used bookstores, usually ensouled with countless herbal tea stains and the aroma of weed, along with paperbacks promising alternative orgasms and the like. There were the many volumes of D.T. Suzuki on Zen Buddhism, works by Carlos Castaneda, Karin Struck, and Erich Fried’s anti-Vietnam War lyrics, and peppered with Luise Rinser’s brand new North Korea diaries praising Chairman Kim. The 206 Ultra-Right Modernism, Colonialism, and a Korean Idol Elefanten Press editions of Weber would occasionally even show up many years later at Cody’s on Telegraph Ave in Berkeley, as I recall. But these books and ideas all disappeared as they faded into obscurity, and even Cody’s itself vanished. Weber’s caricature had originally appeared in a booklet with an essay by Ernst Niekisch and was published by their Widerstands-Verlag, which translates as “Resistance Publisher.” It turns out to be “resistance” from an unexpected, ultranationalist, right-wing position — that is, right of Hitler. Indeed, Niekisch’s text and A. Paul Weber’s illustrations criticized Hitler for not being radical enough. The textbook hero and devoted anti-Semite, Weber, went to jail for his resistance to Hitler from the right, although he was later publicly praised by the regime for his antiBritish caricatures. Numerous other “alternative” figures of the 1960s and 70s proved elusive as well: D.T. Suzuki had once enthusiastically supported Japanese militarism and expansionism and Japanese forms of racial fascism; and writer Luise Rinser, another NS prison inmate, first honed her writing skills as an ambitious Führerfollower, even denouncing her Jewish boss to get his job. Emil Nolde, who had always been more popular than Weber and who had played a far more important role in the history of modernist painting in Germany, succeeded after World War II just like Weber in walking that thin tightrope of hypocrisy and self-exculpation to install himself as an “inner emigration” artist (as opposed to actual exiles such as Oskar Kokoschka, George Grosz, or John Heartfield). Amazingly enough, the myth of Nolde’s passive resistance (see Nolde 1967a) continued to work after Nolde’s death and was only dismantled in the 1980s. Only very few art historians, such as Leopold Ettlinger, suggested early on that “the historian should consider Nolde’s re-nazification rather than his de-nazification” (Ettlinger 1968: 200). Third Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels had been a great admirer of the expressionists, especially Nolde, and in 1933 he decorated his new official residence in Berlin with watercolors by the artist. Had it been up to Goebbels, Albert Speer, and other leading Nazis, and had Goebbels not to compete with Alfred Rosenberg on this issue and follow Hitler’s taste for an anti-intellectual and anti-elitist variant of modernity intermixed with his classical and monumental fables (only clearly expressed to the public in 1937), German expressionism would, no doubt, have become the National Socialist’s designated official style in the arts. Instead it was being shunned in the Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) exhibition (see figs. 16 and 17). Even after that essential cut in 1937, as Gregory Maertz’ findings have shown, expressionism and other modernist styles continued to be practiced until the very end of the Third Reich on a far wider scale than the bulk of postwar studies lead us to believe (for a brief overview, see Maertz 2008). The fuzzy relationship between party propaganda and cultural practice can certainly be explained by the fact that modernism has never been the real issue at stake: the Nazis were not anti-modernists launching an “attack on modern art,” as a recent exhibition in New York had it (Peters 207 Frank Hoffmann 2014). In Hitler’s mind it was no more than an issue of healthy vs. diseased (or “degenerated”). The stylized, masklike faces drawn by a Schmidt-Rottluff and Nolde’s South Sea cannibals were irritating and depicted what appeared to be mentally sick or unhealthy humans (which, of course, expressionists sometimes portrayed). Despite the immense fondness for Nolde in the establishment, which continued after 1945 (Helmut Schmidt once designated his office in the Federal Chancellery in Bonn the “Nolde Room”), the popular reception of the artist has shifted. The emphasis is now on Nolde’s attempted collaboration with the Nazis, on his “disgustingly hypocritical and self-righteous” and “dishonorable snake-like character” (Nagelweihler 2014). As this sort of moralizing criticism demonstrates, the post-1945 democratic halo that prewar modernist artists and even styles were ex post facto assigned during the Cold War years, the era of high modernism, still shines on and informs the reception process today. Hidden political agendas that began to surface in the past decades, as with Nolde, have led to the replacement of some of modernism’s iconic heroes, just the perception of “classical modernism” itself has hardly changed. But we can apply other and alternative interpretative layers. While German art historians did much of the groundwork, the more theoretical insights that put Nolde into a context that transcends moral evaluations of the sort just quoted often came from scholars in the United States. Art historian Jill Lloyd, German studies scholar Russell Berman, and historian Andrew Zimmerman have discussed Nolde in the realm of romantic modernism, Wilhelmine colonialism, as well as Weimar and fascist modernity. Nolde’s stand towards colonialism and the German expressionists’ adaptations of motifs from “exotic” countries is exemplified through the analysis of the making and reception of The Missionary. In the third volume of his poorly written memoirs Nolde begins the short description of his and his wife Ada’s brief trip through Korea in October 1913 with the sentence: “Korea had till now been an inexplicable, distant term” (Nolde 1965: 30). Yet, Nolde had already encountered Korean objects during his visits to the Berlin Ethnological Museum (Museum für Völkerkunde) in the winter of 1911–12. As mentioned earlier, one of these Korean objects is prominently depicted in the artist’s famous oil painting The Missionary of 1912. Like his fellow Brücke and later Neue Secession (New Secession) artists — Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, and Otto Mueller in Dresden and Berlin — Nolde was highly interested in anything “primeval.” He praised Paul Gauguin and his Martinique and Tahiti paintings, was interested in African sculpture and masks, and the like. He and some of his colleagues visited either the Dresden or the Berlin Ethnological Museum for inspiration, mostly to sketch African or Oceanian and Polynesian sculptures. We thus see “savage” nudes by Schmidt-Rottluff and Heckel, or, in a European variant, a series of gypsy lovers in erotic poses, depicting an ethnic group that had supposedly kept some of its primeval shamanic beliefs and practices, painted by Mueller (who had himself joined a band of Romani). 208 Ultra-Right Modernism, Colonialism, and a Korean Idol (Fig. 7) Title page and frontispiece with a 1902 photo of the artist and his wife Ada in the second volume of Emil Nolde’s ideologically charged autobiography, Jahre der Kämpfe [Years of struggle], Berlin 1934. Two full decades elapsed between the time Nolde painted The Missionary and the takeover by the Nazis, and thus we should not fall into the trap of adhering to Nolde’s later interpretation of himself and his early work as National Socialist. “Nazi Emil” (as Karl Hofer, his expressionist-painter colleague preferred to call him) had published the second volume of his autobiography in 1934, containing a number of repulsive racist outbursts and a reinterpretation of his own work as a political conformist. Some parts sound like indirect quotes from Hitler’s Mein Kampf [My struggle], and Nolde’s choice of title, Jahre der Kämpfe [Years of struggle] (see fig. 7), seems no coincidence, either. (The postwar edition released in 1957 was largely purged of its most offensive racist content.) The literature on Nolde has unanimously interpreted the 1934 volume and some letters from the same period as an attempt to distance himself from any sort of prior fascination with exotic art for its own sake. Indeed, that is how it reads when, in 1934, he refers to his trip in 1913–14: “My many watercolors and the paintings [produced during the journey] were artistically not influenced by exotic manners of creation” — and thus his works, especially his small woodcarvings, “remained in sentiment and expression as home-bred as old Nordic-German sculptures.” He goes on: “The absolute, pure, strong was my joy wherever I found it, from the most primitive, primordial and folk art to the most sublime portrayal of greatest beauty. Hybrids I never liked, regardless of whether 209 Frank Hoffmann Chinese–Greek, exotic–Aryan, Japanese–European or French–German. All that is crude mongrel culture (Kulturvermanschung)” (Nolde 1934: 177–178). One wonders how, if at all, this ridicule connects in any way with the works the artist completed during his journey two decades earlier, or with those he completed after visits to the Berlin Ethnological Museum. The Korean Idol The retrospective show ‘Die Brücke’ and Berlin: 100 Years of Expressionism in 2005 at Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin presented Nolde’s Missionary side-by-side with the three artifacts from the Ethnological Museum collection that served as models for the objects in that oil painting. These include a wooden Korean village guardian (changsŭng 長栍, 長丞, sometimes 長承) of the late 19th century, a wooden sculpture with an impressive height of almost three meters (fig. 2); a dance mask of the Bongo in southern Sudan, northeast Africa (Ethnological Museum Berlin, inv. no. III A 774), which in the painting seems to be hanging high in the middle on what could be a yellowish wall; and there is a small sculpture of the Yoruba from Nigeria depicting a mother carrying her child in a blue-white cloth on her back. Like the Bongo dance mask, that Yoruba sculpture follows a generic form of depiction that is not only readily accessible in African souvenir shops catering to foreign tourists today, but had already been canonized and serialized before the era of colonialism; the museum in Berlin has various versions of it, usually no more than 35 cm in height and mostly manufactured in clay or wood (see inv. nos. VIII A 11463, III C 7636, and III C 27073). The same is true for the changsŭng, the Korean statues of village guardian spirits, the underlings of the village mountain spirit (sansin 山神), which went through a canonization and group manufacturing process informed by set community rules and regulated by rites, far removed from any individual artistic outbursts (as the expressionists saw it). The changsŭng were almost completely eradicated during the Park Chung Hee regime’s New Village Movement (saemaŭl undong) in the 1970s, only to be reconstructed later in some fabricated “folk village” theme parks and, until the 1980s, were generally considered something modern society should be ashamed of, something backward. The cultural propaganda of a rapidly developing South Korean society left little place for “low culture” (as opposed to yangban and court culture, or modern Western culture) — i.e. the realm of shamanism, geomancy, and folk beliefs in general. Postwar views in liberated Korea were thus a perfect adaptation and mirror of missionary and Japanese colonialist perspectives on Korean culture. Today, we can see the changsŭng returning as an object of nostalgia, “consumable tradition” as Laurel Kendall calls it (see Kendall 2011), as colorful props at the entrances of galleries and exclusive restaurants or the parking lots of local Korean food stores, with politically correct Han’gŭl inscriptions and facial expressions resembling those 210 Ultra-Right Modernism, Colonialism, and a Korean Idol of characters in Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, or 1950s American cartoons, or faces on totem poles (“Marterpfähle”) from one of the Winnetou movies. In 1980, folklore Professor Kim T’ae-gon 金泰坤 observed one of Korea’s last traditional changsŭng rituals in a small, somewhat remote hillside village near Ch’ŏngju (Kim 1983). Six male changsŭng sculptures, named “Great General under Heaven” (Ch’ŏnha taejanggŭn 天下大將軍), and six female village guardians, titled “Female General under Ground” (Chiha yŏjanggŭn 地下女將軍), stood face-to-face on both sides of the road at the village entrance 50-meters apart. The male and the female guardian deities were made of the same tree trunk; the lower part was used for the male and the upper part for the female figures. The changsŭng festivals were triennial rituals, performed for the year’s first full moon in years when a leap month is added. It was during this ritual that a new pair of male and female poles were added to the existing ones, sometimes replacing the oldest ones. As with all rituals internationally, various officiators were involved: a festival chief, a prayer reader, and others. The villagers elected these officiators a week before the festivities according to the latter’s merits and abilities. Construction on the new guardian figures did not begin until the morning of the festival. The entire village participated in (Fig. 8) Country-side people paying tribute in front of village guardian posts (changsŭng) in the early 1900s in the vicinity of Seoul. In the 1910s Keystone their creation, with View Company, Meadville, Pa., distributed this image as 3D stereoview slides, each person having No. 14089, entitled Natives Praying to Wooden Devils, Chosen (Korea), with an explanatory text that begins like an early King Kong film script: specific tasks accord»These hideous wayside idols, with their fierce eyes, pointed teeth and bestial ing to his or her age, faces are objects of terror to the ignorant and illiterate Korean. He believes them to be malignant demons who will bring upon him misfortune of every gender, moral standkind, who will lay him low with disease, cause his crops to fail, his cattle to ing, and skill. The die, who will rend and destroy him, unless by prayer and supplication he can men who did the acinduce them to grant mercy. (...) Theirs is a religion of fear. ...« 211 Frank Hoffmann tual carving purified themselves over the preceding days (by abstaining from conjugal activity and loud talk, etc.). There were also rules regarding exactly how the work had to be done, which parts had to be carved first and which later, what tools were to be used, and so forth. And, in typical Korean fashion, a percussion troupe performed after the work was finished, which the villagers participated in as well. This, too, followed certain clearly defined patterns and rules, as with every ritual. This ritual — though virtually extinct by 1980 — was, of course, neither static nor centralized, as rituals generally are in Christian churches, for instance. Thus there were many regional variations. The male changsŭng in Berlin that Nolde painted, for example, includes the additional characters “cheil 第一,” a non-standard variation, as part of its name, “Greatest General under Heaven” (Ch’ŏnha cheil taejanggŭn 天下第一大將軍), inscribed on his legs (instead of on the entire space of what is designated as the chest, belly, and legs, as would be usual). Even more uncommon, the Berlin prototype for Nolde’s Missionary holds a roll of paper in his hands, which the artist spotted and utilized immediately. One of the figures in the above historic photo (fig. 8) is also a little unusual, in that the name “Female Sangwŏn General” (Sangwŏn yŏjanggŭn 上 元 女 將 軍 ) is carved into it. Sangwŏn (Chin. shangyuan) is, according to the lunisolar calendar, the name of the 15th day of the first month, according to Taoist beliefs the day to worship the Lord of Heaven and the day after the changsŭng rite is performed (a performance that is actually done at night leading directly into Sangwŏn day). In other regions there are even greater variations. On Cheju Island, for example, there are six different types of guardians made of stone instead of wood, each of them with a specific and clearly defined function for the community (in one case, serving as a kind of signal-post indicating whether guests are welcome at any given time). Kim’s account of the rite, possibly as a direct response to the early 1980s Minjung Cultural Movement or as a reaction to colonial-period Japanese studies, makes villages sound as if they were egalitarian communities governed by grassroots democracy. Other research informs us that Korean village communities were no less rigid or hierarchical than Catholic mountain villages in Bavaria, or Protestant ones in northern Germany. Although Nolde considered Korea a high culture (Kulturvolk, not Naturvolk), the “devil post” was seen as a direct product of blood and soil, and belonged, like the other two objects in his Missionary painting, to folk culture, to the Ursprüngliche, the unadulterated and unspoiled. Moreover, E. Taylor Atkins points out in his book Primitive Selves, that the many changsŭng during colonial times “not only confirmed stereotypes of superstitious Koreans, but that they may also have reinforced a mental association of Koreans with primitive cultures elsewhere in the world” (Atkins 2010: 84–85). Both Kirchner and Nolde had looked for “absolute originality” in the idols, masks, and other works of “the primeval” and “exotic” cultures — made by crafts- 212 Ultra-Right Modernism, Colonialism, and a Korean Idol men who did not follow any set rules. Yet, as we just discussed, the making of the idols followed strict sets of rules, and if the particular village guardian Nolde used as a model was “original” or even Korean-made is another question to be discussed. Assembling The Missionary Juxtaposing non-Western sculptures and other objects from various cultures and merging them into one and the same still life was something Nolde did extensively from about 1911 onward. The juxtaposition of cultural background created a grotesque effect in the arrangements that Nolde aimed to create. As with The Missionary, during this period he always worked from his museum drawings while composing still life oil paintings. Almost 200 of these sketches have survived. (Fig. 9) Three of Nolde’s drawings from the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, 1911/12. Drawings of (a) the Korean village guardian (see fig. 2), (b) a wooden Yoruba sculpture of a mother and child from Nigeria, (c) a wooden dance mask from the Bongo in Northeast Africa. Collection and copyright Nolde Stiftung Seebüll. The quality of the drawings from his visits to the museum varies, as we can see (e.g. fig. 9). His drawings of both the Korean changsŭng and the Yoruba mother– child sculptures are colored, though important details, such as the seven Chinese characters on the guardian’s body that would have immediately identified his geographic and cultural origin as Far Eastern, are missing, and thus are likewise missing from the oil painting. I would therefore suggest that we disregard the mantra-like reiterations in contemporary descriptions of the painting claiming that The Missionary shows a religious idol from an Asian high culture facing a black African woman (with an African mask dangling between them). The idol is then interpreted as Asia (if not Korea) representing the foreign and the colonizer, just as a European figure would have. This reading is unnecessarily complicated and highly unlikely, given that only Nolde knew what his model was, and the omission of Chinese characters deprives viewers of the most basic visual information to determine the identity of the figure as East Asian, except for those who might have seen a changsŭng in a museum 213 Frank Hoffmann or in Korea. Quite the contrary, the figures’ firebrick-red to brown facial colors correspond perfectly, which is also why, even today, many misinformed exhibition reviewers still refer to the village guardian figure as a depiction of a “man wearing a mask” — which is indeed the impression one might have. The Bongo dance mask is unlike the first two objects but like many of Nolde’s other sketches, which are drawn with only a few strokes and not colored. Then again, the lack of color can be understood to be true to the monochrome character of the actual wooden mask, which is not painted. To summarize, these three sketches are relatively true and realistic renderings of the actual objects — appropriations that the artist then recontextualized in his oil painting. However, they would not qualify as scientific illustrations of the sort that ethnographers or archaeologists produced at the time these sketches were done (when drawing was increasingly replaced by photography). Nolde’s sketches lacked the detail for such use, and such important details as omitting the Chinese inscription and changing the body color from black to green would be unacceptable, as would his enlarging the guardian figure’s pupils, thickening the streaks in his beard, which in the actual sculpture are made of horsehair, or elongating the face by coloring part of the figure’s hat (as it shows in the sculpture) in firebrick-red face color, in order to emphasize the face and accentuate its gruesome expression. Similarly, Nolde shrunk the big jar the Yoruba mother holds to a smaller bottle, obviously to draw more attention to her big, pointy breasts and immense nipples. In general, the style of all these sketches reminds us of children’s drawings — and Nolde may indeed have associated Naturvölker (“the primitives”) and what he considered ursprüngliche Kultur (such as shamanism in Korea) with the innocence and ingenuity of children. Thus he may have emulated the drawing style of children in an attempt to use an ingenuous style for what he conceived to be ingenuous artwork. Now, when we take the next step, from these drawings to the oil painting, we notice further artistic changes: all figures are resized, so that the three-meter-tall guardian can interact with the 35-cm-small mother-with-child figure; the Korean guardian suddenly has two legs, and the coloring is now much closer to the sculpture (though not the details); the Bongo mask is now colored, a complete invention, with black teeth and white facial color and pinkish cheeks, and transformed into a hanging mask, like many European masks — and indeed it seems to hang behind the missionary-turned-guardian and the African woman with her child on a yellowish wall. That sense of spaciousness comes out through what now appear to be contours and shadows of the mask on the yellow wall, which otherwise would just appear to be an undefined, colored background and not a physical wall. Excepting the adjustments just discussed, Nolde introduces no major changes in his depiction of the objects; he does not substantially “transform” or “deform” the objects in his rendering. Unlike cubists and other expressionist painters, he basically 214 Ultra-Right Modernism, Colonialism, and a Korean Idol moves relatively realistic depictions of three artifacts from Korea and Africa into the same picture space, just adjusting their sizes and altering some details. Such a replacement of the usual plaster casts, vases, apples, and flowers with “exotic” objects was new, was only seen from around 1910 onwards, and is found in the works of other active or former Brücke artists as well. The dramatic, theatrical effect Nolde produces here is due not so much to his adjustments to each of these artifacts, but to the fact that he assembles them in one picture, and his arrangement of them within that picture space makes it work. That alone is sufficient to create some grotesque imagery, which applies to his entire series of works in the category “still life with exotic figures.” The Missionary’s Choreography and Anti-Colonialist Storyline Nolde’s Missionary stands out in the painter’s oeuvre as his only work of art to openly critique a sociopolitical and cultural-political issue: colonialism. It seems that it was precisely the painting’s political criticism that made it such a success among art critics and art historians in the 1920s and later, a time when Germany had lost its own colonies — now inevitably creating the first postcolonial era within the confines of a major Western power. This was an era when sociopolitical criticism had become the currency of the day for Berlin’s avant-garde. When an artist’s single work stands out significantly in one or another aspect from his entire oeuvre, as in the case of The Missionary, we may raise our eyebrows and take a second look. Mostly what makes The Missionary stand out is the work’s title. In the artist’s personal catalog of his works it had been listed as Exotic Figures: A European, a Mask, and a Clay Figurine (Exotische Figuren. Europäer Maske u. Tonfigur). (The Yoruba sculpture, inv. no. VIII A 11463, is actually made of wood, not clay, unless there was another similar clay figure in the collection that he sketched and then got lost during the war.) Nolde changed that title in 1930 to The Missionary (Der Missionar) in his list (see Urban 1987: entry no. 497; verified and corrected with Nolde Stiftung: 30 July 2014). This fact has led to the widely accepted argument that the artist would have wanted his painting to be understood in a more sociopolitical way from around 1930 on (see, for example, Brugger et al. 2001: 32). And indeed, the title is crucial, as it brings a storyline to the image, imbuing the composition of the still life with vivid choreography, making it no longer “still” and almost forcing a theatrical interpretation, transforming the beholder into a spectator of a drama of social criticism. Our awareness of the title makes the scroll in the figure’s hands appear to be bible scriptures, and the black Korean horsehair hat of married yangban aristocrats, the kat, to be a wide-rimmed parson’s hat of a Western missionary. As an aside: village guardians were often also carved and painted wearing a samo 紗帽 hat with flaps, as worn by high-ranking noble officers at court. In other words, the guardian figures that were supposed to protect the villagers from misfortune and 215 Frank Hoffmann spirits could be identified with a specific social class: the country’s leading upper class. The “nativist” shaman beliefs and customs were by no means politically unintegrated into the state and its Neo-Confucian order, at least by the 19th century. On the contrary, the syncretism of various religious beliefs and value systems so characteristic of Korea also led to eclectic styles in what is usually classified as folk art. Shamanist rituals and objects thus incorporated everything from Taoist cosmology to Neo-Confucian order and national war heroes, and beyond. Since the 1960s even the spirit of General Douglas MacArthur found its way into the shamanist pantheon. The Berlin changsŭng pole has several unusual features. As stated earlier, the “cheil” characters (meaning “the first” or “the most important”) in the inscription are uncommon. Furthermore, compared to photos of other changsŭng in Korea from around the turn of the century, or, for example, the six guardians the Grassi Museum in Leipzig acquired in 1902 (fig. 10; cf. Redöhl 1913–14, and Kungnip Munhwajae Yŏn’guso 2013: 39, 647, and 650), the eyes and eyebrows are just painted, not carved. Also, in place of the usual grotesque bulging eyes are appropriately-sized eyes with relatively small eyeballs, which Nolde, with his unerring aesthetic instinct (and also perhaps because he saw the idols at the Grassi), enlarged in his painting essentially to reenact the same reaction guardian figures usually generate in onlookers. The stamped white eyebrows, consisting of five small circles in a line, are just as unusual — and Nolde again “corrected” those by rendering them as two horizontal black strokes. The figure’s hands, holding what might be a traditional East Asian script roll, although it looks more like just a rolled sheet (Fig. 10) Six changsŭng in a 1913 photo at the Grassi Museum in Leipzig, of paper, painted on acquired in 1902 with around 1,250 other Korean objects from the art what would be the dealer H. Saenger in Hamburg, who specialized in the East Asian art trade. 216 Ultra-Right Modernism, Colonialism, and a Korean Idol chest of the figure in the sculpture, also appears to be unique — even sensational, as it seems very hard to explain, and no similar cases have been documented. We might well speculate one possibility: this figure might once have stood on a path to a Buddhist temple or monastery (for an example, see Chōsen Sōtokufu 1933: 5573), and the paper would thus symbolize Buddhist scriptures. However, this is all guesswork. Given the original title of his painting, Nolde may have had different information about his model than we have today, for instance information even a simple label on the artifact may have contained. The museum guides from that time, unfortunately, do not provide any assistance in this. The last three editions of the official guide before the war only briefly list the museum’s second, smaller changsŭng, and correctly name it Korean Signpost (Koreanischer Wegweiser; 1908 ed.: 265; 1911 ed.: 249; and 1914 ed.: 238; cf. Han’guk Kukche Kyoryu Chaedan et al. 2011: 318– 321), while the earlier 1898 guide does not include any reference to either of the guardian idols (1898 ed.: 197–199). It was Max von Brandt, the diplomat who orchestrated the German–Korean treaty of 1883, who donated that smaller signpost figure in 1890. The taller one that Nolde painted was received seven years later from Moritz Schanz, an industrialist with his own cotton mill who also worked in various functions for the German Colonial Office (Reichskolonialamt), and who traveled to Korea in June and July 1895 and again at the end of 1897. In the Korea chapter of his travelogue, which contains exceptionally detailed descriptions of Korean housing, clothing, and trading, he points to the over 4,200 Japanese inhabitants of the Japanese settlement in Chemulp’o (see Schanz 1897: 215), where he purchased the sculpture, and later emphasizes the lack of any Korean stores other than those for absolute basic necessities. He writes: “‘Craft objects’ a tourist could buy are almost completely absent in Korea” (Schanz 1897: 220). It is highly speculative, but given the “brand new” condition of his changsŭng gift to the museum, the circumstances of his travel, and his personality, I would suggest that he most likely acquired that idol not through some illegal cloak-and-dagger operation in which village guardians were sawn down at night (as may well have been the case with the Grassi pieces, given their condition), but rather through commissioning one to be made. Given all the unusual features discussed above combined with the general situation at the time, that piece may well have been produced by Japanese craftsmen in Chemulp’o. In any case, it seems to have been a special, custom-made souvenir for a special tourist — the exact opposite of what Nolde, with his fixation on “uncorrupted culture,” may have wanted to believe. The satirical storyline for the choreography of Emil Nolde’s Missionary that most art historians agree on goes like this: the Western missionary whose gruesome mask conveys his dishonesty, hiding his true face, his true intentions, lustfully gazes at the African woman with bare breasts — breasts that were never sexualized in Korea or Africa at that time but become sexualized objects through the artist’s rendering, the 217 Frank Hoffmann modern exhibition, and the painting’s Western reading. The African mask, with its square, roughly cut-out eyes and rectangular mouth, signifies primeval culture; and its white base color with reddish pink cheeks (again, Nolde’s model mask was of unpainted wood) signifies the blood and cult of primitive society. Together, this is interpreted as a Western missionary who dominates and restrains a colonialized or semi-colonialized black African woman from following her religious beliefs, thus destroying her indigenous customs and practices, and those of all of the generations to follow (which is signified by the infant who looks straight at the viewer). The woman now seems instead to offer her services to the missionary, who has taken the place of indigenous deities. This interpretation, based on a visual analysis and the work’s title, can be supported by indirect textual evidence in several quotes from Nolde relating to colonialism. The sharpest and most powerful of such quotes comes from a letter to his old friend Hans Fehr. In March 1914, while in Kavieng, German New Guinea, Nolde writes: With touching devotion, to the best of his knowledge and with good intentions, and with modest success at first, does the pious white man seek by missionary means to weaken and to undermine the pagan customs, their self-confidence, and the will of these primeval people (Urmenschen). He works with the energy of a mild fanatic until one innocent victim after another docilely submits to him. He sacrifices himself to death, dying a martyrs’ death, and then, with apparent legality and harshness, the soldiers come in to avenge him. The first big gate is hereby opened for adventurers, for dubious European rabble (Europäergesindel) riddled with venereal diseases, and for the greedy merchant. The colony has been developed! (Nolde 1967b: 98) This anti-colonialist stance is mirrored in many more letters and publications of Nolde, who also supported the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) that opposed Kaiser Wilhelm II’s aggressive colonial policies. The compiler and editor of the volume where the letter quoted above appeared was Max Sauerlandt, a young museum director in Halle. After World War I he took the same position at the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg. Sauerlandt was one of the few important patrons and promoters of German expressionism before the war. He bought The Missionary in 1914 for his private collection, but then still exhibited it between South Sea sculptures at his museum in Halle. It turns out that Sauerlandt was the first to use the title The Missionary in his monograph on Nolde (see Sauerlandt 1921: 37, 83, and fig. 38 in the appendix). This — very important heretofore overlooked — detail again very likely means that it was not Nolde who promoted a politicized interpretation of his still life’s choreography, but Max Sauerlandt, the liberal art historian, museum director and collector. Although the meaning that the title imposes upon the viewer perfectly expresses Nolde’s views, no other of his mostly grotesque still lifes from the time have any such direct 218 Ultra-Right Modernism, Colonialism, and a Korean Idol or hidden political messages; neither their titles nor their visual content convey such allegorical interpretations elsewhere. Colonial Expedition and Sojourn in Korea Nolde’s major interest in “the primeval” and his inspirations from Korea and Korean objects were indeed of a purely formal nature and limited to aesthetics. He was fixated on formal aspects, looking for alien, fresh, exotic forms, colors, and patterns, for new prototypes to use for his juxtaposition still lifes. Andrew Zimmerman (2006 and 2011) argued recently that Nolde did more than just present the people he painted as aesthetic objects, that he actually contributed to the dissolution of the German ethnologists’ binary concept of Naturvölker (the people without history, culture, or art) and Kulturvölker (the people that have all that). He suggests that Nolde as a painter and Emil Stephan as the author of a 1907 book on Südseekunst [Art of the South Seas] are partially responsible for the dissolution of the art/ethnology binary because they accepted that the Naturvölker produced not just “decoration” but “art,” that they actually have a history of artistic styles. While the effect that Nolde and Stephan later had in the Weimar Republic may have been as argued by Zimmerman, in Nolde’s case that influence should be understood rather as an ironic twist. I see no indication that “his [Nolde’s] interests also fit with the new image of the colonized, including their artistic capabilities,” as Zimmerman asserts in his otherwise excellent analysis (2011: 13). To the contrary: there is no evidence that the artist had any interest at all in the artistic capabilities and the cultural development of either the Japanese colony Korea or in German New Guinea, both of which he had visited. It is true that Nolde was not in any way interested in the ethnographer’s approach of “dissecting” the Naturvölker, as it was a tool of positivism, the rationalization and mechanization of the world, and of colonialism — all of which he of course opposed. He was, after all, mostly guided by idealist and romanticist notions. Although he highly esteemed Karl Ernst Osthaus and his Folkwang Museum (we will soon come to that), he simultaneously objected to Osthaus and Sauerlandt’s practice of presenting primitivist objects together with his own modernist paintings (see his letter to Sauerlandt, dated 19 May 1930, quoted in Brugger et al. 2001: 32–33; also see fig. 15). But he still accepted it mostly because it generated publicity for his works, not because he understood such “artifacts” as art or had any interest in the artistic capabilities of so-called “primitive” peoples. That idea as such does not appear anywhere in his writings, and he did comment on almost everything. Nolde was very impressed with Wilhelm Worringer’s dissertation “Abstraktion und Einfühlung” [Abstraction and empathy] of 1907, the same year Picasso had painted his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon — both of which constituted a crucial point of departure for modern art. As a published book the work had then quickly become a bestseller, as its revolutionary ideas appealed especially to artists. The art historian 219 Frank Hoffmann had argued that primitive art was by no means the result of a lack of technical knowledge and skill, that art is not just depicting nature, that it is always, in any historic period and any culture, the fullest expression of the artist’s Kunstwollen (will to form). While that might sound politically correct by present day standards, the text, especially since its expanded third edition of 1911, brings in racial evaluations, discusses the “genetic development of style” (sic!) (Worringer 1911: 101; see also p. 136). Worringer’s revolutionary ideas were of an aesthetic nature, not a political. In a 1973 text on “Yoruba Artistic Criticism” Robert Farris Thompson presented a watershed argument by pointing out in great detail that traditional African cultures like the Yoruba — the origin of the mother–child sculpture in Nolde’s painting — had an aesthetic appreciation of various artistic styles and that their specialists engaged in professional and articulate artistic criticism, just like art critics in Western societies do. This view is sharply at odds with that of Nolde. Even given the standards of their time, the German expressionists still adhered to what must be called an outdated set of colonialist assumptions, as Ettlinger pointed out early on. For example the texts Ernst Ludwig Kirchner read in the British art magazine The Studio stated the natives, in this case those of New Guinea, “produced their artistic work from natural desire or instinct, not acquired by the influence of seeing the work of others,” and that their work was “free from restraint or rule, was full of human individuality, with a balance of line, savage beauty, and pleasant inaccuracies, qualities often wanting in designs by civilised and learned craftsmen, who (...) unconsciously produce an unoriginal, conglomerate echo, with uncertain meaning and often without beauty.” In contrast to the civilized master, the Papuan artist is said to work “with a childlike simplicity” (Praetorius 1903: 58–59). Numerous letters and entries in his memoirs unquestionably confirm how Nolde shared this view of “savage beauty” and the same criticism of modern art as an unoriginal assemblage limited to hollow formalisms. Around 1900 and on into the 20th century, this continued to be the dominant Western — and specifically the colonialist — view. Students of modern Korean art will therefore immediately find familiar ground in such descriptions and evaluations: Yanagi Muneyoshi 柳宗悦 (aka Yanagi Sōetsu), the most important Japanese theoretician of Korean aesthetics during the colonial period, himself influenced by the mystic romanticism of William Blake (who had also been an important figure for the German Lebensreform movement), produced closely-related statements about Korean folk art as being free from restraint or rule, having an emphasis on line, or showing unconsciously-produced pleasant inaccuracies that would create original beauty that the civilized Japanese craftsman wanted to produce but could not, precisely because of the lack of childlike simplicity of his civilized consciousness and his sophisticated artistic training. For the expressionists in France “primitivism was a double-edged discourse, one that drew on colonial ideology even as it was used to condemn that same ideology” 220 Ultra-Right Modernism, Colonialism, and a Korean Idol and some “artists necessarily reinscribed aspects of colonial racism in the process of dissenting from it” (Deyasi 2007: 14–15). But for German expressionists with their primordialist perspective, at least if we see the big picture and simplify slightly, it had mostly been an approach of looking for a static, authentic, pre-modern society that would offer “uncorrupted” wild and exotic forms and color schemes. A nonstatic society with its own history of artistic forms and styles would not have satisfied that desire. Russell Berman, who examined the structural homology of Nolde’s primitivizing images of tribal artifacts in his modernist paintings with Nazism, has noted that “[t]he primitive material remains primarily a matter of topicality: figurative representation of primitive objects. Yet the objects are after all always primitive archetypes, never individuated subjects” (italics added). Berman understands this as “regressive flight from the Enlightenment” and “a search for a static order.” Thus, while the reception of primitive art in France can be characterized as a search for new solutions to aesthetic problems and the rationalization of form, for the expressionists in Berlin, Dresden, and Munich, it was “of interest as a topic marked as authentic, religious, and redemptive, documentation of a cultural alternative to a desiccated modernity,” making it part of “the prehistory of fascism” (Berman 1993: 119–121). Although Emil Nolde never seemed to have had any special interest in East Asia, in the fall of 1913 he had an unexpected opportunity to spend about three weeks in Japan, another three weeks in China, and a few days in Korea. Given that Nolde harbored such strong reservations against colonialism as such, colonialism that even German Social Democrats no longer actively opposed by 1913, it was a profound act of hypocrisy when he and his wife Ada participated in the Medical-Demographic German New Guinea Expedition (Medizinisch-demographische Deutsch-NeuguineaExpedition) of the German Colonial Office. This was the same Colonial Office where Moritz Schanz, the above-mentioned donor of the Korean changsŭng, worked. While this might seem to be just an obscure coincidence, a very minor side note, it is a good example of how missionary activities, culture, modernist arts, and art collecting in connection with Asia and Africa, simultaneously always related to colonial affairs. After all the unspeakable horrors of World War II, German historiography pushed aside the nation’s colonialist history from 1884 to 1920 as if it had been a minor and short-lived accident. However, it was in fact German colonizers in German SouthWest Africa who had carried out the first genocide of the 20th century, to suppress anti-colonial uprisings by the Herero and Nama people between 1904 and 1908, complete with concentration camps (death camps, to be sure) and mass executions. This served as a model that inspired the Holocaust, as has convincingly been shown. In 1907, while the German genocide in what is now Namibia was still going on, Schanz met with the foremost African American leaders at that time, Booker T. 221 Frank Hoffmann Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois (who had studied in Berlin). He proposed that trained American blacks from Southern states should emigrate to German West Africa to educate and train natives in Togo in cotton farming (see Schanz 1908). Schanz repeated this proposal several times until at least 1911. What we see here is an attempt by very slick and highly sophisticated, rational, nonideological economists like Schanz to shift from economically wasteful policies of brute-force and suppression to ones promoting modern, well(Fig. 11) Emil Nolde, A Korean Grandfather, October 1913, ink and pencil structured, post-slavery on paper, 26.9 x 19.9 cm. Collection and copyright Nolde Stiftung Seebüll. society with trained but still subordinate colonial laborers, a structure where blacks train blacks, all in the aim of increased productivity. The situation was very much like this when Nolde and his wife joined the small German New Guinea Expedition. German firms and plantation owners in the kaiser’s colony German New Guinea were exceptionally brutal with their laborers, mostly through creating and exploiting a system of indentured labor, and recruiting native Papuans to produce plantation crops and guano for export. The death rate was amazingly high while the birthrate declined dramatically. The small expedition was organized by the Colonial Office in Berlin to acquire first-hand demographic information and determine if contagious diseases or other medical circumstances in New Guinea might be responsible for the decline in the birthrate (see Zimmerman 2011). The only personnel doing the actual research for the expedition was the leader, 222 Ultra-Right Modernism, Colonialism, and a Korean Idol Alfred T. Leber, a young medical professor and eye specialist from Göttingen University, and Ludwig Külz, an experienced expert in tropical medicine working for the Colonial Office. Leber, being an enthusiast of avant-garde art, was a supporter of Nolde. Thus it was Leber who had arranged the permit for the Noldes to participate in the expedition; but Nolde was required to cover all of his own expenses, and even borrowed the money to do so. The Colonial Office had no real need for his services as a painter or illustrator. Külz and Leber conducted their research, which pointed directly to the German plantation owners and colonial entrepreneurs as the real source of the devastating living conditions and resulting problems, and submitted a report which was so harsh that it did not pass the censor in Berlin. Meanwhile, for half a year, Nolde drew breathtaking sunsets, South Sea landscapes, and portraits of selected Papuans that seemed completely devoid of European influence and “cultural decay,” but corresponded to his ideal of either uncorrupted noble savages or gruesome savages (cannibals, and the like). Thus, Nolde’s take on Korea comes as no surprise. After traveling by TransSiberian Railway from Berlin to Moscow and then on to Manchuria, the Noldes, Gertrud Arnthal, a nurse, and Leber must have arrived in Seoul on the 15th or 16th of October 1913. Writing from China a few weeks later, Nolde noted to a friend: “The Koreans seem lethargic, indolent, but likeable; it will take a long time until they are subverted by foreign influence” (Nolde 1967b: 96). In Seoul, the small group met with the German Consul General Friedrich Krüger, who might have suggested they visit one of the Chosŏn royal tombs in or nearby the capital. Based on their timetable and notes, their destination most likely seems to have been Sŏnjŏngnŭng 宣靖陵 which comprises royal tombs of two 15th and 16th century kings and one Yi Dynasty queen. Ada Nolde composed a description of the royal tombs and made reference to the lotus root harvesting scene at the Kyŏnghoe-ru 慶會樓 (or possibly the smaller Hyangwŏn-jŏng 香遠亭) pavilion in the Royal Korean Palace — see the framed text — in a perfectly romantic literary style. While the Noldes were impressed by the Ming-style tombs, the artist, who otherwise was always working wherever he went (the Nazis later confiscated an amazing 1,052 of his works, more than by any other painter), only created two sketches during those days in Korea: a drawing of a Korean Grandfather (fig. 11) wearing a horsehair kamt’u hat and an ink drawing of a Japanese Geisha with Shamisen by the name of Kiyoka 清香, sketched on the back of a thin sheet of paper for the menu of a Japanese restaurant in Pusan, obviously produced shortly before embarking on a ferry to Shimonoseki (see Reuther 2005: 10–11). Nolde’s short stay in Korea is symptomatic of his overall approach, in that his main work with Korean subject matter preceded his actual stay in the country. While his anti-colonialist remarks and his Missionary painting were an expression of his German humanistic and romanticist perspective, a revolt against stereotyped modes 223 Frank Hoffmann We heard about the royal tombs, traveled down there. They were overwhelming. Around the burial mound were priests and warriors alternating, as powerful, wonderfully carved granite sculptures, and behind each stood — in tears — an animal. All the figures were covered in the slightest green tinge mist, tiny moss and algae had attached to surfaces. I have never before been so surprised and moved in front of sculptures; we were all thrilled and grateful that they had just recently been made accessible to the public. Emil Nolde, Welt und Heimat [World and homeland], Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1965, page 32 Ernst Barlach (1870–1938), another eminent expressionist artist from northern Germany who had never been to Korea but must have seen the first edition of Weber’s book, noted in a conversation: (Fig. 12) Cover design with motifs showing part of a Chosŏn period royal tomb: 1915 edition of Norbert Weber’s book Im Lande der Morgenstille [In the land of the morning calm]. Photos of the tomb of 1895 murdered Queen Min are inside the book on pages 78 to 80 (when King Kojong passed away in 1919 this was moved to his tomb), and on page 201 we find a photo of an older royal tomb from around 1800, the Yungnŭng-Kŏllŭng tomb southwest of Suwŏn. Ming tombs, Korea: Seeing this, my feelings are: that is where you come from. It is as if my true home were there. In such moments, I am inclined to believe in reincarnation. – September 1918 – Friedrich Schult, Barlach im Gespräch [Barlach in conversation], [Wiesbaden]: Insel-Verlag, 1948, page 19 (The booklet did first appear in 1939 as a private print.) 224 Ultra-Right Modernism, Colonialism, and a Korean Idol Thus, we were now in the new Japanese sphere of influence and were under the impression that the little Japs had already dug in tooth and nail. Our first stopover since Moscow was Mukden [Shenyang]. Korea is an ancient kingdom and the legends about it reach back to the year 2333 BC. Now it has become Japanese and the Korean Emperor is kept in strict confinement, he may never leave his residence. After Mukden we went on to its capital Seoul. In my diary I wrote: Seoul, Seoul, we will never forget you with your beautiful Koreans all dressed in white, your charming colorful children, with your palace with the lotus pond, where the sweetest colorful children play in the afternoon sun and naked men harvest [lotus] roots in the water. Seoul with your oxcarts and your men in long light blue or gray or white coats wearing small shiny (Fig. 13) Large Kyŏnghoe-ru banquet hall and surrounding lotus pond at the Royal Korean Palace in Seoul as cover design of the hats. White pants that are second edition of Weber’s Im Lande der Morgenstille, 1923. daintily bunched together with light blue silk ribbons at the bottom, close to the black embroidered shoes. Seoul with your deeply veiled women in green coats or dressed in white like [Anselm] Feuerbach’s gentle and genteel, attractively immaculate ones. With your sunshine and your royal tombs outside, truly royal tombs where granite sculptures of warriors and clerics keep watch with grieving horses behind them, up on the hill in woodland solitude with the tomb in the center and the stone animals with their backs turned to the tomb, in sorrow. From Seoul we traveled through the most beautiful mountainous Korean peninsula to Pusan, then on to Shimonoseki by steamship and to Tōkyō by train. ... Ada Nolde, “Einige Erinnerungen” [Some recollections], typescript, 1914, pages 7–8 225 Frank Hoffmann (Fig. 14) Ada Nolde, “Einige Erinnerungen” [Some recollections], typescript, 1914, page 8 (detail). Collection and copyright Nolde Stiftung Seebüll. of modernity and the workings of modern states with their prolonged arms in the form of missionary churches, these had no practical political consequences. He had no qualms about participating in a “colonial expedition” in order to fill his aesthetic templates with samplings of “original” and new fresh colors, sunsets, faces, masks, and primitivist objects. Like other German modernists of the early 20th century, Nolde’s work was embedded in an old-school humanist and political ultra-right narrative. Such Eurocentric notions belonged, in the words of Andrew Zimmerman, to “a global discourse that made sense of the colonial encounter by defining a European self unaffected by it” (Zimmerman 2001: 3). His artwork was thus only avant-garde in a purely formal aesthetic sense. How we categorize Nolde then also depends on our definition of the term avant-garde itself. For some, namely Peter Bürger (see Bürger 1984), he was a modernist without having been an artist of the historical avant-garde. 226 Ultra-Right Modernism, Colonialism, and a Korean Idol (Fig. 15) A pre-1921 Nolde exhibition (likely second half of the 1910s) at the Folkwang Museum in Hagen, here his 1911 Mask Still Life III (Maskenstilleben III), exhibited between a Malagan figure and an Uli sculpture from Papua New Guinea, until 1914 German New Guinea. (Photo: © Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, no. 625.684.) (Fig. 16) Nolde’s Masks IV (from 2nd series, 1920), top left, in room 3, upper floor, at the 1937 NS exhibition Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) in Munich. On Goebbel’s and Rosenberg’s orders 1,052 of Nolde’s works had been confiscated, of which nearly 50 were exhibited in Munich. On the same wall, the larger sculpture to the right, we see Rudolf Belling’s important abstract expressionist Triad (Dreiklang, 1919). Across the street, at the parallel Nazi art show, the Great German Art Exhibition (Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung), another sculpture by Belling was on display, this time as an exemplary piece for NS aesthetics. (Photo: © bpk, archive no. 50082063.) (Fig. 17) Goebbels (center), who had been an ardent admirer of Nolde earlier, at the opening of the traveling Degenerate Art exhibition that comes from Munich, 27 February 1938 at Haus der Kunst in Berlin, with two of Nolde’s religious works on the left: Jesus Christ and the Sinner (top, 1926), and The Parable of the Wise and the Foolish Virgins (bottom, 1910). (Photo: © German Federal Archive, ID 183-H02648.) 227 Frank Hoffmann (Fig. 18) Emil Nolde, Mask Still Life IV, 1911, oil on canvas, 80 x 70 cm. Private collection. © Nolde Stiftung Seebüll. Korean Masks as Models for One of Nolde’s Mask Still Lifes? We should not end this account without having a brief look at one more of Nolde’s works, a mask painting. For the expressionists with their fierce rejection of positivistic science and modern capitalist civilization, the mask became an important metaphor for almost everything spiritual or intangible. In his celebrated essay “Die Masken” (The masks), August Macke of the Blauer Reiter (Blue Rider) group around Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in Munich wrote of masks as a metaphor for modern art and expression as such. Macke proposed that European, Asian, Oce- 228 Ultra-Right Modernism, Colonialism, and a Korean Idol anian, and African objects should all be treated as equal artworks (see Macke 1912). This new view then took concrete forms in Karl Ernst Osthaus’ Folkwang Museum in Hagen, where Osthaus — much admired by Nolde — exhibited avant-garde European art juxtaposed with idols, masks, and other objects from “the primitives” (see fig. 15). Modernist artworks stood on one side while pieces that embodied the evocative desire for the “pure” and “uncorrupted” and “authentic” expression that many German expressionists sought out in exotic cultures stood on the other. A quarter of a century later, the Degenerate Art show featured quite a number of mask paintings in its attempt to single out the expressionists (rather than abstract art), precisely because the Nazis and the expressionists had connatural and competing ideological constructs. In terms of numbers of exhibited works, it focused especially on Nolde’s two mask series (see fig. 16) and his religious works (see fig. 17). A South Korean scholar of German literature, Chin Sang-bŏm 陳祥範, recently argued that Nolde adopted Korean masks as prototypes for a 1911 oil painting in his mask series (see Chin 2011: 210 and 336). Chin refers to Mask Still Life IV (fig. 18). Although this painting has received little attention over the last hundred years, it certainly should have. The artist himself apparently considered this last work of his first series of mask paintings the finest piece and submitted it to the Sonderbund exhibition of 1912 in Cologne. Sonderbund stands for Separate League of West German Art Lovers and Artists (Sonderbund westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler). The 1912 exhibition was the most important exhibition of modern art in all of Europe during the early modernist era and is often viewed as a breakthrough event for modernist art (see Schaefer 2012). There, van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, and Munch, as well as German expressionists — altogether over 170 artists from ten European countries and roughly 650 works of art — were all introduced to the wider public and to other artists. It also initiated and served as a model for the Armory Show the following year in New York — the first major, large-scale show that introduced modern art to the United States. For the German avant-garde, the exhibition was the first truly important national and international event to present works of art that were considered more than just imitations of modern French art styles. Nolde’s Mask Still Life IV was even reproduced as one of the featured pieces in the exhibition catalog (see Sonderbund Westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler 1912: fig. 470 on p. 50 of the appendix). For this very reason the work is historically his most important work from the two mask series of the early 1910s and the early 1920s. The picture has not, in later years, received the attention it clearly deserves, simply because of its provenance. If the masks that were used as prototypes for the painting indeed turn out to be Korean Hahoe dance masks, as Chin claims, it would be a small sensation. Chin Sang-bŏm’s statement confounds us because it lacks historical evidence. His claim is based entirely on his visual interpretation of the painting itself, and even that is not based on any art historical analysis. Though, I still like to briefly discuss Mask 229 Frank Hoffmann Still Life IV here for the very same reason Chin made that assertion: Nolde’s rendering of the top two masks strikes me, subjectively, as very Korean, in form and expressed sentiment — that is, Korean in the particular northern German expressionist way Nolde would have transformed Hahoe-type masks in 1911 if his models were indeed Korean masks (judged from the work flow and routines we can observe from the other paintings in that series). Nolde’s purely formal, non-political practice of moving, fusing, and simultaneously juxtaposing relatively unaltered images of objects from different cultures onto the same flat surface of his canvas (addressed earlier) applies to the works in his mask series as well. The Noldes had visited the Belgian painter James Ensor in Ostend, and in Nolde’s first mask painting that followed (Mask Still Life I) we can readily see that Ensor’s depictions of grotesque masks, always bearing rather obvious allegorical connotations, inspired it. After that first painting, however, Nolde abandoned all forms of allegory and social critical under- or overtone; all his new approaches were strictly formal ones. In Mask Still Life IV, it is the two top masks that might evoke traditional Korean dance masks for the beholder. Studying all four paintings in the 1911 series shows that the artist increasingly stylized the masks he worked with, further adjusting form and color; and, as in The Missionary, he converts all masks into hanging masks, which really makes the paintings still lifes with exotic objects (while in Ensor’s works we see people wearing them, or people with faces that look like masks). Given that the painting which appears to display Korean masks is the last one in the first series, it does not need to be as highly realistic a rendering as his earlier work. In several of her articles, Jill Lloyd tries to reconstruct bits and pieces of the relationship between a sheet with eight of Nolde’s sketches depicting masks and busts at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin (see Lloyd 1985a, 1985b, and 1991a) — none of which are Korean — with the images in his 1911 mask painting series. Factoring together all arguments, these relationships may be mapped as we see in figure 19. (Fig. 19) A diagram of Jill Lloyd’s suggestions (1985 a and b, and 1991a) that maps the relationship of masks in Nolde’s Mask Still Life II (1911, middle) and Mask Still Life IV (1911, right) with his sketches (left) done the same year at the Berlin Ethnological Museum. 230 Ultra-Right Modernism, Colonialism, and a Korean Idol Taking only the visual information into consideration and looking at Nolde’s work flow in this series, the origin provided for the lower two masks of Mask Still Life IV seems convincing. But the relation suggested for the green mask on the top left seems rather vague, and the model for the white-yellowish one on the right was never tracked down. Indeed, I find it easy to imagine that the top left mask was fashioned after a Malttugi or Yŏnip or Toryŏng mask with green face as a prototype, while the one on the top right might possibly have been inspired by a Waejangnyŏ mask — as with others, all freely recolored and adjusted in line with the painter’s own specific aesthetic aims while preserving the basic sentiment of the original prototypes. In another of Nolde’s 1911 oil paintings, Figure and Mask (fig. 20), now at the Kunstmuseum Basel, the mask with the double-eyebrows reappears next to an African figure with its facial features further altered. It has now been converted from a hanging mask to a hand-held one. Any inferences that these two mask images were modeled after Korean masks, however, are pure speculation. The fact is that the Ethnological Museum in Berlin now has around 60 Korean masks in its collection, most of which were only acquired in the early 1980s (see Thiele 1985: 453–454). About 600 artifacts (out of about 1,000) from Korea had been lost or destroyed in World War II, but in Nolde’s time the museum possessed just two Korean funeral masks that would have been worn by the leader of a funeral procession (Pangsang-ssi 方相氏 ), masks with four golden eyes (inv. nos. I D 12209 and I D 12210). These masks bear no resemblance to the ones in Nolde’s painting. The same applies to the four Korean masks presented to (Fig. 20) Emil Nolde, Figure and Mask, 1911, oil on Hamburg’s Museum of Ethnology in 1888 canvas, 78 x 47.5 cm. Kunstmuseum Basel. © Nolde Stiftung Seebüll. and 1907 (see Prunner 1974: 169, 180, 182– 183, and 187), which very well may have been familiar to Nolde. The artist, though, may have seen Korean masks in a private collection before visiting the peninsula. * The author would like to thank the following scholars for information, suggestions, and image reproduction permissions: Dr. Astrid Becker (Nolde Stiftung Seebüll), Dr. Siegmar Nahser (Ethnological Museum, National Museums of Berlin), Dr. James P. Thomas (McGill University), Dr. Donald L. Baker (University of British Columbia), and Dr. Eckart Dege (Kiel University). 231 Frank Hoffmann References Atkins, E. Taylor 2010 Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press. Belting, Hans 1997 “Deutsche Kunst und deutsche Identität” [German art and German identity]. Heidelberger Jahrbücher 41: 1–19. Berman, Russell A. 1993 Cultural Studies of Modern Germany: History, Representation, and Nationhood. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 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Sonderbund Westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler 1912 Internationale Kunstausstellung des Sonderbundes Westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler zu Cöln 1912 [International art exhibition of the Special League of West German Artists and Art-Lovers 1912 in Cologne]. Cologne: M. Dumont Schauberg. Spotts, Frederic 2003 Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. Woodstock: Overlook Press. Stephan, Emil 1907 Südseekunst: Beiträge zur Kunst des Bismarck-Archipels und zur Urgeschichte der Kunst überhaupt [Art of the South Seas: Contributions to the art of the Bismarck Archipelago and the prehistory of art in general]. Berlin: D. Reimer. Thiele, Peter 1985 “Koreanische Tanzmasken in der Abteilung Ostasien des Berliner Museums für Völkerkunde” [Korean dance masks in the East Asia Division of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin]. Baessler-Archiv, n.s., 33: 453–495. Thompson, Robert Farris 1973 “Yoruba Artistic Criticism.” Warren L. d’Azevedo, ed., The Traditional Artist in African Societies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 19–61, and 435–454. Urban, Martin 1987 Emil Nolde: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil-Paintings. Vol. 1 (1895–1914). Transl. by Gudrun Parsons. London: Philip Wilson for Sotheby’s Publications. ––––––, and Klaus Hoffmann 1970 Emil Nolde: Masken und Figuren [Emil Nolde: Masks and figures]. Bielefeld: Kunsthalle. Wichmann, Siegfried, and Organisationskomitee für die Spiele der XX. Olympiade, eds. 1972 Weltkulturen und moderne Kunst: die Begegnung der europäischen Kunst und Musik im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert mit Asien, Afrika, Ozeanien, Afro- und Indo-Amerika [World cultures and modern art: The encounter of 19th and 20th century Europen art and music with Asia, Africa, Oceania, Afro and Indo America]. Munich: Bruckmann. Wigman, Mary 1975 The Mary Wigman Book: Her Writings. Edited and transl. by Walter Sorell. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Zimmerman, Andrew 2001 Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2006 “From Natural Science to Primitive Art: German New Guinea in Emil Nolde.” Cordula Grewe, ed., Die Schau des Fremden: Ausstellungskonzepte zwischen Kunst, Kommerz und Wissenschaft. Transatlantische Historische Studien 26. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 279–300. 2011 “Primitive Art, Primitive Accumulation, and the Origin of the Work of Art in German New Guinea.” History of the Present 1, no. 1: 5–30. 235 Image Credits (Frontispiece) Pae Un-sŏng, Self-portrait (detail), early 1930s, oil on canvas, 70.5 x 60 cm. Collection and copyright Ethnological Museum, National Museums of Berlin (Ident. No. I D 45496). Frank Hoffmann, “The Berlin Koreans, 1909–1940s,” pp. 9–178: (1) Detail of image at: http://mirokli.com/zbxe/files/attach/images/234/323/1046941798.jpg (2) http://blogfiles.naver.net/20100326_55/buzybee_1269557082523LrNrK_jpg/안중근의사_buzybee.jpg (3) Bavarian State Archives, Munich, Section IV: War Archive, folder StV GKdo. II AK 169. © Bavarian State Archives. (4) Bavarian State Archives, Munich, Section IV: War Archive, folder StV GKdo. II AK 169. © Bavarian State Archives. (5) Scan of detail from magazine Atlantis 3, no. 11 (November 1931): 676–677. (6) Archive, Son Kee Chung Memorial Foundation (Sŏn Ki-chŏng Ki’nyŏm Chaedan), Seoul. (7) An Ch’ŏl-yŏng charyo, vol. 1: An Ch’ŏl-yŏng yŏnghwa kamdok sajin, photo no. 30; National Library of Korea, An Hyŏng-ju Collection, Reg. No. RG008-1. (8) (a) Scans from various fliers published by Informationsdienst der Terra Filmkunst, Berlin, 1939 and 1941. (b) Still shot depicting An Pong-gŭn (in lower left) from the movie Männer müssen so sein. (9) “An Chung-gŭn tongsaeng An Chŏng-gŭn, Ch’ŏngsan-ni chŏnt’usŏ maenghwalyak,” Chugan chosŏn 1818 (26 August 2004); online at: http://weekly1.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2004/08/26/2004082677006.html Image at: http://weekly1.chosun.com/site/data/img_dir/2004/08/26/2004082677006_02.jpg (10) Detail from Maeil sinbo, 8 February 1916, page 3. (11) Detail from Kim Chung-se’s biographical sketch attached to his dissertation “Kuèi-kŭh-tzè, der Philosoph vom Teufelstal” (University of Leipzig, 1927). (12) http://search.i815.or.kr/ImageViewer/ImageViewer.jsp?tid=co&id=1-A00010-055 (13) Federal Archives Berlin-Lichterfelde, folder R 901/83620. © Federal Archives Berlin-Lichterfelde. (14) Wilhelm Doegen, ed., Unter fremden Völkern: Eine neue Völkerkunde, Berlin: Otto Stollberg, Verlag für Politik und Wirtschaft, 1925, plate between pages 16 and 17. (15) Image source and copyright, Humboldt University Sound Archives, Berlin. (16) Archives of the University of Leipzig, Chung Se Kimm folder with 20 sheets, Phil Fak Prom 2282. © University of Leipzig. (17) Detail of an article in the Tonga ilbo, 27 March 1922, page 3. (18) Kukka Pohunch’ŏ, comp., Haeoeŭi han’guk tongnip undong saryo, vol. 1, Seoul: Kukka Pohunch’ŏ, 1991, page 150. (19) Sound Archives, Bibliothèque nationale de France; online at: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1292527 (20) Detail from I Goang-su [Yi Kwang-su], “Aus dem Leben eines koreanischen Gelehrten,” transl. Li Kolu, Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen an der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, Abt. 1, Ostasiatische Studien 30 (1927), page 100. (21) http://shanghaibang.net/webdata/aacn02/news/201308/20130807190705_faba1000.jpg (22) National Archives, Washington, D.C. (23) League against Imperialism Archives, at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. © League against Imperialism Archives. (24) Cover of the magazine Revolutionäres Asien: Das Organ der Vereinigung der revolutionären Asiaten 2 (April 1932). (25) Photo copyright: Yi Ch’ang-gil, 2004. (http://www.mediatoday.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=31295) (26) Detail from Maeil sinbo of 3 August 1943, front page. (27) Archives of the Unified State Schools for Fine and Applied Arts, Berlin. © Frank Hoffmann. (28) Collection of Kurt Runge, Berlin. © Frank Hoffmann. (29) Photographic reproduction from Die Woche 33, no. 36 (5 September 1931), page 1176. (30) Photographic reproduction of cover, Die Dame 62, no. 16 (first August issue 1935). (31) Photographic reproduction of Pae Un-sŏng’s self-portrait as published in an old German magazine of the 1930s, possibly Die Dame (bibliographic record lost). Photo courtesy Michael Menke. (32) Photographic reproduction of page 8 of Die Dame 62, no. 16 (first August issue 1935). (33) Photographic reproduction of the cover of the exhibition catalog: Kungnip Hyŏndae Misulgwan, ed., Pae Un-sŏng chŏn, Seoul: Kungnip Hyŏndae Misulgwan, 2001. (34) »Kakadu Bar« ad from Berliner Börsen-Courier, 14 August 1931. (35) Illustration from Chosŏn ilbo of 9 February 1934. (36) Details from figs. 30 and 31 above. 237 Image Credits (37) Detail of a sketch from Berlin Rom Tokio 2, no. 3 (15 March 1940), page 27. (38) Detail from frontispiece of the magazine Chōsen (November 1941). (39) Group photo with Pae Un-sŏng in 1934, collection of Kurt Runge, Berlin. © Frank Hoffmann. (40) Detail from second page of 1937 certificate of marriage for Pae Un-sŏng and Madlonka von Wrede, BerlinCharlottenburg Registry Office (certified copy for Frank Hoffmann, 24 September 1991). (41) Detail of letter, Koryo Law Office to Frank Hoffmann, 25 July 2009. (42) http://historynews.kr/imgdata/historynews_kr/201109/2011092342411456.jpg (43) (a) http://www.ahneaktai.or.kr/about/images/photo1.jpg (b) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Lü_I_Wen_%26_K_Ehara.jpg (44) Detail from page 80 of the intelligence report by U.S. Army, European Command, Intelligence Division, “Wartime Activities of the German Diplomatic and Military Services during World War II,” 1949, National Archives, IWG, Records of the Central Intelligence Agency, Record Group 263, RC Box #08, RC Location 230/902/64/1. (45) Detail from page 5 of the intelligence report by Office of Strategic Services, SI Istanbul, “Japanese Intelligence and Propaganda in Turkey,” 15 January 1944, document 0004 of folder “Japanese in Europe (WWII),” U.S. National Archives, IWG, Records of the Central Intelligence Agency, Record Group 263, RC Box #39, RC Location 230/86/25/06. (46) Kuni Masami, Geijutsu buyō no kenkyū, Tokyo: Fuzanbō, 1942, plate following page 154. (47) Kuni Masami, Geijutsu buyō no kenkyū, Tokyo: Fuzanbō, 1942, plate following page 148. (48) Detail of photo originally published in Tonga ilbo of 10 September 1937, page 6. (49) Photo by Alexander Binder, from a contemporary A. Berber postcard series published by Binder himself. (50) Photo of piece in private collection, © Frank Hoffmann. (51) Scan of entrance ticket, dance evening with Kuni Masami, Haus des Deutschen Sports, Berlin, 3 June 1937. (52) Collection of Kurt Runge, Berlin. © Frank Hoffmann. (53) Detail of a photo by Harry Weber, from the magazine Berlin Rom Tokio 5, no. 4 (April 1943), page 14. (54) Vienna City Library (Wienbibliothek im Rathaus), Manuscript Department, folder ZPH 619/23. © Vienna City Library. (55) German Broadcasting Archives, Frankfurt am Main, Image #1390140_326363. © German Broadcasting Archives. (56) Detail of a 1944 photo published in Ehara Kōichi, “Rihiaruto Shutorausu ō no omoide,” Rekōdo ongaku 20, no. 11 (November 1950), page 33. (57) Detail of a front page article in the French newspaper Le Matin of 30 March 1943. (58) Photo from Andreas Eckardt’s “Ludwig Chang und die christliche Kunst in Korea,” Die christliche Kunst: Monatsschrift für alle Gebiete der christlichen Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft 25, no. 6 (March 1929), page 187. (59) Detail of an article about Chang Kŭk, morning edition of the Tonga ilbo, 9 February 1939, page 2. (60) Cover of the booklet: Propaganda-Ausschuß für die Olympischen Spiele Berlin 1936, Segelflug, OlympiaHeft 24, Berlin: H.A. Braun & Co., [1936]. (61) Detail of an article in the Chungang ilbo of 14 April 2009. (62) Front page of director Eugen Fischer’s 1933 annual activity report of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWIA); Archives of the Max Planck Society, KWIA documents, document I. Abt., Rep. 1A, Nr. 2404-2. © Archives of the Max Planck Society, Berlin. (63) Photo; Archives of the Max Planck Society, KWIA documents, image #II/8. © Archives of the Max Planck Society, Berlin. (64) Photo; Archives of the Max Planck Society, KWIA documents, image #27 of Eugen Fischer photo folder. © Archives of the Max Planck Society, Berlin. (65) Kim Paek-p’yŏng’s (Baeck Pyeng Kim’s) 1960 U.S. Petition for Naturalization; Microfilm serial M1545, Microfilm roll 67, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Index to Naturalization Petitions and Records of the U.S. District Court, 1906–1966 (Washington, DC). (66) Detail from first page of Kang Se-hyŏng’s article “Hitorā yūgento dainikaime no raihō: Doitsu no seishōnen wa tatakattsuteiru!,” Kokumin shinpō 2, no. 22 (27 August 1939): 4–5. (67) Photo taken from Colin Ross, Das Neue Asien, Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1940, plate following page 104. (68) Detail from an article about Kang Se-hyŏng in the Maeil sinbo of 24 July 1939, page 2. Frank Hoffmann, “Modular Spectacle: The 1904 Liebig Trading Card Set on Korea,” pp. 180–198: (1) Image scan by Frank Hoffmann; private collection. (2) Print reproduction from the article (actually just an extended caption) “How the Chinese Amuse Themselves,” The Sphere: An Illustrated Magazine for the Home 6, no. 80 (3 August 1901), page 127. (3) Image scan by Frank Hoffmann; private collection. (4) Image scan by Frank Hoffmann; private collection. (5) Postcard scan by Frank Hoffmann, detail; private collection. 238 Image Credits (6) Print reproduction of a detail of plate no. 1107 from a book by Louis Braun and Wilhelm Diez, comps., Zur Geschichte der Kostüme: 125 Bogen, enthaltend 500 Kostümbilder aus verschiedenen Jahrhunderten nach Zeichnungen von Louis Braun, W. Diez, Ernst Fröhlich, J. Gehrts, C. Häberlin, M. Heil, Andr. Müller, F. Rothbart, u.a., Munich: Braun & Schneider, 1895? (7) Print reproduction of a detail from a single color plate, but marked and described as entries nos. 6 and 7 in Auguste Racinet’s Le costume historique, vol. 6, Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1876. (8) Photographic reproduction of a wood engraving published in the two-part article “Die Halbinsel Korea und die Koreaner,” Globus: Illustrirte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde 24, no. 10 (1873), page 147. (9) Photographic reproduction of a wood engraving published in the two-part article “Die Halbinsel Korea und die Koreaner,” Globus: Illustrirte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde 24, no. 9 (1873), page 132. (10) Illustration by William Havell in Basil Hall’s Account of a Voyage of Discovery to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island, London: John Murray, 1818; detail from a color plate between pages 16 and 17. (11) Reproduction of a color illustration from Auguste Wahlen’s Mœurs, usages et costumes de tous les peuples du monde, vol. 2, Brussels: Libraire historique-artistique, 1843; color plate following page 318. (12) Illustration from Philipp Freiherr von Siebold’s Nippon: Archiv zur Beschreibung von Japan und dessen Neben- und Schutzländern jezo mit den südlichen Kurilen, Sachalin, Korea und den Liukiu-Inseln, vol. 2, 2nd ed., Würzburg: Leo Woerl, 1897, page 323. (13) Image scan by Frank Hoffmann; private collection. (14) Image scan by Frank Hoffmann, detail; private collection. (15) Image scan by Frank Hoffmann, detail; private collection. (16) A 1897 photo by Jean-Jacques Matignon, first published in his travel account L’orient lointain: Chine, Corée, Mongolie, Japon, Lyon: A. Storck, 1903, page 195. (17) http://seoul.go.kr/life/life/culture/history_book/picture_seoul1/8/031213/1529_9538_253_namdae.jpg (18) Image scan by Frank Hoffmann, detail; private collection. (19) http://photohs.co.kr/xe/freeboard/6185 (20) Cover illustration of the illustrated supplement (no. 783) to Le Petit Parisien of 7 February 1904. (21) An 1880s photo from A. Hagen, “Un voyage en Corée,” part 2, Le Tour du monde, n.s., 10, no. 13 (1904), page 151. (22) Detail from fig. 20. (23) Pages 92 and 93 from the French magazine L’Illustration 52, no. 2684 (4 August 1894). Frank Hoffmann, “Ultra-Right Modernism, Colonialism, and a Korean Idol: Nolde’s Missionary,” pp. 200–235: (1) Private collection, image copyright Nolde Stiftung Seebüll. (2) Photo by Dietrich Graf; collection and image copyright Ethnological Museum, National Museums of Berlin. (3) Cover of the exhibition catalog: Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, ed., Emil Nolde: Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen und Druckgraphik. Cologne: Kunsthalle, 1973. (4) Photo by Hugo Erfurt; collection and copyright Mary Wigman Archive at the Academy of Arts, Berlin. (5) (a) Cover of Karl May’s book Winnetou III, Freiburg im Breisgau: Friedrich Ernst Fehsenfeld, 1904. (b) A 1939 poster for the annual Karl May Festival in Rathen; private collection. (c) Still shot from the 1965 joint German–Italian Western Winnetou III (by director Harald Reinl). (6) Detail from page 42 of the textbook: Jürgen Kochendörfer, ed., Geschichte und Geschehen für Berufsschulen: Lösungen Arbeitsheft 1, Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Schulbuchverlag, 2005. (7) Frontispiece and title page of Emil Nolde’s book Jahre der Kämpfe, Berlin: Rembrandt-Verlag,1934. (8) One of two 3D stereoview slides, no. 14089 (ca. 1919), formerly distributed by the Keystone View Company, Meadville; private collection. (9) All three Nolde sketches, collection and image copyrights Nolde Stiftung Seebüll. (10) Photo from Hugo Redöhl’s “Einige Bemerkungen zu den im Leipziger Völkermuseum befindlichen koreanischen Pfeilergottheiten,” Jahrbuch des Städtischen Museums für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig 6 (1913–14), page 35. (11) Collection and image copyright Nolde Stiftung Seebüll. (12) Cover of the first edition of Norbert Weber’s Im Lande der Morgenstille: Reiseerinnerungen an Korea, Freiburg im Breisgau: Herdersche Verlagshandlung, 1915. (13) Cover of the second, revised edition of Norbert Weber’s Im Lande der Morgenstille: Reiseerinnerungen an Korea, St. Ottilien: Missionsverlag, 1923. (14) Collection and image copyright Nolde Stiftung Seebüll. (15) Copyright Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, no. 625.684. (16) Copyright Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz (bpk), archive no. 50082063. (17) Copyright German Federal Archive, ID 183-H02648. (18) Private collection, image copyright Nolde Stiftung Seebüll. (19) Graphical diagram and copyright Frank Hoffmann. (20) Collection Kunstmuseum Basel, image copyright Nolde Stiftung Seebüll. 239 Contributors Frank Hoffmann studied Korean Studies and Art History at the University of Tübingen. He continued his research on modern Korean art and intellectual history at Harvard University and taught at IIC in San Francisco and Hamburg University, among other institutions. His articles have appeared in specialized journals such as the Korea Journal and Korean Studies, as well as acclaimed popular magazines, including Art in America; he also compiled the Harvard Korean Studies Bibliography (2000). For several years he served as a co-owner and moderator of the academic Moderated Korean Studies Internet Discussion List. Currently, he lives in Berkeley, California, as the CEO of an Internet corporation applying nanotechnology strategies to satellite and data center networks. www.koreanstudies.com, hoffmann@koreanstudies.com Andreas Schirmer studied German Philology, Philosophy, and Korean Studies in Vienna and Korean Language and Literature in Seoul. Holding a PhD in Modern German Literature from the University of Vienna, he has also attended a PhD program in Korean Language and Literature at Seoul National University. After a stint as an assistant professor at the Graduate School for Translation and Interpretation of the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and as a teacher at the Korea Literature Translation Institute, he returned to the Department for East Asian Studies of the University of Vienna in 2010. He has initiated and coordinates a network among Korean Studies programs in Central and Eastern Europe, overseeing exchange between eight programs in seven countries. He has written a textbook for German learners of Korean and translates Korean literature. His recent academic publications and papers mostly relate to Korean literature and translation studies or to the type of historical issues that are featured in the present book. andreas.schirmer@univie.ac.at 241