GERHARD SCHMITT (1933–2017)

Abstract

Slowly, but unrelentingly, the generation of those unusual Western sinologists who spent their childhood in pre-1949 Republican China is fading away. Gerhard Schmitt, who passed away on November 26, 2017, in Berlin, in the wake of an emergency ileus operation after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease, was born in Canton on September 28, 1933. His parents Friedrich and Albertine were missionaries, who seem to have fit the cliché of those “Chinadeutsche” who failed to develop any deeper relationship with the country and its inhabitants—a commonly encountered colonial syndrome recently diagnosed again with lavish materials in Barbara Schmitt-Englert’s Deutsche in China 1920–1950: Alltagsleben und Veränderungen1 for the expat communities of Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin. Schmitt learned Cantonese from his ayi and attended the Deutsche Oberschulein Canton after 1939. Much against the will of his father he exchanged marbles for his first Chinese characters with his Chinese playmates and used his pocket money to “bribe” the nanny to teach him written and Classical Chinese as well. Equipped with a phenomenal memory, by his teens he had already managed to memorize large parts of the classics. After repatriation to Germany in 1946—in the limbo after the end of World War II in Europe and before the founding of the People’s Republic—he continued his education, attending West German schools in Korntal (Baden-Württemberg), Düsseldorf, and Berlin-Steglitz. Strongly opposed to his parents’ religious beliefs and increasingly drawn towards socialism, he decided to leave home for good in 1950, and he obtained his leaving school certificate at the Aufbauschule Neu-Lichtenberg in East Berlin. At a time when many East German intellectuals were heading West, Schmitt thus migrated in the other direction, opting for an “Übersiedlung in den Demokratischen Sektor,” as his dissertation CV laconically states. At Humboldt University he read Sinology, Japanology, and General and Comparative Linguistics, and was assigned as “Aspirant” to the