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315Siebold and his Study of Japan, through to Lens of the Trautz Collection

1. IntroductionFriedrich Max Trautz (1877-1952) performed an essential role in the first half of the 20th century in

both the development of German Japanology and in cultural exchange between Japan and Germany.

The purpose of this paper is to consider Trautz’s research on the biography and work of Philipp

Franz von Siebold as realized in this context of the interaction of Japanology and German-Japanese

cultural exchange.

The wide-ranging activity of Trautz has not been addressed in the history of Japanology in

Germany and German-Japanese cultural exchange, except for a few minor exceptions.1 The reason

for this historiographical and epistemological situation surrounding Trautz and his scholarship is due

only in part to the moral and ethical difficulty of confronting an era when all became embroiled in the

historical process of the rise and fall of Nazi Germany (Trautz joined the Nazi Party while in Japan in

1933).When considered from the perspective of a history that focuses on historical changes of

information and communication media (as social and cultural institutionalized systems) by which

the production, storage, transmission and reproduction of knowledge is made possible, another

contibuting factor to Trautz’s historiographical marginalization can be seen in the forms of

knowledge he practiced. In this paper, I will use this term “forms of knowledge” to refer to an time-

and cultural-specific assumption of “how knowledge should be” enabled through the use of certain

formation media and practice based on it.

From the perspective of the history of media, we come to see the forms of knowledge that

Trautz internalized and embodied to construct “Japan” through his academic practice, as well as the

representation of “Japanology” for him. It shows the epistemological situation in which his forms

of knowledge became antiquated and difficult to understand during the process of the establishing

of Japanese studies in the 20th century, as a result of which Trautz and his scholarship were pushed

to the fringes of historiography. As I will describe below, this is symbolized by the fact that Trautz

considered Siebold the father of Japanology.

The purpose of this paper is to sketch an outline of Trautz’s preferred forms of knowledge,

with Siebold-related objects in the Trautz Collection as guides. This will also serve as a way to

reconsider the characteristics of the forms of knowledge of Siebold at his construction of “Japan.”

2. The Siebold-Related Objects Held in the Trautz Collection of the University of BonnI have preferred the vague and roundabout expression “Siebold-related objects” to “Siebold’s

objects” because there are only a few items in the university’s collection that are directly or

indirectly traceable to Siebold.

Panel 3: Siebold’s “Japan Museum” Plan and its “Presenting” Japan

Siebold and his Study of Japan, through to Lens of the Trautz Collection

Shirō YUKAWA(Translated by Adam HALIBURTON)

316 International Symposium Proceedings ̶ Siebold’s Vision of Japan

These traceable items are, namely, the “Ezo Drawings” thought to be drawn by Siebold, and

two quartos2 with a “Sieboldiana” stamp, and a stamp from the Japan Institute of Berlin (see Figure

1). Other than these, nearly all of the other materials related to Siebold were produced as a result

of Trautz’s grappling with Siebold and his research on Japan: several collections of letters loosely

assembled by theme, such as correspondence between Trautz and the Brandenstein family who

were the heirs-at-law of Siebold’s legacy; unpublished manuscripts and copies of lectures; reference

essays; newspaper and journal clippings; a rubbing from a memorial stone in Nagasaki; materials

related to the publishing of Nippon by the Berlin publisher Wasmuth; the original German draft of a

biography of Siebold by Kure Shūzō edited and published in 1996 by Walravens; and a large number

of photographs related to all these items and events.

These Siebold-related materials held at the University of Bonn are the remnants of

Trautz’s encounters with the figure of Siebold. Accordingly, they portray a highly personal and

individual history of Trautz. On the other hand, if we look at them as media that record the specific

environment that enabled Trautz to act, they become a part of the history of the research on Siebold.

Eberhard Friese provides the only example of the use of these materials, informed by the

above circumstances, with his publication of Philipp Franz von Siebold als früherer Exponent der

Ostasienwissenschaften3 in 1986. Using as yet unsorted materials in the early 1980s, Friese offers

1-1 Frontispiece

1-2 Sieboldiana (Siebold collection) stamp

1-3 Japan Institute of Berlin stamp

1-4 Book label sticker

Fig. 1 Siebold’s Nippon (Leiden: 1852)Trautz Collection at the University of Bonn


research still valuable today for its reconstruction of the particulars of the history of the Siebold

Collection currently housed at Ruhr University Bochum4.

Trautz’s decisive role in German Siebold research and in the Siebold Collection is plainly

described in Friese’s work. Because Trautz contended with Siebold out of respect and enthusiasm,

or perhaps rather because Siebold was able to meet Trautz, Siebold’s personal effects escaped

dispersal after his death in the 1920s and were gathered into the Siebold Collection that exists to

this day. And this is a sign of Trautz’s pioneering work in establishing the person of Siebold as a

subject of study in Germany.

Trautz himself was also conscious of his own role. I would like to draw attention to the

typewritten notes he composed around 1935, “Daten zur Entwicklung der Siebold-Forschung in

Deutschland und Japan5 (Information on the Development of Siebold Research in Germany and

Japan)” (see Reference 2). It is recorded in these notes that Trautz began his search for Siebold’s

personal effects in Breslau in 1922. Items lent to the Asian Department of the Museum of

Ethnology in Berlin in 1926 were bought by Trautz and transferred to the Japan Institute of Berlin in

1927. Then, in 1929 or 1930, Trautz put Siebold’s legacy to its “first scholarly use in Germany”6 by

publishing them in the all-new Nippon.

Trautz wrote these notes when the Siebold Collection was lent to Japan in 1934. At that time,

Trautz was head of the Kyoto Institute for German Cultural Studies (Kyoto doitsu bunka kenkyū-jo).

On September 9th of that year, in a letter7 to then-in-residence Ambassador Herbert von Dirksen of

Germany (1887-1955), Trautz wrote of the news of the lending of the actual collection, as opposed

to photographic reproductions, as a bolt out of the blue. In the letter he expresses the pessimistic

opinion that the arrival of the collection in Japan where they could be extensively photographed

before they were fully studied by German scholars would bring about a rise in the study of Siebold in

Japan and the decline of the same in Germany.

Compelled by these feelings of irritation and disappointment while in Kyoto, Trautz composed

a series of personal recollections (“Ego-Dokument”), among them “Bemerkung zur Siebold-

Angelegenheit (Memos on the Subject of Siebold)” and “Wie ich das Siebold-Material auffand und

dem Japaninstitut Berlin übergab (How I Came to Find Siebold’s Materials and Hand Them Over

to the Japan Institute of Berlin).” All told he left behind fifty such recollections8, and from 1935, they account for the history of the Japan Institute’s Siebold Collection (and Trautz’s sentiments)

in detail. They are important for laying out the history of Siebold scholarship in Germany, and

for containing Trautz’s own commentary. As I pointed out above, from these letters and memoirs

it becomes apparent that it is no exaggeration to say that Trautz played an integral part in the

assembly and study of Siebold and his works in Germany. In this way, through the diversity of

its media, the Trautz Collection made possible the reconstruction of its subject from multiple

perspectives.

Reserving detailed discussion of the above for later, in the next section I would like to relate

how the contents of the Trautz Collection at the University of Bonn came to be assembled. This

topic is also a significant part of the history of the Siebold Collection formerly held by the Japan

Institute.

3. The Acquisition of Trautz’s Personal Estate by the University of BonnThe term “Trautz Collection” refers to the personal estate of Trautz, which was donated by his wife

Hilda Trautz (née von Landwürst, 1887-1973) in around 1960, following his death.

In 1938, Trautz quit his position at the Kyoto Institute for German Cultural Studies and


returned to his hometown of Karlsruhe, where he organized the objects, or rather media of

documentation had collected over many years, while continuing to write and give lectures. On

September 3rd, 1942, something interrupted the deserved tranquility befitting the final days of this

scholar: the total bombing of the city of Karlsruhe by Britain.

Straight after the bombing, Trautz wrote to his friend and the former German ambassador

Ernst Arthur Voretzsch (1868-1965) in a letter9 dated September 16th, to discern whether part of his

collection could be “loaned” to museums in Bamberg for safe-keeping. This is because Voretzsch

had already lent his own collection of oriental art to the Historical Museum of Bamberg.10

Trautz was desperate to protect those things most important to him. In his letter, he divided

works of art, craftwork, photographic plates, and kemari-related objects to Category I, and books

and other printed media to Category II. In this second category Trautz lists Siebold literature and “a

collection of maps including those possessed by Siebold.”

Trautz referred to these assembled materials not as a “collection,” but as reference “tools

(Werkzeug),”11 and as such, he was of the strong opinion that they should be preserved for future

generations.

Taking the long view, I desire that the things that I have gathered and prepared be useful to

the generations to come, or that they shall be. The fundamental knowledge of the Far East

that they would provide will be more indispensable than in our own time, and for that reason

as well, these essential intellectual tools are necessary.12

Voretzsch promptly took this request to the Historical Museum of Bamberg and began

negotiations. In December of 1942, the collection was transferred to the museum. The specifics of this

“loan” and details of the final arrangement are recorded, but I will refrain from going into them here.13

Trautz’s collection was kept safe from the destruction of war. According to certain accounts,

Trautz enquired14 after the condition of the materials directly after the war, in 1946, and they

remained at the museum until after his death. In April of 1952, immediately upon Hilda Trautz’s

inheritance of the collection, possession of it was transferred to the city of Bamberg with her

permission.15

However, “forty or so bound volumes of Japanese texts” that Hilda Trautz had inadvertently

forgotten in Bamberg were returned to Karlsruhe the following year16 to be catalogued by a native

reader of Japanese.

Moving into the 1960s, the circumstances surrounding Trautz’s personal estate began to

change. Due to the lack of productive use of photographic and other materials related to the Japan

Institute by the city of Bamberg, the collection was donated to the University of Bonn at Hilda

Trautz’s behest in 1961,17 uniting them with the research literature and other scholarly writings that

had been donated to the university the year before.18

Those are the beginnings, starting in 1961, of the University of Bonn’s Trautz Collection. It

was the fulfillment by Hilda Trautz of her husband’s wish that the fruits of his labor be useful to

posterity.

However, contrary to what Trautz had hoped, up until now the collection has only very rarely

been used for extensive research.

4. Trautz’s “Forms of Knowledge”: Information Media as ToolsTrautz composed a note to his testament in 1947 at the age of 70. Portions of the draft are held in the


Bundesarchiv Department of Military Archives in Freiburg,19 We can glean his view of information

media from this document.

Note to the Testament

So that the work and scholarly research materials into which I have poured my love and

passion, time and effort, thought and activity, are properly cared for without loss, and so that the

work I have begun can be brought to its culmination and be useful to the world at large, I leave

this testament.

1) I have lived following the inclinations of my heart and my talents. I have devoted myself to

historical, philosophical, linguistic and religious history, relying on realia̶the visible. More

than with philosophy I have been blessed with the visual. Therefore picture-language spoke

more to me, I got my ideas from pictures and visual impressions. Critical thought was not

foreign to me, but without denying the importance of method and system, they were not for

me a source of ideas or strength.

I received an education in the humanities, built on a Christian foundation, and have

lived humbly, as diligently as my powers allowed. The following words of Goethe have had a

strong influence on me.

“If you wish to build something of value, you must place the utmost importance on your

tools.”

In my youth I was an apprentice in the joinery trade and later, bookbinding. When I

entered secondary school I became a regular visitor at the public library. I was no model

student; I took an extreme interest in everything around me, especially history and the natural

sciences.20

Trautz took pride in his handicraft and his visual acumen rather than his skill with words.

And his research owes much to this affinity for “things visible to the eye”̶which is to say, visual

media̶and he intends this phrase literally, not as a metaphor typical of postmodern thought.

In a 1932 talk in Kôyasan, Trautz had this to say:

My teacher [Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Müller, 1863-1930] told me to study extensively “Realien,”

or the material̶in other words, that which stands in the fore- and background of words and

speech, in addition to language learning and whenever he prepared a lecture, it was based on

the extensive use of museum collections. He said that the single best safeguard against error is

a thorough knowledge of things and facts.21

For Trautz it was precisely that which lies beyond words and speech, the physical things

“visible to the eye” that are the tools at the root of scholarly practice. It was for this reason that he

devoted himself to the collection and analysis of physical objects.

Trautz traveled to Japan, the place of origin of the objects of his experience and perception,

those things behind language, to assemble them and most of all to fix their properties in a visual

medium to take back. That was the research method or rather “the forms of knowledge” of Trautz


in the early 20th century. He also put together a wide variety of media along with his photographs:

nearly 2,000 slides and photographic plates, 5,000 prints, 2,000 postcards, different types of

pamphlets, a large number of maps, writings, notes, and manuscripts. And he left them as research

tools to succeeding generations.

His activity can be compared with that of Siebold, who commissioned painters to preserve an

informational record, to take back to Germany. Trautz and Siebold both sought out and collected the

things of their interest, transferring to some other media of record what they could not bring back.

They differed only in the media environment of their respective time periods.

Creating, assembling, and restructuring or giving new order to information and recorded

media; in a word, archiving. Trautz relied on and directed his efforts toward this form of knowledge.

One of the reasons for his historiographical marginalization is that he published little, producing no

“results” in today’s assumption of “how academic knowledge should be.”22 But this goes to show

that he preferred to pour his energy into creating media in a variety of forms̶into archiving̶to

(re) construct a multidimensional body of knowledge, rather than translate or interpret the same

objects into disembodied words, creating a body of knowledge through the semiotic homogenization

of the real things in the language. It is possible that Trautz discovered in Siebold the potential of the

archival form of knowledge that he put into practice himself.

5. The Archive as the Form of Knowledge of Siebold and TrautzTrautz’s interest in Siebold was sparked by his teacher, the orientalist Müller. In the memoir cited

above, “How I Came to Find Siebold’s Materials and Hand Them Over to the Japan Institute of

Berlin”23 written in 1935, Trautz recalls:

My mentor was Professor F.W.K. Müller, the most learned of orientalists, and the most

essential director at the Berlin Ethnological Museum. I learned much of Japanese ethnology

and cultural history from the thousands of Japan-related objects at this museum [...]

It was in the fall of 1919 that Prof. Müller first mentioned Siebold to me. He said that

he had carried out his work encyclopedically, and was the bearer of a most comprehensively

informed mind. And he emphasized that even today Siebold forms the basis of fundamental

knowledge pertaining to modern Japanese culture, and is the most suitable guide for Germans

looking to gain an overall impression of Japan. I heeded my teacher’s advice.24

In truth, Trautz was one of those very Germans seeking an overall impression of Japan. As

Josef Kreiner points out, the whole that this form of knowledge aims at is “not to support the fixed

worded interpretation of Japan and its culture, but support a large body of new findings in various

fields.”25

Siebold selected the word “Archive” as the subtitle for his book Nippon, signifying that form of

knowledge which had rapidly become outmoded through the process of the functional differentiation

of the academic world into the various disciplines with their controlled special terminology in the

20th century.

Trautz availed himself of modern media, but was the last Japanologist to make use of the

encyclopedically and archival form of knowledge that was characteristic of Siebold. Kreiner’s

following observation about Siebold’s relative lack of contribution to the establishment of Japanese

studies explains also the historiographical and epistemological situation surrounding Trautz and his

materials.


Japanology as philology or cultural studies is unrelated to Siebold’s role in developing new

approaches to early Japan, but was pioneered by Ernest Satow, Basil Hull Chamberlain and Karl

Florenz in Germany, during a period of the combined flourishing of European thought and the

native Japanese scholarly tradition (kokugaku) in the Meiji period.26

Taking Siebold as a model, Trautz advanced the archival form of knowledge in contradiction to

the prevailing philological, or rather text-centered Japanology of his time. It is likely that this is one

reason why Siebold research did not progress much in Germany after Trautz.

Even though Trautz was aware of this state of affairs, he was drawn to Siebold’s model of

the archive. The very fact that Trautz took into his own hands the as-yet-unknown books and

manuscripts of Siebold and used them for his research̶that is to say, that he took concrete tools in

hand̶led to his editing and publishing Nippon. It was a laborious task, and he had this to say about it:

None but the editor who wrestled with it can know of the half-finished nature and difficulty

that attended the publishing of this new edition of Siebold’s Nippon. The worthwhile topics

that were left obscure and disorganized, only partially treated by the author and put out into

the world in a lacking condition, have been clarified by a methodical treatment, having their

haphazard and unclear sections resolved into a whole, revised by consulting the original draft

where possible, and supplementing the expansive whole with appendices and an index of names

and subjects.27

With the archive that was Nippon28 before him, even the outline of which was vague, Trautz’s

feat was to take Siebold’s manuscripts and notes as his tools and (re) construct what Siebold had

most likely envisioned. Not only that, but by creating an index and appendices, he inherited and

further developed the unfinished archival work that Siebold had begun, structured by supplementary

referencing material. The visual information attached to the reference section of Wasmuth’s edition

of Nippon, especially, draw one’s attention to the history of media technology. It was not only

things from Siebold’s time that Trautz saw plainly before his eyes and inserted into the pages of his

edition. He added pictures of Siebold’s children and

grandchildren, and of Kure Shūzō, placing Siebold’s

achievements in a historical context and reorienting

what had been Siebold’s future in his own present in

1929-30.The small but definite step of expanding of the

Siebold’s archive towards not only the past, but also

the present and future, was an expression of Trautz’s

disposition of that form of knowledge as an extensible

archive.

This form of knowledge is a hallmark of Trautz’s

work, and there are several volumes at the University

of Bonn that have been (re)bound by him, with

papers interleaved into the original pages, or with

pockets added to the inside of the covers, filled with

photographs and maps and booklets of supplemental

information. Trautz took a book that is considered Fig. 2 Spine of Trautz’s Self-bound Nippon

Trautz Collection at the University of Bonn


3-1 First volume of Nippon. Left page inserted. Right pageWasmuth’s original title page.

3-2 Supplementary information for photographic inserts affixed to left page. Right page, Wasmuth’s page 89.

Fig. 3 Self-bound Volume with Archival Additions

3-3 Trautz’s self-bound Nippon with appendices and index affixed, non-contemporary additions.


a closed medium in our day, and broke it down in order to expand and configure it into a personal

archive. This bears the marks of the same creativity and functionality as when we add sound and

images and video to digital media. It was Trautz’s belief that knowledge should be increased and

advanced, and the Trautz Collection is the physical manifestation of that belief.

Trautz’s refashioned edition of Nippon is held with the University of Bonn’s Siebold-related

materials (Figure 2). This customized version includes miscellaneous images and explanatory notes,

as well as commentary from Siebold, not directly pertaining to matters found in Wasmuth’s edition (see

Figure 3). With his edition, Trautz augmented Nippon as an archive, even as a personal one.

Trautz’s archive was a historical trace of his practices based on the encyclopaedic form of

knowledge of Siebold, with respect to the structuring of infinite knowledge in the form of an archive

by fully using the media technology of the early 20th century.

But this form of knowledge, and the model of Japanology that it relied on, was behind

the 20th century mainstream of scholarly practice in the humanities. Even so, a theoretical and

methodological shift that took place in the 1970s and led to a linguistic turn which refocused

attention the icons and the media, the performance and the space in the fore- and background of

language.29 The subject matter of this very paper exemplifies this turn. We today, when encountering

digital archives or the digital humanities, are faced with the new presence, ubiquity, and structuring

of the visible in digital and online media. From a modern perspective, as forms of knowledge are

being transformed, it is far from futile to reconsider the intellectual practices of Trautz and Siebold,

and their attempt to construct “Japan as archive.” It is not so difficult for us to imagine Siebold or

Trautz with a GPS device or smartphone in hand, or a voice recorder or digital (video) camera; they

seem to be hinting at forms of knowledge and media technology to come.

Note 1 Hartmut Walravens: Friedrich Maximilian Trautz (1877-1954). Eine Bibliographie zu Leben und Werk. In:

Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung 3 (1990), 286-331. In this book Trautz’s middle name is given as “Maximilian,” but it is in fact “Max.”

2 Nippon. Archiv zur Beschreibung von Japan (Leyden 1852), bound separately as Nippon and Anhang / III. Von den Uhren der Schinesen und Japaner. Originally part of the “Sieboldiana” collection of items that was moved from the University of Bonn to Ruhr University Bochum in the eighties. It is surmised that they were left behind, for reasons unclear.

3 Eberhard Friese: Philipp Franz von Siebold als früherer Exponent der Ostasienwissenschaften. Ein Beitrag zur Orientalismusdiskussion und zur Geschichte der europäisch-japanischen Begegnung. Hamburg: Bell, 1986.

4 According to Friese, it is possible that the originals of some photographic replicas of Bonn University’s Siebold-related have already been lost. Moreover, there may also exist more materials traceable to Siebold in addition to the three items mentioned earlier. Determining the value and existence of such materials depends upon further research by Siebold scholars.

5 Bonn University Trautz Collection Reference K03-10. In this paper referred to as “notes” for the sake of convenience, but the fact that Trautz created four carbon copies has invited speculation that they may have been intended as part of a correspondence, or as appendations to some larger document.

6 Ibid. 7 Trautz, Friedrich. Letter to Herbert von Dirksen. 16 Sept. 1934. Trautz Collection Reference K03-21.7.5. 8 University of Bonn Trautz Collection K03-21. 9 Trautz, Friedrich. Letter to Ernst Arthur Voretzsch. 16 Sept. 1942. Bamberg State Archive Reference

C2.7089.1.10 For more information about Voretzsch’s collection and donation, see Ernst Arthur Voretzsch: Führer durch

das Museum für asiatische Kunst. Bamberg: 1938.11 Ibid.


12 Ibid.13 For a detailed account, refer to Bamberg State Archive Reference C.7089. 10-17.14 Trautz, Friedrich. Letter to the Historical Museum of Bamberg. 9 Sept. 1946. Bamberg State Archive

Reference C2.7089.20a.15 Historical Museum of Bamberg Department of Fine Arts (Städtische Kunstsammlung). Letter to Hilda

Trautz. 27 Nov. 1952. Bamberg State Archive Reference C2.7089.27.16 Trautz, Hilda. Letter to Bamberg City Official Schlund. 28 Jan. 1953. Bamberg State Archive Reference C2. 7089.28. Hilda gives the number forty, but the figure of forty-nine written in the letter provides the precise number of bound volumes sent to Karlsruhe.

17 Trautz, Hilda. Bamberg City Official Schlund. 28. Jan. 1961. Bamberg State Archive Reference C2.7089.37.18 It should be remarked that the university’s portion of Trautz’s legacy was not chosen to an exacting

standard. For instance, the rubbings from the Nagasaki stone memorial to Siebold remain at the Historical Museum of Bamberg, and certain other of Trautz’s Siebold-related holdings are held today in unrelated collections at the museum.

19 Trautz’s Will and Testament. Freiburg Federal Military Archives Ref. N508-125.20 Ibid.21 Trautz, F.M. “Impressions of Kōyasan.” Kyoto: 1932. 6. University of Bonn Trautz Collection Ref. K11-9.22 See endnote 1 for Walravens reference.23 University of Bonn Trautz Collection Ref. K03-21.24 Ibid.25 Kreiner, Josef. “Deutschland-Japan. Die frühen Jahrhunderte.” In: Ders.: Deutschland-Japan. Historische

Kontakte. Bonn: 1984. 38-39.26 Ibid. 39.27 Siebold, Philip Franz von, and Friedrich M. Trautz. Nippon. Archiv zur Beschreibung von Japan. Ergäzungs-

und Index-Band. Walravens. Berlin/Vienna/Zurich: 1931. 1450.28 See Fujita Kiroku. “NIPPON no shoshigakuteki kentō.” Siebold Nippon no kenkyū to kaisetsu. Ed. Fumio

Ogata. Kodansha. Tokyo: 1977. 9-29. Miyazaki Katsunori. “Fukugen: Siebold NIPPON no haihon.” Kyūshū daigaku sōgō kenkyū hakubutsu kenkyū hōkoku Vol. 3, 2005. 23-105.

29 Regarding methodological and theoretical “turns,” see Bachmann-Medick, Doris. Cultural Turns. New Orientations in Cultural Scholarship. Rowohlt. Hamburg: 2010.

Appendix 1Timeline of the Biography and Academic History of Friedrich Max Trautz

Federal Military Archives Ref. N508 /120 ; two pages typed, size A4 . Created by Trautz’s wife Hilda after his death, based on his own biographical notes. Handwritten additions indicated by brackets.

Jun. 3, 1877 Born in Karlsruhe to one of Baden’s old Protestant families.1896 Obtains a classical education and college entrance certificate from the Hymanistiches Gymnasium

secondary school in Karlsruhe. Elects a commission in the 6th Field Artillery Regiment.1903-06 Travels to England and France for language study (ten months total).1906-09 War Academy. Begins the study of Japanese (a student of Tsuji [Takahira]); Lieutenant Colonel in the Army, later

General. Practiced Japanese with the support of Nara Takeji.1907 Passes the (military) interpreters’ examination in English and French (highest honors).1910 World travel. Spends one year in Japan, mostly in Kyoto (also in Korea and China). Returns to

Germany via the United States.1906-1913 Attends lectures in East Asian languages at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin as a student of

Professor Tsuji.1911 Obtains degree (in Japanese Language). Marries Hilda von Landwüst.


Travels to Ceylon, Nepal, and the Buddhist regions of India for three months.1911-12 Audits courses at Friedrich Wilhelm University (cut short by the war). No official records after 1919.1912 Receives an order from the Major General Staff Office War History Division to translate a

Japanese history of the Russo-Japanese War for high-ranking officials. Translation serially published in Berlin in a bulletin of Asiatic language courses. Continues to attend lectures at university.

1913 Spends two months in Italy and Southern France.1914-1918 Participates in World War II as a commissioned officer. Two years on the Western Front

(France-Belgium). After injury, employed for two and a half years in Turkey in field railway operations as a joint German-Turk Staff Officer. Several months in Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine. Studies Turkish.

1919 Takes up Japanese language study again.Mar. 31, Retires from the Army with Major’s commission.19201920 Enrolls in Friedrich Wilhelm University to study East Asian languages, geoscience, cultural

history, and history of religion. Important instructors: J. J. de Groot (director of lectures on Sinology, Chinese cultural history), F. W. K. Müller (Buddhist thought, Japanese- and Chinese-language literatures), A. v. Le Coq, C. H. Becker, Sachau (Koran studies, Islam).

1921 Receives the first doctoral degree issued in Berlin for Japanese Studies. [Examined by F. W. K. Müller.]

Dissertation: Buddhist Stupas and Pagodas of Japan – A Survey with Original Texts and Translations. 300 typed pages. Excerpted in academic handbooks in 1921. In 1925 published in Ajia Major (Leipzig) under the heading “Central and East Asian Cultures, New Academic References for Japanese Religious History, Additional Readings.”

Jun. 1921- Research assistant to F. W. K. Müller, director of the Berlin Museum of Oct. 1926 Ethnology.[Oct. 19, Submits thesis for Habilitation.]19261927 Receives the first professorship for a Japanese scholar from Friedrich Wilhelm University with

thesis, Tōkaido – A Contribution to the Cultural History and Regional Studies of the Tokugawa Period.

Jul. 25, Habilitation thesis accepted.19271926-1930 Head of the Japan Institute in Berlin.1927-1930 Private lecturer in Philosophy at Friedrich Wilhelm University.[Feb. 17 Opens Siebold exhibit at the Japan Institute.]19281930-1934 On furlough in Japan for cultural and literature research on language, Buddhist studies, and

Sinology.Dec. 18, Receives unofficial appointment at Friedrich Wilhelm University. 19331934-1938 Becomes the German co-chair of the German-Japanese Institute (Institute of German Culture) in

Kyoto.1938 Returns to Germany.1938-1952 Research in Karlsruhe as an unaffiliated scholar/researcher. Lectures frequently.Apr. 6, Death in Karlsruhe.1952


Appendix 2Developments in German and Japanese Siebold Research

University of Bonn Trautz Collection Ref. K03-10, one page typed.

1922 First survey of Ph. Fr. v. Siebold’s bequeathed property. Performed by Trautz at the request of Siebold’s granddaughter in Breslau.

1926 Second edition of Kure Shūzō’s biography of Siebold published in Tokyo. Most major biography of a European penned by a Japanese author.

1926 Siebold’s estate lent to the Museum of Ethnology, East Asia Department and received by F. W. K. Müller and Trautz.

1927 Trautz purchases Siebold’s estate from Lady Sielcken-Schwartz of Baden-Baden and transfers it to the Japan Institute in Berlin.

1929/30 Part of Siebold’s estate put to first scholarly use in Germany by Trautz, published in the new Nippon (Centennial Press, Berlin). Two-fifths of printing shipped to Japan.

1932 Kure receives ¥3,500 in funds from a Tokyo scholarly society for Japanese learning to prepare the German edition of his biography of Siebold.

1934 New printings of Flora Japonica and Plantaram, quas in Japonia collegit issued in Osaka.1934 The originals of Siebold’s estate lent by the Japan Institute to Tokyo for one year, by order of

former German Ambassador Solf.1935 Fauna Japonica (quarto in four volumes) reissued in Osaka.1935 ¥700 donated by an academic association to photograph the entirety of Siebold’s items lent to

Tokyo.

(University of Bonn)

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