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 Veränderungen Footnote ¹ 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 Institut für Orientforschung of the German Academy of SciencesFootnote ² after graduation in the fall of 1955. Somewhat cryptically, the CV appended to his unpublished Dr. phil. dissertation states: “After a long period of hesitation, conditioned by external difficulties, and encouraged by Professor Steinitz, I finally chose linguistics, a specialization originally quite removed from my range of interests.” With his supervisor, Wolfgang Steinitz (1905–1967), the doyen of Finno-Ugric studies in East Germany, he shared a number of formative experiences and convictions. Like Schmitt, Steinitz had rebelled against his bourgeois and religious family background and joined the Communist Party before graduation from Gymnasium, doing a lot of political work for the Komintern and the Federation for the Protection of German Writers (Schutzverband Deutscher Schriftsteller) during his Swedish exile. He later became both a towering figure in post-war structural linguistics and a pioneer of the folk revival movement in both Germanys.Footnote ³ Among many other tasks, he was also responsible for the establishment of the Sinology Section at the GDR Academy of Sciences and the initiation of the long-term Chinese–German Dictionary project eventually finished in 1985, to which Schmitt occasionally contributed.Footnote ⁴

Schmitt's real interests, however, clearly lay elsewhere, in the dim and distant past of Early China. While he acknowledged some input from his second thesis supervisor Professor Martin Ramming (1889–1988), a Balto-German Japanologist who had served as the “Most Senior Dragoman” of the Russian Embassy in Tōkyō between 1916 and 1925, and who became head of the East Asia Institute of the GDR Academy between 1947 and 1961, Schmitt was mostly self-trained as a linguist of Old Chinese. He thoroughly familiarized himself with system of the Grammata Serica (and, eventually, recensa) but also incorporated many novel ideas of Karlgren's early critics into his own reconstructions. He especially appreciated the work of Luo Changpei 羅常培 (1899–1968) and Lu Zhiwei 陸志韋 (1894–1979), whom he knew from a four-month study period at Academia Sinica in Beijing in 1958. In particular Lu's Guyin shuolüe 古音說略 [Précis of Old Chinese Phonology]—written during imprisonment under the Japanese occupation in 1940–1941 but published only in 1947Footnote ⁵—he held in high esteem for the rest of his life.Footnote ⁶ Proceeding from Lu's phonological “interchangeability” (tongzhuan 通轉) rules between the uvulars, alveolars and labials of certain homophonophoric (xiesheng 諧聲) series, and picking up the thread where Karlgren's work on dialect rhyming,Footnote ⁷ Lin Yutang's 林語堂 (1895–1976) Leipzig dissertation on Archaic Chinese dialectology,Footnote ⁸ and Dong Tonghe's 董同龢 (1911–1963) critique of KarlgrenFootnote ⁹ had left off, the topic Schmitt selected for his dissertation was Zu einigen Problemen der Phonologie des archaischen Chinesisch. Der archaische Süddialekt und die Reimklasse yü 魚 [On several problems of Archaic Chinese phonology. The archaic Southern Dialect and the rhyme class yu 魚] [1].Footnote ¹⁰ Half a century later, the phonology of Early Chinese dialects,Footnote ¹¹ especially of the so-called “Chu 楚 dialect,” has become a field in its own right,Footnote ¹² a development largely driven by the flurry of excavated bamboo strip manuscripts from Chu during the last decades, and routinely (though by no means undisputedlyFootnote ¹³) assumed to represent an Old Southern Chinese dialect of the area. At the time of Schmitt's dissertation, however, it was still highly unusual to approach such problems of Old Chinese phonology in the spirit of Wang Guowei's 王國維 (1877–1927) “method of double proof” (erchong zhengju fa 二重證據法), that is, by demanding inscriptional evidence for phenomena previously studied on the basis of transmitted literature alone. During the 1950s and the 1960s, the most important excavated documents to be cited in such contexts were still bronze inscriptions rather than bamboo manuscripts. Schmitt consistently refers to the pertinent paleographical studies by scholars such as Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892–1978), Rong Geng 容庚 (1894–1983), Tang Lan 唐蘭 (1901–1971), and Yu Xingwu 于省吾 (1896–1984), and especially to the studies of rhyming bronze inscriptions compiled by Wang Guowei and Guo Moruo, in the footsteps of Jiang Yougao's 江有誥 (d. 1851) yundou 韻讀 “rhyme phrase” studies of the first half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁴ He was also thoroughly familiar with the work on ancient dialectology by Father Paul L.-M. Serruys (1912–1999), whose monograph on Yang Xiong's 揚雄 (c. 53 b.c.e.–18 c.e.) Fangyan 方言 [Regional expressions] he seems to have read during his three months’ study period with Jaroslav Průšek (1906–1980) in Prague in 1956, and the wider background of Flemish approaches to Chinese dialect geography, best represented in the work of the Reverend Willem A. Grootaers (1911–1999).Footnote ¹⁵ Other early work on ancient Chinese dialectology like that of Eduard Erkes (1891–1958)Footnote ¹⁶ or Janusz Chmielewski (1916–1998),Footnote ¹⁷ is politely dismissed in his dissertation, while the important Japanese studies by Matake Naoshi 眞武直Footnote ¹⁸ (1906–?) were probably unavailable in East Berlin.

Looking at the behavior of one single Old Chinese rhyme class, Schmitt's dissertation was to all appearances the first detailed work on “slant rhymes” (heyun合韻; a term created by Duan Yucai 段玉裁, 1735–1815) as evidence for early dialects produced outside China, and, a fortiori, a sophisticated discussion of what constitutes a normative ‘refined language’ (yayan 雅言) in Early China. The work is a systematic study of the phenomenon in the early poetic anthologies and it was methodologically innovative in many ways. Thus, Schmitt looked extensively at rhymed passages embedded into the argumentative prose of the master's texts,Footnote ¹⁹ and he tried to verify his proposed rhyme class mergers, shifts and splits on the basis of “dimidiated” rhyming compounds, early paronomastic glosses (shengxun 聲訓) and the occasional incorporation of loanword data. The dissertation also contains some bold proposals, well worth pursuing further even today, like the idea that some of the phenomena commonly analysed as dialect features are perhaps better construed as linguistic varieties attached to the philosophical “schools”: “Die Taoisten sprachen, gleichgültig wo sie wohnten, überall das gleiche Idiom” [No matter where the Daoists dwelt, they all spoke the same idiom] (p. 69). Or it proposed to collect and study the creation of dialect characters in ancient texts, like the hapax legomenon 綮 qìng ‘joint (of sinews, flesh)’ in the Zhuangzi 莊子(3.2)—a desideratum still not fulfilled today. On the other hand, although arguments from statistics are sometimes used, Schmitt doesn't follow his idol Lu Zhiwei in applying (then) advanced techniques such as x ² (chi-square) tests to assess rhyme class stabilities—a method Lu had taken over from his training in psychology in the US during the 1910s.

Still, the dissertation was a pioneering, trailblazing effort, well ahead of the development of ancient dialect linguistics in China and elsewhere, and it is a pity that only a handful of scholars (such as Father SerruysFootnote ²⁰) ever were able to read it. It was also somewhat hermetic in its presentation. Throughout his dissertation and increasingly in many of his later works, Schmitt had a propensity to combine cryptic numerical citation schemes with a dry, often downright cumbrous style and to sparkle even his non-linguistic arguments with a heavy dose of asterisked forms, arcane variant readings and archaizing German translations.

That he could also strike a somewhat different linguistic key is shown by his German translation, of the entire Rulin waishi 儒林外史 [Unofficial History of the World of the Literati], co-authored with Yang Enlin 楊恩林 during his dissertation period. First published by Kiepenheuer in Weimar in 1962, the 1201 pages of the original GDR edition were republished in the year of German reunification in Munich (C.H. Beck) after a thorough stylistic revision by Noa Kiepenheuer and Friedrich Mickwitz, and complemented by comments and an interesting postface by Eva Müller and Ralf Moritz. More recently (2015), they have reappeared again in a three-volume bilingual Chinese–German edition with the Foreign Language Press in Beijing [17].

Already the next two academic papers show Schmitt closer to the interests apparently subdued during the dissertation phase. Both deal with themes that would occupy him for the rest of his life—the reconstruction of Old Chinese myth, ritual, and religious history on the basis of an etymology driven textual philology, coupled with archaeological and ethnographic data; and the study of lexical contacts between Chinese and the Northeast Asian neighboring languages since antiquity.

“The wind as phoenix, totem and taboo” [2] of 1963 offers a reinterpretation of the disyllabic versions of 風 ‘wind’ (Old ChineseFootnote ²¹ *prəm) as feilian 飛廉 (OC *Cə.pə[r,j] + rem) ‘master of the wind’ and of biao 飆~猋 (OC *pew) ‘whirlwind’ as fuyao 扶摇 (OC *m-[p](r)a + l[a]w). Against the widespread understanding of these disyllables as lento forms since the first discussion of these equations by Gu Yanwu 顧炎武 (1613–1682), in connection with his theory of an indigenous origin of the fanqie 反切 spelling technique, Schmitt argues that the ‘dimidiation’ of the underlying monosyllables is by no means ludically or metrically conditioned, but the reflex of a conscious tabooing of “totemic” wind names used by the Shang 商 in the first years after the Zhou 周 conquest.

“Are Chinese liuli and guoluo/kuoluo really of foreign origin?” [3] of 1964 concludes that the two terms liuli 琉璃 (var. 瑠璃, 流離, OC *ru + r⁽ˁ⁾aj) ‘beryll, opaque glass’ and guoluo 郭洛 (*kʷˁak+(Cə.)rˁak), var. kuoluo 廓落 (*kʷʰˁak + kə.rˁak) ‘leather belt’ are—contrary to Otto Maenchen-Helfen (1894–1964) e tutti quanti—in fact simple alliterating (shuangsheng 雙聲)/rhyming (dieyun 疊韻) type compounds, rather than pre-Buddhist Indo-European loanwords in OC. One can see a direct line leading from the dissertation's rhyme compound tests for OC rhyme class shifts to the topics of these studies, but hidden, as they were, in the Mitteilung des Seminars für Orientalische Studien, nobody in the field reacted to these proposals.

Schmitt returned to historical linguistics as his primary focus once more in a contribution on archaic Chinese interjections [4] in 1964, already announced in the dissertation. Here he tries to show that many of the early OC prepositions are derived from interjections, which are in turn sometimes related to bird sound onomatopoeia. In his review of the volume, A.C. Graham (1919–1991) merely summarizes Schmitt's ideas,Footnote ²² leaving out the “bird” part and politely refraining to point out that the sketched grammaticalization path for prepositions would be cross-linguistically highly unusual, to say the least. Another contribution by Schmitt from this period, little known until its recent translation into Chinese [5], deals with the earliest manuscript of the Wenxuan 文選 [Literary Anthology], now kept in the Russian Dunhuang collection in St. Petersburg, to which he had been introduced by the great Russian manuscript specialist Lev N. Men’šikov (1926–2005).Footnote ²³

The contribution of Schmitt's oeuvre best known internationally may be his book on the Changes. Published with the Berlin Akademie-Verlag in 1970 [6], the slim volume is an attempt to make sense of the rhymed, riddle-like hexagram and line statements in the Zhouyi 周易 and their mythological implications, by drawing upon the full array of early transmitted and inscriptional sources and on inspiration from the “wild” Zhouyi readings by Wen Yiduo 聞一多 (1899–1946). Readers interested in an interpretation of the complicated text before it became a key classic and was hijacked for all sorts of politico-philosophical, historical, and numerological appropriations, will find here what Nylan and Sivin have rightfully called a study characterized by “philological rigor.”Footnote ²⁴

During the early 1970s, he continued his interests in early Chinese paleography and archaeology and greatly enjoyed a sojourn at the Kyōto Daigaku Jinbun Kagaku Kenyūjo 京都大学人文科学研究所 in Japan in 1974/75. He was exceedingly pleased to learn from the leading Japanese authority in these fields, the “scholar's scholar”Footnote ²⁵ Hayashi Minao 林巳奈夫 (1925–2006), who urged him to pay more attention to ancient material culture. Otherwise, his interests seem to have shifted more and more towards the question of Chinese contacts with the Northern sphere, i.e. the broader “Altaic” group of speaking communities represented in Early and Medieval Chinese texts. Several articles from this period ([7], [8], [11], [12]) deal with etymologies of nomina ethnica, theonyms and mythological figures, until they finally reach out to the Korean peninsula and Japan [16] in 1985. His “Sino-Tocharica,” announced in the (1985) article (p. 183, n. 62) were unfortunately never finished. At the same time Schmitt was engaged in a long-term project of editing and identifying the Chinese Buddhist fragments of the Berlin Turfan collection in cooperation with Thomas Thilo and Inokuchi Taijun 井ノ口泰淳, volume 1 of which appeared in 1979 [14] and was widely reviewed.

Schmitt's publications in Altorientalische Forschungen—the flagship journal of ancient studies in the former GDR—are probably his most seminal. Uninterested in the then-orthodox interpretations of Chinese history during the Late Neolithic and early bronze age in the PRC, it is in articles like “Meng 氓 as colonists” [10] of 1976 or the “The ‘Divine Weeder’”—his preferred translation for Shennong 神農—“as the inventor of plant cultivation” of 1979 [13], that Schmitt really paves the way for new readings of Early Chinese social and economic history. Often proceeding from radical reinterpretations of a particular Shijing 詩經 ode or Zuozhuan 左傳 passage, and carefully scrutinizing their inscriptional resonances, he pursues many important themes well beyond the realm of textual philology. These concern, for example, the rise of social mobility epitomized by the roaming ‘colonizers’ (meng 氓, *mˁriŋ) organized as ‘oath-taking’ (meng 盟, *mraŋ) allegiances in the late Chunqiu and early Zhanguo period; the restructuring of society and commodity relations through monetized economy and cross-border trade by the colonizers; the role of irrigation systems and the redesigned survival of the ‘well field’ (jingtian 井田) system for the rise of private property [15]; or the relationship between privatization and taxation policies after what would much later be called the “Late Western Zhou ritual reform” period. Many of these topics were also taken up in a more systematic fashion by students and later colleagues, e.g. in Ulrich Lau's Humboldt University Habilitation (of 1988/89) on Western Zhou territorial distribution.Footnote ²⁶ Even if the Marxist underpinnings of these studies are always palpable, for example, when he talks about the “almost capitalist world view” (“nahezu kapitalistische Grundeinstellung”) of Hanfeizi 韓非子, his Marxism was certainly quite far removed from 1970s PRC Sino-Marxism, and, occasionally, even critical of the Honecker regime.

Although he grew to be more and more alienated from GDR politics, 1989 came as a big rupture in his otherwise fairly stable academic life. After the dissolution of the Chinese Section at the GDR Academy, he briefly taught at the China Research Unit at Berlin Technical University and at Free University (1991/92), before moving first to Trier and later to Erlangen, where he occasionally had temporary lectureships at the Sinological Institute and worked in the Chinese library as well. Students who took classes with him in the 1990s describe him as a demanding, sometimes inspiring, sometimes confusing and erratic teacher. His boyhood stories from Guangzhou could have the charm of Martin Booth's Gweilo, Memoirs of a Hong Kong Childhood Footnote ²⁷ a few kilometers across the border, and he never failed to stun his audiences with his superb memory, for instance by citing any Tang poem from the Tangshi sanbai shou 唐詩三百首 by heart, which he had learned during long train and subway rides in Berlin during the 1960s and 1970s. But he could also intensely irritate people with the same skills, for example, when he pedantically corrected the famous ‘misty’ (menglong 朦朧) poet Gu Cheng's 顧城 (1956–1993) quotations from the Zhuangzi—another text Schmitt liked to quote from memory at length—during a well-attended reading of the poet in the Berlin Literaturhaus, a year before Gu's suicide in his New Zealand exile in 1993. It wasn't always easy for his interlocutors, it seems, to get the sensitive connoisseur of Hölderlin and Möricke and aficionado of Schubert interpretations by Dietrich Fischer Dieskau (1925–2012) into the same picture as the stern and stubborn philologist he also was.

More and more submerged in his theory that crucial parts of the Early Chinese classics, especially the Laozi 老子 (cf. [20]) and the Chuci 楚辭, could only be understood on the basis of man'yōgana 万葉仮名-style “alloglottographic” interpretations via its pre-or para-Koreanic Fuyu 夫餘 (Puyǒ) substratum, he became increasingly drawn to mythological and religious themes and their reflection in Neolithic and early bronze age artefacts from Eastern China. Another favorite theme was the history of the settlement of Yayoi 弥生 Japan via the South of the Korean peninsula. Many of his manuscripts became cryptic, and almost impenetrable for those who did not have the chance to enjoy their explanation viva voce. Thus, his last two public lectures at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies in Zurich in 2012 and 2014 were well attended, but left members of the audience either completely dumbfounded or perfectly thrilled. Some of his essays from this period have been collected by the indefatigable Hartmut Walravens (Berlin) under the title Contributions to the Ancient History of East Asia [18.i–iv] and published in mimeograph form by the Prussian State Library in 2012.

But many others remain unpublished. During close to 40 years at the GDR Academy and more sporadically in his Franconian “exile,” Schmitt produced copious philological notes on many ancient texts on an almost daily basis. Most of them are written in pencil on A5-pages of greyish scrap paper, which he collected in cardboard boxes. Some of the notes were clearly intended as the basis for a future dictionary and grammar of Classical Chinese, which never materialized; others read like an oddly anachronistic and stunningly sophisticated shu 疏 commentary on texts which interested him for a year or even decades. The many boxes on the Chuci are among the most systematic in his extensive philological estate, since they were probably intended as the basis for a Habilitation (“Dissertation B” in the GDR system), which he never submitted. Very few scholars have had a chance to look at these materials, but through the kind mediation of his long-term research assistant and dear friend Andrej Keiper (Rantrum), they were transferred to the Sinology Section of the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies at the University of Zurich in 2015, with the help of its librarian, Dr. Marc Winter. Recently moved to custom-made wooden filing boxes, the materials—about 60 packed drawers—are now awaiting future digitization and those willing to raise the treasures buried in the massive unpublished work of the erudite and brilliantly eccentric scholar. R.I.P.!