Edgar Snow

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Edgar Snow (left in the picture) with Zhou Enlai and Deng Yingchao in Wuhan in 1938
Edgar Snow's grave on the Peking University campus

Edgar Snow (born July 17, 1905 in Kansas City , Missouri , † February 15, 1972 in Geneva ) was an American journalist who, thanks to his book Red Star over China (1937, German edition Red Star over China ) about his encounters with Mao Zedong became internationally known.

Life

Snow studied journalism at the University of Missouri , but moved to New York before graduating. He made money speculating on the stock market and in 1928 went on a trip around the world. But he got no further than China, where he soon worked as a correspondent for the Indianapolis magazine The Saturday Evening Post .

Snow was recommended as their sympathizer by the underground communist movement in Shanghai, Mao, who was looking for a foreign writer for his biography aimed at international readership. In this way, in 1936, Snow met the leader of the Chinese communists at the CCP's base in Yan'an and was able to accompany him over and over again over long periods of time.

In China he witnessed the invasion by Japanese troops in 1937 and reported on the Nanking massacre . In 1941, he returned to the United States in good time before the attack on Pearl Harbor . His editorial team sent him as a reporter first to the theaters of war in Asia, then to Moscow in 1944. After his return to the USA in 1945 he took part in the campaign of Soviet-friendly journalists, including Jerome Davis , John Hersey , Richard Lauterbach , Edmund Stevens and Alexander Werth , against the book "Report on the Russians" by the journalist and publisher William Lindsay White , who described the Soviet Union as an economically and socially backward country with a repressive system.

During the McCarthy era , he was questioned by the FBI about his political views. He then moved to Switzerland. 1971 advised the CIA to the White House in Washington to support the invitation Snows to an interview with Mao to the visit of Richard Nixon in Beijing to prepare. According to his former personal doctor, Mao thought he was a CIA agent during this period.

His widow Lois Wheeler Snow criticized the crackdown on the demonstrations on Tian'anmen Square in Beijing in June 1989.

Historical evaluation

Mao himself had taken the initiative for his biography written by Snow. Red Star over China arose largely from interviews Mao and other communists gave Snow over a period of three months in the summer of 1936. Mao left nothing to chance. He replied in writing to the questions that Snow had to submit in advance. According to historians, this resulted in a mixture of valuable information and falsification of content. Mao solidified the central hero myth of the Chinese Communist Party, the Long March , by telling Snow that, apart from his illness, he had covered most of the 10,000 km long distance on foot like ordinary soldiers. Mao did not say a word about his connections to Moscow and Stalin, he also invented battles and heroic deeds, he negated the extent of terror.

The book has been translated into many languages ​​and made a significant contribution to popularizing Mao internationally and turning the mood in his favor in the western world. The book was published in Chinese under the title "Story of a Journey to the West". Snow's reports consistently showed clear sympathy for the politics of the People's Republic of China . According to contemporary historical research, his reporting had a great influence on the image of China in the West.

Works

  • Guest on the other bank. Red China today , Munich: Kindler, 1964.
  • Red star over China . Frankfurt am Main: March, 1969. (Reprints at various publishers, e.g., 1983, ISBN 3-87512-215-1 .
  • That's how it started. Experiences with new times , Stuttgart: DVA, 1977. ISBN 3-426-03573-1 Also with a different subtitle
  • The long revolution. China between tradition and future , Stuttgart: DVA, 1983. ISBN 3-423-01077-0 .
  • Red Horizons (excerpt from Red Star over China ), in MARCH texts 1 . Frankfurt am Main: March, 1969. Again in: MARCH texts 1 & Trivialmythen . Erftstadt: Area, pp. 236–249, 2004 ISBN 3-89996-029-7 . With a photo: Snow with Mao Zedong, 1967)

literature

  • John Maxwell Hamilton: Edgar Snow: A Biography. LSU Press, Baton Rouge La. 2003, ISBN 978-0-8071-2912-8 .
  • Jerry Israel, "Mao's Mr. America". Edgar Snow's Images of China, in: Pacific Historical Review , vol. 47, no. 1 (Feb. 1978), pp. 107-122.
  • Lois Wheeler Snow: Edgar Snow's China . Random House, New York, 1981, ISBN 978-0-394-50954-9 .
  • S. Bernard Thomas: Season of High Adventure: Edgar Snow in China. University of California Press, Oakland Approx. 1996, ISBN 978-0-520-20276-4 .

Movie

  • Home is elsewhere. Swiss documentary by Peter Entell from 2012 about Edgar Snow from the perspective of his second wife, Hollywood actress Lois Wheeler Snow.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical information according to: Edgar Snow Foundation ( Memento of July 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), University of Kansas City
  2. ^ Anne-Marie Brady: Making the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in the People's Republic. Lanham / Oxford 2003, pp. 42-47.
  3. ^ John Maxwell Hamilton: Edgar Snow. A biography. Baton Rouge La. 2003, p. 92.
  4. ^ John Maxwell Hamilton: Edgar Snow: A Biography. LSU Press, Baton Rouge La. 2003, ISBN 978-0-8071-2912-8 .
  5. ^ Jean Folkerts, Report on the Russians: The Controversy Surrounding William Lindsay White's 1945 Account of Russia, in: American Journalism , July 3, 2015, Vol. 32 (3), pp. 319-320.
  6. ↑ Stephen J. Farnsworth, Seeing Red: The FBI and Edgar Snow, in: Journalism History , 28 (3), 2002, pp. 137-145
  7. ↑ Michael Schaller, Détente and Strategic Triangle, in: Robert S. Ross / Changbin Jiang: Re-examining the Cold War: US-China Diplomacy, 1954–1973. Cambridge MA / London 2001, p. 371.
  8. ↑ China 'stole' Edgar Snow Mao memoir, says widow telegraph.co.uk, August 26, 2000.
  9. ↑ Jung Chang / Jon Halliday: Mao. The life of a man, the fate of a people. Munich 2005, p. 13.
  10. ^ Snow (Edgar Snow) East Asia Institute, University of Ludwigshafen am Rhein
  11. ↑ "Mao's Mr. America". Edgar Snow's Images of China , in: Pacific Historical Review , vol. 47, no. 1 (Feb. 1978), pp. 107-122.
  12. ↑ Home is elsewhere. arte.tv, archived from the original on July 3, 2014 ; Retrieved July 3, 2014 .
personal data
SURNAME Snow, Edgar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American journalist and China expert
DATE OF BIRTH July 17, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Kansas City , Missouri, USA
DATE OF DEATH February 15, 1972
Place of death Geneva