Eva Siao

Eva Sandberg ( Chinese  叶华 , W.-G. Ye Hua ) (* 8. November 1911 in Breslau as Eva Sandberg ; † 29. November 2001 in Beijing ) was one of Germany native Chinese photographer and journalist . She was an eyewitness to the Chinese revolution and the years of construction of the People's Republic of China .

Eva and Emi Siao (萧 三 与 叶 华)

Life

Born Eva Sandberg , daughter of a Jewish family of doctors from Breslau, fled from the National Socialists to Sweden in the 1930s and later to the Soviet Union . There she met her future husband, the writer Emi Siao (萧 三), who was a school friend of Mao Zedong ; they married in 1934. She followed her husband to China in 1940 and (after separating from Emi Siao in 1943) survived the war in Kazakhstan with her two sons .

In 1949 she moved to China again after her husband Emi Siao became head of the Chinese Communist Party in Yan'an . She became a Chinese citizen in 1964. Eva Siao worked for the state news agency of China, the Russian news agency TASS and the television of the GDR . She photographed the unofficial China and became known internationally. With the eyes of outsiders, she documented the development of socialist China and life in this country under Mao Zedong . The black and white photographs by German-Chinese Eva Siao showed the upheavals in everyday life after the revolution.

She and her husband were arrested during the Cultural Revolution . She remained in solitary confinement until 1974; In 1979 they are rehabilitated. Her husband died in 1983 as a result of seven years of solitary confinement. She lived in Beijing until her death. Their common grave is in the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing.

Eva Siao's works were acquired by the Ludwig Foundation and brought to the Ludwig Museum in Cologne .

Movie

• Martina Fluck: "My dream, my love, my hope - memoirs of Eva Siao" (also with English subtitles), YUCCA film production 1993, 90 min.
• Gitta Nickel: "China - my dream, my life" [Eva Siao], 1988, 80 min.
• Ulf von Mechow: "Eva Siao, a photographer out of love"
• Sabri Özaydın: "The Way", a film poem with and about Eva Siao, 1995, 30 min.

Fonts

• "Childhood and youth of Mao Tse-tung" , Verlag Neues Leben, Berlin 1953
• "Peking" , Sachsenverlag , Dresden 1956
• "The Peking Opera" , Verlag Neue Welt, Berlin 1957
• "Stars over Tibet" , VEB Brockhaus, Leipzig 1961
• "The little devil" , Postreiter-Verlag, 1962
• "China and its faces. Photographs from two decades" , Nishen-Verlag, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3889400426
• "China - my dream, my life" , Econ 1994, ISBN 3612260987 (autobiography)
• "China. Photographs 1949-1967" , Umschau 1999, ISBN 3894661755

literature

• Eva Verma: China, mon amour. Eva and Emi Siao in: "... wherever you come from. Binational couples through the millennia Dipa, Frankfurt 1993. ISBN 3763801960 [pp. 122–128]
• Diethart Kerbs : Lifelines. German biographies from the 20th century. With an afterword by Arno Klönne. Klartext-Verlag, Essen 2007. ISBN 978-3-89861-799-4

Web links

• Literature by and about Eva Siao in the catalog of the German National Library
• Emi Siao 萧 三 and Eva Sandberg Siao (Emi and Eva Xiao) (English)
• "China my love, my life, Eva Siao - a portrait"