Fritz Max Weiss

Fritz Weiss around 1924

Max Friedrich Weiss since 1951: Wyss (born February 23, 1877 in Zurich ; † October 22, 1955 in Heidelberg ) was a German diplomat and orientalist.

Life

Fritz Weiss studied law and Chinese at the Seminar for Oriental Languages in Berlin. In 1896 he was in the Corps Normannia Berlin recipiert . Konaktive were Felix Genzmer and Max Begemann .

China

In 1899 he went to the Chinese Empire and worked at the customs office of the German leased area Kiautschou in Tsingtau (today: Qingdao ). In the Foreign Service since 1900 , he was employed as an interpreter in various consulates. In 1905 he was transferred to Chongqing and Chengdu , where he provided consular service and was appointed consul in 1911 . During his stay in Xinan , he made extensive trips on foot and on horseback. From a vacation in the German Empire, he returned to China by land via India. He did geography with a camera, sketch pad, drew maps and published essays in geographical magazines. Weiss justified his travels in the interior of the provinces with his superiors by looking for sales areas for German industry and opening up new raw material markets. Through Weiss, numerous ethnological artefacts, zoological and botanical preparations as well as rock samples from unexplored areas of the Middle Kingdom came to Berlin's museums and scientific institutions. Among other things, he acquired two bamboo bear skins (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) in 1908 , which he gave to the Museum für Naturkunde (Berlin) along with other natural history preparations . They were the first remains of a panda in Germany. They were prepared in the museum by the well-known dermoplastic artist Richard Lemm as a display object. The zoologists of the time were ignorant of the natural shape of the animal. Photographs, even credible observations of living bamboo bears, were unknown until then. The preparations were given the outer shape of a brown bear , in which they are still displayed today.

It is a peculiarity, in view of the already pronounced specialization of the fields of knowledge at the time, that a collecting activity extended to such different areas. Fritz Weiss documented his travels, took photos and made sound recordings on wax cylinders with the then new technology of the Edison phonograph. The Ethnological Museum in Berlin used it to make recordings worldwide. In addition to scientific documentation, photography was not least a way for him to express himself artistically.

In 1909 and 1910 he met people who belonged to the Yi minority (then called "Lolo"). A detour to the Daliang Shan , the area of ​​the Yi, was initially unsuccessful in 1910. In Zhao Jue, Weiss had to turn back because the Chinese government officials prevented him from continuing his journey. But he did not give up on the plan and 3 years later he realized it together with his wife.

In the summer of 1911, while on vacation in the German Reich, he met the future author Hedwig Sonnenburg , who, like him, had partly Jewish ancestors. Her father was the physician Eduard Sonnenburg , one of her grandfathers was the psychiatrist Carl Westphal , and one of her great-grandfathers was the banker Alexander Mendelssohn . The couple married that summer and left for China in September 1911. The trip to Chengdu , up the Yangtze , was delayed due to the bourgeois revolution in China in 1911/12, so that they did not arrive in Chengdu until the spring of 1912. In the same year, the Republic of China (1912–1949) was established . During this trip they took numerous pictures of the Yangtze towers and some of their chants.

In November 1913, the couple between O-Pien Ting (today: Ebian) and Ma-Pien Ting (today: Mabian) finally managed to travel to northern Daliang shan. From this trip some photographs and chants of the Yi have survived; The Ethnological Museum in Berlin and the Museum of Five Continents in Munich now also have a collection of artefacts from everyday Yi culture that Weiss bought and then donated. In 1914 Weiss opened a consulate in Kunming , where his wife gave birth to their first two children. In 1917 the Weiss had to leave China because China had entered the First World War on the side of the Triple Entente . The return trip to the German Reich took half a year.

Hedwig Weiss-Sonnenburg published numerous articles about her experiences in China, which also provided the material for two later published children's books. For example, “The Book of Little Chinese Li”, which had several editions between 1925 and 1950, impressively addresses the work of the towers in the gorges of the Yangtze.

Ethiopia

From 1921 to 1928 Fritz Weiss was envoy of the German Reich in Addis Ababa , where he made a personal friendship with Haile Selassie and where his son Dieter Wyss was born. Weiss filmed in Ethiopia and again sent extensive collections to Berlin's museums.

South America

From 1929 to 1934 he was accredited in South American countries , including in Caracas and as an envoy in Asunción (1933/34). He did not succeed in reassigning himself to China. When the National Socialist German Workers' Party came to power, he left his post in Paraguay in 1934. His attempts to find use abroad failed. The couple returned to Berlin in 1936. Hedwig Weiss was classified by the authorities as a "mixed race II degree", the couple survived the Nazi era . Weiss was in contact with Berlin museums until his death.

Descendants, name and estate

Hedwig and Fritz Weiss had three children: Jutta (1914–1969), Alice (1916–2002) and Dieter (1923–1994). The surname Weiss was changed in 1951 to Wyss or Wyß .

In spring 2016, the Berlin State Library took over the estate.

Works

• Chungking. Series II, No 82, domestic and international trade reports. Special impressions from the German trade archive published in the Reich Office of the Interior. October 1906.
• Tengyüe (China). Series II, No 112. Trade reports at home and abroad. Special impressions from the German trade archive published in the Reich Office of the Interior. February 1908.
• The mining and metallurgical industry of the Yunnan Province. In: Reports on Trade and Industry. Volume 11, No. 8, 1908, pp. 646-654.
• From Bhamo to Tengyüe. Probably: Communications from the Seminar for Oriental Languages ​​at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, 1909.
• The production of brick tea destined for Tibet in the Chinese province of Szechuan. In: Agricultural Supplement. Volume 138, No. 9, 1909, pp. 3-4.
• Travel through the native states of West Chechuan. In: Dr. A. Petermann's Geographical Communications . Volume 2, No. 2, 1910, pp. 67-71.
• The Chienchang Valley. In: Reports on Trade and Industry. Volume XIV, No. 1, 1912, pp. 40-55.
• Yunnan Province, its trade and traffic conditions. Reprint from the communications of the Berlin Seminar for Oriental Languages. Volume 15, No. 1, 1912, pp. 3-57.
• Economic conditions of the Chienchang valley in Szetchuan. In: Dr. A. Petermann's communications. Volume 60, June issue, 1914, pp. 310-315.
• The gold deposits of Wali and Tsai Tse Ti in the Chienchang Valley. In: Petermann's geographical communications. Born in 1918.
• Shu Pi. The precious heroic blood of Shu. (Translation from Chinese) Carl Heymanns Verlag, Berlin 1929.

Archives and sources

• Burma-Szuchuan manuscript, report for the Foreign Office, 1907.
• Chengtu-Tachienlu manuscript, report for the Foreign Office, 1908.
• Memories manuscript. Mexico, 1949. Archives of the Foreign Office.

See also

• List of German ambassadors in Ethiopia
• List of German ambassadors in Paraguay

literature

• Alke Dohrmann: Fritz Weiss: Among turtles and hyenas. The life of an envoy and his family in the German embassy in Addis Ababa in the 1920s. In: Kerstin Volker-Saad, Anna Greve (Hrsg.): Ethiopia and Germany. Longing for the distance. Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich and Berlin 2006.
• Ludwig Biewer : Memoirs of the envoy Fritz Weiss / Wyss . Foreign Service, In: Quarterly publication of the Association of German Foreign Officials, 52nd year, Volume IV, October – December 1989.
• Thomas O. Höllmann (Hrsg.): A tribe of uncomfortable independence - the Yi (Southwest China) and their material culture presented on the basis of the Fritz Weiss collection in the State Museum of Ethnology in Munich. In: Fonticuli, Vol. 2. Quest, Berlin 1991. ISBN 3-925686-92-4
• Tamara Wyss: Attempt to search for clues in the Liangshan - an approach to the Nuosu-Yi. In: The Yi, yesterday and today. Kultur- und Stadthistorisches Museum Duisburg, 2006, pp. 34–43.
• Tamara Wyss: Yesterday in the Land of Ba and Shu. Travels of Hedwig and Fritz Weiss in Southwest China. Sichuan University Press, Chengdu 2009.
• Tamara Wyss: Searching for the Lolos. In: Explores and Scientist in China's Borderlands 1880–1950. Washington University Press, 2011.
• Susanne Ziegler: The wax cylinders of the Berlin Phonogram Archive 328 Weiss Abessinien (p. 304); 329 Weiss Südchina (p. 305 f.); 330 Weiss Westchina (p. 306 f.). Weiss, Fritz (short biography) p. 386.
• Johannes Hürter (Red.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871 - 1945. 5. T - Z, supplements. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 5: Bernd Isphording, Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger: Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-71844-0 , pp. 215-217

Web links

• “The Chinese Shoes” film by Tamara Wyss, 2004. Distribution Piffl Medien, DVD Good Movies!

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1960, 5/281
2. ^ Letters, Jan. 4, 1937. In: Time . January 4, 1937.
3. ↑ http://www.chengdu.diplo.de/Vertretung/chengdu/de/Seite__Buchpr_C3_A4sentation__Wyss.html .
4. ↑ Tamara Wyss: Photographs and Sound Recordings: A Short Journey to the Nuosu in 1912 on the page of the 4th International Conference on Yi Studies, 2005.
5. ↑ Abyssinia White No. 1 (1924).
6. ↑ Abyssinia White No. 2 (1927).
7. ↑ Miriam Seeger: Journey into China in the early 20th century - with an online photo exhibition on the Fritz and Hedwig Weiss estate. Retrieved July 19, 2016 . 

predecessor	Office	successor
Lorenz Jensen	Ambassador of the German Reich in Ethiopia 1921–1928	Curt Max examiner