Klaus Pringsheim junior

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Klaus Hubert Pringsheim jun. (* 23. May 1923 in Berlin , † 6. February 2001 in Ancaster , Ontario , Canada ) was a German-American East Asia - historians in the United States and Canada.

family

Klaus Pringsheim came from the German-Jewish Pringsheim merchant family from Silesia . He was officially considered the son of the conductor and composer of the same name, Klaus Pringsheim senior (1883–1972), twin brother of Katia Mann , and his wife Klara Koszler, known as Lala. In fact, according to his autobiography, the opera singer Hans Winckelmann was his father.

It was only from his autobiography that it became known that his official father was homosexual . Many years before he moved to Japan, he was already living separately from his wife Lala and could therefore not be the biological father of Klaus Pringsheim, which he only learned in adulthood, while it was an open secret with the other family members.

Life

When Pringsheim was forced to emigrate , he followed Klaus Pringsheim senior in 1939 at the age of 15. to Japan , who already worked there as general music director in Tokyo . At the beginning of 1945 he was arrested by the Japanese together with Klaus Pringsheim senior and Hans Erik Pringsheim. The driving force was the police attaché Josef Meisinger , who worked at the German embassy in Tokyo . This had reported the Pringsheim family to the Japanese as "anti-National Socialist" and consequently "anti-Japanese" and thus brought about their internment. He then learned Japanese and worked as an interpreter from 1945 .

In 1946 he went to California and lived for some time in the house of his uncle Thomas Mann and his aunt Katia. He reported about this time in Heinrich Breloer's docu-drama Die Manns - A novel of the century . After Thomas and Katia Mann withdrew to Switzerland in 1952, Pringsheim organized the sale of around 3,500 volumes left behind in Thomas Mann's library. A large part of Thomas Mann's record collection also went to Pringsheim.

After doing odd jobs as a taxi driver and vacuum cleaner salesman and as a Japanese teacher in the military, he studied Japanese and Chinese history and politics at the universities of Los Angeles , New York and, most recently, Hong Kong , where he also wrote his dissertation .

In Hong Kong he married the Chinese Hsiu Ping, with her he had three daughters. He returned to the United States with his wife and was granted US citizenship in 1952.

There he received a teaching position at the University of Kansas , but soon followed a call to the University of California, Berkeley as a lecturer in Japanese and Chinese politics. Finally, from 1966 to 1988, he became a full professor at McMaster University in Hamilton , Ontario.

In addition to his lectures and research in Japan, Pringsheim wrote several books and essays. Since his retirement in 1988, he has been President of the Canada-Japanese Economic Development Bureau .

Fonts

  • Who the hell are you? Memoirs, written with Victor Boesen, from the American by Tilman Lang. Verlag Weidle, Bonn 1995, ISBN 3-931135-14-4 . Structure of Taschenbuch Verlag, 2nd edition, 2001, ISBN 3-7466-1799-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Klaus Pringsheim jr .: Who the hell are you? 2nd Edition. Berlin 2002, p. 267 u. ö.
  2. ↑ Irene Suchy: Klaus Pringsheim, in: Lexicon of persecuted musicians from the Nazi era, Claudia Maurer Zenck, Peter Petersen (ed.), Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, 2007 ( https://www.lexm.uni-hamburg.de / object / lexm_lexmperson_00002788 ).
  3. ↑ Clemens Jochem: The Foerster case: The German-Japanese machine factory in Tokyo and the Jewish auxiliary committee Hentrich and Hentrich, Berlin 2017, pp. 90 f., ISBN 978-3-95565-225-8 .
  4. ^ Francis Nenik, Sebastian Stumpf: Seven Palms. The Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles . Spector Books, Leipzig 2018, ISBN 978-3-95905-180-4 , pp. 297-298 .
  5. ↑ Orbituary ( Memento of September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on November 5, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Pringsheim, Klaus junior
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pringsheim, Klaus Hubert jun.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American East Asia historian in the USA and Canada
DATE OF BIRTH May 23, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH February 6, 2001
Place of death Ancaster , Canada