History of Sinology/Chapter 7

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Chapter 7: Germany — From Leibniz to Contemporary Chinawissenschaften

1. Introduction

Among the national traditions of sinology surveyed in this volume, the German case occupies a singular position. Germany came late to the institutional study of China — the first full professorship was not established until 1909 — yet the intellectual engagement of German thinkers with Chinese civilization reaches back three centuries further, to the correspondence between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Jesuit missionaries in the 1690s. This temporal gap between philosophical fascination and academic professionalization is not merely a curiosity of disciplinary history; it defines the essential character of German sinology. More than in any other Western country, the study of China in Germany has been shaped by the gravitational pull of philosophy, by the traditions of Geisteswissenschaft (the humanities in their specifically German inflection), and by the painful ruptures of twentieth-century history.

The story of German sinology can be told as a sequence of four great phases. First, there was the “pre-sinological” epoch (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), in which missionaries, polymath scholars, and Enlightenment philosophers constructed an idealized image of China that served as a mirror for European self-reflection. Second came the slow emergence of professional expertise in the nineteenth century, as orientalists, linguists, and philologists laid the groundwork for a specialized discipline. Third, the early twentieth century witnessed the rapid institutionalization of sinology at German universities — Hamburg, Berlin, Leipzig, Frankfurt — only for the entire edifice to be shattered by National Socialism, war, and the forced emigration of an entire generation of scholars. And fourth, the post-war period saw reconstruction, division between East and West German traditions, the revolutionary upheavals of 1968, and the gradual transformation of classical Sinologie into modern Chinawissenschaften (China Studies) — a process that remains contested and incomplete.

Throughout all of these phases, German sinology has been distinguished by certain recurring traits: a strong philological orientation rooted in the country’s tradition of classical scholarship; a persistent tendency toward ambitious, large-scale works of synthesis — multi-volume histories, philosophies, monumental translations; and a structural fragmentation imposed by Germany’s federal system, in which each Land controls its own university appointments. These strengths and weaknesses continue to define the field today.

2. Early German Encounters with China (Seventeenth–Eighteenth Centuries)

Although Franciscan monks from German-speaking lands are said to have preached in the Yuan-dynasty capital of Khanbaliq as early as the fourteenth century, the first significant impact on German intellectual life came through the printed word. A Middle High German translation of Marco Polo’s travel account appeared in the fourteenth century, followed by a printed edition in 1477, giving German readers their first sustained impression of a vast and sophisticated Chinese civilization. The critical intermediaries, however, were the Jesuit missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Historia de las cosas más notables, ritos y costumbres del gran Reyno de la China (1585) by the Augustinian Juan González de Mendoza — the first European account devoted specifically to Chinese history — appeared in German translation in 1589 and became, in Zhang Xiping’s words, “a bestseller among Enlightenment intellectuals” that laid the groundwork for the Chinoiserie craze to come.

Among the German-born Jesuits who served in China, Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1592–1666) of Cologne achieved the most remarkable career. His astronomical expertise and command of Chinese earned him the directorship of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau (Qintianjian) under both the late Ming and early Qing dynasties — a position that Jesuits would retain until the late eighteenth century. Schall’s Latin account of the Chinese mission, published posthumously in Vienna in 1665 and translated into German by Mannsegg in 1834, together with Martino Martini’s De bello tartarico (1654), became essential reading for any Western scholar seeking to understand the Ming-Qing transition. Other German Jesuits, such as the Bavarian Ignaz Kögler (Dai Jinxian, 1680–1746), made important contributions to astronomy and calendar-making in Beijing, though their impact on sinology proper remained limited.

The most influential early German work on China was produced by a man who never set foot there. Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), born in Geisa near Fulda, was the quintessential Baroque polymath — at once a pioneer of modern science and a compiler of encyclopedic fantasies. Forced to flee Germany during the Swedish invasion of 1632, he spent the rest of his career in Rome, where he held professorships in mathematics, physics, and oriental languages. His China Monumentis qua Sacris qua Profanis… Illustrata (Amsterdam, 1667), known simply as China Illustrata, drew on his extensive correspondence with Jesuits in the field, including his former student Martino Martini and other missionaries such as Michael Boym and Johann Grueber. The work treated China from six perspectives: the Nestorian Stele discovered at Xi’an; European travels in China and Asia; the three Chinese religions (Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism); natural and cultural wonders; architectural marvels (temples, bridges, the Great Wall); and — for the first time in any Western publication — a systematic presentation of different types of Chinese characters. Lavishly illustrated with over one hundred copperplate engravings, China Illustrata appealed to scholars and general readers alike and was quickly translated into multiple European languages. It was, without question, one of the most important catalysts for the Chinoiserie fever that swept across Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The towering figure of this early period is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Leibniz’s engagement with China was not antiquarian; it was philosophical, theological, and ultimately political. His interest was ignited in 1687, the very year that Philippe Couplet’s Latin translation of the Confucian Four Books — Confucius Sinarum Philosophus — was published in Paris. Reading this work, Leibniz concluded that China had come close to realizing the ideal of the “rationalized state.” In his view, mature human civilization existed at the two ends of the Eurasian landmass: China excelled in practical technology, empirical observation, and what he called “natural theology” (i.e., Confucian ethics), while Europe excelled in theoretical science and revealed religion. The two were complementary, and mutual exchange could only benefit both. In 1697, Leibniz published Novissima Sinica (“Latest News from China”), a collection of five letters from Jesuit missionaries in China, prefaced by his own remarkable essay addressed “to the reader.” He went so far as to propose that China should send missionaries to Europe to rescue Christendom from its moral decline — a radical reversal of the conventional missionary arrangement. Leibniz’s engagement with China was lifelong. He corresponded extensively with missionaries, speculated about connections between the Yijing hexagrams and his own binary number system, and repeatedly argued for the equal dignity of Chinese and European civilization. His influence on subsequent German thought about China — from Christian Wolff through the young Hegel — was immense.

Leibniz was not alone in his fascination with the Chinese writing system. Andreas Müller (1630–1694), commissioned by the Elector of Brandenburg to collect books and reports on China, catalogued over three hundred Chinese volumes acquired through the Dutch East India Company. Müller claimed to have discovered a “key” (clavis sinica) that would allow one to master the Chinese writing system in a short time, but he stubbornly refused to reveal it. In the end, he burned his papers, to the great regret of Leibniz, who had written to him in 1679 with fourteen specific questions about Chinese characters. Müller was succeeded as librarian of the Elector’s Chinese collection by Christian Mentzel (1622–1701), who likewise announced the discovery of a secret method for learning Chinese but produced more tangible results, including a Sylloge minutiarum lexici latino-sinico-characteristici (Nuremberg, 1685) — a small Latin-Chinese dictionary based primarily on Mei Yingzuo’s Zihui (1615) — and a 145-page Kurtze chinesische Chronologia (Berlin, 1696). As a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Mentzel maintained an extensive correspondence with scholars interested in East Asia, contributing significantly to the dissemination of knowledge about China in German intellectual circles.

The philosophical reception of China in Germany reached a dramatic crisis in 1721, when the philosopher Christian Wolff (1679–1754) delivered a public lecture at the University of Halle, “Oratio de Sinarum philosophia practica” (“On the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese”). Drawing on Leibniz’s ideas and on Jesuit reports, Wolff argued that the Chinese had achieved a high degree of moral virtue through reason alone, without the aid of divine revelation — a position that was essentially deist. The theological faculty at Halle, dominated by the Pietist August Hermann Francke, denounced Wolff’s lecture as atheistic. King Frederick William I of Prussia issued a decree expelling Wolff from Halle within forty-eight hours under threat of hanging. Wolff fled to the University of Marburg, where he continued his career, and was eventually rehabilitated under Frederick the Great in 1740. The Halle affair demonstrated both the explosive potential of the Chinese example in European intellectual debates and the risks that attached to taking the Leibnizian position too far.

Two major French Jesuit compilations reached German readers in translation and exercised enormous influence. Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique et physique de l’Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise (The Hague, 1736) was translated into German between 1747 and 1756. The German edition included additional materials not found in the original, including documents on the Rites Controversy, a report by the Jesuit Figurist Joachim Bouvet on the Chinese mission, sections on Chinese literature and geography, and Engelbert Kaempfer’s history of Japan. Its copperplate illustrations were reproduced widely and became for several decades the most important visual source through which educated Germans encountered China. Even more influential was the German translation of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses. The German Jesuit Joseph Stöcklein translated and published it as Der neue Welt-Bott mit allerhand Nachrichten der Missionarien Soc. Jesu (Augsburg, 1728–1761), running to forty volumes. Because the Jesuit correspondents had penetrated every level of Chinese society, the collection offered an unprecedentedly thorough account of Chinese life — politics, economy, culture, religion, ethics, customs, and natural products. Its impact on the German intellectual world’s understanding of China was, as Zhang Xiping observed, “incalculable.”

The Jesuit Florian Joseph Bahr (Wei Jijin, 1706–1771) from Upper Silesia, gifted in languages, quickly mastered both Manchu and Chinese after arriving in China. His letters were published as Allerneueste chinesische Merkwürdigkeiten (Augsburg, 1758). His most important sinological contribution was a German-Chinese vocabulary compiled in Beijing in 1748, apparently the German section of a multilingual dictionary compiled by Jesuits resident in Beijing under imperial auspices. This manuscript, rediscovered in 1937 by the German sinologist Walter Fuchs in a Beijing library, contained some 2,200 German words with their pronunciations rendered in Chinese characters. Among the earliest German-born scholars to engage seriously with the Chinese language as an academic subject was Theophilus Siegfried Bayer (1694–1738), born in Königsberg in East Prussia. Having found an academic position at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, Bayer — together with the French scholar Étienne Fourmont — was considered one of the greatest sinologists in eighteenth-century Europe. His Museum Sinicum (St. Petersburg, 1730) was a handbook of the Chinese language that also treated Manchurian grammar, laying the groundwork for the later German and Russian achievements in Manchu studies.

If the seventeenth century had produced an idealized image of China — rational, well-governed, ethically sophisticated — the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a dramatic reversal. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) depicted Chinese civilization as static and stagnant, incapable of the dynamic historical development that characterized the West. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) systematized this judgment, assigning China to the first and most primitive stage of world history, a stage of “substantial freedom” in which the individual had not yet emerged as a self-conscious subject. For Hegel, Chinese history was essentially the absence of history: eternal repetition without dialectical progress. This philosophical devaluation had profound consequences for the emerging discipline of sinology. It provided an intellectual justification for the marginalization of Chinese studies within the German university system: if Chinese civilization represented a lower stage of human development, the argument ran, why should German universities devote scarce resources to studying it? The tension between the Leibnizian tradition — which treated Chinese and European civilizations as equal and complementary — and the Hegelian tradition — which subordinated China to a teleological scheme of Western progress — would persist throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Scholars like Heinrich Plath, who insisted on the intrinsic value of Chinese civilization, found themselves marginalized by the dominant intellectual current.

The German literary engagement with China reached its most celebrated expression in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), who in his later years read Chinese novels in translation and was deeply impressed by them. His concept of Weltliteratur (world literature), first articulated in 1827, was partly inspired by his encounter with Chinese poetry and fiction. Although Goethe’s knowledge of China was inevitably mediated through translations and secondary sources, his openness to Chinese literature as art of universal significance — rather than mere ethnographic curiosity — marked a turning point in German cultural attitudes.

As Zhang Xiping has observed, this entire epoch shares several defining features. The engagement with China was driven not by sinological interest in the modern sense but by philosophical, theological, and political agendas — Leibniz sought confirmation of his vision of universal reason, Wolff sought ammunition for his deism, missionaries sought to advance their evangelizing mission. The writings were selective, drawing on those aspects of Chinese civilization that suited European purposes. The lexicographic tradition reflected a genuine fascination with the writing system but also served practical needs. And the scholarly amateurs, however brilliant, lacked the systematic linguistic training and access to primary sources that would characterize professional sinology. The groundwork had been laid, but the discipline itself had not yet emerged.

3. The Founding of Academic Sinology (Nineteenth Century)

The nineteenth century in Germany was a period of slow maturation. Compared to France, which established the first university chair of Chinese at the Collège de France in 1814 under Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, Germany lagged behind. Until the establishment of the Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen in Berlin in 1887, there was no permanent institutional base for teaching Chinese at a German university. Most German sinologists of this period were self-taught in Chinese, had trained initially in other fields (classical philology, theology, oriental languages), and could not make a living from sinology alone.

The first German sinologist of international stature was Heinrich Julius Klaproth (1783–1835), who taught himself Chinese and Manchu, studied at the University of Dresden, and in 1804 joined the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. After a successful mission to China in 1805–1806 and research in the Caucasus, he was promoted to privy councillor and academician. In 1815, Klaproth moved to Paris, where he became, alongside Abel-Rémusat, one of the two leading sinologists in Europe. In 1822, he co-founded the Société Asiatique with Abel-Rémusat in Paris and helped launch the Journal Asiatique in 1825. He published catalogues of the Chinese and Manchu holdings of both the St. Petersburg and Berlin royal libraries. Most remarkably, in his Asia Polyglotta (Paris, 1823), Klaproth proposed that Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese belonged to the same language family — a hypothesis ridiculed at the time but vindicated a century and a half later, when the Sino-Tibetan language family became an established concept in comparative linguistics. Alexander von Humboldt reportedly tried to secure a professorship in “East Asian Languages” for Klaproth at the University of Berlin, but Klaproth declined, unwilling to leave the scholarly environment of Paris.

The growth of sinology depended critically on access to Chinese books, which were extremely difficult to obtain in early nineteenth-century Europe. Karl Friedrich Neumann (1793–1870), originally trained in Armenian and then a student of Abel-Rémusat, made a decisive contribution to this infrastructure. In 1829, he sailed to Canton, where he assembled a library of over six thousand Chinese books — an extraordinary feat. Some 3,500 volumes went to the Bavarian State Library in Munich, the remainder to Berlin. Neumann’s selections, as a trained sinologist, focused on the foundational texts of Chinese history, philosophy, religion, and lexicography, providing Munich with the core collection that would later support a major sinological tradition. Neumann himself, appointed professor of “State and Ethnology, Chinese, and Armenian Languages” at Munich, published a history of East Asia from the First Opium War to the Treaty of Peking (1861), notable for its attention to intra-Asian relations rather than treating each country in isolation.

Heinrich Plath (1802–1874), a classical philologist who taught himself Chinese, never held a university chair in sinology, but his scholarship surpassed that of many who did. At the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich, he produced a remarkable series of monographs: Die Religion und der Cultus der alten Chinesen (1862–1864), Nahrung, Kleidung und Wohnung der alten Chinesen (1868), and Die Beschäftigung der alten Chinesen (1869). Drawing on the Chinese texts that Neumann had brought to Munich, Plath argued — against the prevailing consensus — that Chinese religion bore no marks of primitiveness and constituted a system fully comparable to Christianity. He further insisted, in the tradition of Leibniz, that Chinese civilization possessed the same high ethical standards as European culture, directly challenging the assumption of Christian moral superiority. Herbert Franke later called Plath “the most scientifically significant” figure in mid-nineteenth-century German sinology. Plath also fought against the mainstream historiographical view of China as a “stagnant empire,” arguing that Chinese history should be incorporated into world history. His advocacy of a multi-axial historical narrative — remarkable for its time — went largely unheeded until the Leipzig scholar August Conrady rediscovered his work decades later.

Wilhelm Schott (1802–1889) pursued a different trajectory. Originally a theologian whose interests shifted to East and Central Asian languages, he became Privatdozent at the University of Berlin in 1838 and was elected to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1841. His publications included Entwurf einer Beschreibung der chinesischen Literatur (1854), Chinesische Sprachlehre (1857), and studies of Jurchen, Tatar, and Khitan languages. Schott’s distinctive contribution was to situate Chinese within the broader context of Asian — especially Central Asian — languages and cultures, rather than studying it in isolation.

The greatest linguistic achievement of nineteenth-century German sinology was the Chinesische Grammatik (Grammatik der chinesischen Schriftsprache, or in its Chinese title, Hanwen jingwei, 1881) by the Leipzig linguist Georg von der Gabelentz. Previous Western grammarians had unconsciously forced Chinese into the mold of Latin syntax; Gabelentz was the first to treat Chinese on its own terms, emphasizing its distinctive typological character as an isolating language. The work became the standard reference for multiple generations of sinologists studying classical Chinese. In 1878, the Saxon Ministry of Education appointed Gabelentz as außerordentlicher Professor of oriental languages at Leipzig — the first dedicated sinological teaching position at a German university, albeit initially a modest one. Gabelentz also taught at the newly founded Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen in Berlin, where he offered courses on East Asian languages.

The founding of the Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen (SOS) at the University of Berlin in 1887 was the most important institutional step of the nineteenth century. Its establishment was driven by practical rather than scholarly motives. According to an oft-repeated anecdote, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, frustrated by the lack of interpreters during a meeting with the Chinese ambassador in 1883, declared that more young German officials must be trained to communicate with major Asian powers. The initiative came formally from Gabelentz’s student Wilhelm Grube (1855–1908), who submitted a proposal to the Ministry of Education in December 1884, and in 1887 an imperial decree established the SOS. In its first semester (1887–1888), the Seminar offered instruction in six languages: Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, and Swahili. Chinese was taught by Carl Arendt (1887–1902), a former diplomat in Beijing, succeeded by Alfred Forke (1903–1914). Among the early students were several who would become giants of the next generation: Otto Franke, Erich Haenisch, and Franz Kuhn, the celebrated translator of Chinese novels. The SOS also published its own journal, the Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen, which from 1898 onwards served as the first German-language periodical devoted in part to sinology, running to eighty-five volumes over thirty-eight years. The SOS was explicitly oriented toward practical training — its purpose was to produce diplomats, consular officials, and merchants, not scholars. Yet its very existence acknowledged that Germany required trained expertise in Chinese and set the stage for the academic institutionalization that would follow.

The most notable nineteenth-century German sinologists often pursued careers outside Germany. Wilhelm Grube, the St. Petersburg-born specialist in Jurchen scripts and Chinese literature, served as director of the East Asian section of Berlin’s Ethnological Museum. His Geschichte der chinesischen Literatur (1902) was the first literary history of China by a trained specialist and remained the standard German-language reference for half a century. His Pekinger Volkskunde (1901), based partly on fieldwork in Beijing in 1897–1899, is still cited in studies of Beijing folk culture, and his pioneering study Sprache und Schrift der Jučen (1896) established the field of Jurchen linguistics. Friedrich Hirth (1845–1927), after studying classical philology at Berlin, entered the Chinese Maritime Customs Service in 1870 and served for twenty-seven years. His publications established him as a leading authority on Sino-Western cultural contacts. In 1902, he was appointed the first professor of Chinese language and literature at Columbia University, where, according to tradition, he served on the committee that examined Hu Shi’s doctoral dissertation. Berthold Laufer (1874–1934), born in Cologne, led expeditions to East Asia for the American Museum of Natural History and settled permanently in the United States. His extraordinary range — encompassing Chinese ceramics, jade, Sino-Iranian relations, and the history of cultivated plants — drew comparisons with Paul Pelliot. Laufer’s departure, and Hirth’s before him, foreshadowed the far more devastating brain drain that would occur under National Socialism.

The nineteenth century also produced a distinctive category of German sinologists: Protestant missionaries whose scholarly achievements rivaled or exceeded those of the university-based academics. Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff (1803–1851) published a voluminous Geschichte des chinesischen Reiches (German edition 1847). Though his work was marred by his colonial entanglements — he served as interpreter during the Opium War negotiations and provided military intelligence to the British — it introduced a European periodization of Chinese history that influenced subsequent Western historiography. Ernst Faber (Hua Zhian, 1839–1899), a Basel Mission theologian who spent decades in China, produced works of far greater scholarly depth, including a Lehrbegriff des Confucius (Hong Kong, 1872) that earned him the respect of even the notoriously critical Gu Hongming; the Canadian missionary MacGillivray called him “the most profound sinologist of the nineteenth century.” Ernst Johann Eitel (1838–1908), originally of the Basel Mission and later a Hong Kong government official, co-authored with Friedrich Wilhelm Lobscheid a Chinese-English Dictionary in the Cantonese Dialect (Hong Kong, 1877) that remains an important source for the study of nineteenth-century Cantonese.

Any account of German engagement with China in the nineteenth century must reckon with Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905), the geologist and geographer whose eight research expeditions across China yielded the monumental China: Ergebnisse eigener Reisen und darauf gegründeter Studien (Berlin, 1877ff.). Richthofen’s work provided the German government and business community with geographical descriptions and maps that far surpassed all previous knowledge. His letters to the British Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai in 1870–1872 had already identified Jiaozhou Bay as a desirable naval port — a recommendation that bore fruit in Germany’s seizure of the bay in 1897. Richthofen’s view of China was that of a declining civilization confronting the ascendant power of the West. He saw no need to expand sinological research in Germany, arguing that questions of culture, history, and religion were passé; what mattered was “providing concrete recommendations for the economic and colonial development of the German Empire in China.” His stance illustrates the intimate connection between German sinology and the imperial project.

4. The Hamburg-Berlin Axis: Institutionalization (1900–1930)

The decisive breakthrough came in the first quarter of the twentieth century. In 1905, the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Society) passed a resolution calling for the establishment of sinological chairs at German universities. In 1909, the German government created a chair at the Hamburgisches Kolonialinstitut — the precursor of the University of Hamburg. Otto Franke (1863–1946) was appointed as the first occupant, becoming the first professional Sinologie-professor in German history. The Hamburg Kolonialinstitut had been founded in 1908 with the dual mission of training colonial administrators and merchants, but also of promoting a more “scientific” approach to the peoples under German colonial rule. As Wolfgang Kubin has noted, the link between German sinology and imperialism cannot be denied, though the relationship was always more complex than the 1968 generation’s slogan of the “eternal colonial institute” (ewiges Kolonialinstitut) suggested.

Franke, despite working in a commercial city, firmly rejected a utilitarian approach. He insisted that the new department be devoted to “the study of the Chinese language and culture as a whole” and named it the Seminar für Sprache und Kultur Chinas — a name it retains to this day. Breaking with the previous emphasis on classical Chinese and ancient texts, Franke advocated beginning with modern spoken Chinese and proceeding from there to the study of traditional culture. Chairs followed in rapid succession: Berlin (1912), where the Dutch scholar J.J.M. de Groot was appointed first professor; Leipzig (1922), under August Conrady; and Frankfurt (1925), under Richard Wilhelm. Göttingen and Bonn established sinological divisions within their oriental studies departments from 1920. By the early 1930s, Germany had built an academic infrastructure for Chinese studies that rivaled or exceeded that of any other European nation.

Franke’s magnum opus was the five-volume Geschichte des Chinesischen Reiches (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1930–1952), a history of the Chinese empire from antiquity to 1368. Using the Zizhi Tongjian as his primary framework, Franke placed Confucian ideology and the concept of tianxia at the center of his narrative, producing what was in essence a political-intellectual history of China. Against the mainstream German historical tradition from Herder through Hegel and Ranke, Franke insisted that China was a dynamic, living civilization whose cultural influence had shaped the entire course of East and Central Asian history. The French sinologist Marianne Bastid called this work “a milestone in European research on Chinese history.”

Alfred Forke (1867–1944), trained as a jurist and then employed as an interpreter in China for thirteen years (1890–1903), was the most productive sinologist of his generation. His three-volume Geschichte der chinesischen Philosophie (1927–1938) remains, at nearly two thousand pages, an indispensable reference. Forke’s method was to embed extensive translated passages from original Chinese texts within his analytical framework, giving readers direct access to primary sources. His German translation of Wang Chong’s Lunheng (1906–1911) earned him the Prix Stanislas Julien, and his 1922 translation of Mozi (Me Ti des Sozialethikers und seiner Schüler philosophische Werke) had an unexpected literary afterlife: it became the principal source for Bertolt Brecht’s Me-ti: Buch der Wendungen.

No figure in the history of German sinology has had a wider cultural impact than Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930). Born in Stuttgart and trained as a Protestant theologian, Wilhelm was sent to the German colony of Qingdao in 1899, where he devoted himself less to missionary work than to the study of Chinese classics, collaborating with the Qing loyalist scholar Lao Naixuan on the Yijing and other Confucian and Daoist texts. Over the following decades, he translated into German a breathtaking range of canonical works: the Lunyu, Mengzi, Daxue, Zhongyong, Kongzi jiayu, Liji, Yijing, Lüshi Chunqiu, Daodejing, Liezi, and Zhuangzi, among others. Wilhelm’s translations were published by the Eugen Diederichs Verlag in Leipzig and achieved extraordinary resonance in the German-speaking world. Appearing in the aftermath of World War I, when European intellectuals were questioning the absolute superiority of Western values, his renderings of Chinese wisdom found a receptive audience. Hermann Hesse, after reading the Daodejing, wrote: “The Chinese philosopher Laozi, unknown to Europe for two thousand years, has in the past fifteen years been translated into all European languages, and his Daodejing has become a fashionable book.” Carl Gustav Jung wrote the foreword to the 1951 English edition of the Yijing, which in the 1970s became a cult text of the American counterculture. In 1921, Wilhelm was appointed scientific attaché at the German legation in Beijing, where he established contacts with the leading figures of the New Culture Movement, including Cai Yuanpei and Hu Shi. Returning to Frankfurt in 1925, he founded the China-Institut, established the journal Chinesische Blätter (later renamed Sinica), and worked tirelessly to bring Chinese culture to the German public. Professional sinologists were not always kind to Wilhelm. They charged that his translations sometimes sacrificed accuracy for readability and that his linguistic command of Chinese was imperfect. Otto Franke pointed to specific translation errors. Yet no other sinologist — before or since — has exerted a comparable influence on the broader culture.

August Conrady (1864–1925), trained initially in Indology before turning to Chinese language and history, developed a distinctive approach influenced by the historian Karl Lamprecht. He insisted on studying Chinese civilization not in isolation but within the broader framework of world history, employing methods from general ethnology, anthropology, and historical sociology. Conrady’s contributions to Sino-Tibetan linguistics were pioneering: he argued that the “Indo-Chinese” language family comprised a Sino-Thai and a Tibeto-Burman branch — a classification that anticipated modern scholarly consensus. Among his students was Lin Yutang, who in 1923 completed a doctoral dissertation on ancient Chinese phonology under his supervision.

The appointment of the Dutch scholar Jan Jacob Maria de Groot to the new chair of sinology at Berlin in 1912 brought to Germany one of the most formidable — and controversial — figures in the history of the field. De Groot learned Hokkien in Xiamen during two extended stays, during which he also conducted the painstaking fieldwork on popular religion that resulted in his magnum opus: the six-volume Religious System of China (Leiden: Brill, 1892–1910), a work of unparalleled ethnographic richness that remains indispensable today. His move to Berlin was motivated in part by his frustration with the Dutch academic system: after thirty-seven years of service, he was entitled to no pension. He became, as Kubin observes, “more German than the Germans,” embracing German nationalism to the point of donating his own money to the German war effort in 1914.

Among the early students of the SOS was Franz Kuhn, who would become the most important translator of Chinese fiction into German, rendering into elegant German many of the great Chinese novels, including the Jinpingmei, Haoqiu zhuan, Yesou puyan, and works by Pu Songling. Ferdinand Lessing (1882–1961), born in the Rhineland, specialized in Mongolian languages, Tibetan Buddhism, and Chinese art, producing a Mongolian-English Dictionary (1960) that remained a standard reference. After emigrating to the United States, he taught at Berkeley, contributing to the transfer of German sinological expertise to America.

The institutional consolidation of German sinology in this period was accompanied by the founding of several important journals. Artibus Asiae (1925, Zurich) was devoted to East Asian art history. Ostasiatische Zeitschrift (1912, Berlin) was the organ of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ostasiatische Kunst. Asia Major (1924–1935, Leipzig) was the most important purely sinological journal, revived in London in 1949. Sinica (Frankfurt) was the organ of Wilhelm’s China-Institut, published until 1943. In Beijing, the Steyler missionary and sinologist Heinrich Stenz founded Monumenta Serica in 1935 at the Catholic Fu Jen University, a journal that attracted contributions from many future luminaries — Wolfram Eberhard, Robert van Gulik, Wolfgang Franke — and continues to this day.

5. Disruption and Diaspora (1933–1945)

The rise of National Socialism devastated German sinology. When Hitler came to power in 1933, professional sinology in Germany was barely twenty years old. The entire country possessed only four sinological professorships: Hamburg (since 1909), Berlin (since 1912), Leipzig (since 1922), and Frankfurt (since 1925). The field was small, and the loss of even a few scholars was catastrophic.

The most devastating blow was the forced emigration of an entire generation. As the Princeton sinologist Martin Kern has documented, a large number of young and established German sinologists and East Asian art historians left the country, most of them for the United States. Gustav Haloun (1898–1951), who had served as lecturer and then assistant professor at Göttingen from 1931 to 1938, was denied a full chair because of his “negative attitude toward the NSDAP.” He accepted a call to Cambridge University in 1938, where he remained until his early death in 1951. Under Haloun’s direction, Göttingen had briefly possessed a serious sinological research library — a collection that was lost in the turmoil of war. A notable detail from the Göttingen story, documented by Michael Knüppel, is that the young Ji Xianlin (1911–2009) — who would later become one of China’s most celebrated scholars of Sanskrit and comparative culture — served as Chinese language lecturer at the Göttingen sinological seminar from 1937 to 1945, having been stranded in Germany by the outbreak of the war.

Wolfram Eberhard (1909–1989), a specialist in Chinese folklore and social history, moved first to Ankara and then to the University of California, Berkeley. His prodigious output — including A History of China (1950), Guilt and Sin in Traditional China (1967), and numerous studies of Chinese folk tales — exemplified the German tradition of synthesizing philological rigor with broad cultural analysis. Erwin Reifler (1903–1965), who had studied at Berlin, emigrated to the United States, where he worked on Chinese linguistics at the University of Washington. The émigrés’ contributions to their host countries were enormous — but none of them was ever recalled to Germany. As Kern has noted, this one-way transfer permanently altered the international balance of sinological research, shifting the center of gravity from German-speaking Europe to the anglophone world.

The war itself compounded the damage. The sinological library of Berlin University — built up over decades into one of the finest collections in Europe — was destroyed in the bombing. Wilhelm Grube’s entire personal library, which he had donated to the East Asian Institute at Leipzig, was likewise lost. Key journals ceased publication: Asia Major in 1935, Sinica in 1943. The deaths of Otto Franke (1946) and Alfred Forke (1944) marked the end of an era. By 1945, German sinology lay in ruins.

6. Post-War Reconstruction (1945–1970s)

The reconstruction of German sinology after 1945 was painfully slow. As Richard Wilhelm’s son, Hellmut Wilhelm (1905–1990), then professor at the University of Washington, observed in 1949, “the pace of recovery of German sinological research is still remarkably slow” compared with the general revival of German academic life. The primary reason was a simple lack of qualified personnel.

In the post-war decades, German sinology organized itself around three centers, each with a distinct intellectual profile. Hamburg under Wolfgang Franke (1912–2007) continued the tradition established by his father Otto. The younger Franke, who had spent thirteen years in China (1937–1950), focused on Ming and Qing history, the overseas Chinese, and modern Chinese intellectual history. His Introduction to the Sources of Ming History (1948, in English) exemplified the Hamburg school’s simultaneous attention to Chinese and Western-language sources. Munich under Herbert Franke (1914–2011; no relation to the Hamburg Frankes) became the southern stronghold of German sinology. Herbert Franke, who held doctorates in both philosophy (sinology) and law, made Song and Yuan dynasty history his specialty. From 1966, he was joined by Wolfgang Bauer (1930–1997), whose magnum opus China und die Hoffnung auf Glück (1971; English: China and the Search for Happiness, 1976) was a sweeping intellectual history of Chinese utopian thought from antiquity to the twentieth century. Together, Franke and Bauer made Munich a center for the study of Chinese history, art, philosophy, and literature. Leipzig in the German Democratic Republic inherited the tradition of Conrady and his son-in-law Eduard Erkes (1891–1958). The Leipzig school’s most distinctive claim was Erkes’s insistence — first articulated in 1919 — that ancient China had not experienced a slave-holding society in the European sense, contradicting the orthodox Marxist periodization that both the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party endorsed. Even under the constraints of GDR ideology, Erkes maintained this position, arguing that Marx’s schema of historical stages could not be universally applied. After Erkes’s death in 1958, his Leipzig chair remained unfilled for twenty-five years.

The development of sinology in the German Democratic Republic followed a distinctive trajectory shaped by the political relationship between East Berlin and Beijing. In the 1950s, the People’s Republic of China was the GDR’s most important ally, and large numbers of East German students were sent to China for language training — including Mechthild Leutner, Helmut Martin, Brunhild Staiger, and others who would later become prominent. The Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s, however, had devastating consequences. After 1963, the demand for sinologists in the GDR plummeted, student enrollments were drastically reduced, and the Leipzig department was effectively shut down. The GDR did produce one unique institution: the classified journal Aktuelle China-Information (1971–1989), published with the notation “confidential — for official use only.” Over eighty issues, it carried more articles on China than all other GDR publications combined, yet most East German sinologists had no access to it.

Beginning in the 1960s, the number of sinological professorships in West Germany grew steadily. By 1967, there were thirteen professors of Chinese studies across eleven institutions. A decisive experiment in restructuring was launched in 1964 at the newly founded Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where an Institute of East Asian Studies was established on the model of American “area studies.” Unlike traditional sinology departments, the Bochum institute brought together specialists in Chinese language and literature, history, philosophy, religion, art, law, economics, and sociology under a single institutional roof — a deliberate break with the Lehrstuhl (professorial chair) system in which the professor’s personal interests dictated the research agenda of an entire department.

7. The 1968 Generation and the Transformation of Sinology

The student protests of 1968, which convulsed West German universities, had a particularly intense impact on sinology. The movement borrowed freely from the iconography of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: protesters marched under red flags, carried portraits of Mao Zedong, and waved the “Little Red Book.” In Munich, demonstrators chanted “We are Mao Zedong’s students, we want nothing but chaos.”

Students demanded that sinology departments — hitherto devoted almost exclusively to ancient and classical subjects — turn their attention to contemporary China. In 1967, only one of the thirteen sinology professors in West Germany worked on contemporary issues. The students demanded instruction in modern spoken Chinese, and they insisted on replacing the hierarchical Lehrstuhl system with student-run seminars and working groups. At the Free University of Berlin, students occupied the East Asian Institute and paralyzed its teaching operations. Tilemann Grimm’s critical book Mao intern (1974), published by the Bochum sinologist Helmut Martin, provoked accusations from far-left student organizations that it was “a publication hostile to China.” Meanwhile, other scholars — notably Joachim Schickel, whose Große Mauer, Große Methode (1968) constructed an idealized image of China as the antithesis of capitalist Western society — fed the utopian fantasies of the student movement while carefully excluding all empirical evidence of Chinese reality. The Munich department under Herbert Franke and Wolfgang Bauer weathered the storm with greater equanimity, though course offerings shifted to accommodate student demand.

The lasting legacy of 1968 was the acceleration of a transformation already underway: the shift from classical Sinologie — philological study of Chinese texts in the German orientalist tradition — to Chinawissenschaften (China Studies), a broader, more interdisciplinary enterprise incorporating social science methods and focusing on modern and contemporary China. This was not merely a generational rebellion. As early as the late 1950s, the German Science Council (Wissenschaftsrat) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft had called for expanded research on contemporary China. The student movement gave political urgency to demands that the academic establishment had already acknowledged in principle. The debate between classical Sinologie and modern Chinawissenschaften has never been fully resolved. Herbert Franke’s 1953 definition of the field — “the study of China, its history, and its culture on the basis of Chinese-language texts, pursued through philological and critical methods” — still commands respect among those who insist that mastery of classical Chinese and deep immersion in the textual tradition are prerequisites for serious scholarship. Critics counter that this definition privileges a self-referential philological practice over engagement with the social, economic, and political realities of contemporary China.

8. Contemporary German Sinology: Major Centers and Figures

German reunification in 1990 brought the East German sinological tradition — or what remained of it — back into contact with the Western mainstream. Today, sinology and China Studies are taught at more than a dozen German universities. Berlin — both the Freie Universität and the Humboldt-Universität — maintains departments of Chinese studies, and together they make Berlin the largest center for Chinese studies in Germany. Hamburg’s Seminar für Sprache und Kultur Chinas, under its original name since 1909, remains one of the most venerable institutions in European sinology. Munich continues to be a major center for historical and philological sinology. Heidelberg’s Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS) represents the newer, more interdisciplinary model, with particular strengths in the history of science and intellectual history; Rudolf Wagner (1941–2019), whose work ranged from the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to the Chinese press and encyclopedias, established Heidelberg as a major center for original sinological research. Göttingen sinology has experienced dramatic fluctuations: founded in 1925, it nearly perished in 2004 when the Faculty of Humanities voted to close both sinology and Japanese studies. Rescue came through endowed funding from regional businesses, and the department now boasts fifteen permanent staff positions. The Bonn school, associated with Rolf Trauzettel (1930–2019) and later Wolfgang Kubin (b. 1945), developed a distinctive approach drawing on European philosophy, theology, and literary theory to interpret Chinese culture. Münster has maintained a focus on classical philology and Han-dynasty studies. Tübingen is known for Chinese legal studies and the work of Harro von Senger on the Strategeme. The Bochum model established in 1964 continues, though the department was shaken by the suicide in 1999 of its long-serving director Helmut Martin. Martin had been a towering figure in post-war German sinology: his focus on contemporary Chinese literature generated several hundred publications, and he founded the Landesspracheninstitut Nordrhein-Westfalen as well as the Richard-Wilhelm-Übersetzungszentrum (Richard Wilhelm Translation Center) at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in 1993 — one of only three translation centers for Chinese literature worldwide. He also edited the book series Chinathemen at the Universitätsverlag Brockmeyer and later a series at Projekt Verlag, Münster, making contemporary Chinese literary and cultural texts accessible to German readers. Martin was instrumental in the institutional development of the field beyond the university: he was a co-founder and, from 1995, chairman of the Deutsche Vereinigung für Chinastudien (DVCS), the professional association of German-speaking China scholars, which had been established in March 1990 at Humboldt University in Berlin. Frankfurt, the historic seat of Richard Wilhelm’s China-Institut, has maintained its sinological tradition under Iwo Amelung (b. 1962), who since 2007 has held the chair at Goethe University, with a distinctive focus on the history of science in modern China and the reception of Western knowledge in the late Qing. Among the newer appointments, Juliane Noth, a specialist in East Asian art history with a focus on modern Chinese painting, has been appointed professor at the Freie Universität Berlin. The FU Berlin has become Germany’s largest sinological institute with five or more professorships: Genia Kostka holds the chair in Chinese Politics, with research on digital transformation, environmental governance, and local governance in China; Sabrina Habich-Sobiegalla has been newly appointed to a professorship in Chinese Studies, focusing on rural development and state-society relations; Christian Meyer holds a Heisenberg Professorship (since 2018) in the culture and history of China with an emphasis on religions, including Neo-Confucianism and Christianity in China; Andreas Guder occupies an endowed professorship (since 2019) in the didactics of Chinese as well as language and literature of China; and Klaus Mühlhahn, who returned to the FU in May 2025 after serving as president of Zeppelin University (2020–2025), brings expertise in modern Chinese history, criminal law, and Sino-German relations. At the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Henning Klöter has held the professorship in Modern Languages and Literatures of China since 2015, with research on sociolinguistics and Taiwan studies, while Sarah Eaton has held a professorship in Transregional Chinese Studies since 2019, focusing on the political economy of China and digitalization.

Hamburg’s department, in addition to its long tradition, now includes Kai Vogelsang, who has held a professorship in sinology since 2008 with a focus on Chinese history and classical Chinese; Julia Schneider, who succeeded Barend ter Haar in October 2024 with expertise in Chinese history from the twelfth to the twentieth century; and Thomas Fröhlich, who works on Chinese intellectual history and political philosophy.

Heidelberg today counts five active professorships in sinology, making it alongside Berlin one of Germany’s largest sinological centers: Barbara Mittler (since 2003) works on Chinese art, music, literature, and cultural history; Gotelind Müller-Saini (since 2004) specializes in Chinese-Japanese cultural exchange and cultural transfer processes; Joachim Kurtz (since 2009) focuses on Chinese intellectual history and knowledge transfer; Enno Giele (since 2012), who serves as institute director, specializes in classical China and manuscript studies; and Anja Senz (since 2014) works on contemporary China, including its politics, economy, and society.

At the University of Bonn, beyond the Trauzettel-Kubin tradition, Ralph Kauz now heads the sinology department with research on Chinese maritime history and Chinese-Iranian relations, while Li Wen holds a professorship in classical Chinese philology and phonology.

Bochum’s Faculty of East Asian Studies has expanded well beyond its original focus. Christine Moll-Murata holds the chair in the History of China, with a distinctive focus on economic and social history, handicrafts, and industrialization. Christian Schwermann, who serves as managing director, occupies the professorship in Languages and Literatures of China (since 2016), specializing in the grammar and rhetoric of classical Chinese. Jörn-Carsten Gottwald holds the chair in Politics of East Asia, working on the political economy of China, while Sebastian Bersick holds the chair in International Political Economy of East Asia, with research on EU-China relations and global governance.

The Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg has emerged as an important center. Michael Lackner, who remains active as senior professor, founded the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities (IKGF), which has attracted major DFG funding for the study of East-West knowledge transfer. Marc André Matten has held a professorship in Contemporary Chinese History since 2009, focusing on political intellectual history and nationalism. Andrea Breard holds an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship in Sinology with a focus on the history of ideas and culture in China — she also serves as Vice President for Education of the FAU — bringing expertise in the history of mathematics in China. Michael Höckelmann occupies the chair in State and Society of China.

Frankfurt’s sinological tradition, alongside Amelung, includes Zhiyi Yang, who was appointed to a professorship in sinology in 2025 with a focus on pre-modern Chinese lyric poetry, aesthetics, and memory studies, and Dorothea Wippermann, who has held the chair in Chinese Language and Culture since 2001, working on applied linguistics and transcultural studies.

Freiburg’s Institute of Sinology, founded as an independent institute by Nicola Spakowski, is led by two chairs: Spakowski herself (since 2010), who works on modern Chinese history and contemporary society, and Daniel Leese (since 2012), a specialist in Maoism and its legacy in the political history of the People’s Republic.

Göttingen sinology, having survived its near-closure, is now led by Axel Schneider (since 2009), who specializes in modern Chinese intellectual history and historiography, and Dominic Sachsenmaier (since 2015), who brings a global-historical perspective to the study of modern China and transnational entanglements.

The University of Cologne has developed a significant presence in China Studies. Stefan Kramer has held the professorship in Chinese Culture since 2014, with research on media theory, aesthetics, and cultural studies. Felix Wemheuer (since 2014) is one of the leading scholars of Maoism and famine politics, while Björn Ahl has held the professorship in Chinese Legal Culture since 2012, succeeding Robert Heuser.

At Leipzig’s Ostasiatisches Institut, Philip Clart holds the chair in sinology with a focus on Chinese religious history, folk religion, and Daoism, while Elisabeth Kaske specializes in the history of modern China and institutional history.

Munich’s tradition is further strengthened by Armin Selbitschka, who works on early Chinese history, material culture, and archaeology, and Max Oidtmann, who has held a chair (since 2022) in Chinese and Central Asian history, with expertise on the Qing dynasty, Tibet, and legal history.

Münster’s Institut für Sinologie und Ostasienkunde is now directed by Kerstin Storm, who bridges classical sinology with modern China research.

Tübingen, beyond von Senger’s legacy in legal studies, has developed a broader profile. Günter Schubert has held the professorship in Greater China Studies since 2003 and founded the European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan (ERCCT), focusing on cross-strait relations and local governance. Achim Mittag (since 2005) works on Chinese intellectual and cultural history and historiography, while Huang Fei holds the chair in History and Society of China, specializing in environmental history and material culture from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.

The University of Trier’s sinology department is led by Christian Soffel (since 2012), who specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of China, with particular attention to Confucianism and Zhu Xi studies. At the University of Würzburg, Roland Altenburger (since 2012) holds a chair in the Cultural History of East Asia, focusing on Chinese literature; Björn Alpermann (since 2013) occupies the chair in Contemporary China Studies, working on Chinese politics and social stratification; and Doris Fischer holds the professorship in China Business and Economics, with research on the Chinese economy and innovation policy.

The Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, at its Germersheim campus (Fachbereich Translations-, Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft), has contributed a distinctive translation-studies dimension to German sinology. Peter Kupfer held a professorship in Chinese Language and Cultural Studies with a focus on translation theory and practice. Hans Peter Hoffmann, who has held a professorship in sinology at Germersheim since 2014/2015 and leads the Chinese section, combines literary translation — including works by Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian, Bei Dao, and Liao Yiwu — with academic translation pedagogy. Ulrich Kautz, who served as extraordinary professor at Germersheim, is known both as a prolific translator of contemporary Chinese prose (including works by Yu Hua, Yan Lianke, and Deng Youmei) and as a translation theorist whose handbooks on Chinese-German translation didactics have become standard references in the field.

The German-speaking sinological tradition extends beyond Germany proper. At the University of Vienna, the largest sinological center in Austria, Rossella Ferrari heads the sinology department with research on modern and contemporary Chinese literature and culture; Christian Göbel holds a professorship in sinology with a focus on the politics of modern China and digital governance; Agnes Schick-Chen serves as associate professor in sinology with a specialization in Chinese legal culture; and Heinz Christoph Steinhardt holds a tenure-track professorship in the state and society of modern China, focusing on political sociology and civil society.

In Switzerland, the University of Zurich’s Asia-Orient-Institut houses a sinological tradition led by Wolfgang Behr, who has held the professorship in Traditional China since 2008 with research on historical linguistics and palaeography; Jean Christopher Mittelstädt was appointed associate professor in sinology with a focus on modern China in 2025. At the University of Geneva, Nicolas Zufferey has held the chair in sinology since 2002, specializing in ancient Chinese philosophy and Confucianism, while Laure Zhang (Zhang Ning) has occupied the professorship in modern and contemporary China since 2011.

Beyond the traditional university system, the Hochschule für Angewandte Sprachen (now Internationale Hochschule SDI München) established a department of Chinese language in 2007 with a dedicated professorship — held from its founding in 2007 to 2014 by Martin Woesler — offering BA programs in Chinese translation and business communication and an MA program in Multilingual Communication and Moderation, a model that complemented the research-oriented university tradition with a more applied orientation. The professorship was later held by Lingqi Meng (from 2017), who currently heads the Chinese department and directs the BA program in Modern Chinese Studies, alongside Rebecca Ehrenwirth, who holds a professorship in Chinese-German translation.

Also other universities of applied sciences established professorships: the Hochschule Bremen operates a China Centre with BA programs in International Mechanical Engineering with a Focus on China (MAWIC) and Applied Business Languages (AWS, founded 1988); the Hochschule Ludwigshafen's Ostasieninstitut (East Asia Institute, founded 1989) offers a BSc in International Business Management East Asia; the HTWG Konstanz runs BA programs in Asian Studies and Management with a China track and hosts the BMBF-funded China-Kompetenzzentrum Bodensee (ChiKoBo), directed by Gabriele Thelen, which networks 24 universities of applied sciences in Baden-Württemberg; the Hochschule Osnabrück established a Hochschulzentrum China (HZC) in 2013 offering a China Competence Certificate and cooperative degree programs with Chinese partner universities; and the FH Dortmund operates DoCoChi, the Dortmund Competence Center China, focusing on transnational education and dual bachelor programs. These institutions are coordinated through the Verbund der Chinazentren (VCdH), founded in 2019, which connects China centres across the German university system to promote China competence in research and teaching.

Several scholars have shaped the character of contemporary German sinology beyond the founding figures already discussed. Wolfgang Kubin (b. 1945, Celle) has been the most prolific and provocative German sinologist of the post-Franke era. His ten-volume Geschichte der chinesischen Literatur (2002–2014), the most ambitious literary history of China undertaken in any Western language, drew both admiration and controversy. Heiner Roetz (b. 1950), professor at Bochum, is the leading German scholar of Chinese philosophy, whose Die chinesische Ethik der Achsenzeit (1992; English: Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age, 1993) challenged the tendency to deny the universality of ethical reasoning by demonstrating the sophisticated argumentative structures in classical Chinese thought. Mechthild Leutner (b. 1949) at the Freie Universität Berlin has been the foremost scholar of modern Chinese social history and Sino-German relations. Hans van Ess (b. 1962) at Munich has continued the Munich tradition of historical sinology with important work on Han-dynasty intellectual history and the Shiji. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer (b. 1948), who combined the directorship of the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel with a sinological professorship at Göttingen, exemplifies the German tradition of embedding sinology within broader humanistic scholarship. Hartmut Walravens (b. 1944), the Berlin-based bibliographer and historian of sinology at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, has spent decades documenting the history of East Asian studies in Germany and beyond. Max Jakob Fölster, a Hamburg-trained sinologist specializing in Han-dynasty manuscript studies, the history of Chinese book-collecting, and the history of German sinology, has served as the representative of the Max Weber Foundation in Beijing, contributing to the ongoing institutional framework of Sino-German academic exchange. Michael Knüppel (b. 1967), trained in Turkology and Altaic studies at Göttingen and Hamburg, has documented the history of orientalist and sinological research at Göttingen — including the remarkable wartime presence of Ji Xianlin at the Göttingen sinological seminar — and 2018-2025 has held a professorship at the Arctic Studies Center of Liaocheng University in China. Felix Clausberg (柯斐烈), currently associate professor at Peking University, represents the emerging generation of German sinologists; trained under the renowned historian of Chinese medicine Paul U. Unschuld (文树德), his research bridges classical Chinese philosophy and the history of science. Dennis Schilling (谢林德), who has held positions at the Universities of Marburg and Munich before joining Renmin University in Beijing, represents the tradition of German philosophical sinology abroad, with research on the Yijing, Zhuangzi, and the modern reception of Buddhist philosophy. Thomas Zimmer (司马涛), Distinguished Professor at Tongji University in Shanghai, has specialized in Chinese literature and the intellectual world of Chinese writers, with his study Der chinesische Roman der ausgehenden Kaiserzeit examining the late imperial novel tradition. Leopold Leeb (雷立柏), an Austrian-born scholar who has taught at Renmin University since the 1990s, occupies a unique niche at the intersection of European classical languages and Chinese cultural history, with pioneering work on the transmission of Latin in China and the history of Christianity in Chinese contexts — his research on 250 German nuns who served in Shandong province between 1905 and 1955 has opened new perspectives on the cultural dimensions of missionary activity in China. Anno Dederichs, formerly at the University of Tübingen's China Centre and now associate professor at Sun Yat-sen University, works on contemporary Chinese sociology and economic-social research, representing the growing trend of German sinologists holding permanent positions at Chinese universities.

The German sinological landscape has also been distinguished by a rich tradition of specialized journals and book series. Wolfgang Kubin’s journal minima sinica: Zeitschrift zum chinesischen Geist, founded in 1989 and co-edited with Li Xuetao, has served as a forum for literary and philosophical engagement with Chinese culture, reflecting the Bonn school’s emphasis on hermeneutic and comparative approaches. Richard Wilhelm’s journal Sinica, originally published from Frankfurt until 1943, was later revived as a book series: Martin Woesler has edited the series Sinica — originally founded by Wilhelm — as well as Scripta Sinica, and since 2024 the series Bibliotheca Sinica at LIT Verlag. Woesler also edits several periodical publications: the Mitteilungsblatt der Deutschen China-Gesellschaft (founded in 1957, in German), the European Journal of Sinology and European Journal of Chinese Studies (both in English), and the journal 汉学 (Hanxue, in Chinese), together constituting a multilingual infrastructure for sinological publication that is unique in the German-speaking world.

The organizational landscape of German sinology is shaped by several professional bodies with distinct profiles. The Deutsche Vereinigung für Chinastudien (DVCS), co-founded by Helmut Martin and led by him from 1995 until his death in 1999, remains the primary professional association for academic sinologists. The Deutsche China-Gesellschaft (German China Association), founded in 1957 to promote mutual understanding and friendship between Germans and Chinese, was led for nearly two decades by the philosopher Gregor Paul (b. 1947), who served as president from 1997 to 2016. Paul, a specialist in Chinese and comparative philosophy at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, brought a distinctly philosophical orientation to the society’s activities, organizing conferences and publications on intercultural ethics and the universality of logical reasoning in Chinese thought. Since 2016, the Deutsche China-Gesellschaft has been led by Martin Woesler, who has also served since 2016 as president of the World Association for Chinese Studies (WACS), an international scholarly network founded in that year with representation from over forty-eight countries. WACS organizes annual conferences in changing locations worldwide — the tenth conference is scheduled for August 2026 at the University of Hong Kong, School of Chinese — with more than 300 lectures providing a platform for sinological exchange that bridges Western and Asian scholarly traditions. The board of the Deutsche China-Gesellschaft includes Thomas Weyrauch (b. 1954), a jurist and author of works on Chinese political history, human rights, and the Republic of China on Taiwan; Cord Eberspächer (培高德), professor at Bonn University and a historian of Sino-German relations and late Qing military history, who also held a professorship in comparative Chinese and European history at Hunan Normal University 2020-2022 and directed the Confucius Institute in Düsseldorf; and Michael Knüppel. Ole Döring (b. 1965), a philosopher and sinologist who holds a professorship at Hunan Normal University since 2020, has made distinctive contributions to Chinese bioethics and intercultural philosophy, receiving recognition from Chinese institutions for his work on ethics in medicine.

A notable feature of recent decades has been the internationalization of German sinological careers. Martin Woesler’s trajectory illustrates this pattern: during his tenure with the professorship at the Hochschule für Angewandte Sprachen in Munich (2007–2014), he served as visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations (2010–2011, on the invitation of David Der-wei Wang), as associate professor of Chinese Studies and founding coordinator of the Chinese Studies program at Utah Valley University (2011–2013), as professor of sinology and comparative culture at the Università Roma Tre (2014–2015), and as professor of literature and communication in China at Witten/Herdecke University (2015–2020), during his last year accepting a Distinguished Professorship of Sinology, Translation Studies, and Comparative Literature at Hunan Normal University in 2019, where he founded and directs the International Centre for Chinese Studies, the EU Jean Monnet Research Centre of Excellence and supervises doctoral candidates. The careers of Eberspächer and Döring at Hunan Normal University reflect a broader trend in which German sinologists, faced with the structural constraints of the German university system, have found positions at Chinese institutions — a reversal of the brain drain that depleted German sinology in the 1930s and 1940s, and a development that raises new questions about the relationship between Western sinological traditions and Chinese academic structures.

8.1 Translation of Chinese Literature into German

The translation of Chinese literature into German constitutes one of the most distinctive and productive dimensions of the German sinological tradition. From the early twentieth century to the present, German-speaking translators have produced a body of work that, in its range and ambition, is rivaled only by the English- and French-language traditions.

The founding figure of this tradition is Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930), who spent twenty-five years in China — first as a missionary in Qingdao, then as a scholar and teacher in Beijing — before returning to Germany in 1924 to assume the first professorship of Chinese philosophy at the University of Frankfurt and to found the China-Institut. His translations of the Yijing (Book of Changes, 1924), the Daodejing (1911), the Zhuangzi (1912), the Lunyu (1910), and numerous other classical texts remain in print a century later and have been translated from German into many other languages. His collaboration with the Chinese scholar Lao Naixuan (劳乃宣, 1843–1921) and the intellectual partnership with C. G. Jung, who wrote the introduction to the Yijing translation, made Wilhelm the single most important mediator of Chinese philosophy in the German-speaking world.

Franz Kuhn (1884–1961), a jurist turned sinologist, accomplished for Chinese narrative fiction what Wilhelm had done for philosophy. His translation of the Jin Ping Mei (1930) became an international bestseller, and his renderings of the Hongloumeng (Dream of the Red Chamber, 1932), the Shuihuzhuan (1934), and other novels made the great works of Chinese prose fiction accessible to a broad German readership for the first time. Though his versions were abridged adaptations rather than complete philological translations, they shaped the German public’s image of Chinese literature for decades. His translation of the Rouputuan (The Carnal Prayer Mat) by Li Yu was seized in Switzerland in 1959 for its illustrations and the printing plates destroyed; it appeared posthumously in Germany in 1964.

Alfred Forke (1867–1944), who served as a consular interpreter in Beijing before holding professorships in Berlin and Hamburg (where he succeeded Otto Franke), produced the only complete Western-language translation of Wang Chong’s Lun Heng (論衡) — though, notably, this monumental work appeared in English rather than German (two volumes, 1907 and 1911). His three-volume Geschichte der chinesischen Philosophie (1927, 1934, 1938), however, remained for decades the most comprehensive German-language treatment of the subject.

Erwin von Zach (1872–1942), an Austrian diplomat and independent scholar, produced what remain the only complete Western-language translations of the collected poems of Li Bai, Du Fu, and Han Yu, as well as large portions of the Wen Xuan (文选) anthology. His translations, remarkable for their philological precision and fidelity to the original, were interrupted by his death in a Japanese torpedo attack on a Dutch vessel in the Indian Ocean in 1942. Vincenz Hundhausen (1878–1955), who held a professorship at Peking University and spent over thirty years in China, pursued a different approach: his Nachdichtungen (creative re-renderings) of over 120 Chinese poems and philosophical texts aimed at poetic effect rather than scholarly accuracy, and were later documented in Hartmut Walravens’s comprehensive bibliography.

In the post-war period, Ernst Schwarz (1916–2003), an Austrian sinologist who worked at the Humboldt University in East Berlin, continued the tradition of Wilhelm with widely circulated translations of Confucius, Laozi, and Tao Yuanming, reaching large audiences through affordable paperback editions. Günther Debon (1921–2005), who held the sinology chair at Heidelberg from 1968 to 1986, is regarded alongside Günter Eich as the finest German translator of classical Chinese poetry; his Reclam edition of the Daodejing is considered a masterpiece of translation. Debon trained a notable generation of scholars including Lutz Bieg, Volker Klöpsch, Roderich Ptak, and Lothar Ledderose.

The contemporary generation of translators has been characterized by both greater philological ambition and greater literary range. Wolfgang Kubin’s six-volume edition of Lu Xun’s complete works represents the most comprehensive German-language engagement with China’s most important modern author. His Johann-Heinrich-Voß-Preis für Übersetzung (2013), awarded by the German Academy for Language and Literature, acknowledged his lifetime achievement as a translator. Rainer Schwarz (1940–2020), a Berlin-based freelance translator trained in the DDR sinological tradition, after Kuhn’s translation of one third of the Hongloumeng, and Martin Woesler together produced the first complete German translation of the Hongloumeng (Dream of the Red Chamber) by Cao Xueqin, published in three volumes in 2006/2007. Rainer Schwarz spent 10 years on a raw translation of the first 80 chapters, Martin Woesler spent 17 years on the translation and worked Schwarz’ chapters into a publishable format and completed the translation with chapters 81–120 (2009). He later published a Chinese-German bilingual edition with the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing (2016), making the Hongloumeng the first of the four great classical Chinese novels to appear in a complete German translation. Woesler has also produced the first complete German translation of the Haoqiuzhuan (好逑传) (after abridged translations by Murr and Kuhn) and is currently engaged in a Lu Xun translation project.

Eva Lüdi Kong (b. 1968), a Swiss sinologist who lived in China for twenty-five years, produced the first complete German translation of the Xiyouji (Journey to the West, Reclam, 2016), a monumental undertaking of some seventeen years that was awarded the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair in the category of translation in 2017. Rainald Simon (b. 1951), a Frankfurt-trained sinologist, has contributed masterly Reclam editions of the Daodejing, Yijing, and Shijing, and in 2023 published the first complete German translation of the Shuihuzhuan (Water Margin) with Suhrkamp/Insel — leaving the Sanguo yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) as the only one of the four great classical novels still awaiting a complete German rendering.

Peter Weber-Schäfer (1935–2019), who held the chair in political science at Bochum, combined his academic work with literary translation, including works by Mo Yan. Volker Klöpsch (b. 1948), a student of Debon, has translated the entire Three Hundred Tang Poems (唐诗三百首) and Sunzi’s Art of War, and co-edited with Eva Müller the Lexikon der chinesischen Literatur (C. H. Beck, 2004) — the most important German-language reference work on Chinese literature. Lutz Bieg (b. 1943), who held the professorship in Chinese Literature and Philosophy at Cologne from 1989 to 2008, produced the comprehensive Bibliographie chinesischer Literatur in deutscher Sprache (De Gruyter Saur, 2012), an indispensable tool for any scholar working on the German reception of Chinese literature.

Among translators active in the twenty-first century, Marc Hermann, a Bonn-based sinologist and former DAAD lecturer at Tongji University Shanghai, has become one of the most prolific and versatile translators of contemporary Chinese prose, translating works by Liu Cixin (whose science fiction has achieved worldwide success), Alai, Bi Feiyu, Su Tong, Yan Lianke, and many others. Karin Betz (b. 1968), who held the August von Schlegel Guest Professorship in the Poetics of Translation at the Freie Universität Berlin (2020/21), has translated Nobel laureate Mo Yan, Liao Yiwu, Liu Cixin, Can Xue, and Jin Yong, and received the Helmut M. Braem Translation Prize in 2024. Susanne Hornfeck (b. 1956), a Munich-trained sinologist and former DAAD lecturer at National Taiwan University, has translated over sixty titles from Chinese and English, including works by Eileen Chang, Qiu Xiaolong, and Ai Weiwei. Karin Hasselblatt (b. 1963) has translated works by Xiao Hong, Wang Anyi, and Mo Yan. Michael Kahn-Ackermann (b. 1946), the founding director of the Goethe-Institut in Beijing (1988), translated Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary (2020), which attracted international attention during the COVID-19 pandemic; he has also translated works by Zhao Tingyang and Liu Zhenyun.

The Germersheim campus of the University of Mainz (Fachbereich Translations-, Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft) has made a distinctive contribution to this tradition through its institutional combination of translation practice and translation theory. In addition to Hoffmann and Kautz (discussed above), Peter Kupfer held a professorship there in Chinese Language and Cultural Studies, further establishing Germersheim as one of the key training centers for Chinese-German translators in the German-speaking world.

This translation tradition, spanning more than a century, has given the German-language reader access to a range and depth of Chinese literary and philosophical works unmatched in any other continental European language — a legacy that reflects both the philological ambitions of German sinology and the broader cultural interest in China that has characterized the German intellectual tradition since Leibniz.

9. The Sinologie vs. Chinawissenschaften Debate

The tension between classical sinology and modern China Studies remains the central structural question facing the field in Germany. Advocates of classical Sinologie insist that the ability to read pre-modern Chinese texts — not just classical Chinese but also Buddhist Chinese, literary Chinese of various periods, and documentary Chinese — is the irreplaceable foundation of any serious engagement with Chinese civilization. Without it, scholars are condemned to superficiality, dependent on translations and secondary literature. Advocates of Chinawissenschaften counter that the overwhelming majority of research questions about contemporary China do not require classical Chinese competence and that the insistence on it functions as a gatekeeping mechanism excluding scholars with relevant expertise in political science, sociology, or economics.

German sinology grew out of the same intellectual soil that produced classical philology, comparative linguistics, and the Geisteswissenschaften. The American “area studies” model, by contrast, was a Cold War product designed to produce policy-relevant knowledge about foreign regions. Many German sinologists resist what they see as the instrumentalization of scholarship in the service of political and economic interests, even as they acknowledge the need for greater engagement with contemporary realities. Richard Wilhelm’s legacy raises a further question: should sinology be primarily an academic discipline, producing scholarship for scholars, or should it also serve as a bridge between cultures, making Chinese civilization accessible to the educated general public?

10. Current State and Challenges

German sinology today faces several structural challenges. The federal system means that there is no national strategy for Chinese studies; each Land makes its own decisions about university funding and faculty appointments, and coordination among institutions remains ad hoc. The recurring threat of budget cuts — exemplified by the near-closure of the Göttingen department in 2004 — keeps smaller programs in a state of permanent insecurity. Zhang Xiping, surveying the field, noted that between 1945 and the early 2000s, only four Chinese nationals held full professorships in German sinology departments (out of over one hundred positions total) — a ratio that has improved but remains far below the proportion found in American and British universities.

The explosive growth of Chinese economic power since the 1990s has generated enormous interest in Chinese language and culture, leading to a significant expansion of student numbers and the creation of new programs and positions. Non-university research institutions such as the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) in Berlin, founded in 2013, have added a policy-oriented dimension to the field. Yet this “China boom” has not been an unmixed blessing for sinology. The emphasis on practical language skills and contemporary expertise has further marginalized the study of classical Chinese and pre-modern history. Programs that once required several years of classical Chinese now offer it only as an elective, and the deep philological training that was once the hallmark of German sinology is increasingly rare. The risk, as Herbert Franke warned decades ago, is that sinology may lose the very competence that distinguishes it from journalism and policy analysis: the ability to read Chinese sources — across all historical periods — in the original. At the same time, the number of German students choosing sinology has fluctuated with geopolitical sentiment. Germany has also been a major site of the global controversy over Confucius Institutes, with several German universities closing or restructuring their Confucius Institutes amid concerns about academic freedom. The deterioration of EU-China relations since the late 2010s has created new pressures on German sinologists, as scholars who maintain cooperative relationships with Chinese colleagues face accusations of naïveté while those who adopt critical positions risk losing access to archives, fieldwork sites, and scholarly exchanges.

11. Contemporary Sinology in the German-Speaking World

The German-speaking world (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) maintains one of the largest concentrations of sinological expertise globally. As of the mid-2020s, more than twenty university departments and approximately sixty professorships are dedicated to Chinese Studies across the DACH region — a density unmatched on the European continent. The institutional landscape is remarkably diverse, ranging from large, multi-chair departments that cover the full chronological span of Chinese civilization to small, specialized programs that have carved out distinctive niches. What follows is a survey of the principal institutions and their current scholarly profiles.

11.1 Germany

Berlin

Berlin possesses the greatest concentration of sinological expertise of any city in the German-speaking world, distributed across two universities and several non-university research institutions. The Freie Universität Berlin (FU) holds the largest number of professorships in Chinese Studies of any single German institution, reflecting its origins as the Cold War counterpart to the Humboldt University in East Berlin. The department's orientation is strongly interdisciplinary, with particular strengths in politics, society, and culture. Its current faculty includes Klaus Mühlhahn, a specialist in modern Chinese history and politics who also serves in the university's senior leadership; Genia Kostka, whose research focuses on Chinese digital governance, environmental politics, and state-society relations in contemporary China; Sabrina Habich-Sobiegalla, who works on rural development, state-society relations, and Chinese domestic politics; Christian Meyer, who holds a Heisenberg Professorship in the culture and history of China with emphasis on Neo-Confucianism and Christianity in China; and Andreas Guder, a leading scholar of Chinese language pedagogy and didactics whose work on teaching Chinese as a foreign language has shaped curricula across the German-speaking world. The Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU), heir to the tradition of the old Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität where Otto Franke once taught, maintains a smaller but intellectually vigorous program. Henning Klöter, a specialist in Chinese historical linguistics, Hokkien studies, and language policy, holds a professorship there, as does Sarah Eaton, whose work focuses on China's political economy, industrial policy, and questions of academic integrity. The presence of the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) and the Staatsbibliothek's extensive East Asian collections further enhances Berlin's position as the de facto capital of German China expertise.

Bochum

The Ruhr-Universität Bochum established its Sinology department in the context of the university's founding in 1965 as one of the new reform universities of the post-war era. The department has developed a distinctive profile combining social and economic history with contemporary politics. Christine Moll-Murata is a leading authority on Chinese labor history, guild systems, and the social history of work in late imperial and modern China. Christian Schwermann specializes in classical Chinese literature, early Chinese manuscripts, and textual criticism — maintaining the philological tradition within a department otherwise oriented toward modern studies. Jörn-Carsten Gottwald brings expertise in Chinese political economy and governance, while Sebastian Bersick focuses on EU-China relations and Asian-European international relations. The department's combination of pre-modern philology and contemporary political economy reflects the broader tension in German sinology between classical and modern approaches, here resolved into productive coexistence.

Bonn

The University of Bonn's sinological tradition, shaped by the long tenure of Wolfgang Kubin — one of the most prominent and controversial sinologists of his generation — retains a strong literary and cultural orientation. Kubin, now emeritus, remains an active and influential figure, known both for his monumental ten-volume Geschichte der chinesischen Literatur and for his outspoken, sometimes polemical interventions in debates about modern Chinese literature. The current department is led by Ralph Kauz, a specialist in the history of Chinese-Central Asian relations, maritime trade routes, and Sino-Iranian cultural exchange — reflecting Bonn's traditional strength in connecting Chinese Studies with broader Eurasian perspectives.

Erlangen-Nürnberg

The Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg has developed one of the most research-intensive sinology programs in Germany, distinguished by its institutional connection to the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities (IKGF), a major interdisciplinary research center funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Andrea Breard, an Alexander von Humboldt Professor, brings a unique profile combining the history of mathematics and science in China with broader questions of cross-cultural knowledge transfer. Marc Matten specializes in modern Chinese intellectual and cultural history, with particular attention to nationalism and historical consciousness. Höckelmann works on Chinese art history and visual culture. Yan Xu-Lackner (徐艳), associate professor and director of the Confucius Institute at Erlangen-Nürnberg — which has been recognized multiple times as a global model Confucius Institute — conducts research on the history of foreign language teaching, the relationship between language and politics, intercultural communication, and cultural policy, with a German-language monograph on the political dimensions of foreign language education in modern China. Marco Pouget (马熠辉), a postdoctoral researcher at Erlangen and Munich, represents the next generation of Erlangen-trained scholars, with a doctoral dissertation on Zheng Xuan's commentaries on the Liji supervised by Michael Lackner, working in the field of Chinese intellectual history and classical studies. The department benefits from the continued presence of Michael Lackner, who as founder and longtime director of the IKGF has made Erlangen a major international hub for research on the fate of the humanities across cultures — a project that places Chinese intellectual traditions in comparative global perspective.

Frankfurt am Main

The Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, where Richard Wilhelm held his professorship from 1924, maintains a department that honors its founder's legacy of cultural bridge-building while pursuing rigorous contemporary scholarship. Iwo Amelung specializes in the history of science and technology in modern China and in Sino-German cultural relations — a field that connects directly to the university's historical role as a center for the study of cultural exchange. Zhiyi Yang, a scholar of classical Chinese poetry and its modern reception, represents a newer generation of scholars who combine deep philological training with theoretically informed literary analysis. Her work on Chinese lyric traditions and cross-cultural poetics has attracted international attention.

Freiburg

The Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg has built a dynamic department with a strong focus on contemporary China. Daniel Leese is one of the leading international scholars of Maoist China, whose work on the Cultural Revolution and transitional justice in the People's Republic has drawn on extensive archival research. Nicola Spakowski specializes in modern Chinese history with particular attention to gender history and the history of Chinese feminism. The department's commitment to generational renewal is evidenced by the appointment in 2024 of Jessica Imbach as junior professor, whose research addresses contemporary Chinese literature and culture.

Göttingen

The Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, which narrowly survived threatened closure in 2004, has since consolidated its position as a center for global and comparative approaches to Chinese Studies. Dominic Sachsenmaier, one of the foremost practitioners of global history with a focus on China, has brought international visibility to the department through his work on cross-cultural historiography and the global dimensions of Chinese intellectual life. Schneider contributes expertise in Chinese history and cultural studies, complementing Sachsenmaier's global-historical orientation.

Hamburg

The Universität Hamburg, home to Germany's oldest sinological seminar — founded in 1909 at the predecessor institution, the Hamburgisches Kolonialinstitut, under the direction of Otto Franke — maintains a vibrant department with strengths spanning from antiquity to the present. Kai Vogelsang, a specialist in early Chinese history, bronze inscriptions, and the history of Chinese writing, carries forward the department's long philological tradition. Thomas Fröhlich works on modern Chinese intellectual history and political thought, with particular attention to Republican-era thinkers and their engagement with Western philosophy. The department was strengthened in October 2024 by the appointment of Julia Schneider, a scholar of modern Chinese history and historiography, adding further depth to its coverage of the modern period.

Heidelberg

The Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg operates the largest sinology department in the German-speaking world, with five professorships covering the full chronological range from antiquity to the present, and a distinctive emphasis on transcultural studies. This breadth is not accidental: Heidelberg has deliberately positioned itself as a center for the study of cultural exchange between China and the rest of the world, an orientation institutionally anchored in the university's Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context." Joachim Kurtz specializes in the history of logic, argumentation, and knowledge transfer between China and Europe. Enno Giele is one of the leading international experts on Han-dynasty administrative documents and early Chinese manuscript culture. Barbara Mittler works on modern Chinese media history, propaganda art, and the cultural history of the Mao era. Anja Senz focuses on contemporary Chinese politics, local governance, and Chinese migration. Gotelind Müller-Saini brings expertise in modern Chinese intellectual and cultural history. The sheer scale and thematic diversity of the Heidelberg department make it the closest German equivalent to the major American East Asian Studies programs, though its intellectual orientation remains distinctively European in its emphasis on hermeneutics and cultural theory.

Cologne

The Universität zu Köln has developed a distinctive profile within the German sinological landscape through the establishment of a chair in Chinese Legal Culture — the only professorship of its kind in the German-speaking world. Björn Ahl, the current holder, combines training in sinology and law to analyze the Chinese legal system from both cultural-historical and comparative-law perspectives. Felix Wemheuer, a specialist in modern Chinese history with a focus on the Mao era, famine, and class politics, has established himself as one of the most important German-language historians of the People's Republic. Kramer contributes expertise in Chinese media studies and visual culture. The department's combination of legal studies, political history, and media analysis reflects Cologne's broader orientation toward the social sciences and law.

Leipzig

The Universität Leipzig, heir to the GDR-era tradition of Chinese Studies (see Section 8 above), has successfully reinvented itself since reunification. Philip Clart, a specialist in Chinese popular religion, temple culture, and religious media, has brought a strong focus on the anthropology of religion to the department. Elisabeth Kaske works on the social and institutional history of modern China, with particular attention to the late Qing reform period. The department benefits from Leipzig's historical strengths in missionary studies and religious encounters — a tradition that now finds expression in sophisticated scholarship on Chinese religious life.

Munich

The Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) maintains one of the most historically important sinology departments in Germany, shaped by the legacy of Herbert Franke, who rebuilt the discipline after the Second World War. Hans van Ess, the current senior professor, is an internationally recognized authority on Han-dynasty intellectual history, the Shiji, and early Chinese historiography — representing the finest tradition of German philological sinology. Armin Selbitschka specializes in the archaeology and material culture of early China, particularly mortuary practices and cultural contact along the Silk Roads. Max Oidtmann brings expertise in Qing-dynasty history, Sino-Tibetan relations, and the history of Inner Asian borderlands. The department's continued emphasis on pre-modern China and philological rigor makes it a bastion of the classical Sinologie tradition.

Münster

The Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster has undergone significant renewal with the appointment in 2022 of Carsten Storm, a specialist in Chinese cultural studies, visual anthropology, and material culture. Storm has brought new energy to a department that was long shaped by the distinguished career of Reinhard Emmerich (now Senior Professor), a specialist in the history of Chinese science, medicine, and the intellectual history of the Han dynasty. The department's combination of cultural-studies approaches and classical scholarship reflects the generational transition that characterizes many smaller German sinology programs.

Tübingen

The Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen has carved out a unique niche in the German sinological landscape through its European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan (ERCCT), one of the very few institutional structures in continental Europe devoted to the academic study of Taiwan. Huang Fei (Faye Huang), a specialist in Chinese and Taiwanese cultural politics and language policy, holds a current professorship. The department has benefited from the long service of Günter Schubert (now Senior Professor), a leading scholar of Taiwan's politics and cross-strait relations, and of Achim Mittag (now Senior Professor), a specialist in Chinese historiography and intellectual history. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, one of the most widely known German sinologists and longtime director of the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, maintains an affiliation with the Tübingen department. The ERCCT has given Tübingen a distinctive identity within the field, making it the primary German-language center for Taiwan Studies.

Trier

The Universität Trier maintains a smaller but intellectually focused sinology program. Christian Soffel specializes in the intellectual history of Song-dynasty Neo-Confucianism and Chinese biography. Kristin Shi-Kupfer brings expertise in contemporary Chinese media policy, digital governance, and civil society — connecting the department to urgent policy debates about China's digital transformation.

Würzburg

The Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg has established a distinctive and increasingly prominent department that combines classical sinological scholarship with a unique orientation toward China's economy and business culture. Björn Alpermann, a specialist in the political economy of rural China, governance, and social stratification, has developed Würzburg into a recognized center for the empirical study of Chinese political and economic institutions. Doris Fischer holds the chair for China Business and Economics — one of the very few professorships in the German-speaking world that systematically bridges sinological expertise and economic analysis. Roland Altenburger specializes in traditional Chinese literature, particularly vernacular fiction and drama of the Ming and Qing dynasties, providing the philological counterweight to the department's contemporary orientation.

A figure of considerable importance for the history of sinology is also associated with Würzburg, though not within the sinology department itself. Claudia von Collani (apl. Prof., Faculty of Catholic Theology) has devoted her career to the history of the Jesuit mission in China, with particular expertise in Figurism — the interpretation of Chinese classical texts as veiled prophecies of Christian revelation — and the Chinese Rites Controversy that convulsed both the Catholic Church and the Qing court in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her meticulous archival research on Jesuit missionaries such as Joachim Bouvet has illuminated a crucial chapter in the intellectual encounter between Europe and China, making her work directly relevant to the early modern history of sinology discussed in Section 2 of this chapter.

Witten/Herdecke

The Universität Witten/Herdecke, Germany's oldest private university, represents an unusual case in the institutional landscape of German sinology. Martin Woesler, a sinologist and comparatist, holds a position there that connects Chinese literary and cultural studies with the university's broader humanistic orientation. His work spans comparative literature, the history of the Chinese novel — particularly the Hongloumeng (Dream of the Red Chamber) — translation studies, and the institutional history of sinology itself.

11.2 Austria

Vienna

The Universität Wien maintains the only comprehensive sinology department in Austria, but it is a substantial one. Situated within the city's long tradition of oriental studies — Vienna was, after all, a major center for the study of the Ottoman, Persian, and Chinese worlds since the Habsburg era — the department has developed considerable breadth. Its current faculty includes Ferrari, a specialist in pre-modern Chinese thought and intellectual history; Göbel, who works on modern Chinese history and society; Schick-Chen, who focuses on contemporary Chinese culture and media; and Steinhardt, who brings expertise in Chinese art and architectural history. The department's size and scope make Vienna an important node in the broader central European network of Chinese Studies, with strong connections to Czech, Hungarian, and Polish scholarly traditions.

11.3 Switzerland

Zurich

The Universität Zürich operates the largest sinology department in Switzerland, with a profile that emphasizes cultural studies, literary theory, and transcultural approaches. Wolfgang Behr, a specialist in Old Chinese phonology, historical linguistics, and early Chinese manuscripts, represents the philological tradition at its most technically demanding — his work on the reconstruction of archaic Chinese has won international recognition. Andrea Riemenschnitter works on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, film, and cultural theory, with particular attention to questions of identity, memory, and diaspora. Mittelstaedt contributes further expertise, rounding out a department whose strength in both historical linguistics and contemporary cultural studies reflects the broad conception of Sinologie that characterizes the best Swiss programs.

Geneva

The Université de Genève maintains a smaller Chinese Studies program within its Faculty of Letters, historically shaped by the work of Nicolas Zufferey, a specialist in classical Chinese thought and ethics. As of the mid-2020s, the department is in a period of transition, with Zufferey's impending retirement and the question of succession still to be resolved — a situation that underscores the vulnerability of smaller programs in an era of tight university budgets.

11.4 Institutional Patterns and Perspectives

Several structural features of this institutional landscape deserve comment. First, the sheer number of professorships — approximately sixty across the DACH region — represents a commitment to the academic study of China that is unmatched in continental Europe. France, with its longer sinological tradition, maintains fewer dedicated positions; Italy and Spain have even fewer. Only the United Kingdom, with its concentration of resources at Oxford, Cambridge, London (SOAS), and a handful of other institutions, approaches the German-speaking world in institutional density.

Second, the distribution of chairs reveals a characteristic pattern. The largest departments — Heidelberg, Berlin (FU), and Munich — aspire to cover the full range of Chinese civilization, from antiquity to the present, combining philological, historical, and social-scientific approaches. Mid-sized departments — Bochum, Cologne, Hamburg, Erlangen, Freiburg — tend to concentrate on two or three areas of strength. The smallest programs — Trier, Münster, Witten/Herdecke, Geneva — often depend on one or two professors and are correspondingly vulnerable to the vagaries of university budgets and appointment politics.

Third, the tension between classical Sinologie and modern Chinawissenschaften that was discussed in Section 9 above is clearly visible in the institutional map. Some departments — Munich, Erlangen, Hamburg — have maintained a strong commitment to pre-modern studies and philological training. Others — Freiburg, Trier, Cologne — have oriented themselves primarily toward contemporary China. The most successful departments are arguably those, like Heidelberg and the FU Berlin, that have achieved a critical mass sufficient to sustain both orientations simultaneously.

Finally, it is worth noting that the German-speaking sinological community benefits from several cross-institutional structures that partially compensate for the fragmentation inherent in the federal system. The Deutsche Vereinigung für Chinastudien (DVCS), the European Association for Chinese Studies (EACS), and collaborative research networks funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) provide frameworks for scholarly exchange and collective action. The existence of policy-oriented think tanks such as MERICS and the growing involvement of German sinologists in public debate about China policy have also raised the field's visibility and — not without controversy — its political salience.

12. Conclusion

The history of German sinology is a history of extraordinary intellectual ambition and devastating historical rupture. From Leibniz’s dream of Eurasian complementarity to the monumental translation projects of Richard Wilhelm, from the pioneering institutional work of Otto Franke to the post-war rebuilding by Herbert Franke and Wolfgang Franke, from the ideological distortions of the GDR to the revolutionary ferment of 1968 — at every turn, the study of China in Germany has been shaped by forces far larger than the discipline itself.

What remains distinctive about the German tradition — even now, as it converges increasingly with international (and especially anglophone) norms — is a certain seriousness about the encounter between European and Chinese civilization. Where the French tradition has emphasized elegant explication, and the American tradition has emphasized social-scientific analysis, the German tradition has characteristically sought to ask the “big questions”: What is the nature of Chinese thought? How does Chinese civilization relate to the West? What can each learn from the other? These were Leibniz’s questions in 1697, and they are still being asked — in somewhat different form — in German seminar rooms today.

The challenge for the coming decades will be to maintain the philological depth and philosophical ambition that have defined German sinology at its best, while adapting to a world in which China is no longer an object of distant scholarly contemplation but a powerful and sometimes threatening presence in daily life. Whether the field can sustain this balance — between scholarship and policy relevance, between classical Sinologie and modern Chinawissenschaften, between admiration for Chinese civilization and clear-eyed engagement with the Chinese state — will determine the future of a tradition that, for all its disruptions, remains one of the richest in the history of Western humanistic scholarship.

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References

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