Margot Grzywacz: A German Professor’s Life in China

Margot Grzywacz: The Professor China Almost Forgot to Send Home

Hamburg, a Dissertation on Jealousy, and a Head Start in Languages

Margot Grzywacz was born in Hamburg on April 20, 1901, the daughter of a former merchant navy captain who later edited the Hamburg Correspondent. She lost both parents in 1920, the same year she finished her schooling at the Unterrichtsanstalten des Klosters St. Johannis, having already passed through the Emilie-Wüstenfeld-Lyzeum and the Realgymnasium für Mädchen under Prof. Dr. Gustav Wendt.

What followed was a serious academic run for a young woman of her era. She qualified to teach at higher girls’ and middle schools in February 1921, then spent the better part of a decade moving between universities: Hamburg (1920 to 1921), Munich (1921 to 1925), Rome, and Berlin (1926), studying Modern Languages, Philosophy, and Pedagogy. Munich awarded her a doctorate in March 1925 for a thesis on jealousy in the Romance languages as a window into medieval cultural history. She even sat in on medicine lectures in Hamburg for four semesters in 1927, and by November 1928 held teaching certification in French, Italian, and Spanish.

A Detour Through Japan That Became a Career in China

She originally set her sights on Russia. In 1929, with help from her old school director, she obtained a Foreign Office permit to study there, but conditions on the ground cut the stay short. She pivoted to Japan instead, building on Japanese she had already picked up from Prof. Dr. Florenz in Hamburg. Between 1929 and the autumn of 1930 she studied in Kyoto, taught at a Japanese girls’ school, and wrote for a German-Japanese cultural magazine.

That Japanese interlude turned out to be the hinge her whole China career swung on.

Professor at Tsing-Hua, Then Shandong University

From 1930 to 1934, Grzywacz pursued Chinese studies in Beijing while teaching French and German at Tsing-Hua University and, from 1930 to 1932, at the Reichsuniversität. When that chapter closed, she moved to Tsingtao (Tsingtau), continuing her Chinese-language study and teaching German at Shandong University from 1934 until the end of 1937, translating Chinese books along the way. Between assignments, she traveled extensively across Europe, the Americas, Japan, and China, the kind of restless itinerary that makes her passport, wherever it eventually surfaces, worth a second look. Readers who collect German documents from this exact corridor of history may recognize the pattern from a rare 1940 German passport issued in Tientsin, stamped with the same Japanese occupation-era cachets that would soon define Grzywacz’s world too.

When the University Closed Around Her

January 1938 brought Japanese occupation to Tsingtao and, with it, the closure of Shandong University. Grzywacz found temporary work at the German School in Tsingtao in 1939, then a longer stretch there from September 1942 to June 1946. It is a narrow, precarious kind of employment history, the sort that historians of German communities in occupied China, such as those documented in Paul Scharffenberg’s story as Chancellor in Tianjin and Nanjing, will recognize immediately.

The Order Nobody in Tsingtao Wanted to Sign

By the summer of 1947, Washington had pushed Nanking to repatriate the remaining German residents of China, and Nanking agreed for the simplest possible reason: it wouldn’t cost the Chinese government a cent, since the Americans covered every leg of the journey. What followed reads less like a bureaucratic footnote and more like a hostage negotiation conducted through unanswered telephone calls.

Those slated for repatriation received a circular from the German Relief organization:

Circular No. 42/47, Tsingtau, August 2, 1947. To all German nationals!
Name of all Germans to expatriate, two groups… Please provide the home addresses: location, province, zone. The maximum luggage allowed per person is 150 kg, and the maximum amount of cash allowed to carry is US $100. Children are allowed half the amount.

Group one was to be forced out. Group two, it seems, went more or less willingly, likely because they had no independent means to stay and no travel costs to worry about with the Americans footing the bill. Those on the forced list could petition Tsingtao’s Mayor Li Hsien-liang for removal, and a fair number did, several of them successfully.

Inside the Mayor’s Office, or Wherever He Was Hiding

I pulled this thread from records at the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C., specifically the files of the American Consulate General in Tsingtau documenting the run-up to the August 28, 1947 departure for Shanghai. The picture that emerges is almost comic if the stakes weren’t so serious. Mayor Li’s secretary, Samuel Li, who ran the Foreigners’ Office, treated the whole affair with visible reluctance, while the American side, Consul General Spiker, Consul Richard Service, and Vice Consul Hein, pushed hard for resolution. Mayor Li himself was conveniently, repeatedly unavailable: “The mayor is not available, we don’t know where he is, we can’t find him.”

Forty-Eight Hours That Decided Who Went Home

The Americans learned that repatriates needed to reach Shanghai by August 25. On August 22, the Tsingtau Consulate forwarded the German Relief’s name list to the Consulate General in Shanghai, with discrepancies already creeping in. Where the German list simply read “Dr. Wallmüller,” the American version specified “Hans Wallmüller, 61 years old, wife Magda, 55 years old, and son Robert, 27 years old.” The trouble: Mrs. Wallmüller and her son hadn’t set foot in Tsingtau in at least eight years. Erich Jungmann, age 70, was listed with his Chinese wife, Wang Teh-ming, age 39, despite belonging to the more voluntary group two.

The location tracking was just as shaky. Gustav Ahrens’ family was actually in Shanghai. David Kiesow was in Tsinan. W. Klahn had apparently already left for Germany back in 1940. Friedrich Klicker sat in communist captivity while his family remained in Tsingtau. Carl Löwenstein was advising General Yen Hsi-shan in Taiyuan. Karl Reichel was in Changsha. Helmut Schwabe had recently been advising Chen Yi’s government in Taiwan.

What follows is drawn directly from the consular memoranda, quoted here verbatim in the original italicized style:

American Consulate General, Tsingtao, Saturday, August 23, 1947. Consul General Spiker, Vice Consul Hein and I (R. Service) commenced work on above subject… at about 2:30 this afternoon. After some difficulty I contacted Sam Lee at the International Club, and sent a car for him… We went over list of Germans. Lee told me that this morning Mayor had received telegram from Fonoff, instructing him to arrange for travel of German’s by boat to Shanghai, to arrive there not later than Aug. 25.

Lee marked off those who had filed petitions, Bälz, Bock, Dietsch, Frinke, Hübotter, Kiesow, Ludwig, Müller, and Wallmüller among them, leaving a shorter list of names actually slated to depart. Through the evening, names shifted again: Düsing was pulled off after the Garrison Commander intervened, then the Klicker family was struck too, only for Lee to note he’d listed them himself earlier that same visit.

By Sunday, August 24, at 12:20 p.m., Spiker recorded the operational status:

Mr. Samuel Lee… telephoned to report that the Police had begun the round-up of Germans to be repatriated, at 5 a.m. this morning; that all had not yet been brought to Police Headquarters where they will spend the night but that all would be at the concentration point by 3 p.m. today.

The Twelve Left on the List, and the Midnight Reprieve

By Saturday evening, only twelve names remained on the forced-repatriation list: Bälz, Bock, Dietsch, Düsing, Frinke, Hübotter, Kiesow, Klicker, Ludwig, Müller, and Wallmüller. At 5 a.m. Sunday, they were told they had a few hours to pack before being taken to the police station, and by afternoon they had been rounded up, inoculated, and processed for an 8 a.m. Monday departure to the airfield.

Then, late Sunday night, everything nearly stalled. An urgent telegram from the U.S. Embassy arrived at 7:10 p.m. Spiker consulted Admiral Cooke about delaying the group’s departure pending a decision on the outstanding petitions, and Cooke agreed to hold the planes if necessary. Spiker and Service then drove to Mayor Li’s own house at 10:30 p.m., where, as the unsigned memorandum records, the Mayor “knew little if anything of developments in the German repatriation” and had to be briefed from scratch by his own secretary.

We prepared our telegram of 11 p.m. and this was delivered to CWO, PortFac at midnight. Sam Lee telephoned and said that his phone was beside his bed, and that he was going to sleep.

By 7 a.m. Monday, with no reply from the Embassy, the Americans assumed their proposal had been accepted and the Germans’ departure was held up after all. The consular record ends there.

The Name Nobody Saw Coming

Here is where Grzywacz enters the story directly, and it is worth pausing on how she enters it. She was not on the original circular. Neither were the Fischborn, Nauert, Weitz, or Dammers families. Their expulsion, as the records put it, “came as a bolt from the blue,” a sudden addition to a list that had already been rewritten half a dozen times in the space of two days by a mayor who mostly wasn’t answering his phone.

In August 1947, she boarded the “General Black” for forced repatriation to Germany. Family lore, at least as reflected in the surviving papers, holds that she and others considered jumping overboard and swimming ashore during the Suez Canal transit, a plan that never came off.

Germersheim, Revelstoke, and a Peace Corps Posting in Antigua

Back in Germany, she taught at the interpreting school in Germersheim into the early 1950s before emigrating to Canada, settling in Revelstoke, British Columbia, where she taught French in a majority English-speaking community. She kept traveling on her vacations, a habit that clearly never left her.

After becoming a Canadian citizen and retiring in 1966, she joined the Canadian Peace Corps and spent two years on Antigua, later serving in what the surviving papers describe only as a former French colony in Central Africa, with no more specific posting given. She kept apartments in both Vancouver and on Spain’s Costa del Sol, and it was in Spain that she died.

What the Documents Actually Show

The lot that surfaced on eBay includes identity papers, correspondence, and a substantial run of personal photographs spanning her Kyoto, Beijing, and Tsingtao years. A selection is reproduced below.

The Documents

What Her Story Tells Collectors

Margot Grzywacz’s papers matter for a reason that goes beyond her own remarkable résumé. She is a case study in how the ordinary, non-diplomatic Germans of treaty-port China, the teachers, the merchants, the missionaries, moved through the same consular machinery as ambassadors and generals, just with far less paper trail to prove it. Collectors chasing similar material, whether that means wartime German passports recovered from Shanghai or documents from the broader German community in occupied and treaty-era China, will find the same pattern: a life reconstructed almost entirely from bureaucratic scraps that were never meant to be read as biography.

That is, in the end, the whole appeal of this hobby. A circular, a memorandum, a name added late to a list, and suddenly a woman who taught French at Tsing-Hua University comes back into focus.

 

Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
Featured by CNN, BBC, Newsweek... Awarded by the U.S. Dept. of State
Ask | Recognition | Books | Set as preferred source