Background and Early Connections to China

Magdalene von Dewall's paternal family originated from the Netherlands, where her ancestors can be traced back to the early seventeenth century.Footnote ² In the eighteenth century some moved to Germany to take up civil or military employment. Magdalene von Dewall's great-great-grandfather Johann Casimir Heinrich von Dewall (1773–1846), a District Administrator (Landrat) and owner of an estate near Kleve, was ennobled by the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II in 1802, resulting in the change of the family name from “van de Wall” to “von Dewall.”Footnote ³ In the following three generations, all of Magdalene von Dewall's direct patrilineal ancestors served as career officers in the Prussian army.

Magdalene von Dewall's father, Job Heinrich von Dewall (1880–1945), was a pioneering aviator. As early as 1911, he joined the Imperial German Air Service (Fliegertruppe), with which he served on the Western Front during World War I. He was taken into French captivity in 1917. When he was released in 1920, Germany's air forces had been abolished by the Treaty of Versailles, and Job Heinrich von Dewall, by then a major, was demobilized. Fourteen years later, in the course of Germany's remilitarization under the Nazi régime, he was reactivated, and he eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant general in the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) during World War II.Footnote ⁴ Although he retired in 1943, he continued to work for the War Scientific Department of the Luftwaffe General Staff at Karlsbad (Karlový Vary, now in the Czech Republic); here he was taken captive when the war ended. He died, possibly during an escape attempt, in September 1945.

As befits an old-style Prussian, Job Heinrich von Dewall was taught early on to care “more about essence than about appearance” (mehr sein als scheinen—a motto that applies to his daughter as well). As a consequence, his historical role is now obscure. But it appears that he was well connected at the highest levels of government, military, and industry, and these connections facilitated his civilian career in the aviation business between his two long stints as a career air force officer. He was employed for some time by the aircraft manufacturer Dornier; played a role in building the airline that in 1926 became Lufthansa;Footnote ⁵ and served for some years as General Manager (Geschäftsführer) of the Halle-Leipzig Airport. It was at Halle that Magdalene von Dewall was born on May 8, 1927.

A link between Job Heinrich von Dewall and China was forged a few weeks before Magdalene von Dewall's birth, in the spring of 1927, when Lufthansa dispatched him to Beijing (then Beiping 北平) to join Sven Hedin's (1865–1952) “Sino-Swedish Expedition.” That expedition involved a contingent of German participants who ostensibly were to survey the on-the-ground conditions along a possible transcontinental flight route from Germany to China for Lufthansa.Footnote ⁶ Only recently has archival research revealed that the entire expedition was secretly funded by the German government, and that at least some of the alleged Lufthansa employees on Hedin's expedition team were in fact German military personnel engaged in what must probably be called espionage.Footnote ⁷ The present article is not the place to expound on the complex political and geostrategic background of these goings-on, or to digress on Hedin's problematic biography. Job Heinrich von Dewall, at any rate, soon clashed with Hedin and was ordered back to Germany.Footnote ⁸ But he remained connected to China and apparently entertained properly-introduced Chinese visitors at his home with some frequency. One of them, vividly remembered by Magdalene von Dewall later in life, was the Harvard-trained economist Wu Baosan 巫寶三 (1909–1999), who eventually became the leading scholar in his field in the People's Republic of China (he was also the father of the famous Sino-American art historian Wu Hung 巫鴻 [b. 1945]). Wu's visit with the von Dewalls must have taken place during his research sojourn in Germany in 1938–39.

Job Heinrich von Dewall also must be given credit for having single-handedly enabled the participation in the “Sino-Swedish Expedition” of his younger friend from Lake Constance, the poet and painter Fritz Mühlenweg (1898–1961).Footnote ⁹ Life on the Sino-Mongolian frontier inspired Mühlenweg to write a number of well-received books—some addressed to young readers—which did much to advance a sympathetic understanding of China during the mid-twentieth century and are still widely read.Footnote ¹⁰ Mühlenweg remained friendly with the von Dewall family after Job Heinrich von Dewall's death, and he is said to have prompted Magdalene von Dewall to specialize in sinology.Footnote ¹¹ His spectacularly sensitive translations of poems from the Classic of Poetry (Shi jing 詩經) inspired Magdalene von Dewall as she undertook her own in-depth study of that text.Footnote ¹²

The family had an even earlier China connection through Job Heinrich von Dewall's younger brother, Wolf von Dewall (1882–1959), who, having been prevented by poor health from pursuing a military career, had joined the Chinese Customs Administration in Guangzhou in 1904,Footnote ¹³ and after 1908 had risen to a senior position in the Chinese Postal Service. In late August, 1914, he was on his way to Madrid, where he was to serve as China's first-ever delegate to the congress of the Universal Postal Union;Footnote ¹⁴ instead, the outbreak of World War I forced his repatriation to Germany. For the following thirty years, Wolf von Dewall worked as a journalist for the Frankfurter Zeitung, then Germany's leading liberal newspaper (the predecessor of today's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), and he served as its correspondent in London (1932–39) and Ankara (1940–46). He published occasionally on East Asia,Footnote ¹⁵ and he was renowned as a China expert.Footnote ¹⁶ Living in Stuttgart after World War II, he sometimes visited Magdalene von Dewall's family in Langenargen, where he also died. For Magdalene von Dewall he was an important partner in conversation after the loss of her own father, and he, too, may have played a role in awakening her interest in China.Footnote ¹⁷

Magdalene von Dewall's mother, Margret von Dewall, née Gauss (1900–1985), was the daughter of Heinrich von Gauss [or Gauß] (1858–1921), mayor (Stadtschultheiss) of Stuttgart from 1899 to 1911 and a renowned liberal politician in Württemberg before World War I. The Gauss family had a summer home at Langenargen, a village on the shores of the Lake Constance (Bodensee) in one of the loveliest landscapes in all of Germany. The house was surrounded by extensive orchards, which Margret Gauss went to manage full-time as a source of food and income for her family during the difficult years after World War I. During a skiing holiday she met and immediately fell in love with Job von Dewall, who was then working for Dornier in nearby Friedrichshafen. Notwithstanding the twenty-year age difference, they married. They had two daughters, Susanne (1926–1969) and Magdalene.Footnote ¹⁸ Throughout Magdalene von Dewall's adulthood, the family home in Langenargen remained the pivot of her private life, and it is here that she passed away on New Year's Day 2014.

Childhood and Early Career

As a consequence of her father's frequent reassignments, Magdalene von Dewall moved several times when still young. She had attended school in Halle and Magdeburg when, sometime in the late 1930s, the family settled in Dresden—just in time to implant a lifelong nostalgia in Magdalene von Dewall for the pre-war splendor of that incomparable city. One enduring trace of her time in Dresden was a faint tinge in her speech of the refined—and now virtually extinct—aristocratic variety of the Saxon dialect (hofsächsisch). Her teenage years in Dresden were overshadowed however by World War II. Whenever she expressed the slightest interest in the small pleasures of life, her father would respond: “Magdalene, there is a war going on (Magdalene, es ist Krieg!).”Footnote ¹⁹ Such early deprivations left their mark on her personality. Even more traumatic was her experience of the bombing of Dresden in 1945. Still, she was more fortunate than many young women her age in that she was not called up for wartime service. The family's apartment, too, appears to have survived the bombing, but it was requisitioned by the Soviet occupying authorities at the end of the war. Margret von Dewall and her daughters thereupon fled to the West, finding refuge with relatives in Stuttgart and eventually settling in Langenargen.

Having arrived with virtually nothing, Magdalene von Dewall had to do manual labor on a farm in Langenargen for a number of months. After schools reopened, she was able to finish high school (Gymnasium) at nearby Friedrichshafen, obtaining her diploma (Abitur) in 1946. Unlike her elder sister, who had started her university education in Dresden and eventually became a pharmacist, Magdalene von Dewall was not encouraged to pursue higher education right away: her relatives insisted that she learn a trade to earn her own living. Like many intellectual women of her generation caught in such a situation, she chose to become a bookseller.Footnote ²⁰ She underwent a two-year traineeship, followed by five years of working for well-known publishing houses in Stuttgart (Ernst Klett), Ravensburg (Otto Mayer), and Düsseldorf (Karl Rauch). Only in the spring of 1953, following what she describes as a “consolidation of family circumstances” (probably referring to her sister completing her professional training and her mother gaining access to funds that had previously been blocked), was she finally able to enter university.

She matriculated in sinology at the University of Frankfurt to study with the Belgian-German scholar Carl Hentze (1883–1975). Hentze surely must be ranked among the oddest figures in the history of Chinese studies. He was entirely self-taught. Originally an artist, he had fallen in love with archaic Chinese art and taught courses in the subject at the University of Ghent for many years before being appointed professor of sinology in Frankfurt in 1943.Footnote ²¹ By 1953 he was retired, but still teaching. But Magdalene von Dewall soon discovered that Hentze knew no Chinese,Footnote ²² had no first-hand experience of the country, and his voluminous hyperdiffusionistic studies on ancient China did not stand up to critical scrutiny.Footnote ²³ She fled Frankfurt after one semester.

Magdalene von Dewall's dilemma—which continued to haunt her throughout her career—was that the field she wanted to study, Chinese archaeology, did not exist as a recognized academic discipline of its own. Still, her experience of Hentze had honed her intellectual instincts, albeit by negative example. Now she knew what she would have to do. She devised for herself an individualized course of study that gave equal weight to sinology and archaeology—sinology mainly for the language, archaeology for the methods. It was at the University of Hamburg that she found an academic environment congenial to such an endeavor. Here Magdalene von Dewall was able to work with some excellent scholars in both her chosen fields.

For practical reasons—since it was clear that the Prehistory and Protohistory Department at Hamburg would never have accepted a doctoral dissertation on a Chinese topic—sinology had to remain her major. Her doctoral advisor was Wolfgang Franke (1912–2007). Franke had lived in China for thirteen years and had a Chinese wife; they had arrived in Germany only in 1950, and they were able to communicate to all those who knew them a sense of China as a living culture rather than some faraway exotic place. This was exhilarating for Magdalene von Dewall, who under the political circumstances of those times had no realistic prospect of experiencing China for herself. Franke's main field of expertise was the Ming dynasty (1368–1644 c.e.), but he also had a strong interest in modern Chinese history and politics. He admitted to knowing nothing about ancient China. Yet, paradoxically, he was the best advisor Magdalene von Dewall could have wished for: for he gave her complete freedom to pursue her own research, only reminding her of the need (1) to pay serious attention to the contemporary conditions in China that constituted the backdrop of ongoing archaeological research; (2) to endeavor to understand modern Chinese scholarship in its intellectual-historical contexts; and (3) to refrain from addressing herself only to the Western scholarly community, but instead to relate her own research, above all, to the much superior Chinese and Japanese scholarship on early China. Moreover, Franke insisted that Magdalene von Dewall's dissertation on horses and chariots in Bronze Age China not be exclusively focused on material culture—it had to include a significant philological component. While this stipulation undoubtedly had the effect of lengthening its completion time, it ultimately proved beneficial, for it ensured that the dissertation and its author would be taken seriously by the sinological community. In his memoirs, Franke acknowledges Magdalene von Dewall with considerable pride.Footnote ²⁴

Magdalene von Dewall also studied with Franke's predecessor, Fritz Jaeger (1886–1957), who had lost his professorship on account of his Nazi past, but was still teaching classical Chinese texts. Franke's assistant at the time was Tilemann Grimm (1922–2002), who had lived in China as a child and later became professor in Tübingen; like Franke, he was a historian of late Imperial and modern China, and he felt a living connection to the country. Moreover, as was de rigueur for sinologists of the “Hamburg School,” Magdalene von Dewall minored in Japanese, studying with Oscar Benl (1914–1986), an expert in classical Japanese literature. Her department's flagship journal, Oriens Extremus, was the venue for her first published scholarly article.Footnote ²⁵

On the archaeological side, her main teachers at Hamburg's Department of Prehistory and Protohistory (Vor- und Frühgeschichte) were all specialists in the study of early Germanic cultures. By 1953, Walther Matthes (1901–1997) had long reoccupied the professorship he had held (thanks to Nazi political patronage, without having acquired the usual credential of the Habilitation) since 1934. In prison for “Denazification” in 1945–46, he had turned from the hypernationalist mysticism that had informed his earlier work to anthroposophy, which imparted his subsequent work with its own brand of mysticism.Footnote ²⁶ Fortunately, none of this rubbed off on Magdalene von Dewall, who profited chiefly from the instruction of Hans Jürgen Eggers (1906–1975). Though also a former member of the Nazi party, Eggers had been judged sufficiently untainted to be appointed to Matthes's chair during the latter's absence after the war; after Matthes's return, he continued to teach as a supernumerary professor at the university while also directing the Prehistory Section of Hamburg's Museum for Ethnography and Prehistory (which under his leadership became a museum of its own). Born in St. Petersburg, raised in Estonia, and having worked in Pomerania until the war, Eggers's research was focused on the archaeology of his Baltic homelands, now inaccessible behind the Iron Curtain. Above all, however, he was a leading archaeological theorist;Footnote ²⁷ the influence of his emphasis on conceptual clarity and strict methodology is pervasive throughout Magdalene von Dewall's oeuvre.

As a student, Magdalene von Dewall obtained her first training in archaeological field techniques at the site of Feddersen Wierde, near Cuxhaven (Niedersachsen), which was excavated from 1954 to 1963 under the direction of Werner Haarnagel (1907–1984).Footnote ²⁸ A coastal village built on artificial elevations (Wurten), dating from the first century b.c.e. to the fifth century c.e., Feddersen Wierde is a rare example of a protohistoric settlement excavated in its entirety, comprehensively integrating the most advanced natural-science methods of analysis then available. The experience of participating in this cutting-edge excavation project lastingly influenced Magdalene von Dewall's outlook on the goals and possibilities of archaeological field research, making her often very critical of practices she was to observe in East Asia.

Magdalene von Dewall forged a close professional friendship with Rolf Hachmann (1917–2014), who completed his Habilitation at Hamburg in 1955 and then taught there as an aspirant professor (Privatdozent), waiting for a chair to become available. As professor at the University of the Saarland in Saarbrücken from 1959 to 1988, Hachmann was to become a major intellectual leader in the field of prehistoric and protohistoric archaeology in postwar Germany. In time, his research interests expanded vastly beyond his early training in Germanic prehistory, and he did extensive archaeological fieldwork in Bulgaria, Turkey, and Lebanon. Almost alone among German prehistorians in his generation, he was open to the idea that the archaeological study of areas outside of the European/Mediterranean sphere could be accommodated under his field of cognizance. In a programmatic gesture, he solicited Magdalene von Dewall's dissertation for publication as the inaugural volume in the Saarbrücken department's series of archaeological monographs.Footnote ²⁹

The dissertation was completed in 1961, and it was published three years thereafter.Footnote ³⁰ It was a masterpiece, demonstrating beyond all possible doubt that in her eight years at Hamburg, Magdalene von Dewall had not only acquired a very solid grounding in her dual disciplines, but also possessed a superior ability to conduct significant original research independently. The next hurdle to be taken on the way to a university professorship was the Habilitation, which required a second book-length study of a topic unrelated to that of the dissertation. For Magdalene von Dewall to pursue this goal was risky, for on the whole, postwar West German universities were anything but a friendly environment for women. As late as 1992, the proportion of female professors Germany-wide was a mere 6.5 percent (it has since risen to a little more than 20 percent, still scandalously low). But as of 1961, Magdalene von Dewall's academic promise was so manifest that, to her male teachers and colleagues as well as to herself, the goal of her becoming Germany's first professor of Chinese archaeology seemed well within reach.

Normally, the next step after the doctorate would have been to work for some years—maximally seven—as a professor's “scientific assistant” (wissenschaftlicher Assistent [male]/wissenschaftliche Assistentin [female]),Footnote ³¹ while producing one's Habilitationsschrift. In the fall of 1961, Magdalene von Dewall did for a few months work as a researcher under Hachmann in the Department of Prehistory and Protohistory at Saarbrücken, and this employment might have led eventually to a full-time job as an Assistentin. But what she really wanted to do was to acquire further training abroad. So soon after the end of World War II, this was not an altogether easy thing for a young German scholar to undertake. To her dismay, Magdalene von Dewall had had to decline an earlier offer of a one-year fellowship from the British Council because of delays in getting her dissertation passed. But she applied again and was successful. She left Saarbrücken for the University of Cambridge in early 1962. With a generosity that would probably be unthinkable today, the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) subsequently extended her post-doctoral funding for an astonishing five more years. After her initial year in Cambridge, she went to the United States for the 1963–64 academic year, where she affiliated herself with Yale University. She then returned to Cambridge and stayed there until 1967.

During this long period, Magdalene von Dewall was privileged to work closely with the two leading scholars of Chinese archaeology in the Western world at the time: Cheng Te-k'un (Zheng Dekun 正德坤, 1907–2001) at Cambridge,Footnote ³² and Kwang-chih Chang (Zhang Guangzhi 張光直, 1931–2001) at Yale.Footnote ³³ Both were Chinese-born. Cheng Te-k'un had started his career at Yanjing University 燕京大學 in Beijing as the assistant to the famous iconoclastic historian Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 (1893–1980) and had served as the director of the museum of West China Union University (Huaxi Daxue 華西大學) in Chengdu during the 1940s.Footnote ³⁴ Along the way he had acquired a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard. Although he had undertaken significant archaeological fieldwork in Sichuan,Footnote ³⁵ Cheng's approach to archaeology was a fairly old-fashioned, artifact-oriented one; what he truly excelled at were traditional connoisseurship and textual history. Cheng encouraged Magdalene von Dewall to work on the Southwestern peripheries of China, and it is at his advice that she undertook to write her Habilitationsschrift about the finds from the recently published chieftains' tombs of the late Bronze Age Dian culture in Yunnan.Footnote ³⁶

Working with K. C. Chang was quite different. Four years younger than Magdalene von Dewall, Chang was a brilliant scholar working at the forefront of anthropological archaeology during a time when that discipline was undergoing great change. In numerous writings, Chang contributed substantively to the fierce debate that was then underway about how to integrate archaeology more fully within the social sciences—a debate that led to the temporary ascendancy of the “New Archaeology” (now called processualist archaeology).Footnote ³⁷ It was precisely about such matters of method and theory that Magdalene von Dewall wanted to learn more when she decided to go to Yale, and she sought out Chang for advice as to how to apply the approaches of contemporary American-style archaeology on East Asian materials. Though possibly less pervasive than the influence of Eggers and her experience of excavating at Feddersen Wierde, the impact of her conversations with Chang is palpable in her subsequent writings.Footnote ³⁸

At Cambridge, Magdalene von Dewall also worked with what was then the crème de la crème of British sinology. Such luminaries as the Han historian Michael Loewe (b. 1922) and the Dutch-born specialist on Taoism Piet van der Loon (1920–2002) became friends.Footnote ³⁹ At Yale, her interlocutors included the historian of medieval China Arthur F. Wright (1913–1976) and the French-born specialist of Southeast Asian art history Paul Mus (1902–1969), among others. Her global network of distinguished academic acquaintances sustained her during her subsequent career. She also became comfortable writing in English—a necessary precondition if her scholarship was going to have an international impact—and she acquired a thorough familiarity with both the British and the American university systems.

Having started to present papers at conferences as early as 1958 (at the XIth Conference of Junior Sinologues in Padova), she continued to do so even more assiduously during her time as a postdoctoral scholar. In addition to speaking at numerous conferences in Europe, she traveled to Mexico in August 1966 to attend the 30th International Congress of the Human Sciences in Asia and North Africa,Footnote ⁴⁰ and she returned to the United States in 1967 for two important meetings: the symposium “Early Chinese Art and Its Possible Influence in the Pacific Basin” at Columbia University in New York,Footnote ⁴¹ and the XXVIIth International Congress of Orientalists in Ann Arbor, Michigan.Footnote ⁴² From her professional affiliations and activities, it is obvious that her socialization by now was chiefly with the East Asian Studies community; her ties to prehistoric and anthropological circles, which briefly had been primary during the time of her association with Hachmann, had become attenuated. This is a sign of how marginal her field remained within the mainstream social sciences.

Her published output from her five years of full-time research in two of the world's best research environments strikes one as scant: it consists merely of three articles. The most substantial of these was a long study of Western Zhou archaeological chronology that she contributed to the Festschrift for Li Ji 李濟 (1896–1979), the “Father of Chinese archaeology.” Li Ji, by then in Taiwan, had generously granted her first-publication rights for some chariots that members of his institute had excavated at Anyang during the 1930s; this was an unusual professional courtesy toward a young foreign scholar whom Li had never met in person, and Magdalene von Dewall's dedication of a major study to Li was a suitable gesture of gratitude. The other two articles, both short pieces, derived from her Habilitationsschrift project on Dian: a general introduction to the Dian culture in the semi-popular British journal Antiquity, and the conference paper from the 1967 conference at Columbia. All her other work from this period remained unpublished. It must be surmised that she was saving the bulk of her research results for her Habilitationsschrift.

To Asia at Last

In 1967, at the recommendation of Wolfgang Franke and Cheng Te-k'un, Magdalene von Dewall was appointed Lecturer in Chinese Art and Archaeology at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. This enabled her, at forty years of age, to travel to Asia for the first time. The Department of Chinese Studies, where she taught, was then being directed by the Cambridge-trained historian of science Ho Peng-Yoke (He Bingyu 何丙郁, b. 1926).Footnote ⁴³ Magdalene von Dewall was initially hired for three years, but she proved such a success that she was soon offered permanent employment; she was promoted to Senior Lecturer (approximately equivalent to Associate Professor in the American system) in 1970. Even though Malay was the official language of the university, she was allowed to teach in English. At the undergraduate level, she lectured on the “Outline of Chinese Culture” to more than five hundred students. According to her own description, the course covered the cultural geography, agricultural economy, family and social structure, world view, intellectual currents, and external cultural relationships from prehistoric times through the advent of Buddhism, as well as the manifestations of early civilization and artistic traditions; it was more a synthetic conspectus than a chronological account.Footnote ⁴⁴ For advanced students, she offered smaller seminars (twenty to thirty persons) on Chinese archaeology and early art history, covering the genesis and expansion of civilization in China from Neolithic through Han (206 b.c.e.–220 c.e.) times.

She also contributed significantly to university administration and served on numerous committees. With her international experience, she was ideally qualified to take an important role in drafting an ambitious restructuring plan for the university, which would have entailed establishing an American-style graduate school. This plan was, however, shelved by the higher authorities.

During her four years at Kuala Lumpur, Magdalene von Dewall undertook extensive research trips to those Asian countries then accessible to the holder of a West German passport. In addition to Malaysia, she went to Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Nepal, and Afghanistan. Wherever she went, she conducted museum research and visited archaeological sites. She even participated briefly in archaeological excavations in the Phimai region in Northeastern Thailand, directed by the British-born B. A. V. Peacock, her colleague at the University of Malaya. Apart from the fieldwork in which she had been involved as a student in Germany, this was to remain her only field experience.

During her time in Malaysia, Magdalene von Dewall had the pleasure of hosting her former teacher Wolfgang Franke when he came to attend the 4th International Conference on Asian History, held in Kuala Lumpur in 1968.Footnote ⁴⁵ The following year she delivered a lecture cycle on “Human Aspirations in Asian Art” at the local Goethe Institute. She remained active in the international scholarly community as well, traveling to Europe in 1970 to speak at the XXIIth Conference of Junior Sinologues in Stockholm and at a symposium on “Southeast Asia in the Modern World” at the Institute for Asian Research in Hamburg.Footnote ⁴⁶ But as far as I know, she published nothing during this time in her life.

Magdalene von Dewall greatly enjoyed her time in Malaysia. She could have stayed indefinitely, though after 1971 she would have had to teach in Malay (which she had started to master).Footnote ⁴⁷ She could have initiated archaeological field projects of her own. Given her competence, tact, and cultural sensitivity, her foreignness might have not have been an obstacle to her rise to high administrative positions in the university. But even so, she resigned from her position and returned to Germany in 1971. In her unpublished vita, she gives two reasons for taking that step: her desire to assume academic responsibilities in Germany, and her feeling that local scholars should be put in charge, given that ethnic nationalism was on the rise in Malaysia. She was in fact succeeded by one of her former MA students. But her main reason for leaving Malaysia was a personal one:Footnote ⁴⁸ her sister had tragically died of a brain tumor in 1969, and Magdalene von Dewall now felt obliged to take care of her aging mother.

In retrospect, the four years in Malaysia were the zenith of Magdalene von Dewall's academic career. They were the only time in her life that she held a professorial appointment. Her encounter with Southeast Asian cultures and their geographic environment left a deep impression. Having previously acquired a strong background in Southeast Asian archaeology in connection with her research on Dian, she took full advantage of the opportunity to expand that expertise, and she maintained an abiding research interest in Southeast Asia for the rest of her life.

Later Career and Life in Retirement

Back in Germany, Magdalene von Dewall found employment at the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg. Unusually in the teaching-oriented German university system, the South Asia Institute, founded in 1962, is a pure research unit. Much of its work has been oriented toward the modern economic and political development of India and its neighbors, but South Asian languages, history, and ethnography are also within its purview. As a Southeast Asia expert, Magdalene von Dewall somehow fit in. She joined the staff of the Institute's Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology (Abteilung für Ethnologie), where her supervisor was the Austrian-born anthropologist Karl Jettmar (1918–2002).Footnote ⁴⁹ In his multi-year expeditions investigation into the religions of the Hindukush, Jettmar included archaeological survey alongside ethnographic investigations. He was therefore sympathetic to Magdalene von Dewall's scholarly outlook and approaches. The South Asia Institute was to remain Magdalene von Dewall's home institution until her retirement in 1992.

Career-wise, her move to Heidelberg was a step down. Ten years after completing her doctorate, and having already worked successfully as a professor, she was now a mere Assistentin to Jettmar. Her most urgent task was to complete her Habilitationsschrift on Dian, which had languished ever since her departure from Cambridge in 1967. That she had not submitted it at that time now became a matter of profound regret:Footnote ⁵⁰ for significant new materials had been discovered that needed to be worked in; more fundamentally, Magdalene von Dewall's entire outlook on Dian and its position on the border of China and Southeast Asia had become far more complex under the impact of what she had learned in the field.

Moreover, her topic had attracted the interest of other competent scholars. In 1974, the French art historian Michèle Pirazzoli-t'Serstevens published an excellent monograph on the Dian culture, based on the very body of material that Magdalene von Dewall had been working on during her years at Cambridge.Footnote ⁵¹ Magdalene von Dewall, who had become used to taking something of a proprietary attitude with respect to Southwest China—an area she fondly referred to as “my southwestern corner” [meine Südwestecke]—was outraged at this intrusion. But Pirazzoli-t'Serstevens probably believed, rightly in my opinion, that Dian offered material abundant and multi-faceted enough for more than one major study. A comparison of Pirazzoli-t'Serstevens's study with the totality of Magdalene von Dewall's published work on Dian does inevitably reveal significant overlap, but Magdalene von Dewall's ideas and approaches stand out as sufficiently distinctive to justify the belief that the planned Habilitationsschrift would still have been viable had she chosen to pursue it.

In fact, the project was not immediately abandoned. In a curriculum vitae circumstantially datable to late 1975 or early 1976, Magdalene von Dewall still confidently lists her Habilitationsschrift on “The pictorial art of the Late Bronze Age tribal culture of Tien [Dian] in the highland of Southeast Asia”Footnote ⁵² with an anticipated completion date of 1976; assuming—as I believe one can—that this is not a mendacious statement, the work must have been very near completion. But we hear nothing more of it thereafter. What caused Magdalene von Dewall to refrain from submitting it, thereby giving up all prospects of rising to professorial rank in the German system?

The reasons are probably complex. University politics may have played a role. I have occasionally heard insinuations—though never from Magdalene von Dewall herself—that unnamed male-chauvinist colleagues actively discouraged her from pursuing her Habilitation; but others who were present at the time swear that this was not the case and assert that a full professorship at the South Asia Institute was waiting for her; all she would have needed to do was to turn in her thesis.Footnote ⁵³ Perhaps Magdalene von Dewall felt that she was receiving mixed signals. There may also have been existential fears—for with the acceptation of her Habilitationsschrift her job as Assistentin would have automatically come to an end, and according to the prevailing arcane academic rules (which are still in force today), she would have had to teach without compensation as a Privatdozentin until offered a professorship. At forty-nine, Magdalene von Dewall was, in 1976, perilously close to the age limit for regular professorial appointments in the state of Baden-Württemberg, and there was no telling whether such an appointment would have come through before she had become too old.

I am inclined to believe that, rather than such external factors, it was above all her own perfectionism that stood in her way. Magdalene von Dewall simply knew too much. Paralyzed by her awareness of the infinite nuances and complexities inherent in any topic she took on, she became increasingly unable to express herself succinctly and to bring her research projects to conclusion. As I can attest from painful experience, this problem regularly manifested itself when she gave presentations at conferences, where, in spite of careful preparation, she would always exceed the time limit. This tendency of saying too much, I believe, was not in contradiction with the strong self-discipline that defined her personality; to the contrary: it emanated from her sense of professional responsibility. Given that her listeners were invariably not in her field, she felt obliged to explain everything; she feared that if she did not share her vast stores of knowledge, that knowledge would be lost. Basic to this fear was a profound sense of loneliness—not on a personal level: though unmarried, she was close to her large extended family and had many friends in and outside of academia; but intellectually: for she was quite literally the only scholar in her field in the German-speaking academic community.

In Magdalene von Dewall's formerly so promising academic trajectory, the mid-1970s thus mark a tragic caesura. Fortunately, at least, she was able to continue working at the South Asia Institute. When her term as an Assistentin ended, she was appointed to a non-professorial staff position with the job title of Scientific Collaborator (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin). Concurrently, she taught for nearly two decades (1973–1992) in the University's Art History Department, where Dietrich Seckel (1910–2007)Footnote ⁵⁴ and Lothar Ledderose (b. 1942)Footnote ⁵⁵ had established Europe's leading doctoral program in East Asian art history. Her seminars covered an impressive breadth of China- and Southeast Asia-related topics. Sometimes she would co-teach with Karl Jettmar or with classical archaeologists for wider cross-cultural comparisons. Her main pedagogical goal was to train students to do research on their own; hence she emphasized problems of method and details of how to use original Chinese historical texts and scholarly publications. While students with only a superficial interest in archaeology were often alienated by the tedium of this style of instruction, serious students profited greatly.

Not achieving professorial rank meant that Magdalene von Dewall was unable to launch major collaborative research initiatives on her own. Her 1976 c.v. still lists as one of her goals the “preparation and possibly training for archaeological excavations in Southeast Asia (Indonesia?),”Footnote ⁵⁶ but such plans were never seriously pursued. Yet, even with her reduced status, Magdalene von Dewall managed to keep abreast of developments in her field. When it became possible to visit mainland China after the end of the Cultural Revolution, she was one of the first German academics to do so. As early as 1976, she intrepidly joined a tourist group organized by the “Society for German-Chinese Friendship,” the successor of a radical Maoist political party that had fielded its candidates in West German elections during the post-1968 period.Footnote ⁵⁷ Subsequently she undertook several trips on her own, and she soon succeeded in making contact with leading Chinese archaeologists.Footnote ⁵⁸ In 1980, the German Research Council awarded her funding for a three-month research sojourn in China, with the Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Social Sciences acting as her host on the Chinese side; helped by letters of introduction from the Institute, she was able to travel extensively within the country. Having so far used Chinese only as a research language, she now made valiant efforts to speak Mandarin, and at the end of her stay she was able to carry on a conversation. Several conference trips followed (Anyang in 1987,Footnote ⁵⁹ Kunming and Xi'an in 1988,Footnote ⁶⁰ Xi'an again in 1993Footnote ⁶¹ ). Launching her own archaeological fieldwork in China, of course, was out of the question. There is a picture that shows her gesturing tragically at a vegetable patch in China, saying “Here, buried below the ground, lies my research.”Footnote ⁶²

Among the Chinese colleagues she met over the years, Magdalene von Dewall was especially close to Tong Enzheng 童恩正 (1935–1997),Footnote ⁶³ the leading specialist on the archaeology of China's southwestern regions. Tong shared her interest in cultural contacts between early China and Southeast Asia and her anthropological research orientation. She invited him to Heidelberg in 1981 on his way back to China from Harvard.Footnote ⁶⁴ Subsequently Tong hosted her several times in Chengdu, and he appointed her to the editorial board of his innovative journal Nanfang minzu kaogu 南方民族考古 (Southwestern Ethnology and Archaeology).

But her interests were never limited to China alone. She continued to travel to conferences all over the Indo-Pacific world (New Zealand 1972 and 1983;Footnote ⁶⁵ Thailand 1977 and 1991;Footnote ⁶⁶ Australia (with Singapore and Malaysia) 1988;Footnote ⁶⁷ India 1994;Footnote ⁶⁸ Malaysia 1998Footnote ⁶⁹ —to mention only extra-European destinations), making use of the opportunity to see archaeological finds and to converse with local colleagues. In early 1991, she obtained a Gibbs Traveling Fellowship from Newnham College, Cambridge, for her first research trip to Vietnam; she used the opportunity to visit Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and China (Kunming again). During that trip, Magdalene von Dewall did preliminary research for a comprehensive catalogue of Southeast Asian bronze drums that she hoped to compile in collaboration with her colleagues Zhang Zengqi 張增祺 from the Yunnan Institute for Cultural Relics and Archaeology and Nguyen Viet from the Institute of Archaeology in Hanoi. Due to a concatenation of political, personal, and logistic problems, this plan never came to fruition.

A total of thirty-one items appeared in print between 1974 and 2010, seven thereof in English.Footnote ⁷⁰ Only three are journal articles in a narrow sense;Footnote ⁷¹ nine—the largest subgroup—are papers published in conference proceedings;Footnote ⁷² four are chapters in exhibition catalogues (in two cases accompanied by catalogue entries written by her);Footnote ⁷³ three (including one collaborative piece) are contributions to edited volumes;Footnote ⁷⁴ and three are contributions to Festschriften (for Jettmar,Footnote ⁷⁵ Franke,Footnote ⁷⁶ and the Indonesian scholar Takdir Alisjahbana [1908–1994].Footnote ⁷⁷ ) In addition, she authored four substantial book reviews,Footnote ⁷⁸ one set of dictionary entries,Footnote ⁷⁹ and four travelogues.Footnote ⁸⁰

Of these, her contributions to exhibition catalogues enjoyed the widest circulation. After the opening of China, numerous loan exhibitions of archaeological finds were being organized during the 1980s and 1990s, and Magdalene von Dewall's collaboration was much sought after. A good citizen of academia, she welcomed the opportunity to share her research with the general public, and she sometimes made the preparatory research for an exhibition the topic of a seminar. She also lectured widely all over Europe, hoping thereby to kindle popular interest in East Asian archaeology.

It should be mentioned that Magdalene von Dewall's published output constitutes only a fraction of what she produced. Various sources list a plethora of other papers that remained unpublished after having been presented at conferences, or that she withdrew because she felt that they were not yet ready for release. In as many as six cases, papers were slated for publication in collective works that never appeared. The appended listing of her unpublished works—certainly incomplete—comprises fifty-two items, thirty-one thereof in English.Footnote ⁸¹ Many of these, and perhaps others, may yet be found among her papers, which are currently being archived at the Reiss-Engelhorn Museen in Mannheim; a number of them would probably still be worth publishing. Most of her published works, as well, appeared in obscure journals that are difficult to find even in Germany, and would warrant republication. Given the enduring freshness and pertinence of her ideas—despite the larger amounts of evidence now available—a volume of Magdalene von Dewall's “Collected Studies” would be an important contribution.

Magdalene von Dewall remained active in retirement, continuing to commute between her book-filled apartment near Heidelberg and her family home in Langenargen. She took up temporary teaching appointments at the universities of München (1992) and Bonn (1996). For some time toward the end of her life, she had an affiliation with the Eurasia Department of the German Archaeological Institute, Berlin.

Her sense of intellectual loneliness gradually subsided. As opportunities to study and do research in China opened up, an increasing number of young German scholars (beginning with myself in 1979)Footnote ⁸² decided to specialize in Chinese archaeology. Magdalene von Dewall graciously assumed the role of mentor. In time, she found herself surrounded by a group of younger colleagues—some trained at Heidelberg, some elsewhere, all with substantial experience in China—who looked up to her for advice and encouragement. She was especially intent on helping female students find their bearings in the still excessively male-dominated German academic system. An incomplete list of those she helped over the years includes Bettina Zorn, who obtained her Ph.D. in archaeology at Peking University in 2003 and has since worked as a museum curator in Vienna and Mainz; Margarete Prüch, who became an independent curator and a widely respected specialist in early Chinese lacquer; Mareile Flitsch, now professor of Chinese ethnography in Zürich;Footnote ⁸³ Jeanette Werning, a specialist on Neolithic archaeology now working at the Reiss-Engelhorn Museen in Mannheim; Mayke Wagner, now deputy director of the Eurasia Department at the German Archaeological Institute and head of its Beijing Branch Office; and Anke Hein, who obtained a Ph.D. at UCLA in 2013 and is presently about to take up a professorial position at Oxford.

Thanks in no small part to Magdalene von Dewall's assiduous efforts, the mainstream of German academia has recently come to acknowledge that East Asia deserves the same level of academic attention as other ancient civilizations. Although at the time of her passing there was still no professorship dedicated to East or Southeast Asian archaeology at any German university, Mayke Wagner was teaching the subject as a Privatdozentin at the Free University in Berlin, and several German universities were making moves toward establishing regular chairs. There is no question that the field had gained greatly in visibility since the time when Magdalene von Dewall had entered it.

Magdalene von Dewall's generosity was not limited to academic advice and moral support. Around the year 2000 she resolved to set up a foundation dedicated to helping the cause of Chinese archaeology in Germany, using a substantial sum of her own inherited money. Due to the lack of an established “culture of philanthropy” at German universities, this idea proved difficult to put into practice at first. It was not until 2006 that an arrangement was found with the Reiss-Engelhorn Museen in Mannheim, under which Magdalene von Dewall provided that institution with multi-year funding for the compilation of a comprehensive Sino–German archaeological dictionary. This ambitious project, which was entrusted to Jeanette Werning, was still underway at the time of Magdalene von Dewall's death.

On 20 May 2007, the Reiss-Engelhorn Museen hosted a day-long celebration on the occasion of Magdalene von Dewall's eightieth birthday. After her death they organized a memorial celebration on what would have been her eighty-seventh birthday, May 8, 2014. Both events were well attended and conveyed strongly that Magdalene von Dewall was not alone, that the importance of her life's work was being acknowledged, and that her efforts to promote the cause of East Asian archaeology in Germany had begun to bear fruit.Footnote ⁸⁴

Research and Publications

In her 1971 vita, Magdalene von Dewall ambitiously formulated her scholarly interests as follows.

Five years later, she listed her areas of interest as comprising

The titles of her ongoing research projects during her time at the South Asia Institute were variously given as: “Cultural-historical continuity of the Bronze Age of South China and Southeast Asia from an archaeological and an ethnological perspective”; “Style formation and style fixation as cultural-historical parameters in early Southeast Asia: Attempts toward a critical reorientation aiming to link artistic-artisanal creative traditions in ethnographic and archaeological contexts”; and “Material culture as a research topic in the formation of archaeological theories from an ethnological perspective.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Such formulations, which may also be encountered in her published works, show that her viewpoint was fundamentally an anthropological one.

But she was not to be narrowly pinned down. One running theme in Magdalene von Dewall's work is her insistence on a multi-disciplinary approach. Aside from archaeology (European as well as Asian), she was well read in cultural anthropology, religious studies, and art history (or “art science” [Kunstwissenschaft], as she liked to call it in the tradition of Aby Warburg [1866–1929] and Ernst Cassirer [1874–1945]). Faithful to the humanistic education she had received at the Gymnasium, she was intent on expressing herself with philosophical depth. This sometimes led to overly complex formulations, but the underlying conceptual thinking is always crystal clear and of considerable theoretical sophistication.

Her views as to the nature of archaeological evidence and the purpose of archaeological research were far more advanced than the mainstream of German prehistoric and protohistoric archaeology of her time, which, after the Nazi-era aberrations, had turned excessively descriptive and almost dogmatically avoided engagement with larger social science or historical questions. Even before she came under the influence of the anthropological approaches during her stay in the United States—and all the more so thereafter—Magdalene von Dewall insisted that archaeologists focus on the human beings who created the material record. Hence she shifted her focus from artifacts to sites and archaeological contexts, which she used as a basis for reconstructing ancient people's cultural habits. This basic orientation reflects the long-term impact of her early experience at Feddersen Wierde.

While she regarded the understanding of ancient societies as one important goal of archaeological research design, she was nevertheless skeptical vis-à-vis deterministic views that construed societies as closed systems and arranged them along a simplistic evolutionary sequence. Simultaneously with social formations, she endeavored to reconstruct the personal perspectives of individuals reflected in the archaeological materials. Far from being narrowly particularistic, such a focus was intended to reveal the scope of autonomous human creativity and freedom vis-à-vis the cultural “system.” In conceiving such a dialectical approach, Magdalene von Dewall went well beyond what American anthropologists were advocating in the 1960s and 1970s; her subtle, multi-layered investigation of the data strikes one as uncannily postmodern, prefiguring the concern with “agency” that has come to dominate much of archaeological and art-historical discussion in the United States during the past decade or so.Footnote ⁸⁸

In this connection, Magdalene von Dewall insisted, furthermore, that archaeologists examine the intellectual processes that went into the manufacture as well as the usage of the material objects found; some of her findings on how objects in their cultural setting may exert an agency of their own anticipate what writers at the cutting edge of archaeological and visual theory are writing today.Footnote ⁸⁹

Magdalene von Dewall never wrote on purely theoretical issues. All her work is contextualized in the study of ancient East and Southeast Asian cultures, and the expression of her theoretical views is always explicitly related to concrete archaeological evidence. Several times over the course of her career, she presented conference papers on broad cross-cultural comparisons and on continuities between archaeological finds and the ethnographic present, but none of them was published. Most of her publications fall under three major themes: (1) the horse-and-chariot complex in pre-Imperial China;Footnote ⁹⁰ (2) East Asian funerary customs and their reflections in archaeology;Footnote ⁹¹ and (3) the early cultures and cultural contacts along the southern and southwestern margins of China.Footnote ⁹² Her contributions to each of these themes deserve a few words of comment.

(1) Half a century after its publication, her 1964 book on “Horse and Chariot in Early China” stands as a pathbreaking contribution; it is still one of the best monographs on East Asian archaeology ever published in a Western language.Footnote ⁹³ Exemplifying the strategy of “marching separately and striking jointly” (getrennt marschieren, vereint schlagen), she discusses textual references and archaeological materials separately, each with the appropriate methodologies; the two strands of analysis are brought together in the final chapter. This is both the most responsible and, potentially, the most rewarding way of handling written and material data in conjunction, and the solidity of her procedure lends particular weight to Magdalene von Dewall's conclusions as to the nature of technical and military developments from Shang to Zhou times. Her treatment of the horse-and-chariot theme in the poetry of the Shijing is exemplary and remains to this day one of the major Western sinological contributions to the understanding of that text. She makes brilliant use of both texts and archaeological finds in contextualizing chariots in a culture of aristocratic chivalry. Here and throughout her later writings on chariots she emphasizes their display value, denying—correctly, as subsequent archaeological discoveries have confirmed—that they exclusively served in a military function.

Familiar as she was with archaeological finds from all over Eurasia, Magdalene von Dewall accepted from the outset the fact—unpopular in Chinese archaeological circles at the time, but by now virtually uncontested—that chariots were originally invented somewhere in West Asia and reached China as a cultural import. But she was also sensitive to the technical innovations introduced by chariot-builders in Shang and Zhou China, and she explained these as adaptations to the changed cultural role of chariots in their Chinese settings. While she never attempted to trace the diffusion of the chariot to China in detail, she wrote several papers—all unfortunately unpublished—in which she presented detailed comparisons between chariot use in China, Egypt, the Middle East, and late prehistoric Europe. Commendably, Magdalene von Dewall was averse to simplistic assumptions about the “ethnic” associations of any kind of material-culture item, emphasizing instead the ability of objects—especially of highly desirable objects such as chariots—to generate communication across cultural and ethnic boundaries.

(2) Since early Chinese chariots have been found almost invariably in association with tombs, Magdalene von Dewall was confronted early on with the age-old archaeological problem of how to extract reliable social-historical information from funerary remains. Her very first published article was pioneering in its time in that it looked at entire funerary assemblages at Anyang as a basis for discerning social distinctions within the Shang aristocracy—a radical departure from the then-current habit of regarding tombs merely as repositories of appealing objects.Footnote ⁹⁴ In time, Magdalene von Dewall developed a sophisticated method of funerary analysis that incorporated the consideration of religious factors and socially-conditioned customs of display. In several studies of individual Zhou-dynasty cemeteries she assessed the excavated finds from every conceivable angle.Footnote ⁹⁵ Elsewhere she addressed the still-extant funerary complexes of China's imperial epoch, for which she advanced a highly original anthropological interpretation.Footnote ⁹⁶ As mentioned, she was particularly interested in the dialectical relationship between the funerary “system” and the individuals participating in it, and she proposed models that could accommodate both the notion of a ritual code and the deviations and transgressions that inevitably happened when that code was adapted to real-life exigencies, ambitions, and tastes.

(3) The lion's share of Magdalene von Dewall's publications—and an even larger number of her unpublished papers—concern the archaeology of Far Southern and Southwestern China as well as Southeast Asia. Her work on Dian provided her with a point of departure for an exploration of the multi-faceted local cultures of that vast area. In many studies she investigated the cultural relationships among them, as well as with the Chinese empire to the north. In this connection, she developed original and quite sophisticated theoretical notions of such key anthropological concepts as culture contact and ethnic identity; she explored these themes with great sensitivity and finesse.

Her article in the catalogue of the exhibition of Dian finds from Yunnan organized in 1986 by the Museum Rietberg in Zürich is a digest of what she had planned to write in her Habilitationsschrift;Footnote ⁹⁷ a masterful synthesis, it is, in my opinion, the most important piece she published after her book. Besides Yunnan, she also wrote about finds from the Tibetan borderlands of Sichuan,Footnote ⁹⁸ from Guangxi and Guangdong,Footnote ⁹⁹ Vietnam,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Thailand,Footnote ¹⁰¹ and Indonesia.Footnote ¹⁰² In assessing the originality and creativity of the early inhabitants of Southeast Asia vis-à-vis the Chinese cultural impact, she adopted a nuanced understanding of prevailing sociocultural asymmetries. Rather than resorting to notions of “ethnic” affiliation, which at any rate are difficult to substantiate archaeologically, she emphasized rituals and feasts as ways of creating unity within as well as among communities. To give additional substance to this idea, she produced a number of still-authoritative studies of early Chinese and Southeast Asian musical instruments, which she analyzed both from a musicological (organological) perspective and in their contexts of excavation.

Outside of the above-mentioned three main rubrics, Magdalene von Dewall's publication record shows occasional glimpses of the fact that her knowledge of East and Southeast Asian archaeology was truly comprehensive. For instance, an article on jades of the Late Neolithic Liangzhu culture 良渚文化—loosely tied in with her interest in the local cultures of South China—presents some quite original ideas on their ornamentation.Footnote ¹⁰³ Her only other work on early Chinese prehistory is a long review of two books on Neolithic cultures in North China, part of a series that attempted to pigeonhole the evidence into a standardized, European-derived set of analytical criteria, ostensibly to facilitate comparative research;Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Magdalene von Dewall so cogently criticized the shallowness of this approach that the entire series was discontinued. Likewise, a small number of articles on Chinese archaeology she wrote for the general public invariably show a firm grasp of the discipline in its entirety.

In her review of a book on the Shang military, while positive overall, she quibbles with its author's use of terminology. This exemplifies another lifelong characteristic of her scholarly persona: her obsessive search for the mot juste. Her command of the intricate specialized vocabulary of horse-and-chariot gear and weaponry—whether in German, English, or Chinese—was second to none. In the belief that a stringent scholarly vocabulary was needed in order to bring about further advances in scholarship, she sought to create standard German equivalents for Chinese archaeological terms that she hoped would be adopted by everyone. The neologisms she proposed in this connection are based on observable form, not on inferred function; for, as she explains in her final article, co-authored with Bettina Grieß, any such terminology should be as neutral as possible, not implying an interpretation.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ For example, the bronze vessel known in Chinese as jue 爵 is called Schnabelbecher (“beaked beaker”); and the three predominant ceramic forms of the Western Zhou period are referred to, respectively, as Beutelfußtopf (“pouch-footed pot,” for li 鬲), Ringfußschüssel (“ring-footed tureen,” for gui 簋 and yu 盂), and Schaftschale (“stemmed bowl,” for dou 豆).

As my awkward English renderings demonstrate, this terminological practice is difficult to replicate in other languages: it is closely tied to the genius, such as it is, of the German language. But in Magdalene von Dewall's view, the very fact that German allows for such a style of writing about East Asian archaeology proves that there should be a place for German in the concert of scholarly languages used in that field. German, she believed, can express certain nuances of cultural meaning that may be inaccessible through other languages. (The same idea underlies contemporary language-preservation policies in some of the smaller European countries such as Norway.) The stylistic subtleties in Magdalene von Dewall's own work in German exemplify this potential to a considerable degree. And yet one hopes that they will all one day be translated into languages read by a larger number of colleagues.

Such considerations are the background for the Chinese–German archaeological dictionary project that Magdalene von Dewall inaugurated, and with which she remained closely involved for the rest of her life. Even though it may be doubted that its existence in and of itself will prompt East Asian archaeology specialists all over the world to learn German, this dictionary will doubtless be a useful reference tool well beyond the Germanophone scholarly community. Once published, it will stand as a lasting monument to Magdalene von Dewall's generosity and to her lifelong quest to make accessible for others the knowledge she herself had acquired so painstakingly.

As a person, Magdalene von Dewall was unpretentious, open, communicative, yet utterly disinclined toward self-promotion. She was impeccably well-bred, courteous and considerate, but in scholarly discussion, she did not mince her words. Michael Tellenbach, a long-term acquaintance, aptly characterizes her as “spirited, energetic and strong-willed”; he goes on to describe her as “a profound scholarly character, unassuming, knowledgeable, always ready for conversation and discourse, team-minded, without any of the arrogance that might have been expected from a scholar of her standing.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ From my more than thirty years of interactions with Magdalene von Dewall, I can confirm all of this. I will leave the last word to one of her protégées, Mareile Flitsch, who remembers Magdalene von Dewall as “a pugnacious yet amiable gentlelady, who in the last analysis mainly did one thing: she gave us courage.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷