Article

Germany

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Germany

Germany’s relationship with the Malay world spans military confrontation, colonial labour, academic philology, and literary exchange. From the seventeenth-century German employees of the Dutch East India Company who documented their service in the archipelago, through the First World War destruction of the German raider SMS Emden off the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, to the sustained programme of German-language scholarship on Malay language and literature that continues into the twenty-first century, German engagement with the region has been continuous, multifaceted, and often shaped by the geopolitical currents of the era in which it occurred. The records preserved in the Society’s journal reveal a pattern in which German actors—soldiers, planters, philologists, and translators—have alternately imposed European frameworks upon Malay culture and, in later periods, been progressively displaced by Malaysian institutions asserting their own scholarly authority.

Military Encounters in the Malay World

The most dramatic German military presence in the region during the modern period was the campaign of the light cruiser SMS Emden in the early months of the First World War. The Emden caused serious damage to Allied shipping in the Indian Ocean, including an attack near Penang on 28 October 1914 in which it sank the Russian warship Zhemchug and the French destroyer Mousquet [1, p. 91]. On 9 November 1914, the Emden put a landing party ashore on Direction Island, one of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, to destroy the cable station’s communications facilities. The radio operator sent a distress signal before the German soldiers arrived, and the Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney responded, initiating a battle that resulted in the Emden’s destruction [1, p. 91].

The civilian eyewitness account of C. Clunies-Ross, written on 10 November 1914 from the cable station, provides a ground-level perspective that complements the official naval narrative. The Sydney fired approximately 560 rounds of 6-inch shells while the Emden fired nearly 900 rounds of 4.6-inch shells and one torpedo, which narrowly missed the Sydney [1, p. 93]. The Sydney suffered three killed and eleven wounded, including one officer, Lieutenant Hampden; the Emden lost nearly three-quarters of her complement killed, with half of the remainder wounded, some severely burned [1, p. 93]. The action commenced at a range of approximately 10,000 yards and closed to 4,500 yards under bright morning conditions [1, p. 93]. Captain von Müller surrendered aboard the Sydney on the quarter deck, his and his officers’ swords being returned to them in a formal ceremony [1, p. 92]. During 1916–17 the wreck was dismantled and the guns salvaged for the Australian Government, reportedly installed in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Brisbane; by 1920 only boilers and a portion of the hull were visible at low tide [1, p. 93].

German Academic Malay Studies, 1800–1945

The earliest German engagement with Malay literature dates to Adelbert von Chamisso’s 1822 article “Über malayische Volkslieder,” which characterised the pantun (a traditional Malay poetic form of four lines) as “real folk songs” and “original poetry,” establishing the first academic study of Malay literature in German [2, pp. 4–5]. This romantic phase, shaped by Herder’s philosophy of the Volksgeist (the authentic spirit of a people), was dominated by armchair scholars including Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose monumental three-volume study of Old Javanese (1836–39) established a hierarchical framework in which Malay was deemed grammatically “imperfect” and “poor” relative to the Sanskrit-inflected classical languages of Java [2, pp. 4–8]. Adolf Bastian, who visited the Malay Archipelago four times between 1851 and 1903, carried these romantic notions into the empirical domain through his theory of the Elementargedanke (elementary idea), producing a five-volume ethnographic study of Indonesia that, despite its lack of systematic rigour, remains a valuable source for comparative vocabulary and oral traditions [2, pp. 8–9].

The institutionalisation of Malay studies at German universities in the twentieth century marked a decisive shift toward empirical linguistics. Georg Conon von der Gabelentz taught Malay at Leipzig from the 1880s, the university having established Germany’s first chair of East Asian Studies in 1878 [2, pp. 10–11]. Emil Luning delivered courses in Frankfurt between 1913 and 1916, drawing on his twenty years of missionary work in the Malay Peninsula. Otto Dempwolff established the first dedicated chair of Indonesian and South Seas Languages at Hamburg in 1919, with the first Malay language course taught in 1920 [2, pp. 10–11]. Dempwolff’s posthumously published Malay grammar (1941) and his three-volume comparative phonology of Austronesian vocabulary (1934–38) represent the apex of German academic Malay studies, both heavily dependent on the linguistic expertise of native speakers such as Oesman Idris, a Minangkabau from Payakumbuh who arrived at Hamburg in 1922 and served as Dempwolff’s primary informant [2, pp. 14–15]. Dempwolff also recorded Malay oral literature, including Pelanduk Jenaka (clever mouse-deer) stories and historical legends, from a Johore-born sailor, Muhamed bin Hadji Abdurahim, in a prisoner-of-war camp at Ruhleben in April 1917 [2, pp. 13–14].

The Cold War introduced a sharp ideological bifurcation in the field. In East Germany, socialist genre theory privileged the “low genres” of the common people, resulting in a sustained programme of folk-tale translations by scholars such as Gerhard Kahlo, whose anthology Bidasari (1958) was translated into Russian and republished in Moscow in 1967 [3, p. 53]. In West Germany, by contrast, the post-1969 period of Malaysian stability catalysed a turn toward classical court literature as a “post-colonial era gesture of recognition,” followed by an increasingly robust engagement with modern Malaysian literary production centred at Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Cologne [3, pp. 53–58]. Hans Overbeck’s pre-war translations of the Hikayat Hang Tuah (1922) and the Malaiische Chronik (1927) were reprinted in West Germany in 1975, 1976, and 1986, demonstrating the long shelf-life of the pre-war tradition [3, pp. 53–54]. By 2003, German academic publications on Malay literature were concentrated in only four universities—Cologne, Bonn, Frankfurt, and Hamburg—reflecting a marked contraction of the field following the Asian financial crisis and German university budget cuts [3, p. 58].

Colonial Presence and Practical Language

A significant body of German-language writing on the Malay world derives from the commercial and colonial sphere rather than the university. E. U. Kratz identified 37 German authors who wrote memoirs, diaries, letters, and compendia about their service with the Dutch East India Company (VOC) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries [4, p. 63]. The most prolific writers were not the high-ranking officials but the lower ranks—common soldiers, sailors, coopers, tanners, and bakers—whose books were often less about the exotic East than about how a righteous Christian endures adversity [4, p. 64]. The earliest German reference to the archipelago is Balthasar Springer’s 1509 account of a Portuguese voyage, and the first German eyewitness travel book is Verken’s 1612 Eylffte Schiffart [4, pp. 63].

Among the most valuable of these texts, Barchewitz’s 1730 account stands out as the most sustained ethnographic observation, with six years of residence on Leti, an island off Timor, yielding detailed descriptions of indigenous religion, social structure, and daily life, accompanied by a map and Malay word-list [4, pp. 70–71]. Schwarz’s 1751 book provides one of only two German eyewitness accounts of the 1749 Chinese massacre in Batavia, recording that after the killings prices rose tenfold and that when Chinese returned they were hanged in groups of ten, twenty, or thirty on a gallows erected near the town hall [4, pp. 73–74].

The colonial plantation context generated a distinct genre of practical Malay language booklets published between the 1890s and 1930s by German planters and traders working in Sumatra, Java, and German New Guinea. By 1892, more than 2,700 workers from Indonesia and Malaysia were living in German New Guinea, with a further 950 arriving in 1893; epidemics of influenza and smallpox led Dutch and British authorities to halt further immigration [2, p. 21]. Richard Hindorf’s Leitfaden zur Erlernung der Malayischen Umgangssprache (1890) saw four subsequent editions (1898, 1904, 1913, 1927) and documents a pidgin Malay with strong Javanese and Jakarta elements spoken on plantations in German New Guinea; several Malay loanwords (klambu, tiang, kasang, mandur, binatang) entered Tok Pisin through this contact [2, pp. 20–22]. Warnk argues that these “amateur” publications, though dismissed by university scholars as linguistically unsound, provide irreplaceable evidence for the sociolinguistic history of pidgin Malay and the everyday realities of colonial plantation labour [2, pp. 16–23].

German Literary Influence on Malay Literature

German literary works entered the Malay literary sphere primarily through the institutional mechanism of the Sultan Idris Training College’s Malay Translation Bureau, established in 1924. Staffed by figures such as Za’ba and Ahmad Murad Nasaruddin, the bureau produced translations of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Conan Doyle that shaped the literary training of a generation of Malay teachers [5, pp. 102–103]. The bureau produced at least 48 titles in its Malay School Series (1924–1936) and 64 titles in its Malay Home Library Series (abandoned 1957), with print runs of 5,000 to 10,000 copies per title [5, pp. 102–103]. Holger Warnk’s broader argument is that translations from European, Chinese, Urdu, and Arabic sources were a foundational but systematically overlooked force in the emergence of modern Malay literature between 1850 and 1950, serving as the vehicle through which the novel form, realistic prose style, and modern concepts of authorship entered both the Malay Peninsula and the Netherlands East Indies [5, pp. 91–113].

The full circle of Malaysian–German literary exchange was symbolised in 2004 when Kratz and Anwar Ridhwan of Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka co-published Hati Mesra: Pantun Melayu Sebelum 1914, featuring Overbeck’s pre-World War I pantun collection [3, p. 59]. From the 1990s onward, Malaysian institutions—Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, ATMA, IKON, and the European Chair of Malay Studies in Leiden—began to set the agenda for international Malay studies, organising conferences, funding translations, and critically re-examining Western Orientalist approaches, a development Graf frames as a post-Orientalist deconstruction carried out from the Malaysian side [3, pp. 58–59].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s journal has documented German engagement with the Malay world across a wide chronological and thematic range, reflecting shifting priorities in the field. The earliest contribution in this set is Kratz’s 1981 survey of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German travel books, which intervened in the Dutch-dominated field of VOC history by asserting the independent value of German-language sources previously dismissed as inferior to the Linschoten series [4, p. 63]. Warnk’s 2007 article on translations addressed a gap in Malay literary historiography that had traditionally traced the modern Malay novel to indigenous roots while ignoring the constitutive role of European-language translations [5, pp. 91–113]. His 2011 article provided the first comprehensive periodisation of German academic Malay studies from 1800 to 1945, foregrounding the role of native Malay-speaking collaborators whose contributions had been largely invisible in the standard narrative [2, pp. 14–15]. Graf’s 2007 survey extended this periodisation into the Cold War and post-colonial eras, mapping the contraction of the field to four German universities and the eventual reversal of scholarly agency toward Malaysian institutions [3, pp. 53–59]. The 2025 facsimile reprint of Clunies-Ross’s typescript, with Kratoska’s editor’s note, adds a primary-source dimension to the military history of the region, preserving a civilian perspective on the Emden’s destruction that had survived in a photograph album at the National University of Singapore [1, pp. 91–98]. Together, these contributions trace a trajectory from German cultural imposition to German scholarly dependence on Malaysian sources, and finally to Malaysian institutional leadership of the field.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. C. Clunies Ross (2025). Keeling Cocos Islands and the Destruction of the German Raider Emden in 1914. Facsimile reprint. With a note P. Kratoska JMBRAS 98(1): 91–98.
  2. H. Warnk (2011). From romanticism to colonial pragmatics: Malay language and literature studies in Germany 1800‒1945 JMBRAS 84(2): 67–94. Read on JSTOR
  3. A. Graf (2007). German works on Malay culture and literature since the nineteenth century JMBRAS 80(2): 51–65. Read on JSTOR
  4. E.U. Kratz (1981). The journey to the East: 17th and 18th century German travel books as sources of study JMBRAS 54(1): 65–81. Read on JSTOR
  5. H. Warnk (2007). The role of translations in the development of modern Malay literature JMBRAS 80(1): 91–113.