Emil Krebs

Emil Krebs (15 November 1867 in Freiburg in Schlesien – 31 March 1930 in Berlin) was a German polyglot and sinologist. He was said to master 68 languages perfectly in speech and writing and studied 120 other languages.

Life

The early years

Born in Freiburg in Silesia, Poland (now Świebodzice) on 15 November 1867, Emil Krebs was the son of a master carpenter named Gottlob Krebs and his wife Pauline Scholz. In 1870 he moved with his parents to Esdorf, where he attended primary school. From 1878 to 1880 he attended the Freiburger Realschule (secondary school), and from 1880 to 1887 he studied at the gymnasium in Schweidnitz. The curriculum included Latin, French, Hebrew and Classical Greek, but in addition he studied Modern Greek, English, Italian and later Spanish, Russian, Polish, Arabic and Turkish. He left the Schweidnitz gymnasium on March 17, 1887 after passing the abitur. Thereafter he enrolled in the theology course of the University of Breslau for the summer semester. At that point he already spoke twelve languages.

The following semester Krebs enrolled as a law student at the University of Berlin. The newly founded Oriental seminar department captivated Krebs, who had concluded he wished to make the study of foreign languages the primary objective of his education. He was interested in everything that was taught there, but turned first towards the study of Chinese, because it was regarded by many to be the most difficult language to learn. On July 24, 1890 he passed the interpreters examination in Chinese at the seminar for eastern languages of Berlin University with “good” marks. Within two years, Emil Krebs had absorbed Chinese to such an extent that he had mastered the refinements of that language to the level of well-educated natives.

Despite his passion for learning foreign languages he did not neglect his legal studies and passed the first State examination after the prescribed 6 semesters on June 12, 1891 with "good" marks. He then entered the legal training service with the Royal Prussian district court in Gottesberg as a junior court lawyer. By Easter 1892, he was a junior lawyer at the Berlin Court of Appeal. Soon afterwards he began attending Turkish at the Seminar for Oriental Languages at Berlin University. On 30 September 1893, Krebs was sent to Peking (Beijing) as an aspirant interpreter.

tay in China

On 5 December 1893, Krebs arrived in Beijing where he worked and lived until the cessation of diplomatic relations between Germany and China due to the First World War. On 10 May 1896, Krebs was entrusted with a temporary assignment as second interpreter at the imperial legation in BeijingFact|date=October 2007; on 7 October of the same year he was assigned to the post full time.Fact|date=October 2007. As a mediator of the conversations with Chinese politicians, he gained fame due to his impressive fluency. The German Reich took the murder of two missionaries in Shandong Province as a pretext to occupy Tsingtao in November 1897 as an endorsement for its “demands of payment for damages”. From 10 November 1897 to February 1898, Krebs joined the occupation of Kiautschou. He was accompanied German squadrons to impose order and afterwards worked in the imperial government for the area.

On 30 July 1900, Krebs started to work in the administration of the government of Kiautschou, later he returned to the German legation in BeijingFact|date=October 2007. In the time between November 1897 and July 1900 he became more than "just" an interpreter. During this period, he had the opportunity to improve his contacts with Chinese officials, which also allowed him to develop relationships with the Chinese on a personal level.

On 16 July 1901, Emil Krebs got the job of "first interpreter" at the legation in Beijing. Krebs had gained great respect among the Chinese, especially in the Waichiaopu, the Chinese Foreign Office. The Chinese authority EN even asked for his advice concerning grammatical questions of the Chinese language.

On 15 February 1912, Krebs was given the title of Legationsrat. On 5 February 1913, he married the German imperial consulate in Shanghai, Mande Heyne. She was the eldest daughter of the secret senior counsel Glasewald. In February and March 1914, he was incumbent on the agency of the envoy of Haxthausen during its official travel to central and south China. Finally, on 8 August 1914, civil powers were transferred to the legation. Since he was in informed circles of Peking as an always welcome guest, it was decided that the Chinese empress received updates more frequently than interlocutors.

In March 1917, following the cessation of diplomatic relations between Germany and China, Krebs left Peking on 25 March 1917.Fact|date=October 2007

Return to Berlin

On 23 May 1917, he returned to Berlin. On 8 September, in the same year he was transferred due to the dissolution of the legation in Peking. This became effective on 1 January 1918. He was then appointed to temporary service with the intelligence office for the Orient (November/December 1917), where he was assigned to the coding service of the Foreign Office until after the First World War. Between 1921 and 1923 he worked additionally in the translating and interpreting service. He died in March 1930, at his home in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, (Lime Tree Avenue 26), of a brain impact. He was buried in the Stahnsdorfer south Westkirchhof,(Epiphanien Gartenblock I, garden place 81), under sponsorship.

Legacy

His brain was removed in 1930 by the researcher Oskar Vogt. It is still kept as an "elite brain" in the C. and O. Vogt Institute for Brain Research of the Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf (Professor Dr. K. Zilles). His private library of over 3500 volumes and writings in approximately 120 languages is kept in the National Library in Washington D.C. From the compilation and the range of literature written in the respective national languages and a language list personally written by him, Krebs mastered all the languages of today's European Union, as well as other languages such as “Egyptian” (Arabic? Coptic?), Ainu, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Burmese, Chinese, Georgian, Hebrew, Japanese, Javanese, Korean, Latin, Manchurian, Mongolian, Nivkh, Persian, Russian, Sanskrit, Syrian (Arabic? Aramaic?), Tibetan, Turkish, and Urdu. His writings and books of language studies prove that he not only learned foreign languages through his native German, but that he also used previously mastered "second languages". For example, through English he learned “Afghan” (Pashto? Dari?), Burmese, Gujarati, Hindi, Irish, Sinhalese and Portuguese, via Russian the languages Buryat, Finnish, Tartar and Ukrainian; he learned the difficult Basque exclusively through Spanish - he dealt at the same time with its dialects Guipuzcoa, Bizcaya, Laburdi and Zubero. As a "second language", beside German, Krebs predominantly used English, French, Russian, Chinese, Greek, Italian, Turkish, Latin, Spanish and Arabic for learning and improving his knowledge of a new language. The "New Testament", in 61 different languages, also played a significant role.

Works

Emil Krebs was not scientifically active and therefore, left almost no important scientific works. Worth mentioning is his extended translation of the "Chinese Shade Plays" by William Grube (Munich 1915).

ee also

*Genius
*Giuseppe Mezzofanti
*Lorenzo Hervas y Panduro
*Johan Vandewalle

External links

*
* [http://www.swr.de/wiesoweshalbwarum/archiv/2005/03/10/beitrag1.html the secret of the genius - short report over investigations of the brain of Emil Krebs]
* [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15068917&dopt=Abstract Abstract of an article of Professor Dr. K. Amunts on the Cytoarchitektonik of the brain of Emil Krebs (Pubmed)
* [http://www.weikopf.de/index.php?article_id=188 Article based on information from his family (German)]