Red China Expert Pringsheim Has International Background
Page 5
By Jerry Musil
German by birth, American by choice and Oriental by education. This is KU's new Communist China expert and instructor in the political science department, Klaus Pringsheim.
He is a tall young man with unruly black hair, sparkling green eyes and an easy smile which say, "Let's talk."
Born in Berlin, Germany, in 1923, he and his family left there for political reasons when Hitler began his rise to power.
After spending six years in England, his family moved to Japan where his father became symphony conductor at the Imperial Academy of Music. They remained in Japan during World War II.
His uncle, Thomas Mann, the author, was a leader of an anti-Fascist movement abroad and his family was known to be in sympathy with the movement. The Germans wanted revenge and denounced him as a spy to the Japanese government.
BEING A German citizen, he was drafted by the Army of the Third Reich, but refused to return to Germany because of political reasons. The Nazi regime started desertion proceedings against him and sentenced him to death in absentia.
Because of his father's position with the Imperial Japanese Government, he was viewed as a political refugee, even though Japan was an ally of Germany.
He was arrested in 1944 by the Japanese and imprisoned until after the war. Shortly after his arrest the government began investigating the German charges.
"THE ONLY reason I came out alive was my extremely good luck," he said.
The spy trial was about to begin when the first prosecutor in the case and all the evidence went up in flames from an American bomb.
The second prosecutor was married and had three children. He feared a fate similar to that of the first prosecutor—death. He resigned and took his family to the mountains.
The third prosecutor began investigating, but was interrupted by the end of the war. After being released, Mr. Pringsheim worked for Gen. MacArthur as a translator and censor of the Japanese press. (Mr. Pringsheim speaks six languages: Chinese, Russian, French, Japanese, English and German. He speaks the latter three best.)
Monday, March 19, 1962 University Daily Kansan
HE CAME TO THE United States in 1946 and went to live with his uncle, Thomas Mann, in Southern California. He worked at the University of Southern California translating Chinese and Japanese books, but could not make the grade as a student. He then had a series of false starts—taxi cab driver and salesman, man.
In 1948 he joined the Army where he taught Japanese to officers and enlisted men in the language school in Monterey, California, for three years.
After another false start as a writer of technical handbooks for the aircraft industry, he enrolled at UCLA at the age of 30. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in political science in two and one-half years and decided to go to graduate school.
When the GI Bill benefits ran out.
Mr. Pringsheim's luck came through again. He received a Ford Foundation grant which enabled him to continue his studies.
HE RECEIVED five consecutive Ford grants from 1956 to 1961. He has received his Masters of Arts
degree from Columbia University in New York and has partially completed his dissertation for his doctorate.
He credits the Ford help to his concentration on the Chinese Communist area. His dissertation is a study of the Communist Youth League on the China mainland.
He arrived at KU after spending two years in Hong Kong where he did most of his research for his dissertation.
Klaus Pringsheim
Mr. Pringsheim has praised the KU administration for its foresight in developing an East Asian area program.
"Those of us here already intend to work very hard to put KU on the map in East Asian studies," he continued.
"IF THE POLICY continues, the University of Kansas should soon be one of the few institutions which has a full staff of East Asian specialists," he said.
He said he gets all his material from the American Consulate General in Hong Kong. The Consulate translates the most important articles from the Chinese Communist press as a free service for governmental offices and scholars.
He said he has collected about $2,000 worth of Communist periodicals dating from the beginning of the regime in 1949.
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