On the face of it, the three characters here seem to have little in common – aside from the fact that each committed wartime acts that led some to see them as national heroes, and others as villains. All three were mythmakers, larger-than-life storytellers, for whom the truth was beside the point.
Felix Kersten was a plump Finnish pleasure-seeker who became Heinrich Himmler’s indispensable personal masseur – Himmler calling him his ‘magic Buddha’. Kersten presented himself after the war as a resistance hero who convinced Himmler to save countless people from mass murder. Kawashima Yoshiko, a gender fluid Manchu princess, spied for the Japanese secret police in China, and was mythologized by the Japanese as a heroic combination of Mata Hari and Joan of Arc. Friedrich Weinreb was a Hasidic Jew in Holland who took large amounts of money from fellow Jews in an imaginary scheme to save them from deportation, while in fact betraying some of them to the German secret police. Sentenced after the war as a traitor and a con artist, he is still regarded by supporters as the ‘Dutch Dreyfus’.
All three figures have been vilified and mythologized, out of a never-ending need, Ian Buruma argues, to see history, and particularly war, and above all World War II, as a neat tale of angels and devils. In telling their often-self-invented stories, The Collaborators offers a fascinating reconstruction of what in fact we can know about these fantasists and what will always remain out of reach. It is also an examination of the power and credibility of history: truth is always a relative concept but perhaps especially so in times of political turmoil, not unlike our own.
HMS Terrible was a Royal Navy Cruiser commissioned in the 1890s. She served on the China Station in 1900 supporting the suppression of the Boxer Uprising in northern China. Upon Terrible‘s return home in 1902, she was refitted for two years and was then placed in reserve, sporadically being activated to ferry replacements to Hong Kong and China. She later served as a troop transport in World War One, then a training ship, and then sold for scrap in 1932.
At some point in 1904 into 1905 Terrible visited Hong Kong (and Weihaiwei). A member of the crew took the photographs below…
HMS Terrible in Hong Kong Harbour (probably November and the King’s birthday)
Terrible‘s (hopefully not too terrible) hockey team
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New York Times China (and now diplomatic I think) correspondent Ed Wong’s new At the Edge of Empire (Profile Books)…
The son of Chinese immigrants in Washington, DC, Edward Wong grew up among family secrets. His father toiled in restaurants and rarely spoke of his native land or his years in the People’s Liberation Army under Mao. Yook Kearn Wong came of age during the Japanese occupation in World War II and the Communist revolution, when he fell under the spell of Mao’s promise of a powerful China. His astonishing journey as a soldier took him from Manchuria during the Korean War to Xinjiang on the Central Asian frontier. In 1962, disillusioned with the Communist Party, he planned a desperate escape to Hong Kong.
When Edward Wong became the Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times, he investigated his father’s mysterious past while assessing for himself the dream of a resurgent China. He met the citizens driving the nation’s astounding economic boom and global expansion – and grappling with the vortex of nationalistic rule under Xi Jinping, the most powerful leader since Mao. Following in his father’s footsteps, he witnessed protests and civil rights struggles in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong. And he had an insider’s view of the world’s two superpowers meeting at a perilous crossroads
All too often on this site I have the sad duty to report destruction – hutong, lilong, shikumen, temples, all manner of buildings – all lost so frequently to the bulldozer for, invariably, jerry-built high rises, endless roads or yet more half empty shopping malls. However, Qinglongqiao Railway Station in Badaling, by the Great Wall, has survived…
Below a picture by RE Baber of National Geographic from 1923 showing a train at the station and the old station sign. Below that the station in 1909, and below that the preserved station today…
