Friedrich Karl Georg Rumpf

Vocation

Family

German draftsman, folklorist and Japanologist, also known as Fritz Rumpf junior, who was the son of the Potsdam painter Fritz Rumpf. He grew up in Potsdam and learned the Japanese language as a 15-year-old from a Japanese officer at the Potsdam War School. After middle school, he studied at the Royal Art School Berlin with Philipp Franck and passed the exam as a drawing teacher. He joined the military as a one-year volunteer, and served from 1907 to 1908 in Tsingtau, China. After military service, he moved to Japan, where he learned about Japanese colour woodcuts with Igami Bonkotsu (1875-1933). From 1910 he continued his studies at the Royal School of Art under Emil Orlik. In 1911-1912 he studied, together with his younger brother Andreas, the later classical archaeologist, in Paris. But Paris bored him, he longed for East Asia. In 1913 he travelled again to a reserve exercise in China and after its completion again to Japan. At the beginning of the First World War he was drafted as a sergeant of the reserve for heavy battery or reserve field battery in Tsingtau. After the German surrender before the Imperial Japanese Army in November 1914, he went into Japanese captivity and was interned in the camps Ōita and Narashino. In the Ōita camp he collaborated with the Lübeck illustrator and graphic artist Charles Derlien (1891-1963) to create the Oita yellow book with rhymes and illustrations about camp life. The Oita yellow book was first printed in the camp Narashino and it was only in early 1920 that he was released from captivity. Returning to Germany, in the same year he married Alice Heller, his girlfriend since their years at art school. In 1925 he took up the study of art history with Adolph Goldschmidt at the University of Berlin after passing his examination. In 1931, under Otto Kümmel he wrote his PhD dissertation on The Isemonogatari of 1608. He was an employee of the Japan Institute Berlin in 1926, for which he undertook several trips to Japan. During the journey in 1927-1928 he was accompanied by the art collector Felix Tikotin. In 1940, due to his language skills, he served in the military at the foreign letter centre, first in Berlin, then, until 1944, in Paris. He died on 13 May 1949 in Potsdam, aged 61. Link to Wikipedia biography (German)