Authors: Michael Erard
One day, an exacting Chinese imperial
official inquired who in the German legation was writing such elegant Chinese documents. It was Krebs. From then on, the Empress Dowager Cixi often invited him for tea, which they drank out of translucent porcelain cups. She “preferred to converse with him as the most careful and best Chinese speaker among the foreigners.” Chinese authorities asked him questions about the languages in their
realm (Chinese, Mongolian, Manchurian, Tibetan)—because they had no tradition of polyglottery, they wouldn’t have known these languages themselves. One story told about Krebs is that Chinese officials, unable to read a letter sent from a rebel Mongolian tribe, asked Krebs to translate it.
“Throughout Chinese history,” said Victor Mair, a Sinologist at the University of Pennsylvania, “practically
the only Chinese who learned Sanskrit were a few monks who actually traveled to India and stayed there for an extended period of time. Merchants and others (e.g., some officials who traveled widely within China) learned several Sinitic languages (so-called ‘dialects’) in the various places where they went. There was no interest in learning other languages out of sheer intellectual or linguistic
curiosity.” Steven Owen, a Harvard professor of Chinese literature,
added that some of the Chinese population learned Manchu when the Qing ruled China (from 1644 to 1911), but that they were specialists working for the emperor.
“As an intellectual endeavor,” Owen said, “meaning learning languages that are not proximate or needed, with an attendant interest in the culture—I don’t know of any cases
among the educated [Chinese] elite before modern times.”
One reason was most certainly cultural. In the West, polyglottery had its earliest roots in Christianity, which was, from the start, an evangelical religion with no single language (Jesus himself spoke Aramaic and Hebrew, and maybe Greek) and whose central text was propagated in many languages. Polyglottery also stemmed from European exploration,
colonization, and empire building. By contrast, in China, the main pursuit of the intellectual class for thousands of years had been trying to either join or rise up in the civil service. This required such extensive literacy—being able to read and write upward of one hundred thousand characters—little time was left for much else. Moreover, the one writing system itself linked intellectual
cultures across time and space in a way that, in the West, required fluency in many languages. Perhaps most significantly, the Chinese perceived themselves to be the center of the world, so they could hardly be expected to learn barbarian languages. The barbarians should first learn some Chinese.
One shouldn’t think that the hyperpolyglot is uniquely Western, however. I was connected with a historical
document from sixteenth-century Java which outlined the responsibilities of someone called “the Polyglot,” who was a real or imagined figure in the royal court’s intelligentsia. The Polyglot held linguistic knowledge of all the communities in the Indian Ocean world that Sundanese traders might contact, as well as “all other kinds of foreign lands.” Exactly what sort of abilities this Polyglot
had in all those languages (and there were nearly five dozen of them) isn’t known. But as linguist Benjamin Zimmer noted in his fascinating analysis of this document, it provides “a striking example of the linguistic outward-lookingness that has pervaded the Indian Ocean world” for centuries before the Europeans arrived. Exactly the time and place where a hyperpolyglot would have flourished,
in other words.
In 1913, at the age of forty-five, Krebs married Amande, a German divorcee. On a honeymoon tour, at a stop at the tomb of Confucius, he read the inscriptions in Mandarin, Manchurian, Mongolian, Kalmuck, and Turkish. Frail and perpetually underpaid, Krebs (or “Krebsy,” as his wife called him) sat down the following year and wrote a list of what languages he could use—he could,
for instance, translate into and out of German in thirty-two languages.
*
Later he would be said to “know” sixty or sixty-five languages. His stepdaughter appended her own note to the list: “It is a great difference between whether one can speak, write, and master a language, or whether one is able to finish correct translations as a proven interpreter.” Be that as it may, during his lifetime he
passed government tests in Chinese, Turkish, Japanese, and Finnish, and possibly more.
Similar to other hyperpolyglots I had met or read about, one of Krebs’s most stunning traits lay in how quickly he could learn. Werner Otto von Hentig, a young German attaché in China, described how Krebs had jumped up in the middle of breakfast to find out from two strangers what language, “foreign to him,
had been battering his ear.” Armenian, he found. After ordering books, he spent two weeks on the grammar, three on old Armenian, and four on the spoken language. “Then he was a master of them too,” Hentig wrote.
If the anecdotes about Krebs’s language genius—and his obsessive passion—are as rich as those of Mezzofanti, they differ in one respect: they tell of a character who was rude and impatient.
Hentig related that Krebs once refused to speak to his wife for three months because she had told him to wear an overcoat in December; in one year, he fired
a succession of eighteen Chinese cooks, none of whom pleased him. Once, in order to satisfy a bureaucratic requirement, Krebs had to take a test in both Finnish and Japanese. He intimidated the examiner with his knowledge, scaring the man
from the room. In China, Krebs made it perfectly clear that he wanted to study languages rather than do his job (especially since he was often sleeping during the day, having stayed up all night studying).
In another revealing anecdote, Hentig described having to fetch Krebs for a meeting.
“His Excellence wants to see you!” Hentig shouted over the walls of Krebs’s compound. There was no answer.
“Herr Krebs, the legate needs you!” No answer. “The Herr Minister is asking for you!” Finally Hentig heard a grumble.
“The legate knows me, leave me in peace,” Krebs grumbled.
“May I help you get dressed?”
“Go to hell!”
“They really need you.”
“They always say that,” Krebs muttered.
One contemporary said that Krebs had never learned the “technique of life.” He was someone who could tell
you off in dozens of languages. He had translated the phrase “kiss my ass” (known as the Swabian salute) into forty languages. Something of a joker, he gave a German journalist the Chinese name Bu Zhidao, “doesn’t know.” In daily life he was so disagreeable that no one wanted to work with him, which became a liability later in his career, when no one was willing to promote him or accept his work in
languages other than Chinese.
Like Alexander Arguelles, Krebs reviewed his languages on rotation: a strict schedule that assigned Turkish to Monday, Chinese to Tuesday, Greek to Wednesday, and so on. With a book in hand, he walked around and around the dining room table from midnight to four in the morning, naked, smoking a cigar, drunk on German beer. His library was organized by language and
language group. For each book he wrote a summary, which he regularly reviewed. At his desk, he stood. He refused to eat anything but meat, and sought out social interaction only if he could use one of his languages. “He knew 32 languages, not in the way we often see with polyglots, but elegantly and well spoken in Arabic
as well as Russian or Italian,” Hentig wrote. His Tuscan dialect was so good,
the Italian ambassador in Beijing offered to cut Krebs’s hair, just to be able to hear Tuscan.
Unavoidably, writers of the time compared him to Mezzofanti, but in the eyes of German writers, Krebs was superior. “Against whatever kind of displeasing experiences are told of the Mezzofantis, who know all languages, but none fundamentally,” wrote Ferdinand Lessing, a German translator in Tsingtao
and later a professor and polyglot himself, “this wonderful talent bites its thumb.”
If they could have roamed freely once they reached New York, the Krebs family would have found a city filled with immigrants from Europe—in fact, there were more daily newspapers published in other languages (Italian, German, Hungarian, French, Croatian, Spanish, etc.) than in English at the time. In addition
to twenty-two English newspapers, there were ten Italian, seven German, seven Yiddish or Hebrew, three Greek, three Hungarian, two French, two Bohemian, two Croatian, and one apiece in Spanish, Serbian, and Syrian. Perhaps the Krebs family was detained at Ellis Island, the main through-point for immigrants arriving on the East Coast. There he could have met professional language learners who, like
himself, had been employed to deal with the polyglot huddled masses. One of these was an Italian immigrant named Anthony Frabasilis, a renowned scholar of Greek philology at the University of Athens, who was hired at Ellis Island as a Greek interpreter in 1909 and also worked in Italian, Spanish, French, German, Polish, Russian, Turkish, and Armenian. He’s said to have known fifteen languages, and
to have spoken them all well.
Starting in 1909, a civil service exam tested interpreters’ writing, reading, and speaking abilities in some (or all) of the languages in which they worked, which provides hard evidence for a cluster of real hyperpolyglots at Ellis Island. Another interpreter employed there was Reuben Volovick, a native of Russia, who knew Yiddish, Russian, Ruthenian, and many other
Slavic languages. Another was Peter Mikolainis, a Lithuanian native, who knew seven languages. They would meet with passengers, sorting and directing them through medical exams and legal
interrogations. Except in rare medical cases, the interviews were simple enough: What’s your occupation? Your race? Your ethnicity? Have you ever been an anarchist? A polygamist?
Finally, the Krebs family boarded
a ship for Europe, leaving behind Emil’s extensive library, which eventually was sold to the US Library of Congress. Back in Germany, Krebs turned to languages with full force, “surrendering to his great ambition for language study,” as his great nephew, Eckhard Hoffmann, wrote. The Foreign Office was offering 90 deutschmarks for every language that someone could speak. “You’ll be a millionaire!”
family friends told him. But officials informed Krebs that he would be restricted to testing in two languages. He made nothing for being able to read the cuneiform writings of Assyrian, Babylonian, and Sumerian.
One afternoon in March 1930, while he was translating something (what isn’t known), Krebs collapsed, and he died soon afterward. The news spread quickly, and later that day, his wife
received a chilling call: Would the family donate his brain to science? The request came from Oskar Vogt (1870–1959), a pugnacious specialist in brain anatomy and the director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research. The brain would be a fine addition to Vogt’s collection of elite brains, and the only brain of a
Sprachgenie
.
Vogt, devoted to the study of elite brains, had a trail of
scrapes and narrow escapes behind him. In 1924, he’d been invited to Moscow to study the brain of Vladimir Lenin. At the time, political maneuvering in the young Soviet Union, particularly by Joseph Stalin, saw the importance of creating and sustaining a cult of Lenin as a revolutionary supergenius. “It also appeared a brilliant idea to obtain, if possible, a confirmation of Lenin’s ‘genius’ from
some respectable source, preferably from abroad,” wrote Igor Klatzo, a biographer of Vogt and his wife, Cécile. By 1927 Vogt had soaked Lenin’s brain in formalin, embedded it in paraffin, and sliced it into 31,000 sections. From there, he faced a huge challenge: how to remain scientifically principled yet not offend his Soviet sponsors? How to explain certain features of Lenin’s brain without referencing
the fact that he might have had syphilis? (He didn’t—Lenin apparently had a family history of atherosclerosis.) And what if Lenin’s brain didn’t match other elite brains?
Vogt solved the problem by describing the rich array of pyramidal neurons in Lenin’s cortex and explaining that they must have been involved in rich imaginative, rational thinking. To great Soviet acclaim, his paper was published
in 1929, and Vogt turned to other projects.
Little did he know he would be collecting a hyperpolyglot brain the next year. He met Krebs’s sister-in-law and his stepdaughter in the church where the funeral was to be held; by law, brain extraction required family members to be present. Toni and Charlotte-Luise, who had stepped away because they couldn’t bear to watch, could hear Vogt’s hammering
and sawing. The mood must have been one of Frankensteinian gloom: the dark church; the flickering gaslight; and Vogt walking away with Krebs’s brain, jiggling in a glass jar.
It was this brain, I hoped, that would have something to say for itself.
Chapter 11
T
he brains that have added the most to our understanding of language abilities belong not to the Mezzofantis or Krebses of the world but to people who have lost those abilities. One of the more famous of these was a man named Leborgne, an epileptic laborer in Paris who had barely spoken for years when he was brought to the hospital in 1861 for an inflammation of the legs. He could only
say “tan” (though he could say it with different intonations) and gesture with his left hand. The hospital staff, and later the medical literature, knew him as Tan Tan.
When, several days later, Leborgne died, his doctor, Paul Broca, performed an autopsy and found, on the left front side of Leborgne’s brain, an area of tissue damaged by syphilis. Later, Broca collected the brains of others who
had the same broken speech as Leborgne (we now call it aphasia) and damage to the same part of the brain. This led Broca to propose, against prevailing scientific opinion, that he had found the brain’s locus for speech functions. Also contrary to ideas of the day was his proposal that speech control was located only on one side of the brain (in most people, on the left). More confirmation was needed,
but the outlines of Broca’s notion soon passed into fact. Now scientists recognize that this area is responsible for more functions than previously thought—and also that languages are controlled in other places besides “Broca’s area.” But it was an important discovery nonetheless.