Richard Hertz
Richard Hertz, ambassador of West Germany to Korea, was born in 1898, in the very midst of Germany's greatest age. Wilhelm I had embraced Bismarck's blood-and-iron policy, forged a powerful army, crushed the rival Austrian Empire, and unified Germany; victory in the war that followed, against Napoleon III of France, brought Alsace-Lorraine into the empire, and Germany then vied with Britain for the place of Europe's supreme power.
Hertz was born under Wilhelm II, grandson of Wilhelm I. Richard, child of a prosperous house, passed a happy boyhood. For a time the German Empire was stable and abundant, overflowing with the confidence that it could overtake Britain and stand as the first nation of Europe. Britain might be the richer country, people told themselves, but in the education of its citizens and in their welfare, Germany was the better of the two.
That season of glory did not last. In 1914, the year Richard turned sixteen, Wilhelm II declared war. The First World War had begun.
The war ended, absurdly, after four years. Germany had occupied French soil and fought well against the Entente of Russia, France, Britain, and the United States. Not a single boot from the armies of those four nations had stepped onto German territory, and the German people believed, as a matter of course, that Germany was winning. Then the emperor surrendered. Sailors rose in mutiny, the monarchy was abolished, and a republic was born. The victorious powers demanded staggering reparations of defeated Germany.
Richard, a young man in his early twenties working at the Foreign Office of the German Empire, was thrown into tremendous confusion by a world that had changed overnight. Faith in everything shook beneath him. In the end Hertz went so far as to convert to Lutheranism.
In 1927 he became a diplomat of the Weimar Republic and was posted as vice-consul to Singapore. Leaving a Germany dizzy with runaway inflation and political chaos steadied both his mind and his body, and in Singapore he met the man who would heal his inner turmoil: Pablo Neruda, later a Nobel laureate in literature, then serving as Chile's honorary consul. Richard, who had an artistic bent to begin with, grew close to Neruda and sharpened both his sensibility and his eye. He grew interested, too, in the singular history, philosophy, and art of the East.
Perhaps his fate was already bound to Asia. Arriving in an unfamiliar Orient that had never concerned him, he found his eyes opened anew. Absorbed not only in Eastern art but in Eastern thought, philosophy, and history, he sank deeper into the continent. He took a keen interest even in Indonesia, then a Dutch colony, and reported home on the grave racial discrimination there.
After five years in Asia, Richard was recalled in 1932. While he was serving in Section II of the Foreign Office on Wilhelmstrasse, Adolf Hitler came to power, and in August 1933 Hertz swore him an oath of loyalty. Back in Germany his heart grew uneasy and dark again. In February 1937 he was dispatched as consul general to Chicago; a month after he took up the post, orders suddenly came recalling him home. Richard refused. He did not want to return to a Germany ruled by Hitler. He did not trust the man, and he feared him.
It was the right choice. Hertz did not know it, but he was of Jewish blood; had he gone back to Germany, he would have been a dead man. His revulsion toward Hitler drove him into exile, and he took a professorship at the University of Dubuque in Iowa. The unease and loathing he had felt proved exact. Two years later, in 1939, Hitler started a war, and after six years and more than fifty million casualties it came to an end. From America, Richard watched with a heavy heart as the homeland that had unleashed that hideous war was torn in two, East and West.
It pained him, but he thought it could not be helped. His country had committed a great crime against the world and sacrificed innumerable lives; it deserved such punishment. Yet when the homeland called him again, he followed gladly—not from any wish to resurrect the mighty German Empire of his childhood, but because he wanted to help a country that would starve if American aid did not come at once. He became a diplomat once more, of West Germany, or more precisely of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, and served as consul general in Los Angeles.
Then the fate that bound him to the East stirred again. On October 10, 1957, he came to Seoul, received President Syngman Rhee's agrément for his posting, and began his duties. Back in Asia, Richard's mind grew easy once more. He was fifty-nine when he arrived—no small age for work in a backward country whose medical care was wanting—yet he felt an affection for the land called Korea. Like Germany, it had been made a sacrifice to ideology, split in half, and left a ruin by war. Shortages of food, wretched sanitation, an oppressive regime: to him Korea looked like the confused Germany just after the First World War and the confused Germany just after the Second, laid one upon the other.
Even amid all that, Richard took an interest in the Korean artists who went on burning with the spirit of their art. He sponsored them and held exhibitions for them, and he bought old Korean works and gathered them in Room 300 of the Bando Hotel, his office.
To Richard, Koreans were dynamic, attractive people. They lived on the foundation of a native culture they had kept for thousands of years, and at the same time they worked eagerly to take in the Western civilization of which America was the emblem. His keen artistic eye caught that tension in Korean painting. The contradictory heart of a people who wished to keep their own culture, and yet had to accept the culture of the West if they were to live well, had been dissolved into the pictures of a painter named Park Nae-hyeon.
A few days earlier, Lee Ki-jo had brought that very woman painter to him and made the introduction. In the coffee shop of the Bando Hotel, Richard was able to talk at length with Park Nae-hyeon, the artist he admired, and with her husband, the painter Kim Ki-chang.
How did he know... that I love that painter's work...
Richard could only marvel. Whatever Lee Ki-jo undertook seemed to strike dead-center at his tastes. He had also introduced Jeon Hyeong-pil, Korea's foremost collector of antiquities, and let him spend long hours viewing the man's private collection. It was truly astonishing. No one had read his artistic tastes this way since Pablo Neruda in Singapore.
But as his liking for Lee Ki-jo grew, so did his wariness. Richard was a man seasoned to the bone by decades abroad as diplomat and professor. As a rule, locals who approached a diplomat came for their own advantage, and businessmen most of all. Yet the feeling that came off the man called Lee Ki-jo was unlike that of any ordinary man of business.
With curiosity and caution crossing in him, Richard instructed a Korean member of the German embassy staff to gather the talk about Lee Ki-jo. A few days later a report of five pages was delivered into his hands. Reading it, he grew still more certain that Ki-jo was no simple businessman. He did not seem a man who did business merely to grow rich. His treatment of his employees, and the way he ran his company, differed from other Korean businessmen. That anyone in Korea should actually observe the Labor Standards Act was, in itself, a shock.
Even the Germans, famous for keeping the law, had endured long and terrible labor pains before that law took root. So fierce had the struggle been that, before Hitler came to power, unions flying red flags had fought furiously against government and employers—and had gone on fighting even after the emperor was deposed and a republic stood in his place. That such a man should appear in Korea, a country with neither that history of labor struggle nor any long experience of capitalism, was enough to astonish. Moreover, in 1957, before Richard himself took up his post, a typhoon had left its victims behind, and Ki-jo had relieved them out of his own pocket.
Richard decided to summon him and talk. He wanted to hear, frankly, why the man was drawing near.
Sunday, April 5, 1959. Summoned by Ambassador Hertz, Ki-jo made his way to the Bando Hotel. He knew a great deal about Richard Hertz: that he was a German of Jewish descent, born in the days of the German Empire; that he had served as a diplomat in Asia and in America and cared deeply for art—and even when the man would die, and why. He had arranged matters accordingly, introducing Park Nae-hyeon and Kim Ki-chang and seeing to it that Hertz could view Jeon Hyeong-pil's collection of antiquities.
Of all the diplomats Ki-jo had courted, Richard Hertz was far and away the one on whom he had lavished the most care. It could not be otherwise. At present, the only country Korea could lean on was West Germany.
By the 1950s West Germany had become the advanced nation growing fastest in the free world. The growth of its industrial production had reached 25.0 percent in 1950 and 18.1 percent in 1951, and it held at a high level all through the decade. As a result, West German industrial capacity now stood at two and a half times what it had been in 1950, and GDP had grown by seventy percent. Unemployment had fallen from 10.3 percent to 1.2 percent—and that even after an influx of 16.5 million workers: Germans driven home from abroad after the war, people who had fled East Germany, and released prisoners of war whom the various countries had been holding. West Germany in the 1950s was a country displaying an enormous economic miracle. Its foreign reserves reached eight billion dollars, eight times Japan's.
The revival called the Miracle on the Rhine owed something to the efforts of West Germans themselves, but it owed still more to America's unqualified support. When the Second World War ended, the United States provided West Germany with 1.4 billion dollars in loans under the Marshall Plan. A quarter of a million American troops were stationed there, and the annual cost of maintaining them came to 2.4 billion dollars. With a loan of 1.4 billion dollars and 2.4 billion a year in garrison costs pouring into the country, a West Germany already superb in science and in the making of things could not help but rise like a wildfire.
America, for its part, gave itself wholly to reviving a West Germany that had once been its enemy. West Germany bordered East Germany and stood on the front line of Western Europe, holding the communist states back. Without West Germany there was no Western Europe, and so it was only natural that America should lavish such care upon it.
And above all, what gave Ki-jo his hopes of West Germany was this: in the 1950s the country was rich, and remarkably generous about transferring technology abroad. Perhaps because it bore the original sin of two world wars, West Germany often showed itself exceedingly lenient toward other nations. It behaved, too, as if anticommunism were the national creed—enough that one might have called it the South Korea of Europe. If a country of the free world was fighting the communist bloc, Bonn was quick to support it with technology and capital. That policy sprang from a practical desperation. Alone, West Germany could not hold off the Soviet Union and its satellites, and West German politicians and businessmen shared the conviction that unless they bound themselves tightly to the free world, they could not survive. So they were warmly disposed toward Korea, a fellow divided nation fighting a communist state.
From the late 1950s through the 1960s was the perfect season in which to make use of West Germany. Once Japan rose and the United States began to keep its allies in check, West Germany too would lose its room to be generous. And as the sense of Cold War crisis that would crest in 1968 gradually thinned through the 1970s, the fellow-feeling of anticommunist nations would fade as well.
Richard Hertz was the thread that would join West Germany to Ki-jo.
He stopped the car in front of the Bando Hotel and picked up the papers he had set on the seat beside him. They set out why a fertilizer plant had to be built in Korea, and why there was no fear that a West German loan of tens of millions of dollars would simply be made off with. They were material for dealing, effectively, with cool and rational Germans.
A folder full of facts, statistics, and reasoned analysis in his hand, Ki-jo stepped out of the car and climbed slowly toward Room 300 of the Bando Hotel.