Talk:Eva Sandberg Xiao

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Eva Sandberg (her name was Eva Siao after she became a Chinese citizen in 1964) was born November 8, 1911, in Breslau, and she died in Beijing November 29, 2001. Her fate after release from prison is very well known. Just have a look at the German Wikipedia. She has been a very famous photographer in China and in Germany and two films about her life and work were made in the late 80ies. Her photographical works are kept today in the "Museum Ludwig" in Cologne. Especially her autobiography "China - mein Traum, mein Leben" (China - my dream and my life) became a bestseller in Germany. So I think, somebody should add some informations from the German Wikipedia. Best greetings from German Wikipedia, 130.60.70.14 (talk) 14:28, 2 February 2010 (UTC) Please have a look at the Website www.eva-siao.de too. 130.60.70.14 (talk) 14:31, 2 February 2010 (UTC) Eva Sandberg was born in 1911 into a Jewish middle class family in Pomerania. Her father was a medical doctor and her elder brother, Herbert, became a renowned conductor with the Stockholm Royal Opera House. She became Eva Siao after her marriage to the renowned Chinese poet, friend and comrade of Mao TseTung, Emi Siao. She died in Beijing 2001.

She became a renowned photographer in China and in Germany and two films about her life and work were made in the late 80s. Much of her photographic work is today archived in the "Museum Ludwig" in Cologne. Her autobiography "China - mein Traum, mein Leben" (China - my dream and my life) became a bestseller in Germany.

China – Mein Traum, Mein Leben (China – My Dream, My Life by Eva Siao nee Sandberg.

Eva Sandberg was born in 1911 into a Jewish middle class family in Pomerania. Her father was a medical doctor and her elder brother, Herbert, became a renowned conductor with the Stockholm Royal Opera House. She became Eva Siao after her marriage to the renowned Chinese poet, friend and comrade of Mao TseTung, Emi Siao. She died in Beijing 2001.

She became a renowned photographer in China and in Germany and two films about her life and work were made in the late 80s. Much of her photographic work is today archived in the "Museum Ludwig" in Cologne. Her autobiography "China - mein Traum, mein Leben" (China - my dream and my life) became a bestseller in Germany.

She studied photography and film from 29-30 at the Munich State Film and Photography College, but after completing her studies found it impossible to find work – at the time no women were employed as camera people or even assistants in the film industry. By the early thirties she was very much influenced by a young German Zionist, Helmut, who wished to go with her to Palestine, but she was reluctant. He later settled there. In 1930 she went to Stockholm where her brother was already based, working with the conductor Leo Blech. In Stockholm she found work as an assistant with a Russian émigré who ran a photo studio there. In 1933 Hitler came to power. That same year, influenced by a young, passionate Swede, who had returned in the holiday break from his studies in Moscow. He fired her imagination about this ‘new socialist state’, and she applied for a tourist visa to the Soviet Union and spent some time there. Meeting the famous writer Isaak Babel, with who she became close friends, as well as other writers including eh Chinese poet, Emi Siao, with whom she fell immediately in love. Emi was already married to a Russian woman, although separated, and they had one son. He was in exile in Moscow after fleeing Chiang Kai Shek’s pogroms of communists. Emi was, at the time, a close friend of Mao Tse Tung with whom he had been to school. They decided to get married, but by 1935 her visa had run out and she was forced to return to Stockholm, but later in that same year Herbert had a concert tour in the Soviet Union and she was able to accompany him and was given a new tourist visum for the Soviet Union. In 1935 she also became friends with the well-known dramatist Friedrich Wolf and family and they remained life-long friends. Emi and Eva married in Moscow in 1935. Because she was Jewish and with a German passport which was now more of a handicap than advantage, she took on Soviet citizenship. The Soviet Union, she said, became her second homeland. She and Emi had a son, Lion, while in the Soviet Union. Although life in the Soviet Union at this time was far from luxurious and for someone like Eva, who was used to the relatively high standards of living in both Sweden and Germany, daily life was a struggle. However, this in no way disenchanted her; she was in love and full of optimism. The waves of arrests and executions unleashed by Stalin in 1936 came as a profound shock, particularly as some of her close friends, including Isaak babel were caught up in the purges. In 1939 Emi returned to China to join Mao’s 8th route army in the mountains of Yan’an. Eventually she obtained permission from Moscow to travel to China with her son to join Emi in the mountains, where the partisans were obliged to live in caves to escape Chiang Kai Shek’s aerial bombardments. It was there in 1941 that she gave birth to her second son, Victor or Vitya. Her last son, Heping, was born in China in 1951. The privation in the mountains was extreme, particularly for a young woman who spoke no Chinese and with a small child. Added to that was that she was pregnant again and gave birth to a second son in the bare cave they were living in. Largely as a result of the domestic difficulties – she felt not only isolated but rather useless, while Emi was fully occupied with political and organisational work – she and Emi became estranged and she left in November 1944 with the children. As a Soviet citizen, she travelled back to the Soviet Union which was at the time in the throes of war with Nazi Germany. Because much of the country was under German occupation, she, alongside many other refugees was quartered by the Red Cross in Shymkent, Kazakhstan, where she spent 5 years with almost nothing to live on; food and all other consumer products were scarce to non-existent. There she almost died of typhus and was in a coma for 10 days, but survived. She eked out an existence as a freelance family portrait photographer. In 1946, after the war was over, she was able to write and receive mail from outside. In October 1947 she was able to leave Shymkent for Moscow and from there was obliged to go to Chernowitz, Slovenia (formerly Austrian but then under Soviet control). In April 1949 she met Emi again, after five years, in Moscow and their old love was reignited. In July 1949 she and the children left for China to join him there. She would spend the rest of her life in China, devoting her life to making a photographic record of life in this, in the West, largely unknown country. She also documented life in Tibet at the point of enormous change after the revolution and under China’s control. Her life in China brought her into contact with numerous leading personalities from around the world, not only Mao Tse Dong and Chou en Lai, but the American Anna Louise Strong, Pablo Neruda, Cartier Bresson, Joris Ivens and many others. She became recognised as an extremely talented photographer and the foremost documentarian of Chinese life after the revolution. During the Cultural Revolution, she and her husband Emi spent years in prison. Her memoir, China, my Dream, My Life, reveals her as a largely un-political or un-ideological, more instinctive supporter of socialism. Her motivation was clearly humanitarian, a belief in justice and solidarity. In many ways her naivety informed her photographic attitudes and endowed them with a genuine sense of real life, life caught unawares. Through the high standing of her husband she enjoyed a privileged existence until he, too, fell under the wheels of the Cultural Revolution. She reveals the momentous achievements wrought by socialism in China but she also documents the conflicts with the dogmatists and the narrow-minded, the deformations and tragedies that Mao’s authoritarian intransigence brought about.

With the rising tide of chaos in China as a result of the Cultural Revolution, everyone comes under suspicion, but particularly the intellectuals and foreigners who are seen as spies. In 1967 both Eva Siao and her husband Emi are arrested. They are interrogated weekly and are kept in solitary confinement. They will spend 7 years in solitary confinement in Mao’s prisons before being released into virtual house arrest 1974. It was only in 1976 with the downfall the ‘Gang of Four’ that they were finally given their freedom once more. In 1979 they were both completely rehabilitated, compensated and provided with generous state support, although in the meantime Emi Siao’s health had become seriously undermined and he died in 1983. Eva died in November 2001 in Beijing