The young German bookseller Irene Weitemeyer opened the Zeitgeist Bookstore (a branch of the Zeitgeist Bookstore, Berlin) in Shanghai in November 1930. The small store at 130 North Soochow Road (now North Suzhou Road) opposite the General Post Office still features in stories about secret service activities, in its role as a meeting place for Comintern members and agents in the Red Army secret service network in Moscow – such as Richard Sorge, or the Chinese ‘Reds‘. What is mere legend and what really happened there cannot be reconstructed beyond doubt.

Lu Xun’s circle of friends included the American writer Agnes Smedley, whom Käthe Kollwitz knew from her time in Germany (1919–1928), Ursula Hamburger (née Kuczynski, a.k.a. Ruth Werner), Rudolf Hamburger’s wife, and Irene Weitemeyer. A German woodcut exhibition organised at the Zeitgeist Bookstore presumably took place in June 1931. Ursula Hamburger helped bring the prints for Käthe Kollwitz’s exhibition from Berlin to Shanghai.

In June 1932 a further exhibition with more than 200 works by German artists, including works by Käthe Kollwitz and George Grosz, was shown at the Chinese Y.M.C.A. in Szechuan Road in the French Concession. According to a report in The China Press (June 25, 1932), the ‘proletarian‘ character of the works on display was a great inspiration for young Chinese artists.

At the end of 1932, the Berlin artist couple Julius Wentscher and Tina Haim Wentscher arrived from Bali via Beijing in Shanghai, where they also frequented the group around Rudolf and Ursula Hamburger. In December, they exhibited their work at the American Women’s Club. He showed watercolours while she showed sculptures made out of different materials, with those made from beeswax especially attracting a lot of attention. Käthe Kollwitz warned the Wentschers not to return to Germany because of their Jewish origins. They stayed in Asia for several years before travelling to Australia as Enemy Aliens from Malaysia in the early 1940s. They never returned to Germany and continued to live in Melbourne (and changed their name to Wentcher).

The impact of these exhibitions on the young generation of Chinese artists was immense. The themes of social inequality, the resistance against the national Chinese government and later against the Japanese occupiers were taken up in woodcuts and disseminated. The Chinese artist and writer Lu Xun was deeply involved in the art and artistic technique of woodcut. He saw it as a means by which pictures could be produced and reproduced quickly and easily. In a largely illiterate rural-based society, radio and image-based communication were important tools. The sheets by Käthe Kollwitz that Lu Xun bought at the time are still in Chinese archives, and artistic works from the 1930s clearly show the impact of Kollwitz’s and Grosz’s work.