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Every Balinese knows the name of Walter Spies, a man of tremendous versatility who did inestimable good to the Island of Gods and Demons. Spies was the first in a millennia-long Balinese history to give a secular dimension to Balinese art, previously viewed as sacrifice to the gods. Painters, woodcarvers, composers and choreographers took anonymity for granted.
Spies the choreographer and film director staged the Kecak, or Monkey Chant dance, which millions of tourists flock to see (now most foreigners and even many Indonesians outside Bali firmly believe it emerged in Bali in times immemorial).
Spies the composer and performing musician invented the notation of gamelan music.
Spies the cultural activist and man of the world, a friend of Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward and Rabindranath Tagore, made Bali a fashionable health resort and a quiet retreat for celebrities to work in.
All people of Bali are connoisseurs of art, and fully appreciate what he did for their island.
He is far more obscure in Germany, which inaccurate biographers believe to be his native land. A German-language collection of Spies’ letters to friends and relatives and his friends’ accounts of him—the only available biographical information about him—“has been out of print for many years due to the lack of interest from German-speaking communities in Spies,” to quote Japanese scholar Miyuki Soejima.
Russia, his real birthplace, knows nothing at all about Spies. Content writers to tourist websites are no less careless than biographers, and repeat the same old story about his childhood and youth—and never mind the discrepancies it proffers.
Russians are never embarrassed by their short memories. Still, I think it a matter of principle to pay tribute to the memory of our undeservedly forgotten compatriot.
The Investigation Starts
Walter Spies’ biographers, with token exceptions, say his father was a German diplomat, with rare mentions of Moscow as his birthplace. I, too, was sure he was a German artist though some facts surprised me:
- What would you say of a German who lived in Moscow and the Urals for 18 out of his 28 years in Europe?
- Was it like a born and bred German to cherish memories of his family ‘dacha’ (a Russian-style country house) outside Moscow?
- Was it typical for a German’s friends to address him as Walja (Russian diminutive of Valentine)?
The final argument came with a video footage I saw on YouTube, in which John Stowell, a prominent researcher on Spies, refers to his merchant father and grandfather as German honorary consuls in Russia - though he, too, says Walter was a German.
The latter point is hardly plausible. Merchant dynasties usually naturalize in host countries for business’ sake, and honorary consuls are usually appointed from among citizens of the country of their sojourn.
Still, I had nothing to substantiate my arguments with before I got help from Sergei Belenky, a Russian in Pennsylvania, and an Internet friend with an interest in electronic archives. This was not the first time we worked together. Once, Sergei tracked down the history of botanic classification of Indonesian tall ginger. One of the Latin names of this Javanese plant is Nicolaia elatior. As Sergei found, it received the name in honor of Russian Emperor Nicholas I.
Sergei was a great help this time, too. I owe him the next two chapters.
What I Learned from My Pennsylvanian Friend
The Spies dynasty in Russia was founded by Robert Spies (1819-1897), Walter’s grandfather. The 19th century was a time of economic and cultural boom in Russia, and the government was attracting gifted and energetic foreigners, continuing the policy of Peter the Great.
The son of a trader of Elberfeld, in the east of the Ruhr Valley, Robert was one such foreigner. He moved to Russia in 1846 (or 1845, as some papers say) and eventually naturalized. In 1866, he became Merchant of the 1st Guild in Moscow—the guild that united the wealthiest businessmen. Russian citizenship was a necessary qualification for membership. The Spies belonged to the guild for many years. Certain Western sources say that Emperor Alexander II authorized the Spies family to reinstate its Prussian citizenship, so possibly the Spies’ had dual citizenship.
The Spies Co. belonged to the Russian industrial elite. It was ruled by Robert’s nephew Ernst and children Georg, Leon, Albert, Rudolf and Adele. The latter two linked the Spies through marriage with the Wogau, another prosperous merchant dynasty of Russified Germans.
1870 was a landmark year for the two companies—together they founded the Moscow Discount Bank and joined Austrian industrialist De Valbell as partners in the Laferm tobacco factory in St. Petersburg, which eventually became purveyor to the Imperial court. Presently, it is the prosperous Petro tobacco company. The Spies were creative financiers. Tobacco export and import brought them an industrial and commercial empire—the Laferm joint stock company with 14 factories in every part of Russia, plus two subsidiaries, Stucken & Spies and Spies & Pren.
The company also imported cotton and natural dyes, mainly indigo, in the 1850s. It held major stock in the Ducat tobacco works in Moscow, the Franz Rabeneck dye-house, the Myshega iron-and-steel plant and sawmill, the Cherepovets iron-and-steel plant, the Stroem chemical industrial company, the Warsaw-based Strzemeszice chemical and superphosphate manufacturers, and the Anchor insurers of Moscow. The Spies possessed a sugar refining chain in the Kiev and Podolia provinces of Ukraine—the Kiev Lump Sugar Works and the Kalnik, Romanovsky and Yaropovich sugar refineries. They had major interests in the Caucasus, too, with the Kazbek Syndicate of tobacco industry, oil derricks in Grozny, plus drilling equipment manufacturing.
Walter Spies was born into this affluent family on September 15, 1895.
Leon, his father and one of the sons of Robert, belonged to Russia’s foremost tycoons—a 1st guild merchant, and manager and co-proprietor of the Spies&Pren, the Spies Co. commercial intermediary arm.
The origin of the misunderstanding due to which Leon Spies and his brothers and children are considered German nationals is clear—Leon followed in his father’s footsteps as German honorary vice-consul in Moscow. Other errors come thence—in particular, references to Walter as the son of a diplomat.
Generally, honorary consuls are not on the diplomatic staff. They merely accept certain diplomatic duties as a symbolical appointment aiming to maintain the contacts of an ethnic community with its ancestral country. Russia and many other countries maintain this practice today.
World War I put an abrupt end to the Spies’ industry and trade.
The Adolescence of Walter Spies
Walter Spies grew up in Moscow, displaying gifts for botany, zoology, music, dancing and painting. Many members of his family were richly endowed. Four of them were men of the arts. Celebrities, notably Scriabin, Rachmaninoff and Maxim Gorky, frequented Leon Spies’ salon.
Walter went to Dresden to continue his education in 1910. That was his first encounter with German culture, which was at that time the stronghold of modernist trends—Futurism, Expressionism and Cubism. He got more infatuated with Scriabin with every passing day, and called him “my God”. Walter’s first endeavors at composition were atonal, following his trailblazer idol.
The boy spent his vacations with his parents in Moscow. The outbreak of the war, in 1914, resulted in this move.
The Spies family was interned in Moscow, eventually to emigrate. Walter stayed in Moscow for a year, after which he was interned as he came of age (twenty was the conscription age in Russia at that time) and sent to live in Sterlitamak, a Bashkir steppe land town in the Ural foothills. He became enthusiastic about local customs and folk music. He retained lifelong admiration for the simple ways and inimitable tunes of the Tatar, Bashkir and Kirghiz.
Walter spent a year in an internee camp, and later was allowed to rent rooms in a Tatar household, whose children he taught music. He notated folk tunes, took up drawing and arranged concerts with German internee engineers. His cheerful and humorous letters to his family describe those amateur concerts, his long walks, local landscapes, and studies of the Tatar and Kirghiz languages and Arabic literature. The letters are imbued with admiration for local people’s simplicity and frankness. “If people were emptier, how much of God could flow into them!” he exclaimed in one of them.
East Meets West
“His amazing versatility and connection with Javanese and Balinese cultures may represent one of the most fruitful encounters between East and West,” Soejima says about Walter Spies.
The basis for this encounter was laid in the Urals, where the young Muscovite saw a unique multiethnic atmosphere, a conglomeration of Tatar, Bashkir, Kirghiz and other indigenous cultures.
The Ural land of that time was not a melting pot leveling out the diversity of indigenous cultures. Rather, they retained their identity in parallel development. The situation prepared Walter for the role he later played in Bali.
There was another major difference between Ural and West European art. “No one knew who wrote the songs that they had sung for many generations. Spies began to believe that ‘in most folk art, truth is hidden in anonymous works’,” Soejima says. The situation Walter saw in Bali fully repeated what he had found in the Urals.
Walter was especially enthusiastic about Bashkir folk music. “I have never heard anything so beautiful before,” he said in a letter.
His opinion of Kirghiz culture was just as high. “You don’t know at all, how much these things touch me. Such calm and clear meanings, which go so straight into the truth,” he wrote in another letter.
Walter was allowed to return to Moscow at the end of 1917, soon after the Bolshevik Revolution. He left stormy Russia for Germany in October 1918 to settle in Dresden and later move to Berlin.
His ancestral land did not bring him self-fulfillment, though the five years he spent in Germany were eventful enough to base a film or a novel on. A mere chronological account is long enough to make a chapter in this essay.
He is far more obscure in Germany, which inaccurate biographers believe to be his native land. A German-language collection of Spies’ letters to friends and relatives and his friends’ accounts of him—the only available biographical information about him—“has been out of print for many years due to the lack of interest from German-speaking communities in Spies,” to quote Japanese scholar Miyuki Soejima.
Russia, his real birthplace, knows nothing at all about Spies. Content writers to tourist websites are no less careless than biographers, and repeat the same old story about his childhood and youth—and never mind the discrepancies it proffers.
Russians are never embarrassed by their short memories. Still, I think it a matter of principle to pay tribute to the memory of our undeservedly forgotten compatriot.
The Investigation Starts
Walter Spies’ biographers, with token exceptions, say his father was a German diplomat, with rare mentions of Moscow as his birthplace. I, too, was sure he was a German artist though some facts surprised me:
- What would you say of a German who lived in Moscow and the Urals for 18 out of his 28 years in Europe?
- Was it like a born and bred German to cherish memories of his family ‘dacha’ (a Russian-style country house) outside Moscow?
- Was it typical for a German’s friends to address him as Walja (Russian diminutive of Valentine)?
The final argument came with a video footage I saw on YouTube, in which John Stowell, a prominent researcher on Spies, refers to his merchant father and grandfather as German honorary consuls in Russia - though he, too, says Walter was a German.
The latter point is hardly plausible. Merchant dynasties usually naturalize in host countries for business’ sake, and honorary consuls are usually appointed from among citizens of the country of their sojourn.
Still, I had nothing to substantiate my arguments with before I got help from Sergei Belenky, a Russian in Pennsylvania, and an Internet friend with an interest in electronic archives. This was not the first time we worked together. Once, Sergei tracked down the history of botanic classification of Indonesian tall ginger. One of the Latin names of this Javanese plant is Nicolaia elatior. As Sergei found, it received the name in honor of Russian Emperor Nicholas I.
Sergei was a great help this time, too. I owe him the next two chapters.
What I Learned from My Pennsylvanian Friend
The Spies dynasty in Russia was founded by Robert Spies (1819-1897), Walter’s grandfather. The 19th century was a time of economic and cultural boom in Russia, and the government was attracting gifted and energetic foreigners, continuing the policy of Peter the Great.
The son of a trader of Elberfeld, in the east of the Ruhr Valley, Robert was one such foreigner. He moved to Russia in 1846 (or 1845, as some papers say) and eventually naturalized. In 1866, he became Merchant of the 1st Guild in Moscow—the guild that united the wealthiest businessmen. Russian citizenship was a necessary qualification for membership. The Spies belonged to the guild for many years. Certain Western sources say that Emperor Alexander II authorized the Spies family to reinstate its Prussian citizenship, so possibly the Spies’ had dual citizenship.
The Spies Co. belonged to the Russian industrial elite. It was ruled by Robert’s nephew Ernst and children Georg, Leon, Albert, Rudolf and Adele. The latter two linked the Spies through marriage with the Wogau, another prosperous merchant dynasty of Russified Germans.
1870 was a landmark year for the two companies—together they founded the Moscow Discount Bank and joined Austrian industrialist De Valbell as partners in the Laferm tobacco factory in St. Petersburg, which eventually became purveyor to the Imperial court. Presently, it is the prosperous Petro tobacco company. The Spies were creative financiers. Tobacco export and import brought them an industrial and commercial empire—the Laferm joint stock company with 14 factories in every part of Russia, plus two subsidiaries, Stucken & Spies and Spies & Pren.
The company also imported cotton and natural dyes, mainly indigo, in the 1850s. It held major stock in the Ducat tobacco works in Moscow, the Franz Rabeneck dye-house, the Myshega iron-and-steel plant and sawmill, the Cherepovets iron-and-steel plant, the Stroem chemical industrial company, the Warsaw-based Strzemeszice chemical and superphosphate manufacturers, and the Anchor insurers of Moscow. The Spies possessed a sugar refining chain in the Kiev and Podolia provinces of Ukraine—the Kiev Lump Sugar Works and the Kalnik, Romanovsky and Yaropovich sugar refineries. They had major interests in the Caucasus, too, with the Kazbek Syndicate of tobacco industry, oil derricks in Grozny, plus drilling equipment manufacturing.
Walter Spies was born into this affluent family on September 15, 1895.
Leon, his father and one of the sons of Robert, belonged to Russia’s foremost tycoons—a 1st guild merchant, and manager and co-proprietor of the Spies&Pren, the Spies Co. commercial intermediary arm.
The origin of the misunderstanding due to which Leon Spies and his brothers and children are considered German nationals is clear—Leon followed in his father’s footsteps as German honorary vice-consul in Moscow. Other errors come thence—in particular, references to Walter as the son of a diplomat.
Generally, honorary consuls are not on the diplomatic staff. They merely accept certain diplomatic duties as a symbolical appointment aiming to maintain the contacts of an ethnic community with its ancestral country. Russia and many other countries maintain this practice today.
World War I put an abrupt end to the Spies’ industry and trade.
The Adolescence of Walter Spies
Walter Spies grew up in Moscow, displaying gifts for botany, zoology, music, dancing and painting. Many members of his family were richly endowed. Four of them were men of the arts. Celebrities, notably Scriabin, Rachmaninoff and Maxim Gorky, frequented Leon Spies’ salon.
Walter went to Dresden to continue his education in 1910. That was his first encounter with German culture, which was at that time the stronghold of modernist trends—Futurism, Expressionism and Cubism. He got more infatuated with Scriabin with every passing day, and called him “my God”. Walter’s first endeavors at composition were atonal, following his trailblazer idol.
The boy spent his vacations with his parents in Moscow. The outbreak of the war, in 1914, resulted in this move.
The Spies family was interned in Moscow, eventually to emigrate. Walter stayed in Moscow for a year, after which he was interned as he came of age (twenty was the conscription age in Russia at that time) and sent to live in Sterlitamak, a Bashkir steppe land town in the Ural foothills. He became enthusiastic about local customs and folk music. He retained lifelong admiration for the simple ways and inimitable tunes of the Tatar, Bashkir and Kirghiz.
Walter spent a year in an internee camp, and later was allowed to rent rooms in a Tatar household, whose children he taught music. He notated folk tunes, took up drawing and arranged concerts with German internee engineers. His cheerful and humorous letters to his family describe those amateur concerts, his long walks, local landscapes, and studies of the Tatar and Kirghiz languages and Arabic literature. The letters are imbued with admiration for local people’s simplicity and frankness. “If people were emptier, how much of God could flow into them!” he exclaimed in one of them.
East Meets West
“His amazing versatility and connection with Javanese and Balinese cultures may represent one of the most fruitful encounters between East and West,” Soejima says about Walter Spies.
The basis for this encounter was laid in the Urals, where the young Muscovite saw a unique multiethnic atmosphere, a conglomeration of Tatar, Bashkir, Kirghiz and other indigenous cultures.
The Ural land of that time was not a melting pot leveling out the diversity of indigenous cultures. Rather, they retained their identity in parallel development. The situation prepared Walter for the role he later played in Bali.
There was another major difference between Ural and West European art. “No one knew who wrote the songs that they had sung for many generations. Spies began to believe that ‘in most folk art, truth is hidden in anonymous works’,” Soejima says. The situation Walter saw in Bali fully repeated what he had found in the Urals.
Walter was especially enthusiastic about Bashkir folk music. “I have never heard anything so beautiful before,” he said in a letter.
His opinion of Kirghiz culture was just as high. “You don’t know at all, how much these things touch me. Such calm and clear meanings, which go so straight into the truth,” he wrote in another letter.
Walter was allowed to return to Moscow at the end of 1917, soon after the Bolshevik Revolution. He left stormy Russia for Germany in October 1918 to settle in Dresden and later move to Berlin.
His ancestral land did not bring him self-fulfillment, though the five years he spent in Germany were eventful enough to base a film or a novel on. A mere chronological account is long enough to make a chapter in this essay.
- Location:Jakarta
- Mood:
thoughtful
