The Russian Revolution. The rise of fascism in Berlin. Japan’s invasion of China. The Nuremberg trials. Communist witch-hunts in the United States. Olga Lang witnessed enough major events in the first half of the 20th century to last several lifetimes. Then, she came to Swarthmore.

Like her fellow émigrés, Lang brought to the College a broad cultural knowledge. "Olga by memory knew almost all of Russian poetry," says her colleague Thompson Bradley. "You could give her a line, and she would recite the whole poem. She was the quintessential Russian intelligentka."

But unlike other émigré colleagues, Lang never received tenure and was never promoted to full professor. Her time at Swarthmore was by far the shortest of any of them.

"Of all the émigrés on the faculty, the most interesting—and most difficult—was Olga," says her friend Martin Ostwald. "She knew and published a lot and was a wonderful and dedicated teacher. But she never received the recognition she deserved."

"She needed senior faculty to fight for her," Bradley agrees, "though most did not recognize her true gifts or her scholarship. She was small, had a pronounced accent, and she often was treated with condescension. It was easier to dismiss her or find her comical than find out who she really was or what she lived through."

Lang was born to a Jewish socialist family in Ekaterinoslav, Russia (a large industrial city, now Dnepropetrovsk, in eastern Ukraine). She studied Russian and European history and literature at the elite Women’s University in Petrograd during World War I and became an activist member of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, witnessing the 1917 revolution.

After further study at Moscow University, Lang worked for the Central Council of Trade Unions and later moved to Berlin in 1927 with her husband, a German doctor. As a reporter covering German labor and politics for the Soviet labor journal Trud, she interviewed workers and attended (sometimes taking part in) strike meetings and conventions. She also joined the German Communist Party. In 1932, a collection of her "sketches" was published in Moscow as Images of German Workers.

By the time Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Lang was part of the radical left intellectual world in Berlin along with her second husband, Karl August Wittfogel, then an outspoken critic of the Nazis. Swastikas in neighbors’ windows became more frequent, as did attacks on Communists in their homes. After their apartment was raided, the couple went into hiding. Lang developed then what would become a lifelong predilection for public telephones, terrified as she was of being overheard by Nazi police if she used her own.

Later that year, Wittfogel was arrested while trying to leave the country and sent to a prison camp. Lang pushed for his release over the next eight months, even, with her strongly accented German, appealing in person to SS officials at Gestapo headquarters. Her efforts succeeded, and the couple fled first to England, then China.

(Wittfogel later renounced communism. In 1951 testimony before a McCarthy-era House subcommittee on internal security, he named Lang—by then his ex-wife—along with several of his former friends and colleagues.)

In China, Lang immersed herself in the culture and learned to speak and write the language. She also met Ida Pruitt, an American social worker whose files from the Peking Union Medical College Hospital, where she was head of social services, helped form the basis of Lang’s Chinese Family and Society, published in 1946.

After Japan invaded China in 1937, Lang came to America, where during World War II she helped prepare soldiers for service in Asia as part of the Army Specialized Training Program. She also helped compile and edit a dictionary of spoken Russian. After the war, she worked for the newly formed United Nations and as an interpreter and researcher at the Nuremberg trials.

In 1951, Lang began graduate studies at Columbia University and received a Ph.D. in Chinese and Japanese. She became an expert on Pa Chin, an anarchist writer popular among Chinese students in the 1930s and 1940s. Her dissertation Pa Chin: Chinese Youth in the Transnational Period was followed by her 1967 book Pa Chin and His Writing: Chinese Youth Between the Two Revolutions. Although by then at Swarthmore, Lang never taught Chinese at the College because, despite her efforts, no program existed. (Swarthmore offered its first year of Chinese language in 1981.)

Lang eschewed small talk and rarely spoke of her personal life. Yet she relished discussions of theater, politics, and Russian history and literature. After a dinner party Lang gave for a Soviet bureaucrat in the writers’ union who spoke on campus in 1964, she and her guests peppered the official with questions. According to Thompson Bradley, also in attendance: "Olga Lamkert wanted to know about everything happening in the Russian church; Helen Shatagin wanted to know about the [Smolny Institute], which after 1917 had become the Communist Party headquarters; Olga wanted to know about trade unions, people in cultural affairs, how the university was organized, and most of all about the writers and poets."

Bradley was amazed by what followed. "When he couldn’t answer any of their questions," he says, "they gave him a stern political, historical, and cultural history of Russia and the Soviet Union since the beginning of the century. He was flabbergasted."

Lang always kept an apartment in New York, and, after retiring from Swarthmore, she returned to Columbia as an adjunct associate professor of Russian. She continued her research on Chinese-Russian cultural relations and remained affiliated with the university until 1985. She then moved to a nursing home in the city, where she died in 1992. Her death went unnoticed by the College, which continued to send her mail for another year, until a former neighbor included the news in a returned invitation.

Although Lang may have not received the respect she deserved from Swarthmore, "she did get lifelong recognition from her students," Bradley says, "and she should have. They loved her."

"She was a mensch," says Ostwald, "a civilized human being."

Additional sources: Dr. Lang’s two unpublished memoirs, Tatiana Cosman’s My Heritage With Morning Glories: A White Russian Growing Up in China (1995), and Lewis Coser’s Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Experiences (1984)

 

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