Wolfgang Franke was born in
Hamburg on 24 July 1912, the fourth and youngest child of the prominent sinologist
Otto Franke and his wife Luise Niebuhr. He had a sister, as well as two brothers who died in their teens. Franke graduated from the Grunewald Gymnasium in
Berlin, and studied sinology at the
University of Berlin from 1931 to 1934, but transferred in his final year to the
University of Hamburg After serving in the military for a year, Franke left for China, arriving in
Shanghai on 18 May 1937, just before the
Battle of Shanghai and the
Second Sino-Japanese War began. After the end of World War II, he became a professor at
Sichuan University and the private
West China Union College in
Chengdu, teaching Ming history and German history. Two years later, he became a professor of German language at
Peking University. When peace was restored in post-war Germany, Franke returned to Hamburg with his family in 1950. He was appointed Chair of Sinology at the University of Hamburg, and was also Director of the Seminar for Language and Culture in China. He was the fourth holder of the Chair of Sinology and succeeded his father
Otto Franke, who had set up the chair in 1910. He worked there until his retirement in 1977. After his wife died in 1988, Franke moved to
Petaling Jaya near the
University of Malaya, where he had students and friends. He lived in Malaysia until his late eighties, when he moved to Berlin in May 2000 to live with his daughter. In his final years, when he could no longer travel, his daughter hired Chinese students to look after him, so that he could speak Chinese to someone. He died in Berlin on 6 September 2007, at the age of 95. ==Publications==