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The Red Countess

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Hermynia Zur Mühlen

3. Notes on Persons and Events Mentioned in the Memoir

Lionel Gossman

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1 Dehm

1Properly Deym. Franz de Paula, Graf Deym von Střtež (1838–1903), a large landowner in Bohemia, was Austro-Hungarian Ambassador in London, 1883–1903. At an early stage in his own diplomatic career, Zur Mühlen’s “Onkel Anton” (Christoph Anton Maria, Graf von Wydenbruck) served under him in the Legation in London, where Wydenbruck’s daughter, the writer Nora Wydenbruck, was born in 1894. The family mockery of Deym suggests that the young diplomat did not get on with his chief.

2He was apparently not the only one. Another diplomat, Franz, Graf Lützow, who had also served under Deym in London and had since retired from the service, had married a lady reputed to have once been the mistress of Prince Batthyány, a Hungarian residing in England, where he bred horses. To get his new wife accepted in good society, Lützow asked Deym if, as a favor, he would arrange for the ambassadress to introduce the lady in question at one of her receptions. Deym refused point blank, probably in disrespectful terms, for Lützow immediately challenged him to a duel. Apparently it did not have a fatal outcome for either party. The fall-out from the affair did not enhance Deym’s reputation as a diplomat, however, since Lützow was soon writing and speaking out in England in favor of independence for the Czechs and in terms very unfavorable to the dual monarchy.

(Source: Edwin Marsch, ed., November 1918 auf dem Ballhausplatz. Erinnerungen Ludwigs Freiherrn von Flotow [Vienna/Cologne/Graz: Hermann Böhlau Nachf., 1982], p. 363).

2 Uncle

3The Uncle in question, who asks the provocative question about his niece’s father (i.e. his brother-in-law), is Onkel Anton (Christoph Anton Maria), the eldest son of Ferdinand, Graf (Count) von Wydenbruck, and the latter’s wife — Zur Mühlen’s beloved grandmother Isabella Blacker. A diplomat like his father and like Zur Mühlen’s own father, Christoph Anton “first went to school in America,” during the two years when Ferdinand von Wydenbruck was Emperor Franz Joseph’s Envoy Extraordinary in Washington, D.C. (1865–1867) — a circumstance that resulted, in the view of his daughter, the writer Nora Wydenbruck, in his “democratic predilections” and “violent disapproval of Austrian society and its Byzantine class distinctions.” (See Chapter 6 below, “Remembering Hemynia Zur Mühlen.”) His diplomatic career, according to one modern scholar, was that of “a mediocrity who made little mark on his contemporaries.” After stints in a subaltern position in London, as ambassador to Japan from 1893 until 1899 (not, probably a much desired or prestigious posting at the time), and as head of the Austro-Hungarian legation first in Denmark (1899–1907), then in the Netherlands (1908–1911), his “comfortably mediocre career ended as ambassador in Spain” (1911–1913). This was not his wish, however, nor is the judgment of his career a fair one, in the view of his daughter. He had been promised the post of ambassador to Washington, she recounts, and “he would have been eminently fitted for this appointment: not only had he spent part of his schooldays in the United States, he had democratic sympathies, a realistic outlook and a grasp of world politics which must have been almost unique among Austrian career diplomats.” For instance, “his dispatches from Tokyo had been such that when the Russo-Japanese war broke out and an astonished world realized that the country of geishas and cherry-blossom had produced a nation to be reckoned with from a military point of view, it was murmured on the Ballhausplatz [where the Austrian Foreign Office was situated] that ‘Wydenbrook had been right after all,’ though previously everyone had made fun of his alarmist reports.”

4On his return from Madrid Onkel Anton found himself less and less at home in his native Austria. “He already had at that time a liking for solitude and a certain timidity with people,” according to Zur Mühlen, “and he was finally driven to live all alone in an old castle in the country,” where he died in 1917. In addition, Nora Wydenbruck writes, “in his loneliness he [had become] a sad and solitary drinker” whose “main weapons against the outside world were irony and sarcasm.” Just as Zur Mühlen’s paternal grandfather, Franz de Crenneville, was probably a distant model for the figure of the young heroine’s great-uncle Franz in the novel Reise durch ein Leben, a solitary who has devoted his retirement to writing a book against the death penalty in order to make amends for the many death sentences he signed while governor of one of the provinces of the Empire, Onkel Anton was probably the model for the same heroine’s great-uncle Emanuel, who, we are told, was sometimes referred to as “der rote Graf” [the red Count] — a solitary who likes to talk down his own class and its prejudices but who does not expect rule by the bourgeoisie or the popular masses to be any better and who thus remains socially and politically isolated and ineffectual.

(Sources: William D. Godsey, Jr., Aristocratic Redoubt: The Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office on the Eve of the First World War [West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1999; Nora Wydenbruck, My Two Worlds: An Autobiography [London: Longmans, Green, 1956], quotations from pp. 3, 39–40; http://en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​List_of_diplomatic_missions_of_Austria-Hungary).

3 Father

5Victor, Count Folliot de Crenneville-Poutet (1847–1920), Zur Mühlen’s father, was the oldest of the three sons of Franz, Count Folliot de Crenneville-Poutet (on whom see below under “Paternal Grandfather”). He had a less distinguished career than his father. After being appointed Secretary of the Austrian Legation in Washington, D.C. in 1889, he served in the consular corps as Consul-General in Tunis and in various other positions. He was the author of a small book on the island of Cyprus, Die Insel Cypern in ihrer heutigen Gestalt, ihren ethnographischen und wirtschaftlichen Verhältnissen (Vienna: Faesy und Frick, 1879). He married Isabella, Countess von Wydenbruck in 1882. In addition to the portrait she presents of her father in her memoir, Zur Mühlen drew a fictionalized portrait of him as the father of the young heroine of her 1932 novel Das Riesenrad [The Wheel of Life]; see “Remembering Hermynia Zur Mühlen: A Tribute” in the present volume, Chapter 6, note 8.

4 Paternal grandfather

6Franz Maria Johann, Count Folliot de Crenneville-Poutet (1815–1888), Hermynia Zur Mühlen’s paternal grandfather, had a distinguished career, first as a general in the Imperial Austrian army, and then, later in life, at the court of Emperor Franz Joseph, where as First Chamberlain (Oberstkämmerer), he oversaw the Imperial art collections.

7“With the benefit of a cosmopolitan education and wide interests,” he started out at age 25 as a gentleman-in-waiting (Dienstkämmerer) to the epileptic and severely handicapped Emperor Ferdinand I, but soon followed in the footsteps of his father, Ludwig Folliot de Crenneville — an émigré French aristocrat who had become a cavalry general in the service of the Austrian Emperor and embarked on a military career. He quickly rose to the rank of colonel and aide-de-camp of the Emperor. After Ferdinand’s abdication in favor of his nephew Franz Joseph (December 1848), Crenneville took part in the Austrian campaign to quell nationalist revolts in Italy and in 1850 was appointed Governor of Livorno and commander of the Imperial forces in Tuscany. His zeal in combatting revolutionaries and supporters of Garibaldi was remarked upon in a communication from Carl von Hügel, a seasoned diplomat then serving as Austrian chargé d’affaires in Florence, to Foreign Minister Schwarzenberg (15 January 1850): “Livourne est la seule ville de la Toscane où la population des basses classes est animée d’un esprit d’insubordination et de révolte. Le colonel comte de Crenneville y est parfaitement à sa place et il se sert admirablement de la force que lui donne l’état de siège pour maintenir et punir les mauvaises passions et actions qui s’y montrent continuellement.”

8By July 1850 Crenneville had been promoted to the rank of general. During the Crimean War he was sent on a special mission to Napoleon III; in 1854 he played a leading part in putting down revolutionary unrest in Parma after the assassination of Duke Carlo III; and at the battle of Solferino (1859), at which the French and Sardinian armies under Napoleon III and Vittorio Emmanuele II defeated the Austrian army under Franz Joseph I, his horse was killed under him and he himself was wounded. For his bravery in battle, he was awarded the Cross of the Order of Leopold and soon afterwards made Privy Councillor and First Adjutant-General of the Emperor. In this capacity, he helped to carry out important reforms in the army. His strong military bearing and his forceful way of expressing his opinions, both in public and in conversation with individuals, made him enemies, however, and probably led to his being held responsible in some quarters for the army’s failures in the 1866 war with Prussia. Further honours were heaped upon him. He was promoted to the rank of Field Commander (Feldzugmeister) and in 1867 appointed First Chamberlain. In 1876, Franz Joseph charged him with the design and execution of what has been called “an elaborate program” intended to “enhance the Emperor’s prestige through glorification of Habsburg cultural achievements.”

9Himself the owner of a notable library and collection of medals, Crenneville set about reorganizing the Imperial collections. He had them thoroughly inventoried, oversaw their transfer to the new museum on the Ringstrasse, recruited first-rate staff for the new museum, and arranged for the preparation of catalogues and guides. One of these, Die hervorragensten Kunstwerke der Schatzkammer des österreichischen Kaiserhauses, received a long and glowing review in the French Gazette des Beaux-Arts (16ème année, 2ème période, vol. XI, pp. 209–32), in which special praise was reserved for “M. le comte Folliot de Crenneville, dont aucun des exposants français de 1873 [at the Vienna International Exhibition] n’a oublié la courtoise obligeance.” In 1880–82 a two-volume facsimile edition of Freydal: des Kaisers Maximilian I Turniere und Mummereien, edited by Quirin von Leitner, with over 250 heliogravures, was published by Holzhausen in Vienna “unter der Leitung des K.K. Oberstkämmerers, Feldzugmeister Franz Grafen Folliot de Crenneville.” Finally, the Count initiated and supervised the publication of the Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses (Vienna: A. Holzhausen), the first volume of which, dated 1883, was immediately hailed as a major event in the art and museum world. This annual publication has continued to appear for well over a century, albeit with a few interruptions during wartime, and to enjoy the reputation for impeccable scholarship that had been a key objective of its founder. In 1884, however, depressed by the death of his wife and of his best friend, Count Bigot de St. Quentin, Crenneville asked the Emperor for permission to retire and spent the last four years of his life working on the history and art treasures of the little lakeside city of Gmunden, where in 1867 he had acquired a villa known as “Bergschlössl.”

10Though we can only surmise from the published evidence that Hermynia Zur Mühlen’s paternal grandfather, with all his talents, held extremely conservative political views, we do know what those of his “best friend,” Karl, Count Bigot de St. Quentin, were, since Bigot chose to make them public. Like Creneville, Bigot (1805–1884) was the son of a French aristocrat who had emigrated to Austria at the time of the French Revolution. The author of several works, including the frequently republished Von einem deutschen Soldate (1843), he “had a highly conservative conviction of the domestic stabilizing function of the army,” according to one recent scholar, and had nothing but contempt for the lower classes (der Pöbel) “which,” he declared, “lust only after well-paid idleness, acts of violence, nights spent at the barricades, and that sanctioned debauchery that comes with the erosion of the bonds of order.” Nor was the bourgeoisie spared. He scorned the self-interest allegedly motivating it as much as he scorned the greediness of the revolutionary masses. “The ideas of the people should never be permitted to follow a path that diverges from that of the upper classes,” he asserted. “It should be emancipated only to the extent that is necessary at any given time, and it should never be allowed to get to the point that it itself loosens its iron collar, because, like a raging tiger, it will not stop until it is completely unfettered.” The paternal grandfather of the so-called “rote Gräfin” [red Countess] has given posterity no reason to believe that his opinions were different from those of his “best friend.”

11She, however, made an attempt to redeem him, from her point of view, in her fiction. Though she could not have known him well personally (she was five years old when he died), she used him, in all likelihood, as the model for the figure referred to in the novel Reise durch ein Leben as “Exzellenz” — the heroine’s great-uncle Franz, who, as governor of one of the provinces of the Habsburg Empire had had to sign many death sentences, and is now, in his solitary retirement, making amends for his actions by writing a massive scholarly critique of the death penalty. Zur Mühlen also attributes to this figure an old, exalted idea of what it means to be an aristocrat: “The young people today, like your father,” he tells Erika, the heroine of the novel, “do not understand that they have more obligations than others. They only enjoy the privileges of rank. And that is why they are headed for ruin. For them, being a member of the aristocracy is only something that provides comfort and ease, not something that obligates them to live an honest, simple, honourable life.” (Reise durch ein Leben [Bern and Leipzig: Gotthelf, 1933], p. 73)

(Sources: Oscar Griste in Allgemeine deutsche Biogaphie, 48, pp. 614–16; Erwin M. Auer in Neue deutsche Biographie, 5, p. 287; Fonti per la Storia d’Italia pubblicate dall’Istituto Storico Italiano; Le Relazione diplomatiche fra l’Austria e il Granducato di Toscana, III Serie 1848–1860, ed. Angelo Filipuzzi [Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per l’Età Moderna e Contemporanea, 1967], vol. 2, pp. 47–48, 216, 366, 411; Erika Esau, “Imperial Cultural Policy and the Jahrbuch der kunshistorischen Sammlungen in Wien,“Journal of the History of Collections, 8 [1996], pp. 193–200; Günther Kronenbitter, “Krieg im Frieden.” Die Führung der k.u.k. Armee und die Großmachtpolitik Österreich-Ungarns 1906–1914 [Munich: Oldenbourg, 2003], p. 125; Karl August, Graf Bigot de Saint Quentin, Cancan eines deutschen Edelmanns [Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1842–1845], 3 vols., vol. 1, p. 256).

5 Great-uncle

12Ludwig, Count Folliot de Crenneville (1813–1876), brother of the better known Franz. He was a cavalry general, commander of the fortress in Mainz, and at one point (1861–1867) Governor of Transylvania, just before it was incorporated into Hungary. In a letter to his daughter Leontine (11 September, 1848), Metternich tells of having lunch “chez les Crenneville, à Mayence.” (Mémoires, documents et écrits divers laissés par le Prince de Metternich, 8 vols, [Paris: Plon, 1880–1884], vol. 8, p. 294; the originals of Metternich’s letters to his daughter are in French).

6 His wife

13Ernestine, Gräfin (Countess) Kinsky zu Wchinitz und Tettau (b. 1827). She married Ludwig Folliot de Crenneville in 1852. Like both her brother-in-law Franz and Countess von Wydenbruck, Zur Mühlen’s grandmother, she settled in the small lakeside city of Gmunden.

7 Sophie Chotek

14Daughter of Bohuslav, Count Chotek von Chotkova, chief equerry at the Imperial Court, onetime Austrian envoy to Russia and Spain, and his wife Wilhelmine, Countess Kinsky zu Wchinitz und Tettau, sister of Zur Mühlen’s great-aunt, Ernestine, Countess Kinsky zu Wchinitz und Tettau. As a young woman Sophie became lady-inwaiting to Archduchess Isabella of Pressburg. She met Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Imperial throne, at a ball in Prague in 1888 and the two fell in love. When Franz Ferdinand began paying frequent visits to the Archduke and Archduchess of Pressburg, it was assumed that he was interested in one of their daughters, Marie Christine. After it finally became known that he was pursuing not Marie Christine but her mother’s lady-in-waiting, Countess Sophie was dismissed and the affair created a public scandal. The Emperor made it clear to his heir that he would not be permitted to marry Sophie. An eligible partner for a member of the royal family had to be descended from the House of Hapsburg or from one of the ruling dynasties of Europe. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, however, insisted that he would not marry anyone other than Countess Sophie. After various European monarchs intervened on Franz Ferdinand’s behalf, Franz Joseph agreed in 1899 to a morganatic marriage (which meant that no child of Sophie’s could succeed to the throne). He himself did not attend the wedding. Nor did Franz Ferdinand’s brothers or their families. The judgment of Sophie by her aunt — Zur Mühlen’s great-aunt — thus reflects the view of Sophie generally held in conservative circles. At the time about which Zur Mühlen is writing here, Countess Ernestine could not, of course, know the tragic events that were to ensue some fifteen years later.

15In June 1914 the Governor of Austrian-ruled Bosnia-Herzegovina, invited Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie to observe his troops on manoeuvers. Immediately after the royal couple arrived in Sarajevo a carefully planned attempt was made by a nationalist, pro-Serbian group to assassinate the Archduke. The attempt failed, but two occupants of the car behind that in which Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were travelling were seriously wounded. Later the same day, after the official welcome at the Town Hall, Franz Ferdinand expressed a desire to visit the wounded men in the hospital. It was generally agreed that such a visit was dangerous and that Sophie should stay behind, but she refused. This time, due to a driver’s error, the assassination succeeded. Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were both hit and died from their wounds soon after. The stage was now set for the First World War.

16These events were, of course, known to Zur Mühlen herself, writing in 1929.

8 Neue Freie Presse

17The successor to and for a time rival of Die Presse (founded in the so-called Year of Revolutions, 1848), the Neue Freie Presse, launched in 1864 by two editors who had seceded from the older newspaper, represented the political and economic liberalism of the educated and cultivated upper bourgeoisie in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Despite the early deaths (1872 and 1879) of the two founding editors, the paper continued to flourish under a new editor, Eduard Bacher, and his brilliant lead article writer, Moritz Benedikt — both from liberal Jewish families in the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. Known throughout Europe as the Austrian Times, the paper had a staff of over 500, including 80 foreign correspondents. It was stylish in the upper bourgeoisie to be a subscriber and the paper was often critical of the aristocracy. “In contrast to London where (even before our time) the Iron Duke bowed before Peel who was a weaver’s son, the aristocracy here is sterile and sequestered,” the paper declared in December 1888. “Forty years ago, Mrs. Trollope spent a winter in Vienna and was quite astonished by the caste-like separations of the various social levels. She had never met more graceful ladies than those in bankers’ houses, yet these were not admitted to aristocratic circles.” Though some members of the bourgeoisie “try to deny their origins,” the article continued, and “are indolent in all questions of bourgeois freedom, we are not. The bourgeoisie must contend with the aristocrats, but it is sure of victory.” (Quoted in Frederic Morton, A Nevous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889 [Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1979], p. 167) Nevertheless, the paper was supportive of the multi-ethnic Empire and opposed to nationalist movements in its constituent parts, though not to some increased local autonomy. At the same time it sometimes sounded a note of elegiac pessimism about the viability of the Empire in a continent overwhelmed by vehement nationalism.

9 Fremdenblatt

18A daily paper published in Vienna from 1847 until 1919. From about 1852, it was virtually a mouthpiece of the government and especially of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

10 Grandmother

19Isabella Luisa, Countess von Wydenbruck (1829–1900) was one of two daughters of St. John Blacker of Merrion Square in Dublin, a member of the Anglo-Irish gentry, a sometime British Envoy to the Court of Persia, and a lieutenant-colonel in the First Regiment of the Madras Native Army. Her mother was Welsh and her grandmother half Scottish. She and Ferdinand von Wydenbruck (1816–1878), an Austrian diplomat, were married in London in 1854. She bore him three children: Christoph Anton (b. 1856), August Wilhelm (b. 1857) and Isabella Luisa Alexandrina Maria (b. 1862), Zur Mühlen’s mother. For more information about her, see Chapter 6, “Remembering Hermynia Zur Mühlen,” in the present volume.

11 Moritz Benedikt

20A baptized Jew from Moravia, Benedikt (1849–1920) joined the staff of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse as a journalist at the age of twenty-three. In 1880 he became editor-in-chief of the paper as well as its co-publisher. His lead articles were celebrated for their intelligence and wit. His liberalism was not incompatible with strong support for the multi-ethnic Empire and opposition to minority nationalist movements, including Zionism — which led in 1896 to a falling-out with Theodor Herzl, then one of the journalists who worked for him. Benedikt and his paper later became a favourite target of Karl Kraus in Die Fackel.

12 Great-uncle

21This was Julius, Graf von Falkenhayn (1829–1899), who in 1857 married Zur Mühlen’s great-aunt, Viktoria Eugenia, Countess Crenneville (1816–1900), fourth child of the original French émigré and cavalry general Ludwig Folliot de Crenneville and widow of Johann, Graf Keglevich von Buzin, her first husband. Falkenhayn was himself the son of a cavalry general and began his career in the military but then turned to managing his estates in Upper Austria. He was elected to the Upper Austrian Landtag or regional parliament as a representative of the conservative federalist and ultramontane party. His interest in financial questions led to the publication of two books on the finances of the Austrian state in the 1870s. In 1879 Franz Joseph appointed him Minister of Agriculture, in which capacity he served for sixteen years. He was known as an extreme conservative in politics.

13 G.

22G. is the town of Gmunden on the Traunsee, a lake in the Salzkammergut, a hundred and some miles west of Vienna where Zur Mühlen’s grandmother had a villa, and where other members of her family also lived or had summer homes. It is where the author of The End and the Beginning claims she spent the happiest years of her childhood and it is also evoked in at least two of her main fictional writings, Das Riesenrad and Reise durch ein Leben.

23It was a resort much favored by the titled nobility of the German-speaking lands. Albrecht, Duke of Württenberg, had an estate there, mentioned on p. 9 of Zur Mühlen’s memoir, and George V of Hanover, expelled from his kingdom, after it had been annexed by Prussia for having sided with Austria in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, settled there with his family. Hubertus, Prinz zu Loewenstein, a Bavarian nobleman of about the same age as Zur Mühlen and subsequently a friend and ally in the fight against National Socialism, was another resident of Gmunden in his youth. “Gmunden in Upper Austria,” he wrote in his Memoirs, “… a little town of about six thousand inhabitants, on the banks of a wonderful lake… was looked upon as the refuge of impoverished Austrian and German aristocrats. It used to be said that if you accidentally trod on the toe of an unknown man in the street, it was perfectly safe to say, ‘I beg your pardon, my dear Count,’ for you would be sure to be right.” (Conquest of the Past: An Autobiography [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938], p. 33)

24Neither Zur Mühlen’s grandfather, Count Franz de Crenneville, who acquired the villa known as “Bergschlössl” in Gmunden as early as 1867, nor her grandmother, Countess Isabella Luisa von Wydenbruck, who, in 1888, bought the Villa Elisabeth (so called after its previous owner, Elisabeth Franziska Maria, Archduchess of Austria, Princess of Hungary and Bohemia), appears to have been in the least impoverished before World War I, though Countess von Wydenbruck may well have lived more modestly than other members of the family. Sigmund Freud spent his first vacation in the little town in the year of Zur Mühlen’s birth and wrote glowingly of it to his fiancée Martha Bernays. Artists, apparently, were as drawn to it as aristocrats — Moritz von Schwind earlier in the century and, as Zur Mühlen herself tells us, the composer Karl Goldmark, the painter Heinrich von Angeli, and the writer Peter Altenberg in the 1890s and early 1900s. Altenberg in particular wrote often and affectionately about the town, beginning with a piece about the deposed Queen Maria, the wife of George V of Hanover, in the celebrated art nouveau journal Jugend (16 April, 1900). The most famous historical event in the history of Gmunden — the defeat and massacre, in 1626, of “hundreds of peasants fighting for their rights and their daily bread” by the forces of Maximilian I — is adroitly evoked in Zur Mühlen’s novel Reise durch ein Leben (the chapter entitled “Das heilige Brot,” pp. 118–19; “Holy Bread” in the English translation, A Life’s Journey, pp. 98–99]) as a social and political learning experience for the heroine.

14 Countess Szapáry

25Widow of the Hungarian-born László Szapáry of Muraszombath (1831–1883), a decorated cavalry general in the Imperial Army who had fought with Radetzky’s army in Italy. A favourite of both Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth, Szapáry died of a stroke at age 51. His widow, born Marianne, Countess Grünne in 1835, was the daughter of Carl, Count Grünne, First Adjutant-General of Franz Joseph from 1848 to 1859. She died in Gmunden in 1906.

15 Friedericke Grossmann

26A popular actress of the time, Grossmann is listed among the leading living actors and actresses of Germany in Albert Ellery Berg, The Drama, Painting, Poetry, and Song (New York: P.F. Collier, 1884), p. 256. In her biography of her brother, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche tells of the philosopher’s enthusiasm for the theatre and for Friederike Grossmann in particular: “He took advantage of his stay in Bonn to attend as many theatres and concerts there and in Cologne as he could possibly afford. And he was very lucky, for he heard the most famous singers and actresses of the period… He saw Seebach in a series of her most beautiful parts, and finally Friederike Grossmann in several little comedies. ‘We Franconians, he writes, ‘were naturally in love with her to a man, shouted her songs of an evening at the beer table, and would drink general toasts in her honour.’” (The Life of Nietzsche by Frau Förster-Nietzsche, transl. Anthony M. Ludovici, vol. 1: The Young Nietzsche [New York: Sturgis and Walton, 1912], p. 130) Die Grille or The Cricket was a popular German adaptation for the stage of George Sand’s La petite Fadette.

27Anton Prokesch von Osten, to whom Friedericke Grossmann was married, was the son of the internationally celebrated soldier, diplomat, scholar and writer of the same name (1795–1876).

16 Pauline Lucca

28Born in modest circumstances in Vienna in 1841, Pauline Lucca, “the greatest singer that Germany has produced in recent times” (Albert Ellery Berg, The Drama, Painting, Poetry, and Song [New York: P.F. Collier, 1884], p. 256), made her debut as the Second Boy in Mozart’s Zauberflöte at the Komische Oper. Her first major role was as Elvira in Verdi’s Ernani in the provincial city of Olmütz in Moravia. She came to the attention of Meyerbeer who brought her to Berlin to sing Selica in L’Africaine, a role she repeated in London, where she enjoyed great success, returning regularly in 1863–68 and 1870–72, with a brief interruption in 1871 when she came back to Germany to nurse her husband, Baron von Rahden, who had been injured in the Franco-Prussian war. In 1868–69 she performed in Russia, and in 1872, to great acclaim, in America. From 1874 until 1889 she was a member of the Vienna Opera. Meyerbeer and Auber considered her unequalled, and the latter was so struck by her interpretation of the part of Zerline in Fra Diavolo that he made her a present of the pen with which he had written the opera. Her most celebrated roles were Carmen, Selica in L’Africaine, Zerlina in Don Giovanni, and Leonora in Verdi’s Trovatore. Her Carmen, in particular, is said to have caused a sensation — “as did her appearances offstage with Bismarck: Cosima Wagner, lamenting their public familiarity, wrote: ‘Such things do no honour to the Crown or to art.’” (Oxford Dictionary of Opera, 1992, p. 420) In 1889, she retired to Gmunden, where she gave voice lessons. She was a potential purchaser of the Villa Elisabeth just before it was acquired by Zur Mühlen’s grandmother.

17 Fritzi Massary

29Born in Vienna to Jewish parents, who encouraged her to take singing lessons, Friederike Massarik (1882–1969) got her first engagement, under her new stage name Fritzi Massary, in a minor role at the Landestheater in Linz in 1899/1900. After another similar engagement in Hamburg, she returned to Vienna to a stint, lasting until 1904, at Danzer’s Orpheum, a summer theatre. Meantime she gave birth to a daughter — the father was Karl-Kuno Rollo, Graf von Coudenhove, whose family threatened to have him shut up in a mental institution if he dared to marry an actress — and was baptised a Protestant. While performing at the Orpheum, she was discovered by a Berlin theatre director and brought to the Geman capital, where she mostly performed in revues. Soon the cheeky soubrette, “the Massary,” had become the idol of a generation. A major breakthrough in her career occurred in 1911, when she appeared as guest artist in Jacques Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène at Max Reinhardt’s Künstlertheater. In 1917 she married Max Pallenberg (1877–1934), the leading comic actor of the German stage.

30Among the works created especially for her was the operetta Die Kaiserin (The Empress) by Leo Fall (1915). She sang the title role in Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow and that of Adele in Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus under Bruno Walter. She had a close association with Oscar Straus, creating roles in six of his operettas, notably Der letzte Walzer (1920). Massary first nights were a highlight of every season in Berlin. According to her friend and mentor Alma Mahler-Werfel, the intelligence she brought to the stupidest operettas “made the impossible credible.” Her recordings include excerpts from Oscar Straus’s Eine Frau, die weiß, was sie will (A Woman Who Knows What She Wants), in the premiere of which she starred in 1932, and from Madame Pompadour by Leo Fall.

31Being non-Aryan, neither she nor Pallenberg had opportunities to perform in Berlin after 1933. The couple returned to Vienna, then moved to Switzerland. Pallenberg was killed in a plane crash shortly afterwards. Finally, after a brief guest appearance in London, where she was befriended by Noel Coward and played the role of Liesl Haren, the fading Viennese operetta star, in his not very successful musical play Operette (1938), Massary moved to the United States. Along with her daughter and her son-in-law, the author Bruno Frank, she settled, like other exiles, such as Elisabeth Bergner and Max Reinhardt, in Beverly Hills, California, in what was known as the “New Weimar” on the Pacific. Once idolized, she lived a quiet, withdrawn life. “The Massary of the stage no longer exists,” she said. “Some people can remember her, if they wish, but I don’t want to any more.” She died in Los Angeles on January 30, 1969.

32In a little book dedicated to her art as a stage performer in 1920, Oscar Bie — the author of a classic study of the piano — emphasized both her many-sidedness and the diligence with which she worked to make the most of her talents as actress, singer, and dancer. “It is almost as though I had never seen her in a work that was worthy of her,” he wrote of her career as an operetta star. “She remains, while the works she plays in vanish. […] Her art makes me dream of the possibilities a future operetta might open up, an operetta different from anything yet written, an operetta that would fully realize the essence of the genre. Every time I saw her in the imperfect works to which her art provides support, that dream was transformed for me into a living and complete image that bore her name.” (Oscar Bie, Fritzi Massary [Berlin: Erich Reiß Verlag, n.d.], p. 33)

18 Goldmark

33The composer Karl or Karoly Goldmark, one of the many children of a Jewish cantor, was born in Hungary in 1830. He entered the Vienna Conservatoire in 1867, played in various theaters as a violinist, and had his first major success as a composer with the opera Die Königin von Saba (The Queen of Sheba). First performed at the Vienna Opera in 1875, it remained in the repertoire until 1938.

34Other operas followed: Merlin (1886, revised in 1904), Die Kriegsgefangene (1890), Götz von Berlichingen (1902), Ein Wintermärchen (1908). Goldmark also composed symphonies, symphonic poems, concert overtures, a violin concerto, chamber music, piano music, choral music and Lieder. Much influenced by Wagner, he is generally considered a late Romantic. He died in Vienna in 1915 and was clearly at a mature, productive stage in his life when the young Zur Mühlen would run into him on the lakeside promenade in Gmunden.

19 Peter Altenberg

35Pseudonym of Richard Engländer (1859–1919). Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna, he first studied law, then medicine. When both proved uncongenial, his kindly and understanding father provided him with an allowance, thanks to which he set himself up (for life, as it turned out) in a room at the Hotel Graben in the heart of Vienna, took up writing, assumed a new name, and quickly became part of Jung Wien, the lively fin-de-siècle avant-garde artistic movement that had put Vienna on the map in music, literature, and design. A flâneur, he did most of his writing on scraps of paper or on the backs of postcards in cafés, nightspots, and bars. His first publication, a volume of extremely short, fragmentary sketches and poems entitled Wie ich es sehe (1896), with an emphasis on the moment and on everyday, seemingly insignificant characters, conversations, gestures, and events, created a sensation in Germany as well as Austria. Twelve collections of sketches, aphorisms and poems followed. (The little town of Gmunden figures in several of these and was clearly a place to which he was strongly attached.) All were published, with one exception, by the highly respected S. Fischer Verlag in Berlin and all went through several — up to twenty — editions. Hugo von Hofmannsthal admired the young writer’s ability to make the ordinary into something special and to discern magic in the quotidian. Always eager to be enchanted, Hofmannsthal explained, Altenberg saw the world as a scene of enchantment. To Thomas Mann, the young Viennese combined the childlike, magical vision of Hans Christian Andersen with the talent and penchant for the short form and for aphorism of Nietzsche. Among Altenberg’s admirers, in addition to Hofmannsthal and Thomas Mann, were Karl Kraus, the sharp-tongued Viennese commentator and satirist, the playwrights Gerhart Hauptmann and Arthur Schnitzler, the critic Hermann Bahr, and the novelists Heinrich Mann and Robert Musil, to say nothing of his close friends, the noted architect and designer Adolf Loos and the composer Alban Berg, who set some of his work to music. (The first performance of Berg’s Five songs on picture postcard texts by Peter Altenberg in 1913 caused an uproar and had to be halted — a complete performance was not given until 1952! — but the unfavorable reception was most probably due to the music rather than to the text.) Another friend, the well-known cultural historian Egon Friedell, devoted a book to him (Ecce Poeta [1912]), the aim of which was to present him, with his disdain of conventional rhyme, meter, and subject-matter, and his choice of the fragmentary in place of sustained, elaborated forms like the epic and the novel (about which he sometimes wrote disparagingly), as the prototype of the modern writer. After Altenberg’s death Friedell again produced a book in his praise: Das Altenbergbuch (Leipzig, Vienna, Zurich: Verlag der Wiener graphischen Werkstätte, 1921) with selections from his work, numerous photographs and caricatures, a moving tribute from Adolf Loos, and testimonies from Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Georg Kaiser, and others. “If one may speak of ‘love at first hearing,’ that is what happened to me,” Thomas Mann wrote in this book (p. 72), “when, early on, I came across this poet in prose.”

36In an age of violence, oppression, and injustice, Brecht once said, it becomes almost a crime to write about trees. Peter Altenberg wrote almost exclusively about “trees.” It might be argued that, though he was not politically active or engaged, his emphasis on the moment (carpe horam became his motto), on spontaneity, on immediate experience, on the everyday and seemingly insignificant, his contempt for convention, social prejudice, cliché ideas and feelings, everything that blurs or distorts the purity and immediacy of perception and experience, and his Diogenes-like advocacy of the simple life, together with his constant critique of what he saw as a culturally implanted desire for luxury and excess, were in themselves subversive in an age of hypocrisy, class and ethnic prejudice, exploitation, and dangerous jingoism. The limitations of Altenberg’s form of protest and celebration became clear, however, with the outbreak of the First World War. He became despondent; his writing began to flag; and after breaking both wrists in a fall at his hotel, he was bedridden for months and began to slowly poison himself by taking vast quantities of sleeping pills. “I find myself completely abandoned, isolated, put away into a corner” [Ich finde mich vollkommen verlassen, vereinsamt, in die Ecke gestellt], he noted on August 3, 1918. When he died in 1919 — Karl Kraus spoke the eulogy at his graveside — he was already, in a sense, passé. As a contributor to Das Altenbergbuch wrote, “A poet who understood, loved, and revered the world, died because he could not survive the folly and evil of the World War.” (Dr. Genia Schwarzwald, p. 383)

37There has been a strong revival of interest in Altenberg and in his fragmentary writing in the last twenty years or so, both in the German-speaking world and in the English-speaking world. Most of his work has been republished; several books have been written about him in both English and German; and hitherto untranslated works have been translated into English.

20 Angeli

38The son of an innkeeper in Hungary of Venetian origin, Heinrich von Angeli (1840–1925) studied art at the academies of Vienna, Düsseldorf, and Munich. Though he painted genre scenes in his early years, by the early 1870s he was well launched on a highly successful career as a court painter in Vienna, London, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. There are numerous portraits by him of members of the European royal and princely families, including Emperor Franz Joseph, Frederick III of Prussia as Crown Prince, as well as his wife Princess Victoria, Queen Victoria’s daughter. He was a great favourite of Queen Victoria herself, as well as of Prince Albert. He made portraits of her for the various royal residences. She also had him make portraits of other members of the royal family and, as a mark of her special regard for Slatin Pasha (see below) and her Indian servant Abdul Karim (the “Munshi”), had Angeli make her portraits of them. In addition, Angeli was much in demand in English and German aristocratic circles.

21 Hans Blum

39Hans Blum (1841–1910) was the son of Robert Blum (1804–1848), a combatant in the 1848 Revolution in Vienna, whither he had gone to bring a message of solidarity with the Viennese revolutionaries from the left wing of the Frankfurt Parliament — in which he represented Leipzig. When the revolutionaries were defeated by the Imperial troops, Robert Blum was taken prisoner. On November 8, he was tried and condemned to death and, a day later, executed. He immediately became a hero and martyr in the cause of freedom for the entire German democratic movement. Ferdinand Freiligrath, the popular poet of the Revolution (see note below), published a poetic tribute to him as a proletarian hero. His son Hans Blum, however, was no revolutionary but an ardent German nationalist. In 1867–70 he was a representative from the National Liberal party, Bismarck’s chief parliamentary support, in the North German Confederation Reichstag and its expanded version, the so-called “Zollparlament,” to which the South German states were pressured by Bismarck to send representatives after Prussia’s victory in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. A war correspondent in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, he continued his career in journalism by serving as editor of Der Grenzbote from 1871 to 1878. All his historical writing was directed to the German Volk and to German youth and aimed to promote patriotism and national pride in both. In the richly illustrated book on the 1848 Revolution referred to here by Zur Mühlen (Die Deutsche Revolution 1848–49. Ein Jubiläumsausgabe für das deutsche Volk [Florence and Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs, 1898], Blum gave a clear hint where his political sympathies lay when he wrote that the work he is undertaking is one for which he is ill equipped, since he is “not at all in full sympathy” with the political tendencies he has to discuss.

40Zur Mühlen might have discovered that “Blum’s son had actually written a reactionary book” sooner than she did had she also read Blum’s biography of his father, written thirty years after 1848, when Germany was basking in the glory of Prussia’s victory over France and the establishment of the Second German Empire. In it Blum relates that on May 23, 1870, “after a session of the Reichstag in which I was attacked by ‘die Herrn Socialisten’ because, by my vote, the criminal code [Strafgesetzbuch] had come into existence, Count Bismarck, then Bundeskanzler, invited me into his study. He stretched out his hand and said, ‘Let us make an alliance at this hour, which I regard as one fraught with blessings for Germany.’ I was startled. ‘An alliance,’ he continued, with a subtle smile [feinem Lächeln], ‘not for the benefit of either one of us, or of any living man, but of the dead. Do you understand what I mean? Should Messieurs les Socialistes entertain the idea of degrading your father by claiming him as one of themselves, then you are at liberty to make use of my power, in the press, to keep that picture clean. Your father was very advanced [sehr liberal]. Even to-day he would be regarded as very “liberal.” But he was also a good patriot [gut national] — that is, a supporter of the government.’” After quoting this passage in his massive, four-volume History of the German Struggle for Liberty (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1896–1905), Poultney Bigelow comments: “Thus we see, as in 1864 with Lassalle [founder of the Allgemeiner deutscher Arbeiterverein, the forerunner of the German Social Democratic Party], for the sake of weakening the Socialists, the strongest single party in the state, Bismarck claimed Blum as his fellow-partisan — and the son capitulated to Bismarck” (vol. 3, p. 306). In 1903, to cap his career, Hans Blum published a book celebrating the statesmanship of Bismarck (Bismarck: ein Buch für Deutschlands Jugend und Volk [Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1903]).

22 Uncle Anton

41See Note 2, ‘Uncle.’

23 “Where do the aristocrats belong?”

42The reference is to the famous French Revolutionary song, the Ça ira:

Les aristocrates à la lanterne !
Ah ! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira.
Les aristocrates, on les pendra.
Le despotisme expirera.
La liberté triomphera.
Ah ! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira…

24 Lenau

43Hungarian-born Nikolaus Franz Niembsch, Edler von Strehlenau (1807–1850), studied law, then medicine, but after receiving an inheritance on his grandmother’s death was able to devote himself to writing, under the pseudonym Nikolaus Lenau. A major figure in German Romantic literature, his reputation as the author of a body of lyric poetry suffused with melancholy has remained high. His first volume of Gedichte appeared in 1832. Lenau also wrote verse epics and dramas (Faust, 1836, Savonarola, 1837, Die Albigensier, 1842, Don Juan — begun in 1844 and published posthumously). His melancholy was no doubt partly due to a dark vision of human existence in general but it was also not unrelated to a negative judgment of the society and culture of his time, which led him, in 1832, to set sail for the New World in the hope of finding more congenial conditions in what he took to be an unspoiled wilderness. He landed in Baltimore and settled briefly on a farm, then in the community known as Economy (now Ambridge) on the Ohio River, about 16 miles North-West of Pittsburgh, which had been founded by the mystically inclined Württemberger Georg Rapp and his chiliastic followers. Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, who visited “das freundliche und werktätige [friendly and hardworking] Economy,” reported that while “Rapp’s intention is almost the same as Mr. Owen’s [Robert Owen, the early British socialist, who purchased Rapp’s settlement of New Harmony, Indiana in 1825 and reformed it according to his own principles] — i.e. communal ownership and co-operation of each member of the community for the good of all — Herr Rapp also holds his community together by the bonds of religion, which is totally absent from Mr. Owen’s community.” Lenau did not stay long in Economy. Disillusioned by America and what he judged to be its materialist culture, he returned to Europe after a year. The experience led him to distance himself radically from his earlier political liberalism and to identify with the downtrodden and oppressed, represented by American Indians and Gypsies. Never very stable emotionally, Lenau had a severe nervous breakdown in 1844 when he jumped out of a window and ran down the street shouting “Revolt! Freedom! Help! Fire!” He spent the last years of his life in a mental asylum on the outskirts of Vienna. The young Zur Mühlen’s attraction to him is understandable in light of her own outlook at the time.

(Source for information on Lenau’s American journey, commonly and erroneously said to have included a stay at New Harmony, Indiana: Roman Roček, Dämonie des Biedermeier: Nikolaus Lenaus Lebenstragödie [Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 2005, pp. 135–241]).

25 Freiligrath

44Ferdinand Freiligrath (1810–1876) had a successful career as a popular poet and journalist, interrupted by stints of activity in the world of commerce. His first volume of poems, Gedichte (1839), was such a success that he was able to give up his job as a bookkeeper in Barmen. On the recommendation of Alexander von Humboldt, he was awarded a pension by Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia in 1842, which he renounced, however, in 1844 when he aligned himself unequivocally with the democratic opposition to the established order. His next collection, Glaubensbekenntnis (1844), established him as the poet of the struggle for freedom and social justice of the middle years of the nineteenth century and was an even greater success than the 1839 volume. The revolutionary content was unmistakable. The following are some sample lines from the poem “Mit raschen Pferden jagt die Zeit”:

Mit raschen Pferden jagt die Zeit
Ein heißes Weib, nach Freiheit lechzend…
Ein Gottweib! Ernst verehr‘ ich sie,
Und geh‘ ihr nach mit Schwert und Schilde,
Und jauchz‘ ihr zu;-doch nun und nie
Entweih‘ ich sie zum Götzenbilde!

[On speedy steeds, Time, a woman hot with passion and thirsty for freedom, leads the hunt… A divine woman! I adore her with all my being and follow her with sword and shield, and sing her hymns of praise — but neither now nor ever will I turn her into a sacred idol!]

45Feeling that he was no longer safe from arrest in Germany, Freiligrath moved to Belgium, where he came into contact with Karl Marx. In 1845 the provocatively titled Ça ira! Sechs Gedichte appeared. The verse was marked by even stronger, almost military rhythms and clear, memorable rhymes. The tone was now outspokenly revolutionary. Two samples, the first from “Von unten auf,” the second from “Wie man’s macht”:

“Du bist viel weniger ein Zeus, als ich, O König, ein Titan!
Beherrsch‘ ich nicht, auf dem Du gehst, den allzeit kochenden Vulkan?
Es liegt an mir; - Ein Ruck von mir, Ein Schlag von mir zu dieser Frist,
und siehe, das Gebäude stürzt, von welchem Du die Spitze bist!“

[“You are far less a Zeus, O King, than I am a Titan! Do I not control the ever rumbling volcano on which you walk? It is up to me; One push from me, one blow from me at this point in time, and behold, the whole edifice of which you are the summit collapses!”]

So wird es kommen, eh’ ihr denkt: — Das Volk hat Nichts zu beißen mehr!
Durch seine Lumpen pfeift der Wind! Wo nimmt es Brot und Kleider her?
Da tritt ein kecker Bursche vor; der spricht: “Die Kleider wüßt‘ ich schon!
Mir nach, wer Rock und Hosen will! Zeug für ein ganzes Bataillon!“

[And so it will come before you think: — The common people have nothing more to chew! The wind whistles through their rags. Where are they to get bread and clothes? A bold young fellow steps forward and says: “I know where to get clothes. Let whoever wants a coat and stockings follow me! There is stuff for a whole battalion!”]

46“Von unten auf” continues with the people storming an army storehouse and taking not only clothes but weapons.

47In 1848 Freiligrath returned to Germany to take part in the Revolution, was quickly arrested, released shortly afterwards, and accepted Marx’s invitation to join the staff of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, of which Marx was general editor. When the paper was banned in 1849, however, Freiligrath was again out of a job. With a warrant out for his arrest, he moved from one city to another until in 1851 he again left Germany, this time for London. After working for a few years for a commercial firm he was appointed director of the London branch of a Swiss bank. In 1865 the branch was closed and two years later, after the announcement of an amnesty for everyone charged with political crimes, Freiligrath returned to Germany. Like several others, who had once been revolutionaries of the Left, he rallied to the nationalist cause and on the outbreak of war with France, on 25 July 1870, produced the jingoist poem “Hurra, Germania!” which won general applause and was immediately set to folksong-like music:

Hurra, du stolzes, schönes Weib,

[Hurrah! thou lady proud and fair,

Hurra, Germania!

Hurrah! Germania mine!

Wie kühn mit vorgebeugtem Leib

What fire is in thine eye as there

Am Rheine stehst du da!

Thou bendest o’er the Rhine!

Im vollen Brand der Juliglut,

How in July’s full blaze dost thou

Wie ziehst du frisch dein Schwert!

Flash forth thy sword, and go,

Wie trittst du zornig frohgemut

With heart elate and knitted brow,

Zum Schutz vor deinen Herd!

To strike the invader low!

Hurra, hurra, hurra!

Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!

Hurra, Germania!

Hurrah! Germania!

Du dachtest nicht an Kampf und Streit:

No thought hadst thou, so calm and light,

In Fried’ und Freud’ und Ruh’

Of war or battle plain,

Auf deinen Feldern, weit und breit,

But on thy broad fields, waving bright,

Die Ernte schnittest du.

Didst mow the golden grain,

Bei Sichelklang im Ährenkranz

With clashing sickles, wreaths of corn

Die Garben fuhrst du ein:

Thy sheaves didst garner in,

Da plötzlich, horch, ein andrer Tanz!

When, hark! across the Rhine War’ s horn

Das Kriegshorn überm Rhein!

Breaks through the merry din!

Hurra, hurra, hurra!

Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!

Hurra, Germania!

Hurrah! Germania!

Da warfst die Sichel du ins Korn,

Down sickle then and wreath of wheat

Den Ährenkranz dazu;

Amidst the corn were cast,

Da fuhrst du auf in hellem Zorn

And, starting fiercely to thy feet,

Tief atmend auf im Nu;

Thy heart beat loud and fast;

Schlugst jauchzend in die Hände dann:

Then with a shout I heard thee call.

Willst du’s, so mag es sein!

Well, since you will, you may!

Auf, meine Kinder, alle Mann!

Up, up, my children, one and all,

Zum Rhein! zum Rhein! zum Rhein!

On to the Rhine! Away!

Hurra, hurra, hurra!

Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!

Hurra, Germania!

Hurrah! Germania!

Da rauscht das Haff, da rauscht der Belt,

From port to port the summons flew,

Da rauscht das deutsche Meer;

Rang o’er our German wave,

Da rückt die Oder dreist ins Feld,

The Oder on her harness drew,

Die Elbe greift zur Wehr.

The Elbe girt on her glaive;

Neckar und Weser stürmen an,

Neckar and Weser swell the tide,

Sogar die Flut des Mains!

Main flashes to the sun,

Vergessen ist der alte Span:

Old feuds, old hates are dash’d aside,

Das deutsche Volk ist eins!

All German men are one!

Hurra, hurra, hurra!

Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!

Hurra, Germania!

Hurrah! Germania!

Schwaben und Preußen Hand in Hand,

Swabian and Prussian, hand in hand,

Der Nord, der Süd ein Heer!

North, South, one host, one vow!

Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland--

“What is the German’ s Fatherland?”

Wir fragen’ s heut nicht mehr!

Who asks that question now?

Ein Geist, ein Arm, ein einz’ ger Leib,

One soul, one arm, one close-knit frame,

Ein Wille sind wir heut!

One will are we to-day;

Hurra, Germania, stolzes Weib!

Hurrah, Germania! thou proud dame,

Hurra, du große Zeit!

Oh, glorious time, hurrah!

Hurra, hurra, hurra!

Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!

Hurra, Germania!

Hurrah! Germania!

Mag kommen nun, was kommen mag:

Germania now, let come what may,

Fest steht Germania!

Will stand unshook through all;

Dies ist All-Deutschlands Ehrentag:

This is our country’s festal day;

Nun weh dir, Gallia!

Now woe betide thee, Gaul!

Weh, daß ein Räuber dir das Schwert

Woe worth the hour a robber thrust

Frech in die Hand gedrückt!

Thy sword into thy hand!

Fluch ihm! Und nun für Heim und Herd

A curse upon him that we must

Das deutsche Schwert gezückt!

Unsheathe our German brand!

Hurra, hurra, hurra!

Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!

Hurra, Germania!

Hurrah! Germania!

Für Heim und Herd, für Weib und Kind,

For home and hearth, for wife and child,

Für jedes teure Gut,

For all loved things that we

Dem wir bestellt zu Hütern sind

Are bound to keep all undefiled

Vor fremdem Frevelmut!

From foreign ruffianry!

Für deutsches Recht, für deutsches Wort

For German right, for German speech,

Für deutsche Sitt und Art-

For German household ways,

Für jeden heil’ gen deutschen Hort!

For German homesteads, all and each,

Hurra! zur Kriegesfahrt!

Strike home through battle’s blaze!

Hurra, hurra, hurra!

Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!

Hurra, Germania!

Hurrah! Germania!

Auf, Deutschland, auf, und Gott mit dir!

Up, Germans, up, with God! The die

Ins Feld! der Würfel klirrt!

Clicks loud, — we wait the throw!

Wohl schnürt die Brust uns, denken wir

Oh, who may think without a sigh,

Des Bluts, das fließen wird!

What blood is doom’d to flow?

Dennoch das Auge kühn empor!

Yet, look thou up, with fearless heart!

Denn siegen wirst du ja:

Thou must, thou shalt prevail!

Groß, herrlich, frei, wie nie zuvor!

Great, glorious, free as ne’er thou wert,

Hurra, Germania!

All hail, Germania, hail!

Hurra, Viktoria!

Hurrah! Victoria!

Hurra, Germania!

Hurrah! Germania!]

(Source of English translation: Theodore S. Hamerow, ed., The Age of Bismarck: Documents and Interpretations. New York: Harper & Row, 1973, pp. 96–97).

48It is a fair bet that the poems by Freiligrath “published” in the Anchor Society’s monthly bulletin were not those of this later period in the poet’s career.

26 Anastasius Grün

49Anastasius Grün was the pseudonym of Anton Alexander, Graf von Auersperg (1806–1876). He achieved celebrity in the Vormärz, the period leading up to the 1848 Revolution, as an aristocratic supporter of liberal ideals and demands. Born into a noble German-speaking family in Laibach (present-day Ljubljana, Slovenia), then the capital of a province of the Austrian Empire known as the Duchy of Carniola (Krain in German), he studied law at the Universities of Graz and Vienna and in 1830 published a volume of harmless lyric poems, Blätter der Liebe. Another collection, Der letzte Ritter, published later the same year, while celebrating the chivalry and bravery of Kaiser Maximilian I in verses of the same form as the Nibelungenlied, already showed signs of the rhetoric of freedom which was to characterise the poems of the succeeding years and on which the poet’s reputation as a champion of liberal principles was based. One of the poems in the collection, for instance, the lively ballad entitled “Ritter und Freie” [Knights and Free Men], is an eighty-stanza paean to Switzerland as the land of the free.

Was treibt euch wohl, ihr Fürsten, stets in die Schweizergaun?
Wollt einmal doch im Leben ein freies Land ihr schaun?
Wollt ihr das Zepter tauschen um einen Hirtenstab?
Ha, oder wollt ihr finden in freier Erd’ ein Grab?

Seht auf das Land hernieder von hoher Alpenwand!
Da liegt’s, gleich einem Buche, geschrieben von Gotteshand,
Die Berge sind die Lettern, das Blatt die grüne Trift,
Sankt Gotthard ist ein Punkt nur in dieser Riesenschrift.

Wißt ihr, was drin geschrieben? O seht, es strahlt so licht!
Freiheit! steht drin, ihr Herren; die Schrift kennt ihr wohl nicht,
Es schrieb sie ja kein Kanzler, es ist kein Pergament,
Drauf eines Volkes Herzblut als rothes Siegel brennt.

[What drives you constantly, you Princes, to invade the Swiss lands? Do you want, for once in your life, to see a free country? Do you want to exchange the sceptre for a shepherd’s staff? Or do you want to find a grave in free soil? Look down on this land from the high wall of the Alps! There it lies, like a book written by the hand of God. The mountains are the letters, the green pastures are the page. The Saint Gotthard is but a period in this gigantic text. Do you know what is written in it? Oh, look, it shines out so clearly! Freedom! is what it says, my lords. You do not know this script. No chancellor wrote it; it is not written on parchment. The red seal burned on it is the blood of a people’s heart.]

50The two heroes of the ballad, a brave and faithful knight on King Max’s side and an equally brave free Swiss, are both killed in battle. The narrator laments their death, then asks rhetorically in whose place the living would rather sleep the eternal sleep.

Schlaft sanft, ihr Zwei! Ihr aber, die ihr noch jetzo wacht:
An wessen Stelle lieber schlieft ihr die ew’ ge Nacht?

(Sleep softly, you two! But you who are still awake, in whose place would you rather sleep the eternal sleep?)

51Two further collections, Spaziergänge eines Wiener Poeten (1831) and Schutt (1835), created something of a sensation on account of their criticisms of political conditions in Germany and Austria (then still led by Metternich). In subsequent works — Nibelungen im Frack (1843) and Pfaff vom Kahlenberg (1850), criticism was expressed by means of ironic humor. Auersberg also translated Slovenian folk poems into German and wrote a series of ballads on the theme of Robin Hood.

52In the meantime, he had succeeded to his ancestral estate and two years later, in 1832, became a member of the upper house of the Landtag, or assembly, of the Duchy of Carniola. Here too he made a name for himself by criticising political conditions in Austria and leading local opposition to the exactions of the central government in Vienna. After the 1848 Revolution he represented the district of Laibach in the Frankfurt Parliament but failed to persuade the Slavic Slovenians, who desired independence, to send representatives to the German parliament. Within a year the violent turn taken by the Revolution led him to resign his seat and withdraw into private life. In 1860, however, he was summoned to the remodeled Reichsrat by Franz Joseph and the following year was appointed a life member of the Austrian upper house (Herrenhaus). His evolution from idealistic champion of freedom to a moderate position within the political establishment is not untypical, but to the young editor of the “Anchor Society” bulletin, he doubtless stood out as a model aristocrat who rose above the prejudices of his class and used his literary talent to advance the cause of progress.

27 Daschynski

53Ignacy Daszyński (1866–1936), born in a Polish province of the Habsburg Empire, was one of the founders of the Polish Republic after the defeat of the Central Powers in 1918. Having helped to organize the Social Democratic Party of Galicia (1890), the forerunner of the Polish Social Democratic Party, he entered the lower house of the Reichsrat (the parliament established by Emperor Franz Joseph in 1861) as a deputy from Galicia in 1897 and quickly made a name for himself as a brilliant public orator. It was in this role that he made an impression on the young Hermynia Zur Mühlen. Much later, on the night of November 6, 1918, after the occupying Austrian army had withdrawn, he led a group of Galician socialists in forming a Provisional People’s Government of the Polish Republic in the city of Lublin, south-west of Warsaw, with himself at the head of it as Prime Minister. On November 18 General Josef Pilsudksi, also a socialist and a founder, in 1892, of the Polish Socialist Party (with which the Social Democratic Party merged in 1919), but above all a Polish nationalist and longtime fighter for Polish independence, entered Warsaw and entrusted Daszyński with the task of forming a new cabinet. The Polish Right objected so strongly, however, that Daszyński was replaced by a more moderate socialist before he ever got to serve. In 1926, when Pilsudski, who had retired as chief of state four years earlier in accordance with the constitution, staged a coup that returned him to power, Daszyński at first supported him, along with the Socialist Party, but soon led the opposition to him. To Pilsudski’s annoyance, the Sejm or Diet, elected not his candidate for the position of marshal or speaker, but Daszyński.

54In 1929, Daszyński had his moment of glory — of which Zur Mühlen cannot have been aware since it occurred after her memoir had appeared. In an attempt to intimidate the Sejm, Pilsudksi sent a large group of army officers to take up positions in the vestibule and hallways on the day of the opening session. Ushers asked the officers to leave, but they refused. In his office Daszyński had a violent interview with his one-time friend and fellow-combattant, Pilsudski; it ended with Daszyński refusing to open the session. “Is that your last word?” Pilsudski is said to have demanded. “Yes,” Daszyński replied. “I refuse to open the session under the threat of swords, bayonets, carbines, and revolvers.” This reply became famous. In his autobiography Trotsky quotes a similar dramatic retort of Daszyński’s on the same occasion: “To this day I remember the phrase which Daszyński flung in the face of the police when they entered the house of parliament. ‘I represent thirty thousand workers and peasants of Galicia — who will dare touch me?’ We pictured the Galician revolutionist as a titanic figure. The theatrical stage of parliamentarism, alas, cruelly deceived us.” To Trotsky, in the end, the fiery Daszyński turned out to be just another ineffectual socialist in the Social Democratic ranks, a man with the gift of the gab, but no revolutionary commitment.

28 Tried for high treason

55Zur Mühlen was charged with high treason in Germany, where she was then living, after the publication of her novella Schupomann Karl Müller (1924), in which the policeman hero breaks ranks and sides with the revolutionaries he is supposed to defend “society” against. The charges were dropped for lack of evidence.

29 Trotzkopf

56Der Trotzkopf was a celebrated, widely read German girls’ story by Emmy von Rhoden (pseudonym of Emilie Friedrich) that first appeared in 1885. Its lesson was essentially that marriage is a girl’ s main aim in life, and that she cannot therefore be headstrong or wilful, but must learn to be meek, pliant, and amiable; she should also acquire appropriate domestic skills like sewing and cooking. This is the lesson that the unruly 15-year old heroine of the story, Ilse Macket — the “Trotzkopf” or contrary spirit — has to be taught in the course of von Rhoden‘s novel. The penalty for not getting a husband and remaining a spinster is having to work. Marriage and work are thus opposites, the former the reward of good behaviour, the latter the punishment for bad behaviour. In general, pursuing a career of any kind is viewed in the novel as a sign of a woman‘s failure in the most important business of her life. The novel spawned several sequels, three of them by von Rhoden’ s daughter, Else Wildhagen, in the 1890s and early 1900s. It is still in print and has also been made into a movie and a TV series. Der Trotzkopf is a classic of the so-called Backfischroman, novels for young girls, the aim of which was to prepare their readers for a place in the conservative social order ot the Wilhelminian age. Zur Mühlen’s hatred of the Backfischroman was deep and enduring. Several of her own fictions can be read as anti-Backfisch novels (as can her memoir, which, even though it purports to be non-fiction, still has the form of a Bildungsroman) and she also criticized these novels directly in an article of 1919, “Junge-Mädchen-Literatur,” published in the leftwing Die Erde. See the article “‘Fairy Tales for Workers’ Children’: Zur Mühlen and the socialist fairy tale” in the online supplement to this volume.

30 Aunt Maria, aunt Vicky, aunt Steffi

57Aunt Maria might be either Maria, Countess von Esterhàzy (born in 1859), the wife of Zur Mühlen’s mother’s brother, August Wilhelm Maria von Wydenbruck, or Maria Countess Fugger zu Babenhausen (born in 1858), the wife of her mother’s other brother, Christoph Anton Maria von Wydenbruck, the “Onkel Anton” of Zur Mühlen’s memoir. However, even if one or the other was “little and roly-poly,” neither is likely to have been considered “old” at this point in Zur Mühlen’s life, even in those days. They were barely 25 years older than Zur Mühlen herself.

58The Hungarian Teréz Brunszvik, Countess von Korompa (1775–1861), to whom Aunt Maria was related, is sometimes said to have been the “ferne Geliebte” of Beethoven’s celebrated song cycle. “Korompa” was the name Zur Mühlen gave to the estate in Slovakia of the fictitious aristocratic family, the Herdegens, whose destinies from 1815 to 1848 and from 1938 to 1939 are the subject of her two late novels, We Poor Shadows (London, 1943; original German, 1939) and Came the Stranger (London, 1946). The real Korompa (in Hungarian; Krompachy in Slovak) is actually quite far from Vienna. It lies in Eastern Slovakia, near Kosice.

59Aunt Victoria was probably Victoria Eugenie, the sister of Zur Mühlen’s grandfather Franz, Count Crenneville. She was indeed old. Born in 1816 and married twice — first to Johann, Graf Keglevich zu Busin and after his death to Julius, Graf von Falkenhayn — she outlived her second husband by one year and died in Vienna in 1900.

60Aunt Steffi could unfortunately not be identified.

31 Prater

61The celebrated green area and amusement park established in the Leopoldstadt district for the benefit of the citizens of Vienna by Emperor Joseph II in 1766. It was the site of a universal exhibition in 1873 and figures famously in Carol Reed’s 1949 film, The Third Man, the screenplay of which was written by Graham Greene.

32 Herr Habert

62Zur Mühlen’s piano teacher was in fact a distinguished musician, musical scholar, and composer. Johannes Evangelista Habert (1833–1896), born in Bohemia and trained in Linz, settled in Gmunden in 1860 and was appointed municipal organist there in 1861. He edited musical compositions by earlier composers of church music (Stadlmayr, Fux, Führer) `and was a prolific composer, in his own right, of masses, litanies, and motets, as well as of orchestral and chamber music, piano pieces, and songs. In the context of the Cecilianist movement in German Church music in the nineteenth century — the aim of which was to free church music from the theatrical and operatic style of the baroque and rococo and return to the simplicity of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — Habert used his position as editor of the Zeitschrift für katholische Musik, which he founded in 1867, to argue in favor of retaining instrumentally accompanied liturgical music. Thus he wrote an extremely favorable review of Bruckner’s Mass in E minor and became one of Bruckner’s staunchest champions.

63A multi-volume complete edition of Habert’s works was begun under his own direction two years before his death and published by Breitkopf and Härtel in Leipzig (1894–99), with four volumes devoted to his theoretical writings alone (Beiträge zur Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition). His Mass in B Minor was republished by Breitkopf and Härtl (now in Wiesbaden) as recently as 1989, his Mass in C Major for two voices and organ by Edition Musica Rinata in Ditzingen in 2007.

(Sources: Matthias Schmidt in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie [London: Macmillan, 2001], vol. 10, p. 637; James Garratt, Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002]).

33 Aunt Agnes

64Almost certainly a relative of Zur Mühlen’s Anglo-Irish grandmother. Hence Aunt Agnes’s friendship with May Crommelin, whose family was also prominent in Northern Ireland.

34 May Cromelin

65Maria Henriette de la Cherois Crommelin (1849–1930), known as May Crommelin, was a descendant of a Huguenot refugee family that had settled in Great Britain in 1690, one of her ancestors having been invited by William III to establish the linen industry in Ireland. Her family’s Irish connection — May Crommelin herself was born on the family estate of Carrowdore Castle in County Down, Northern Ireland — probably explains her relation to Aunt Agnes, who was in all likelihood, like Zur Mühlen’s grandmother, from the family of the Blackers of Carrickblacker, County Armagh. Completely forgotten now, Crommelin was a prolific and in her time popular author. Between her first novel, Queenie, published in 1874, when she was 25, and her last, published in 1924, when she was 75, she wrote over two dozen novels and collections of short stories, in addition to children’s books and travel books. One of a long line of intrepid British women travellers (Over the Andes from the Argentine to Chile and Peru appeared in 1896), she was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. When Zur Mühlen met her, she was at the height of her popularity.

35 Jerome K. Jerome

66Jerome K. Jerome (1859–1927), best known as the author of the still widely read Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (1899) and Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886), produced a number of novels as well as plays and collections of short stories and essays. A contemporary and friend of J. M. Barrie, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, and Israel Zangwill, he was probably one of the English-language authors read to Zur Mühlen by her grandmother. He quickly became one of her favourites. She translated several of his stories and also wrote his obituary for the Frankfurter Zeitung (1927, no. 437A, p. 649), two years before Ende und Anfang appeared in instalments in the same newspaper.

36 Kürenberger

67Most likely not “Der von Kürenberg” or “Der Kürenberger,” an Austrian poet of the mid-twelfth century, but Ferdinand Kürnberger (1821–1879), a child of working-class parents, who became one of Austria’s leading journalists. His feuilletons were famously critical of the old Habsburg Empire in general (“Asiatic, retarded, lazy, and stupid”) [“asiatisch, zurückgeblieben, faul, dumm”] and of Viennese society in particular: “In the shadow of a scepter whose sway extends from Donauschingen to Smyrna, Vienna is developing relentlessly into a world-city, but while we have become inhabitants of a world-city, we have acquired none of the urbanity of world citizens.” Kürnberger also wrote plays, novellas, and novels. Karl Kraus, the famous Viennese critic and satirist of the next generation, sometimes referred to him as his most important predecessor.

68Kürnberger was already writing for various newspapers when the October 1848 Revolution broke out in Vienna. Having taken part in it, he fled to Germany after it was suppressed, but soon landed in prison anyway for having allegedly participated in the Dresden uprising of the following May. In 1855 he published Der Amerika-Müde, based on Nikolaus Lenau’s American experience. Ostensibly a novel, it was also a critical study of modern democratic and capitalist societies through the eyes of its idealistic hero Moorfeld, who, arriving in New York full of enthusiasm for a New World he expects to be radically different from Old Europe, discovers that “the crowning blossom of human progress,” “the savior that one day will redeem us all,” while certainly different from Old Europe, is a land where all are equally grasping and obsessed with gain and where the first lesson one is taught is indeed “not German metaphysics” but that “time is money” and that “wasting” it in unremunerated activities is equivalent to throwing money away. (Der Amerika-Müde. Amerikanisches Kulturbild [Frankfurt a.M.: Meidinger Sohn & Cie., 1855], in the series Deutsche Bibliothek, Sammlung auserlesener Original-Romane, vol. 8, pp. 1, 2, 19)

69Kürnberger’s way of looking at his world — unblinkingly, without illusion, and with provocative realism — can be gauged from the cynical observation of one of the characters in Der Amerika-Müde: “Long live the freedom of the press! Yes, yes, my dear Sir, the freedom of the press is the jewel of our enlightened and happy land. An enslaved press is an excellent instrument of emancipation, for then the public forms its own judgment. But a free press is an invaluable instrument of tyranny. The mob believes it and parrots what it is told.” (p. 190) “Press freedom and press abomination are directly connected,” the narrator had already noted at the beginning of the novel (p. 8). Usually accounted a liberal, Kürnberger did not shrink from unmasking liberal hypocrisy and attacking liberal shibboleths. Hence the press itself, for which he worked on and off for most of his life, became a prime object of criticism in as much as it served to disseminate political clichés. For the political slogan [“die politische Phrase”], he declared, “is a dangerous toy” [“ein gefährliches Spielzeug”]. In the 1860’s when he served as General Secretary of the Schiller Foundation, what he picked out from Schiller’s writings (and paraphrased in his own way) was almost the opposite of the idea people usually associated with the most loved and admired poet of German neo-classicism. Literature should not restore wellbeing to people, Schiller held (according to Kürnberger), but should “destroy their sense of wellbeing,” it should “inkommodieren” them [cause them discomfort]. Likewise Revolution should never allow itself to become institutionalized in a new order. In phrases reminiscent of Stirner, Kürnberger warned that “the avenger whom the people itself awakens, can never hold an office and incur obligations; he can never be engaged, patented, privileged; he can never be a subscriber to anything; he can only be totally free and he can never act except of his own free will.” The critic did not allow himself any illusions about his own activity. “I have been enlightened about the Enlightenment itself,” he once remarked. Criticism and satire are not effective in themselves, he added. They change nothing. Power will not yield to truth, but only to the pressure that will follow widespread recognition of the truth.

70While the corrosiveness of his criticism doubtless appealed to Zur Mühlen’s father — and to the rebellious young Countess herself — it is unlikely that either endorsed his German nationalism, which manifested itself in contempt for the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire and, in particular, for its Slavic (“Asiatic”) components and which culminated in enthusiastic celebration of the Prussian victory over France in 1870. Germany has long been despised and the German worker treated like a domestic animal, the revolutionary of 1848 wrote — without irony — in August 1870, but “Now our Messiah has come! Nothing on earth is greater than the German name.” To Zur Mühlen, in contrast, as her novel Ewiges Schattenspiel (We Poor Shadows) makes especially clear, the multi-ethnic character of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire was a positive quality, while in the novel Reise durch ein Leben (A Life’s Journey), the patchwork quilt is a symbol of the only unity individuals and nations can or ought to strive for.

(Sources: Karl Riha, Kritik, Satire, Parodie [Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1992]; Andrea Wildhagen, Das politische Feuilleton Ferdinand Kürnbergers [Frankfurt, Bern, New York: Peter Lang, 1985]; Wolfgang Klaubacher, “Ferdinand Kürnberger und Adolf Fischhof: zwei ehemalige `Märzkämpfer` in deutschnationaler Euphorie,” in Klaus Amann and Karl Wagner, eds., Literatur und Nation [Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 1996]).

37 “Gojicher Kopf”

71A Yiddish expression, meaning “mind or brain of a Christian.” While in this case the narrator is simply quoting, Zur Mühlen did like to use the occasional common Yiddish expression, as in one of her letters to Nathaniel Asch — a Jewish-American writer, whose work she had translated — where she refers to herself as one of the anti-Nazi “gojim” (Christians), whom even the Jewish publishers in Vienna are afraid to publish. (See the essay “Remembering Hermynia Zur Mühlen” in this volume.) This was obviously a way of making her opposition to anti-Semitism public.

38 Crown Prince Rudolf

72Archduke Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia (1858–1889), the well-educated, thoughtful, and relatively liberally inclined son and heir of Franz Joseph I was rather unhappily married and had apparently many affairs. In 1889 he was found dead, along with his latest mistress, a girl of seventeen, at Mayerling, his hunting lodge. What actually happened at Mayerling is still the subject of much speculation and many books. With Rudolf’s death, Franz Joseph’s younger brother Karl Ludwig became heir to the throne. He, however, renounced his succession rights in favor of his son, Franz Ferdinand, who was assassinated in 1914 at Sarajevo. (See Note 7, “Sophie Chotek.”)

39 Henry George

73An American politician and political economist, George (1839–1897) was a proponent of a land value tax, also known as the “Single Tax” on land. According to the economic line of thought he inspired, everyone owns the product of his or her labour, but everything found in nature, above all land, belongs equally to all humanity. George supported state ownership of telegraphic communications and municipal ownership of the water supply. He was strongly opposed to private monopolies. His most famous work, Progress and Poverty (1879), deals with inequality and the cyclic nature of industrial economies and proposes possible remedies. A well known speaker and public figure, George ran for Mayor of New York City in 1886 and came in second, ahead of the Republican candidate, Theodore Roosevelt. 100,000 people attended his funeral. Now almost forgotten, he influenced the thinking of George Bernard Shaw and Leo Tolstoi on economic matters, and of Silvio Gesell, an unconventional economist, near-contemporary of Zur Mühlen, and author of Die natürliche Wirtschaftsordnung (1916; originally two volumes under different titles [1906, 1911]; French translation 1916, English translation 1929), who is likewise almost forgotten now, but was well regarded by Keynes.

40 Stirner

74Max Stirner (1806–1856) studied under Hegel in Berlin and was one of the group known as the “Young Hegelians.” These students of Hegel — they included, besides Stirner, Bruno Bauer, David Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Karl Marx — diverged in important respects from the master and also engaged in polemical debates with each other. Stirner is usually seen as one of the founders of anarchism. He was also an influence on modern existentialism.

75Rejecting revolution in the usual sense as inherently statist and fated simply to replace one repressive system by another, he advocated instead freeing oneself from any fixed standpoint and from all dogmatic presuppositions, those of the Left as well as those of the Right, those of modern atheists as well as those of traditional Christians, “nature” no less than God. His writing style and mode of argumentation were distinctive and disconcerting. He relied a good deal on word play and on exploiting words with related etymologies, since he claimed that language and rationality are themselves products of human culture that have come to constrain and oppress their creators. Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844; English transl. The Ego and Its Own, 1907) was the most important statement of his radical philosophical views.

41 Nauheim

76Bad Nauheim, about 20 miles from Frankfurt-am-Main, was a world-famous health resort, noted for its salt springs, which were used to treat heart and nerve diseases. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s father underwent the water cure here for his heart condition and brought his son along with him.

42 Henry Thode

77Thode (1857–1920) was one of the most prominent art historians of the turn of the century. From 1884 he co-edited the prestigious art-history journal Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft with Hugo von Tschudi, who was later to become director of the Berlin Nationalgalerie. In 1889, on the recommendation of Wilhelm Bode, then Director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, Thode was offered the position of Director of the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt, one of the greatest German art museums. He resigned two years later, however, because of disagreements with the administration. After three years as an untenured professor of art history at Heidelberg, he was appointed to the Chair of Art History in 1896. In 1886 he had married Daniela, the daughter of Cosima Liszt and the conductor Hans von Bülow. This brought him into close contact with the Wagner family and the Wagnerites. (Cosima had begun living with Wagner in 1866 and, after getting a divorce from von Bülow, married him in 1870.) As an art and cultural historian, Thode rejected Burckhardt’s widely accepted view that the Italian Renaissance marked Western humanity’s emancipation from the Middle Ages and the emergence of modern individualism. He emphasized instead the continued importance of Christian values and ideas. A longtime friend of the painter Hans Thoma, he also opposed the “alien” influence of French Impressionism on contemporary German art, attacking in particular its leading representative at the time, the Jewish painter Max Liebermann, and the “commercial interests of a small clique in Berlin,” by which he meant the — largely Jewish — Berlin art dealers who were promoting Impressionism. This did not prevent Thode from living a high-profile social life. He and Daniela ultimately moved to a villa on the Lago di Garda in Italy where they maintained a lavish lifestyle.

43 Siegfried Wagner

78The son of Richard Wagner and his second wife Cosima — and thus the grandson of Liszt — Siegfried Wagner (1869–1930) followed in his father’s footsteps after briefly contemplating a career as an architect. Between the late 1890s and the 1920s he wrote both the music and the libretti for over a dozen operas, none of them much performed now, though several have been recorded. He also wrote orchestral works and Lieder. He made his debut at Bayreuth as assistant conductor in 1894, became associate conductor two years later, and in 1908 succeeded his mother as Artistic Director of the Festival. He was often held to have inherited his father’s anti-Semitism — hence Zur Mühlen’s remark about his nose, written from the perspective of 1929 — and his wife Winfried certainly maintained the anti-Semitic climate that enveloped the entire Wagnerian enterprise. (This did not, of course, prevent the use of an occasional Jewish singer or musician when the success of the performances required it.) It has been argued, however — most movingly by his daughter Friedlinde, who emigrated in 1939 first to England, where she wrote anti-Nazi columns for the Daily Sketch, then in 1941 to the United States, where she took part in anti-Nazi radio broadcasts, in her memoir Heritage of Fire: The Story of Richard Wagner’s Grand-daughter (New York and London: Harper Brothers, 1945) — that Siegfried did not share his father’s or his wife’s anti-Semitism.

44 Daughter of Bülow

79Blandine von Bülow (1863–1941), the younger of two daughters of Richard Wagner’s wife Cosima (herself the daughter of Franz Liszt) and her first husband, the musician Hans von Bülow, who conducted the premieres of Tristan und Isolde (1865) and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868). She was married to Biagio, Conte di Gravina, who died in 1897 at the age of fourty-seven, a year after the birth of the couple’s fourth child. The oldest son, referred to here as a Fascist in the late 1920s, was Manfredi (1883–1932). From 1929 until his death he was the League of Nations’ High Commissioner for the then Free City of Danzig.

45 “Panther affair”

80The Panther was a German warship. Zur Mühlen may be confusing two incidents involving it. In the first, which took place in 1905 and is usually referred to as the “Panther affair,” the ship was deployed to the Brazilian port of Itajahy, where her crew conducted an unauthorized search on Brazilian soil and kidnapped a German dissident. This “Panther affair” had obviously nothing to do with Morocco. In the second incident, which took place in 1911 and is usually referred to as the “Agadir Crisis,” the Panther was sent to Agadir in Morocco, ostensibly to signal German support for a French plan to send troops to Fez, where the Sultan of Morocco was holed up in the midst of a revolt. By “saving” the Sultan, the French would in effect establish themselves as colonial masters of Morocco. The presence of the Panther was apparently intended to remind the French that their colonial designs in Morocco, recognized by the British in return for French recognition of Britain’s designs in Egypt, also depended on German acquiescence, and thus to promote a Franco-German alliance. It so alarmed the British, however, who read it as a challenge to their naval power, while at the same time alienating the French, that it had the effect of cementing the Entente between Britain and France against Germany. As her father held the post in Tangiers from June 1901 until June 1904, Zur Mühlen’s stay there ended just a year before the Brazilian “Panther affair.” A year before the “Agadir Crisis” in Morocco, she was a married woman and was well established at Eigstfer in Estonia, on the estate of her husband, Viktor von zur Mühlen. Tension among the great powers over their competing colonial ambitions in Africa and the Near East, was already running high by 1904, however, and the recollection of this may have led Zur Mühlen to advance the date of the second “Panther affair.”

46 The Sultan and his one-eye’d brother

81Presumably Abdul Aziz bin Hasan, Sultan from 1894 to 1908, and his older half-brother Abdul Hafiz bin Hasan. Abdul Aziz, whose attempts to modernize Morocco and whose personal extravagance and infatuation with Western luxury products had made him unpopular, was forced to abdicate in 1908 and yield power to his half-brother. For a time, both claimed the throne, the one “ruling” from Rabat, the other from Marrakesh, with Fez in dispute.

47 Raisuli

82Mulay Ahmed ben Mohammed Raisuli — the name is sometimes transcribed as Raisuni — was the Shereef (i.e. leader, claiming direct descent from the Prophet Mohammed) of the Rif Berber tribe at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His dates of birth and death are uncertain: circa 1870 to circa 1925. The American historian Barbara Tuchman describes him as “the renowned Berber chief, lord of the Rif and last of the Barbary pirates, whose personal struggle for power against his nominal overlord, the Sultan of Morocco, periodically erupted over Tangier in raids, rapine, and interesting varieties of pillage.” (“Perdicaris Alive or Raisuli Dead,” in Practicing History: Selected Essays [New York: Ballantine Books, 1982], pp. 104–17) Though considered by some the rightful heir to the throne of Morocco, he had no pretentions to the Sultanate, according to Walter Harris, the correspondent of the Times of London, who spoke Arabic and came to know him well. (Morocco That Was [London and Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1921], p. 212) His struggle seems to have been that of a traditional local warlord against a ruler who, in his view, was trying to exercise a degree of power and authority to which he was not entitled. “The whole situation in Morocco was seething,” Harris writes about the first decade of the twentieth century (p. 211). “The tribes had become to all intents and purposes independent, and many threw off all pretence of obeying the orders of their Governors.” At the same time, Raisuli sometimes represented himself as a leader engaged in a jihad to rid Morocco of foreigners and Christians (mostly French), who, because of the dependence on them of the reigning Sultan Abdul Aziz bin Hasan, were rapidly coming to be masters of the Muslim country. In addition to constant skirmishes with the forces of the Sultan and incessant raids and cattle robberies resulting in not a few murders (for which he was imprisoned at one point for several years in the dreaded dungeons of Mogador), Raisuli used kidnappings as an instrument in his struggle for power, financial resources, and recognition.

83In 1903, he kidnapped Harris, who had gone into the countryside on a hunting expedition at the time. Because of Harris’s kindness and hospitality to tribespeople at his home in Tangiers, no money was demanded for his release, only the freeing of a number of tribesmen in government detention. This was successfully negotiated by the British Minister, Sir Arthur Nicolson. Harris later described his captor as a handsome, chivalrous, well educated, and intelligent tribal chief with a keen sense of honour, even if he shrank from no act of violence. A more notorious kidnapping took place the following year, when Raisuli boldly abducted a wealthy Greek-American named Ion Perdicaris and his British stepson Cromwell Oliver Varley from Perdicaris’s villa in Tangiers — “’Aidonia,’‘the place of nightingales,’ a comfortable house,” as Sir Arthur’s son, Harold Nicolson, later described it, “with green shutters, an open fore-court, red candles on the dining table, a large telescope on the terrace, and groves of myrtle, roses and arbutus falling to the sea,” where “he lived a cultured and retired life with his wife, his stepson…, his daughter-in-law Mrs. Varley, some grandchildren, some tame pheasants, a demoiselle crane, and several monkeys.” (Sir Arthur Nicolson, Bart. First Lord Carnock: A Study in the Old Diplomacy [London: Constable], 1930, p. 151) In return for their release, Raisuli demanded the dismissal of the Governor of Tangiers, a distant relative and bitter enemy, and his own appointment as Governor in his place, the withdrawal of government troops from “his” territory, the arrest and imprisonment of personal enemies, the release from prison of personal friends, and a ransom of $70,000. The kidnapping of Perdicaris caused an international incident. The Sultan was pressured by Britain, France, and the United States to intervene, but was powerless to do so. President Theodore Roosevelt then ordered four American warships with a detachment of Marines to Tangiers. In the end a settlement was negotiated, with most of Raisuli’s terms being met. He got his $70,000 and he was appointed Pasha of Tangiers — though the appointment was revoked in 1906. Like Harris, Perdicaris came to admire his captor, describing him later in a talk at the New York Library Club (April, 1905) as “a true patriot who is leading his people in the fight for independence.”

84Raisuli caused yet another sensation in 1907–1908 — some time after Zur Mühlen and her father had left Tangiers — when he kidnapped Colonel Harry Maclean, known as Caïd Maclean, a British army officer who had been charged with training the Sultan’s army and was a well liked figure at the Sultan’s court. Maclean had been authorized by the Sultan to negotiate a settlement of some outstanding issues with Raisuli in a remote place half way between Tangiers and Fez. Raisuli took him prisoner, held him for several months, and finally, after lengthy negotiations, obtained £20,000 sterling and the status of a British protected subject in return for his release.

85In the struggle between Sultan Abdul Aziz and his brother Abdul Hafiz, Raisuli threw in his lot with the latter. The two swore an oath on the Koran to drive the foreign Christians out of Morocco. (Charles-André Julien, Le Maroc face aux impérialismes 1415–1956 [Paris: Editions J. A., 1978], p. 46) Abdul Hafiz’s reign did not last for long, however, and Raisuli himself was ultimately displaced in the guerilla war against the foreigner by a rival tribal leader, the celebrated Moroccan “freedom fighter” Abdelkrim, whose guerilla tactics are known to have inspired Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara.

86In addition to Harris’s book (cited above), of which a 100-page chapter on Raisuli takes up about a third, and the essay by Tuchman (also cited above), Raisuli is the subject of a romantic biography by Rosita Forbes, one of a number of intrepid British women adventurer-writers around this time (El Raisuni: The Sultan of the Mountains. His Life Story as told to Rosita Forbes [London: T. Butterworth, 1924]). A heavily fictionalized film, The Wind and the Lion (1975), in which Raisuli is played by Sean Connery, focuses on the Perdicaris kidnapping. Ion Perdicaris himself wrote an account of his kidnapping in the National Geographic Magazine in 1906 and in an autobiographical memoir, published in London in 1911, The Hand of Fate (reproduced in John Hughes, ed., House of Tears: Westerners’ Adventures in Islamic Lands [Guildford, CT: The Lyon Press, 2005], pp. 103–26). Raisuli’s relation to Spain, which he tried to play off against France, is treated in Stanley G. Payne, Politics and the Military in Modern Spain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967). He is situated in the context of the history of terrorism in Jeffrey D. Simon, The Terrorist Trap: America’s Experience with Terrorism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994).

48 Madame St. R. T.

87Madeleine Marie Louise Chevrillon Saint-René Taillandier (1875-?), the wife of the French Minister in Tangiers, and a niece of the eminent French historian Hippolyte Taine, went on to have a considerable career as a writer in her own right, specializing in books about personalities of the French 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries (Henri IV avant la messe; Racine; Madame de Maintenon; Madame de Sévigné et sa fille; La Tragédie de Port-Royal; La Jeunesse du Grand Roi: Louis XIV et Anne d’Autriche; Le Grand Roi et sa cour; Du Roi Soleil au roi Voltaire, among others). Most of her elegantly and concisely written books appeared with leading publishers, such as Plon, Grasset, and Hachette in the 1920s and 1930s, when historical biographies that read like novels were in great vogue, but she continued to publish until the early 1950s and several of her works were translated into English. In 1942, the publisher Plon put out a book by her about her uncle, Mon Oncle Taine, and in 1947 the same publisher brought out her charmingly written Ce Monde disparu: Souvenirs, the entire second half of which is devoted to the events and personalities of the years she and her husband spent in Morocco. Madame Taillandier’s narrative confirms what, according to Zur Mühlen, her father said about the insignificance of the post the Austrian government had given him in Tangiers. Of the great powers, Austria alone had no interests in a country where Germany, France, Great Britain, and Spain all had competing interests, and Madame Taillandier never mentions it. Nor, though she devotes many pages to Nicolson, Lady Nicolson, and their children (for all of whom she had great affection), writes at some length of the German mission and its then chief, Baron de Menzingen (“Ce Badois n’était pas prussianisé: un excellent homme, père de six enfants”), and offers brief accounts of the Russian, Spanish, Italian, and Belgian representatives, does she once mention Crenneville. In fact, Austria maintained neither an embassy nor a legation in Tangiers, but only what was called a “diplomatic agency” (“diplomatische Agentie”) and even it was shut down in 1913 after being in existence for under twenty years. Though he was a member of the diplomatic corps (and was referred to by the Moroccan servants as “Baschador” or Ambassador), Crenneville bore the official title only of diplomatic agent, not ambassador or minister.

49 Sir Arthur Nicholson

88Nicolson (1849–1928), consistently misspelled by Zur Mühlen as “Nicholson,” the son of an Admiral, began a wide-ranging career in the British Foreign Office in 1870. From 1872 to 1874 he was Assistant Secretary to the Foreign Secretary, George Granville; from 1874 to 1876 Third Secretary in the Embassy in Berlin; from 1876 to 1878, Second Secretary in Peking. He then returned briefly to Berlin before being posted to Constantinople (1879–1882), Athens (1884–1885), Teheran (1885–1888), Budapest, where he was Consul-General from 1888 to 1892, Constantinople again (1893), and Sofia (1894). In 1895 he was appointed British Minister in Tangiers, a position which he held for almost ten years and in which he finally got a chance to show his mettle as a diplomat. According to a colleague, a Secretary of State for India, writing in 1907, Nicolson was “the best man of his day in his own trade. He is quiet, steady, full of ready resource, not making difficulties, not delighting to put the other man into a hole.” Appointed Ambassador to Spain in 1905, he returned to Morocco in 1906 as British representative at the Algeciras Conference and that same year took on the key role of Ambassador to Russia in St. Petersburg, where Zur Mühlen met up with him again. In 1910 he returned to London to be Permanent Under-Secretary to Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, in which capacity he did his best, against opposition from many liberals unfavorable to close association with the oppressive regime of the Czar, to promote a strong British-Russian-French alliance as a means of holding Germany in check. He played an important part in the diplomatic negotiations and manoeverings that preceded the outbreak of the First World War, urging Grey to make it very clear to Germany that Britain would support France and Russia in the event of war. The German ambassador to Britain, Prince Lichnowsky, described him as “not a friend” of Germany (this was also Zur Mühlen’s view), but unfailingly courteous and eager to avoid war.

89During his 1874–1876 stint at the Embassy in Berlin, Nicolson published A Sketch of the German Constitution and of the Events in Germany from 1815 to 1871 (London: Longmans, Green, 1875), a thoughtful little book on the development of the German Constitution from the time of the German Confederation in 1815 to the Imperial Constitution of 1871. Informative, objective, and fair, while at the same time pointing to important features of the 1871 constitution that left the executive free of responsibility to elected, representative bodies, it gives a good sense of the quality of the author’s mind and of his political values. Nicolson was the subject of a fine biography — Sir Arthur Nicolson, Bart., First Lord Carnock: A Study in the Old Diplomacy (London: Constable, 1930) — by his son, the prolific and elegant writer, essayist, and scholar, Sir Harold Nicolson. Nicolson’s important role in Morocco at a time of increasing tension among the three major powers with interests there — France, Great Britain, and Germany — occupies three chapters of the book (chapters V to VII, pp. 108–99). Nicolson emerges from his son’s narrative as cautious and suspicious of German intentions but, contrary to the assertion of Zur Mühlen’s father, not ill-disposed to the German Minister in Tangiers, Baron Schenk von Schweinsberg, who was appointed soon after Nicolson himself arrived in 1895 and whom Nicolson describes as “an old friend of mine [doubtless from his time at the Embassy in Berlin] and a great improvement on his hot-headed predecessor. He is mild and conciliatory.” Nicolson himself resisted efforts by, among others, “Caïd” Maclean, a retired British army officer in charge of training the Sultan’s troops, to get him to promote British power and influence in Morocco by establishing close relations with the Moroccan court. Such an aggressive stance, Nicolson felt, would alienate the other interested European powers and would not, in the end, be to Britain’s advantage. “I do not know whether it would be desirable for us to obtain a very intimate and powerful footing at Court,” he wrote to Maclean. “We should thereby incur certain responsibilities which I think it would be wiser to avoid. The future is very uncertain in this country, and I should like our hands to be quite free and not to encourage these people to imagine that we were their sole support and advisers. I do not think this would be fair as they might expect more than we should probably perform. I am anxious to be on the most friendly terms and do what I can to help them, but not to strive for a specially predominant position. The consequences might be awkward.”

90Madame Saint-René Taillandier, wife of the French Ambassador to Morocco, traces an engaging portrait of her husband’s colleague and, for a time, rival, in the sense that, as she herself explains with great clarity, while Great Britain had no designs on Morocco, it also sought — until the two countries worked out an agreement giving France a free hand in Morocco in exchange for France’s recognition of Britain’s control of Egypt — to prevent French dominance there. The passage is quoted in French to give a sense of Madame Saint-René Taillandier’s writing: “C’était un homme charmant, il pouvait avoir passé la cinquantaine: très mince et de structure simple et légère, un peu voûté, mais comme un coureur qui va prendre son élan, le visage coloré de cette carnation britannique qui semble se ressentir de la mer et du vent: l’œil bleu, très clair, pénétrant, à tous moments pétillant de malice et tout à coup adouci en une expression de confiance affectueuse. C’était l’Anglais qui ne ressemble qu’à lui-même; il gardait, à travers une expérience déjà longue, une simplicité de jeunesse: sympathique à tous, de vieille race écossaise, protestant naturellement, mais assez réservé sur le sujet religieux pour qu’on pût le croire détaché ou indifférent, il avait probablement contre le monde catholique en général, contre l’obédience romaine, le préjugé héréditaire des Ecossais, les fils de Knox. Il avait la culture générale de l’Anglais qui doit plus à l’expérience, au contact des hommes qu’aux livres et cette pointe d’humour qui invente une expression imprévue, fait rire et surprend. Avec cela, des attentions affectueuses; j’avais perdu un volume d’un de ces romans anglais dont j’ai toujours nourri mes loisirs. Deux semaines plus tard, Sir Arthur avait fait venir ce volume de Londres et s’excusait de ce qu’il fût rouge et son pareil vert. Il me fit rire un jour qu’il me raconta que, lors de sa première audience avec la reine Victoria, on lui avait dit qu’il devrait s’agenouiller pour lui baiser la main. Cette révélation l’avait consterné et il l’était encore quand il se rappelait son mouvement de protestation: No, must I really.(Ce Monde disparu: Souvenirs [Paris: Plon, 1947], pp. 159–60) The Anglo-French agreement altered the terms of the official relations between the British and the French ambassadors — though not their personal relationship, which had always been warm. Basically, Nicolson had been told to give his French counterpart a free hand. “Ce que je me rappelle avec sympathie,” Madame Taillandier writes, “c’est l’attitude si noble, et de fair play de Sir Arthur Nicolson: il s’associait d’une âme élevée à la politique de grande envergure du cabinet de Londres, il ne manifesta aucun dépit et ne rencontra chez son collègue français aucune vanité de succès. Tous deux se serrèrent les mains, et mieux que jamais en amis.” (p. 215) Saint-René Taillandier himself confirms his wife’s view of Nicolson. Having great personal regard for each other, he relates, and regularly exchanging information and consulting with each other on day-to-day practical matters and events in Morocco, the two, as if by common consent, avoided “useless” discussions about the long term future of the country, since decisions on that score had to be taken in London and Paris. One day, however, on the eve of Saint-René’s departure for a six-week stay in France, Nicolson broached the fenced-off topic: “It’s obvious that everyone needs the people here to carry out reforms and it’s equally obvious that they won’t do so themselves. Helping them to do so is decidedly not our business. But it could well be yours.” Saint-René Taillandier had already received a telegram from Paris indicating that negotiations with London appeared to be going well but it was Nicolson’s comment that made it clear to him. “Ce mot par où, après une vive et traditionnelle rivalité de deux années, mon adversaire et ami mettait bas les armes, s’est fixé dans mon souvenir comme un bien élégant et généreux exemple de ce que nos voisins appellent le fair-play. Il était d’un beau joueur et d’un galant homme.” (Les Origines du Maroc français: Récit d’une mission, 1901–1906 [Paris: Plon, 1930], p. 150)

50 Monsieur St. R. T.

91Georges Saint-René Taillandier (sometimes spelled Tallandier) (1852-?), appointed French Minister in Tangiers in 1901, played a major role in defending French interests in Morocco. He was in correspondence in the 1880s with Hippolyte Taine — whose niece he subsequently married — about Taine’s Origines de la France contemporaine, the first volume of which appeared in 1875.

92Taine had taken a dim view of the French Revolution. Taillandier defended the Revolution, claiming that it had resulted in the sweeping away of the Old Regime all over Europe. Taine replied that the way this occurred in England (under the influence of Locke) and in Germany (under the influence of Stein) was far preferable to the way it occurred in France (under the influence of Rousseau). Taine’s letters to Taillandier, dated July 20, August 6 and November 21, 1881, are in print. Taillandier subsequently wrote an account of his activity in Morocco: Les Origines du Maroc français; récit d’une mission 1901–1906 (Paris: Plon, 1930).

51 See under ‘Raisuli’

52 Cunningham Graham

93Robert Bontine Cunninghame [note the final ‘e’] Graham (1852–1936), though born in London, was of old Scottish stock, with a dash of Spanish nobility on his mother’s side. This aristocrat was an adventurer, a prolific writer, a combative socialist, and a Scottish nationalist; he was the first ever avowed socialist to be elected to the British House of Commons, a founder of the Scottish Labour Party, and first President of the Scottish National Party. His political positions were what nowadays would be called “leftist,” however, rather than consistently left. Probably he is best described as an anarchist, opposed to all authority. “Much has been said about the badness of the Government of Morocco,” he wrote in Mogreb-el-Acksa: A Journey in Morocco in 1898. “Most governments are bad, the best a disagreeable institution which men submit to only because they fear to plunge into the unknown, and therefore bear taxation, armies, navies, gold-laced caps, and all the tawdry rubbish which takes from themselves, to furnish living and employment for their neighbours, under the style and title of national defences, home administration, and the like. In countries like Morocco, where men still live under the tribal system, all government must be despotic; witness Algeria, Afghanistan, and Russian Tartary. The unit is the tribe and not the individual, and what we understand by freedom and democracy would seem to them the grossest form of tyranny on earth. No doubt no man in all Morocco is secure in the enjoyment of his property; but then in order to be amenable to tyranny, one must be rich, and as most tribesmen own but a horse or two, a camel, perhaps a slave, some little patch of cultivated ground or olive garden, it is not generally on them the extortion of Government descends, but on the chief Sheikh, Kaid, or Governor, who, if he happens to be rich, can never sleep secure a single day.” (London: Heinemann, 1898; quoted from the 1930 ed., New York: Viking Press, p. 53)

94Mogreb-el-Acksa: A Journey in Morocco, one of Cunninghame Graham’s first books, is chiefly an account of his adventures as, in the guise of “Sheikh Mohammed el Fasi” and claiming to be a Sheerif (i.e. directly descended from the Prophet), he attempted to reach the forbidden city of Tarudant. Zur Mühlen and her father both certainly knew of this journey and they may well also have read Cunninghame Graham’s narrative of it.

95It would be impossible to do better here than quote from the excellent Introduction to the Selected Writings of Cunninghame Graham (East Brunswick, London, Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1981) by Dr. Cedric Watts, a scholar who has studied Cunninghame Graham closely and written a substantial biography of him:

Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham was born in 1852 and died in 1936; in the interim he became a celebrity, a notoriety, a living legend; and in the aftermath he has become, gradually, a forgotten figure, his achievements neglected. Those achievements were many, the most notable (as John Lavery [a Scottish painter and friend of Cunninghame Graham] observed) being ‘his masterpiece — himself.’ He was a colourful, swaggering, protean adventurer: journalists called him ‘a cowboy dandy,’ ‘the Uncrowned King of Scotland,’ ‘the modern Don Quixote.’ He was variously traveler, cattle-rancher and horse-dealer, sword-fencer, Liberal M.P., pioneer Socialist, demagogue, convict, Mohammed el Fasi of Morocco, prospector for gold, begetter of Sergius Saranoff in Shaw’s Arms and the Man, political columnist, essayist, critic, story-writer, historian, biographer, translator, leader of the Scottish nationalists, ‘the curly darling’ to factory girls and an expert with the lasso and with pistols. The list of his friends and acquaintances reads like a bizarre Who’s Who. On political platforms he campaigned alongside William Morris, Friedrich Engels, Prince Kropotkin, Keir Hardie, H.M. Hyndman […] Eric Linklater and Hugh McDiarmid; he was admired by figures as diverse as Wyndham Lewis, George Bernard Shaw, Jacob Epstein, G.K. Chesterton, Ezra Pound and Theodore Roosevelt; his correspondents included H.G. Wells, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Lawrence of Arabia and John Galsworthy; and his closest literary friendships were with Joseph Conrad, W.H. Hudson and Edward Garnett.
He was born into the Scottish landed gentry […]; his ancestry was three-quarters Scottish, one quarter Spanish. On his father’s side he could trace his descent from Robert the Bruce, King Robert I of Scotland; another ancestor had fought and died beside William Wallace in 1298. […] At the age of seventeen he went to South America to seek his fortune. During the subsequent years he frequently travelled in Central and South America, living among
gauchos, llaneros and cattle-ranchers, making repeated attempts to prosper as a cattle-and horse-dealer — attempts which failed partly because of his youthful rashness, and partly because of Indian raids and the revolutionary upheavals in those regions. […]
Back in Scotland after his father’s death […] he was elected to Parliament as Liberal member for North-West Lanark [a Scottish constituency near Glasgow] in July 1886 and remained an M.P. until 1892. His Liberalism was nominal: he was attentive to the left-wing ideas of H.M. Hyndman and William Morris; the
People’s Press (26 April 1890, p. 30) regarded him as ‘the only member of Parliament who can really be called a Socialist’; and indeed he was in practice the first Socialist in the House of Commons. […] [His] scornfully ironic and uncompromising maiden speech set the tone for his subsequent parliamentary appearances, during which he condemned British imperialism, profiteering landlords and industrialists, child labour, corporal and capital punishments, the House of Lords, and religious instruction for schoolchildren; and he advocated the eight-hour working day […], free education, Home Rule for Ireland and Scotland, and nationalisation of mining and industry generally. […]
His notoriety increased with his part in the ‘Bloody Sunday’ demonstrations of 13 November, 1887, when huge crowds of radicals, socialists, and workmen were involved in fights with police at Trafalgar Square and were not scattered until the Grenadier Guards appeared on the scene with fixed bayonets. Graham, arrested after a rush at the police, was subsequently found guilty of “unlawful assembly” and was sentenced to six weeks’ imprisonment at Pentonville. His experiences as a convict did nothing to diminish his campaigning ardour: in 1888 he helped to found the Scottish Labour Party, becoming its President, with Keir Hardie as Secretary. At demonstrations on behalf of the dockers and in the campaign for the eight-hour day he appeared alongside Kropotkin, Engels, H.M. Hyndman and John Burns, and he travelled to Paris with Hardie and William Morris to speak at the Marxist Congress of the Second International. […]
After 1900, as the Labour group in Parliament gathered strength, he turned increasingly against it: he felt that once Labour Members arrived there, they became too ‘respectable,’ too eager to compromise. […] He […] became increasingly the champion of extreme militancy, his rhetoric approaching advocacy of violent revolution. […]
After the war, in his later years he turned increasingly to the cause of Scottish Home Rule […] He became President of the National Party of Scotland and of its successor, the Scottish National Party, and was still head of the movement when he died in 1936.
There were good reasons why, in his lifetime, he had become known as “the modern Don Quixote.” He had the style and swagger of a Spanish grandee, he admired Cervantes’s hero, and on horseback, with his lean erect bearing, his upswept hair and his pointed beard, he bore some resemblance to Quixote; and his friends affectionately addressed him as Don Roberto. It is also the case that in his chivalrous impetuosity, in his concern for the underdog, and in his contempt for so much that passed for modern progress he could be seen as quixotically anachronistic. Yet this “champion of lost causes” was also ahead of his times. Many of the causes for which he fought so zealously were eventually to succeed. […] They included, as we have seen, the eight-hour working day, militant trade-unionism, the end of sweated labour, the emergence of a Labour Party and free education; he championed the cause of feminist emancipation from the 1890s onward, and urged greater concern for oppressed racial minorities. […]
Just as Graham’s political career has received inadequate attention from historians, … so Graham’s literary work seems today to have been forgotten by the general public and academic critics alike. Yet, in his lifetime, he was regarded as a master. […] His works were customarily reviewed in tones ranging from the respectful to the gleeful. He impressed authors as diverse as Edward Garnett, Ezra Pound, Arthur Symons and John Galsworthy. […] Joseph Conrad’s tributes, in his correspondence with Graham, […] are generous almost to the point of sycophancy. […] Even when he is not writing at his best, he is distinctive, original, provocative. The texture may be thin, but it is wiry; […] he always has an eye for the telling detail. […] His tales form an extended and complex autobiography; and though it is the autobiography of a man who had a large stock of vanity and egotism, we also learn of a man who had magnanimous sympathies and indignations, and a capacity to see human efforts in multiple perspectives.

96Probably Victor de Crenneville did not like Cunninghame Graham for the same reason that he did not like the similarly flamboyant Walter Harris, who, as it happens, was a friend of Cunninghame Graham’s. If we can judge by Hermynia Zur Mühlen’s portrait of her father, he was too cynical and désabusé to appreciate the energy and histrionics Graham brought to everything he did. Though she is not very forthcoming, Zur Mühlen herself could well have felt differently. She turned out to be more practical, realistic, and consistent than Graham, but she could well have recognized some of her own impulses in the rage and indignation, the anti-bourgeois stance, and — not least — the chivalrous concern for the oppressed and downtrodden of the leftist Scottish aristocrat.

53 Harris, Walter

97Walter Harris (1866–1933), the son of a prosperous London businessman, educated at Harrow and (briefly) Cambridge, visited Constantinople, India, Egypt, Yemen and South Africa before settling in Tangiers in 1886 at the age of twenty. He continued to travel in and write about many areas of the Middle East, but Tangiers, where he occupied a handsome villa, was his home for the next thirty-five years. Though the interior of Morocco was largely closed to foreigners at the time, Harris was an intrepid and clever explorer and got to see and describe areas hitherto unvisited. In addition, as the correspondent of the London Times in Tangiers, an Arabic speaker, and the intimate of at least three of the ruling Sultans, he had many opportunities to observe every aspect of Moroccan life. After he was captured by the mountain chieftain Raisuli one day when he was out hunting, he not only succeeded in securing his own release — with the help, generously acknowledged, of Sir Arthur Nicolson, the British Minister in Tangiers — he won the respect of his captor, of whom he in turn wrote admiringly. Harris is the author of many books describing the places and societies he visited: The Land of the African Sultan: Travels in Morocco (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1889); A Journey through the Yemen (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1893); Tafilat: The Narrative of a Journey of Exploration to the Atlas Mountains and the Oases of the North-west Sahara (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1895); From Batum to Baghdad by way of Tiflis, Tabriz and Persian Kurdistan (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Son, 1896); Morocco that Was (Edinburgh and London: William Backwood and Sons, 1921); France, Spain and the Rif (London: Arnold, 1927); East for Pleasure: The Narrative of Eight Months’ Travel in Burma, Siam, the Netherlands East Indies and French Indo-China (London: Arnold, 1929); East Again: The Narrative of a Journey in the Near, Middle and Far East (n.p.: Butterworth, 1933). His books were generally favorably reviewed and deemed “most entertaining.” He also published a collection of short stories, Danovitch and other stories (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Son, 1895), as well as articles, mostly about North Africa and the Middle East, in magazines, such as Blackwood’s, The Independent, and The Geographical Journal.

98The editor of a recent re-edition of Morocco That Was describes Harris as “an eccentric” about whom “it is hard to distinguish the truth from the legend,” a man who “loved to tell stories, especially about himself,” and “loved to make his own part in any yarn he was telling into a hymn about his own cleverness, cunning, bravery, popularity, and importance. All his geese had to be swans.”

99Madame Saint-René Taillandier, the wife of the French envoy in Morocco, remembers him as “un petit homme vif, agile, amusant, hospitalier, se classant volontiers lui-même avec sa demeure, parmi les curiosités à montrer aux étrangers.” At the same time, it is said, he was “throughout his life a trusted and valued correspondent of The Times, and that august journal, especially in those days, would not tolerate any divergence from strict accuracy.” As with Cunninghame Graham, it would seem that Harris’s vanity, self-importance, and flamboyance outweighed, for the courteous and aristocratic Victor de Crenneville, whatever virtues he might have had.

(Sources: Walter Harris, Morocco That Was, with a new Preface by Patrick Thursfield [London: Eland Books, 1983; orig. Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood an Sons, 1921]; Mme Saint-René Taillandier, Ce Monde disparu. Souvenirs [Paris: Plon, 1947], pp. 164–65 et passim).

54 Count Cr.

100I.e. Count Crenneville. “Graf Crenneville” was the usual short way of referring to the male members of the Folliot de Crenneville family.

55 Herr von M.

101Probably Karl, Freiherr von Macchio (1859–1945), an Austrian career diplomat who was to see service in Constantinople, Bucharest, and St. Petersburg, before becoming Under-Secretary to Foreign Minister Berchtold. He spoke in Berchtold’s name whenever the Foreign Minister was not available at the Ballhausplatz, the headquarters of the Austro-Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In August, 1914 he was sent on an important special mission to Rome to support the ambassador and the embassy staff there in their efforts to delay for as long as possible an Italian declaration of war against Austria-Hungary. The episode described here by Zur Mühlen obviously occurred early in his career.

56 Count Cr.

102In this passage, “Count Cr.” refers to Zur Mühlen’s paternal grandfather, Franz, Count Crenneville. As Governor of Livorno and Commander of the Imperial forces in Tuscany from about 1850 until 1855, Crenneville was zealous in the execution of his assignment to root out revolutionary movements in the Duchy of Tuscany. (See above under ‘Paternal Grandfather’.) His own three sons were Victor (Zur Mühlen’s father, born 1847), Heinrich Otto (born 1855) and Franz (born 1856). He is represented in the novel Reise durch ein Leben in the figure of the heroine’s uncle (referred to as “Exzellenz”), who in his retirement from public service, has withdrawn to an old castle, where he lives alone, except for a manservant, receives no one, and spends his days and nights writing a massive history and critique of the death penalty in order to make amends for all the death warrants he signed while in the Emperor’s service as governor of an Italian province.

57 My aunt, the wife of one of my father’s brothers

103Either Rosalie Mathilde Edler von Glaser, born 1860, married to Heinrich Otto, Count Crenneville in 1888, or Hermine, Countess Zichy zu Zichy und Vasonykeö, born 1866, married to Franz, Count Crenneville in 1895.

58 Geneva

104Geneva as a gathering-place of socialist exiles from czarist Russia is also the scene of Joseph Conrad’s 1911 novel Under Western Eyes.

59 Sir Rudolf Slatin Pasha

105Rudolf Carl Slatin (1857–1932), the fourth of six children of a Jewish merchant who had converted to Christianity, was born in what is now Vienna’s XIIIth District of Ober-Sankt-Veit. After a period of study at the Vienna Handelsakademie (commercial school), he took a job, at the age of seventeen, with a German bookseller in Cairo. He boarded ship at Trieste (then part of the Habsburg Empire) for the five-day voyage to Alexandria, set out for Khartoum soon after his arrival in Cairo and began exploring, on his own, the mountainous Dar Nuba region of the Sudan. On the outbreak of a rebellion of local Hawazma Arabs against the Egyptian government, however, being in his own words “merely a traveller” (i.e. tourist), he “received a summons to return forthwith to El Obeid, the chief town of Kodofan,” whence he went back to Khartoum. There he met Mehmet Emin Pasha, a.k.a. Izaak Eduard Schnitzer, another converted Jew (in this case from Silesia) who had studied at Breslau, Königsberg and Berlin, qualified as a doctor, opened a practice in Khartoum, and attracted the attention of General Charles George Gordon, then Governor of the Equatorial Provinces of Egypt. Gordon appointed him chief medical officer of the provinces and also sent him, on account of his language skills, on various diplomatic missions. Slatin asked Emin Pasha to take him to meet Gordon, but in the meantime he was recalled to Austria to fulfill his required military service. Emin Pasha, however, did recommend the young Slatin to Gordon for employment in the Sudan, and in 1878, while serving as a lieutenant in Crown Prince Rudolf’s regiment in the Bosnian campaign, Slatin received a letter from Gordon, inviting him to the Sudan, where Gordon had become Governor-General.

106As soon as the Bosnian campaign was over, Slatin obtained permission to go to Africa, arriving in Khartoum in January 1879. Soon after, Gordon appointed him, at the age of twenty-two, “Mudir” or governor of Dara, the south-western part of Darfur, a post he held until early 1881, when he was promoted to be Governor-General of Darfur and given the rank of “bey.” While administering Dara, Slatin conducted a successful campaign against one of the Darfur princes who was leading a revolt, and as Governor of Darfur, he endeavoured to remedy many abuses, particularly in the slave trade — even though he asserted that black Africans “do not deserve to be treated like free and independent men.” (When she learned of his views on slavery, Queen Victoria, whose friendship he later enjoyed, was apparently not amused, and he was told to mind his words.) However, he soon had to confront, as Governor, the rising power of the Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmed. Early in 1882, the Arabs in southern Darfur rose in rebellion. Though victorious in over 20 engagements, Slatin kept losing ground, and as his followers attributed this to his being a Christian, he converted nominally, but publicly, to Islam (1883) in the hope of rallying his troops. All possibility of maintaining Egyptian authority vanished, however, with the almost total destruction, at the battle of El Obeid, of Colonel William Hicks’s army of Egyptian fellahin, which had been sent to combat the Mahdi. In December 1883 Slatin surrendered, seeing it as his duty not to sacrifice lives unnecessarily in a hopeless cause. He considered taking his own life in order to avoid captivity, but “I was young,” as he wrote later, “my life during the past four years had been one of anxious responsibility, but of stirring adventure as well, and I had no particular desire to bring it to a close, even with the dark prospect in front of me.” (Fire and Sword in the Sudan [London and New York: Edward Arnold, 1896], pp. 259–60) He was therefore taken prisoner. When, a little over a year later, he rebuffed the Mahdi’s efforts to get him to persuade Gordon to surrender, he was placed in chains and on January 26, 1885, within hours of the fall of Khartoum, the severed head of Gordon was brought to the camp and doubtless shown to him. On the death of the Mahdi the same year, Slatin remained as the prisoner of his successor, Khalifa Abdullahi. Obliged to serve in the latter’s personal retinue, and to act as his interpreter and adviser, he was treated alternately with cruelty and comparative indulgence. In fact, Slatin tried to maintain his contacts with the Khalifa and other Mahdists, even after he had regained his freedom, in the belief that for the purposes of intelligence-gathering and negotiating, these contacts could be useful.

107After over eleven years in captivity, during which, among other things, the Mahdi had provided him with two concubines, one of whom gave birth to a child by him, Slatin succeeded in making his escape, with the help of Major Sir Reginald Wingate of the Egyptian Intelligence Department, in a dangerous 600-mile three-week journey across the desert. (Wingate was a cousin of the father of Major-General Orde Wingate, the dedicated British supporter of a Jewish state in Palestine.) A year later he wrote Fire and Sword in the Sudan, which was not only “a Personal Narrative of Fighting and Serving the Dervishes,” as stated in the subtitle, but a comprehensive account of the Sudan under the rule of the Khalifa. “By permission humbly dedicated” to “Her Most Gracious Majesty, The Queen of Great Britain and Ireland and Empress of India, who has ever shown deep solicitude for and gracious sympathy with the European prisoners in the Sudan,” “by Her Majesty’s most devoted and faithful Rudolf C. Slatin,” the book was published simultaneously in German and in an English translation heavily edited by Wingate. It was translated into French and Italian and became a Europe-wide bestseller. Raised to the rank of Pasha by the Ottoman Khedive or Viceroy of Egypt, Slatin was made a CB (Companion of the Order of the Bath) and shortly afterwards a KCMG (Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. Geoge) by Queen Victoria in recognition of his services. In Austria, he was given an audience with Franz Joseph who made him a baron with the title “Freiherr von Slatin.” In 1899, he was knighted by Queen Victoria and made a Brigadier-General in the British army; in 1900 he was appointed Inspector-General of the Sudan, a title which no one had held before or was to hold after him and which he held until the outbreak of war in 1914; and in 1907 he was made an honorary Major-General in the British army. He was a favourite and a frequent guest, at Windsor and Balmoral, of Queen Victoria, who had a portrait of him painted for her own collection by one of her personal portrait-painters, Heinrich von Angeli. He was also a guest at other European courts.

108By the time Zur Mühlen met Slatin in Morocco, therefore, he was a European celebrity. Hence her surprise and delight at finding him modest and unassuming.

109As Inspector-General of the Sudan, Slatin pursued a policy of strengthening “orthodox” Islam as a barrier against what he saw as Sufi and Mahdist fanaticism. He tried to limit Christian proselytizing and to reinforce tribal leadership and family bonds. The outbreak of war between Great Britain and Austria-Hungary in 1914 was particularly painful for him. His entire career had been in the service of the British monarchy. Now he had to give up his position and separate from some of his closest friends. (He and Wingate were especially close, worked together in the administration of the Sudan, and had complete trust in one another.) Returning to Austria, he settled in the villa at Traunkirchen (only a few miles from Zur Mühlen’s beloved Gmunden) which he had purchased in 1897 and where he had been host to many noted personalities, including King Edward VII. He took no active part in the war but instead headed the Prisoners-of-War section of the Austrian Red Cross, which allowed him to intervene on behalf of British prisoners-of-war, and he is said to have been involved in attempts to work out a separate peace between Great Britain and France on the one hand and Austria-Hungary on the other. In 1919, he was a member of the Austrian delegation that negotiated the peace treaty between the new Republic of Austria and the victorious allied powers. In recognition of his having secured food supplies for the starving population of Vienna in 1918, he was made an honorary citizen of Vienna. After the death, in 1921, of his wife, Baroness Alice von Ramberg, whom he had married in 1914 and by whom he had a daughter, he moved to Merano, formerly in Austria, but Italian since the end of the war. In June 1932, a couple of months before his own death following a cancer operation in Vienna, he and his daughter, Anne-Marie, were received by King George V in London.

110A movie about Slatin, entitled Slatin Pascha was produced in 1967 by the German TV channel ZDF and and a 90-minute documentary about him was completed in 2012 by the Austrian company Fischer Film.

60 Baron Oppenheim

111Max von Oppenheim (1860–1946), an internationally renowned orientalist and archaeologist, known to the British in World War I as “the Kaiser’s spy,” was born into a wealthy Jewish banking family in Cologne. The private bank known as “Sal. [i.e. Salomon] Oppenheim,” founded in 1789, exists to this day, though its headquarters were moved to Luxembourg in 2007. It is said to be the largest such bank in Europe, with about 3,100 employees.

112The Oppenheims are first mentioned as silk merchants in Frankfurt in the 16th century. In 1740 a Salomon Oppenheim moved to Bonn where the Oppenheims became court factors of the Elector Clement August. The founder of the modern banking business of Sal. Oppenheim Jr & Cie was a younger Salomon (1772–1828) who transferred it in 1798 to Cologne. His sons, Simon (1803–1880) and Abraham (1804–1878), together with their mother Therese, who had taken over the management of the firm on her husband’s death, transformed it into a powerful engine of modern commercial and industrial capitalism in Germany. Linked by marriage to other Jewish banking families — the Rothschilds, the Habers, the Foulds — the Oppenheims were involved in the financing of Germany’s first industrial firms: they promoted railroad construction, river transportation, insurance, and corporate banks in Germany and abroad, and they helped to finance the up-and-coming heavy industry in the Ruhr, including the Krupp company. In the first half of the nineteenth century Simon and Abraham identified themselves as Jews and sought to advance the cause of Jewish emancipation. In 1841, for example, they submitted “a humble petition” for emancipation of the Jews to the King of Prussia. Twenty years later Abraham helped to fund the construction of a handsome new synagogue in Cologne. Along with a third brother, Dagobert (originally David, 1809–1889), the brothers also supported general cultural and philanthropic ventures in Cologne. They were among the founding members of the Cologne Kunstverein [Art Association] in 1839; they immediately joined the Zentral-Dombau-Verein, set up in 1842 to ensure preservation of the fabric of Cologne’s great cathedral; and in 1859 Dagobert and his son Eduard (1831–1909) played a major role in the establishment of the Cologne Zoo and the “Flora” Horticultural Society. In 1875 Simon and Abraham, along with Dagobert’s sons Eduard and Albert (1834–1912), provided funding for the Cologne Music Conservatory. In 1867, “for services in railway financing,” Simon was ennobled by Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria with the hereditary title of baron (Freiherr); Abraham received the same honour from the Prussian monarch a year later. In 1856, on the occasion of his marriage to the daughter of a prominent Catholic family in Cologne, Dagobert’s son Albert — who was to be a major art collector — embraced the Roman Catholic faith; his brother Eduard converted to Protestantism the following year. As they were the only male heirs, the family’s and the firm’s Jewish connections were thereby ended. Max von Oppenheim was the son of Albert.

113It was intended that Max should enter the firm and prepare to take it over when the time came. Max, however, had developed a keen interest in the Islamic world and dreamed of devoting his life to the study of the peoples and cultures of the Middle East and North Africa. After he obtained a law degree in 1883, his father permitted him to undertake a journey to the Orient. In the winter of 1883–1884 he accompanied an uncle to Athens, Smyrna and Constantinople. In 1886 he spent six months in Morocco in what he describes as a Forschungsreise [research trip], and he learned Arabic. He himself recounts the subsequent development of his career in the first volume (1939) of his book on the Bedouins:

In 1892 I was able to begin pursuing my scholarly activities in the Orient on a larger scale. With the ethnographer Wilhelm Joest, a fellow-citizen of Cologne, I travelled from Morocco right across North Africa. At the end of the trip I stopped for some months in Cairo, where I lodged in an Arab house in the native quarter. Here I lived exactly as the local Muslims did in order to develop my fluency in the Arabic language and to study thoroughly the spirit of Islam and the customs and manners of the native inhabitants. My plan was to prepare myself in this way for further expeditions that would lead me into the Eastern part of the Arab world. In the Spring of 1893, my path led to Damascus. From here I set out on my first truly major research trip in the Near East. It is narrated in my two-volume book Vom Mittelmeer zum Persischen Golf durch den Haurān und die Syrische Wüste [1899–1900]. […]
As early as this 1893 trip I was able to collect much material on the Bedouins. This is laid out in the second volume of the aforementioned book. In the course of this expedition I came to love the wild, unconstrained life of the sons of the desert. […] In Cairo I had already become accustomed to eating with my fingers (one may use only those of the right hand), as was still then the practice in the Cairene middle classes, instead of with a knife and fork. […] That is naturally how I ate with the Bedouins, both when I was their guest and when they were my guests. By sharing their way of life in the saddle and in the tent, I acquired ever greater knowledge of their ways. They felt that I was well disposed towards them and that I understood their customs and peculiarities. Hence, they were also well disposed towards me and readily answered any question I put to them. […]
The return journey from Mesopotamia took me by way of the Persian Gulf and India to our then young and beautiful colony of East Africa. I made an expedition into the interior, in the course of which I acquired an extensive tract of land in Usambara, which was later turned into plantations by the
Rheinische Handel-Plantagen-Gesellschaft, which here successfully cultivated first the coffee bean, and then, after the coffee worm made its appearance, sisal — until this flourishing plantation was lost to Germany as a consequence of the World War. […]
From there I returned to Cairo, where in early 1894 I met Zuber Pasha who, by hunting for men to sell as slaves, had succeeded in establishing a large principality. As he began to become too strong, however, Khedive Ismail enticed him to Cairo where he detained him in a beautiful palace, that was like a gilded cage. From Zuber Pasha, I obtained extraordinarily interesting information about one of his former generals named Rabeh, who had refused to capitulate to the Egyptians and had moved westwards from the Nile valley with a large number of his former soldiers and their families.
Back in Germany, I wrote up a report on this, as well as on other things I had learned in Cairo about the area around Lake Chad and about the Muslim order of the Senussi, which was of great importance not only from a religious but also from a political standpoint. This report led the Foreign Office to ask me, in the context of our rivalry with France and England, to lead a German expedition into the hinterland of the Cameroons in order to acquire the area up to Lake Chad for Germany. […]
Our expedition plans had to be abandoned however. In the competition involving France, England and Germany the aforementioned Rabeh had moved faster than the European powers. Starting out from the Egyptian Sudan he had led his army from victory to victory, like a black Napoleon, and had seized all the lands south of Wadai [a former kingdom situated between Lake Chad and Darfur] together with the large kingdoms of Bagirmi and Bornu. Still, his reign was of short duration. He fell in a battle with the French and the empire he founded collapsed. When his lands were divided up by the European colonial powers, my expedition, which was all ready to go, became part of the bargaining process. Germany received the so-called “Caprivi-strip” of our Cameroons colony, namely large parts of Bagirmi and Bornu and thereby access to Lake Chad.
From then on I was employed by the Foreign Office and attached to our diplomatic legation in Cairo. From there I was in a position to observe closely all the affairs of the Islamic world. No place was better for this than Cairo. The Egyptian Press, published in the Arabic of the Koran, was of decisive importance for the entire Islamic world from the Atlantic to China. Whereas in Turkey Sultan Abdul Hamid wielded absolute power and did not tolerate the free expression of opinion in the newspapers, Cairo was the resort of all Muslim political refugees, especially those from the Ottoman Empire.
But I also managed to establish excellent relations with Sultan Abdul Hamid […] [who] asked me to call on him whenever I was in Constantinople, which I regularly did.

114Oppenheim goes on to tell of the “excellent relations” he established through the Sultan with the family of Emir Faisal, who was to become King of Iraq — and a personal friend, with Abdul Huda, the Sultan’s astrologer and the head of the “widespread Muslim brotherhood of Rifa’ija,” and with many other personalities of the Muslim world.

115With a few interruptions, when he was attached to the Embassies in Washington and Paris or was employed by the Foreign Office in Berlin itself, Oppenheim spent the years from 1896 until 1909, he relates, in Cairo, where his house “was on the border between the native and the European quarters” and where he entertained many Egyptians and other Muslims. It was during this period that Zur Mühlen and her father met him.

116It seems clear that Oppenheim’s scholarly interest in the world of Islam cannot be dissociated from the politics of the time and in particular from the intense rivalry among the European powers for influence in Africa and the Middle East. It is not surprising therefore that the scholar was approached by Georg von Siemens, the Director of the Deutsche Bank, about prospecting and giving advice on the best route for the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway on the stretch between Aleppo and Mosul. Though the German Foreign Office would not allow Oppenheim to accept this commission openly, for fear that the participation of a Foreign Office agent in the project would be viewed with displeasure and suspicion by the British, the scholar was able to give Siemens the requested advice privately. It seems, moreover, that Oppenheim and his scholarly associates sometimes lodged in the same buildings as the engineers of the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway.

117Oppenheim’s role in German national politics went considerably further than establishing contacts with leading Muslims and providing Berlin with useful information. In the decades preceding the First World War Kaiser Wilhelm II was actively pursuing an Ottoman-German alliance to counter British and French influence in the Middle East. He had even re-affirmed his friendship with the Ottoman Sultan after an 1896 Turkish massacre of Christian Armenians had shocked most of Europe. Oppenheim’s profound knowledge of the region, the voluminous notes he had taken, the countless maps he had drawn, and not least his contacts with Muslim tribal chieftains and leaders were clearly of immense value to the German government and it is hardly to be wondered at that he was soon engaged directly in working for it. What Zur Mühlen reports in her memoir about him and his activities reflects the general opinion of the time, especially in British and French diplomatic circles (but also, thanks to John Buchan’s popular spy thriller Greenmantle of 1916, in the English-speaking public at large). Oppenheim, in the words of one recent historian,” travelled extensively throughout Mesopotamia and Syria, […] mapping and taking meticulous notes on everything. […] It was not long before the British guessed that he, and other scholars, were working for the Kaiser’s intelligence services.”

118Oppenheim’s great journey of 1899 from Cairo by way of Aleppo and Urfa to the Khabur, which resulted in his main claim to scholarly fame, the discovery of Tel-Halaf in Syrian Kurdistan, with its rich treasure of Neolithic artefacts from 4,000–5,000 B.C.E., was not, as we have seen, unconnected with prospecting the route of the Berlin to Baghdad railway. A year earlier, shortly before a projected visit of the Kaiser to Constantinople, the scholar had sent a memorandum to Berlin from Cairo, dated 5 July, 1898, in which he reported on pan-Islamic movements in the Middle East and suggested that jihad or Muslim holy war could be a mighty weapon if Muslims could actually be made ready and willing to engage in it. Were jihad proclaimed, he wrote, volunteers and money from all over the Islamic world would arrive for the Sultan, as happened in his 1877–78 war against Russia. Since Germany, of all the Christian nations, was considered by Muslims to be their best friend, according to Oppenheim, the message of the memorandum was clear: prepare to use the Sultan to call for jihad in the colonial territories of potential enemies. Despite some disagreement about how effective it actually was, there is general consensus among modern scholars that the “Holy War strategy,” which the Kaiser did in fact adopt in the 1914–1918 War, was “mainly Oppenheim’s idea” and that, as its “principal architect” and “mastermind,” he was also largely in charge of its execution. It may well be, for instance, that his advice influenced the Sultan’s decision in the summer of 1915 to persuade the head of the Senussi religious brotherhood, the Grand Senussi Ahmed Sharif es-Sanussi, to order his tribesmen to attack British-occupied Egypt from the west, raise jihad, and foment an insurrection within Egypt against the British. The so-called Senussi revolt turned out to be a serious challenge to the Allied war effort. As Oppenheim himself recalled in the Introduction to his 1939 book on the Bedouins, he had submitted a memorandum to the German Foreign Office in the 1890s on the Sanussi brotherhood, and the military leader of the revolt, Jaafar Pasha al-Askari, a Kurd from Mesopotamia and a former Ottoman army officer, had been trained in Germany.

119Around 1909 Oppenheim withdrew from the Foreign Service to devote himself fully to the excavations at Tel-Halaf, having been advised by the Turkish government that he must act immediately on the right to excavate, which he had obtained ten years earlier from the Sultan, since the English were now requesting permission to explore the site. On the outbreak of war, however, he was summoned to Berlin by the Kaiser to head the newly created Oriental News Department at the Foreign Ministry, for which a dozen German academics had been recruited, and the aim of which was to spread propaganda among Muslims. Soon after, in October 1914, he submitted a top secret 136-page report to the Kaiser entitled “Die Revolutionierung der islamischen Gebiete unserer Feinde” (“Fomenting Revolution in the Islamic territories of our enemies”). The report recommended that the Sultan proclaim a jihad against the French, the British, and the Russians and that he receive support from Berlin in the form of money, experts, and matériel. The targets of the propaganda effort were to be Muslims in British India, French North Africa, and Russian Asia. In 1915 Oppenheim was sent to head the News Department of the German Embassy in Constantinople. Among other measures, he initiated and oversaw the production of thousands of propaganda leaflets and booklets for distribution in Muslim countries, started a film company to produce newsreels and other short propaganda movies, and created a network of 70 reading halls (Nachrichtensaale) in major population centres where his guidelines for jihad were to be communicated and spread.

120With the defeat of Germany, Oppenheim’s nationalist dreams for his country also collapsed. He took up the excavations at Tel-Halaf again and published accounts of the findings, of which he had to give half over to the Syrian authorities. To house and exhibit his share of them he established the Tel-Halaf Museum in Berlin in 1930 and at the same time set up a Foundation, the Max-Freiherr von Oppenheim Stiftung, to promote research into all aspects of the societies and cultures of the Near East, from prehistoric times to the present. The Foundation had a library of 40,000 books and a large collection of Islamic manuscripts and artefacts.

121Despite his Jewish origins — after all, though his mother was Christian, his father was a converted Jew and he was therefore, by Nazi standards, half-Jewish — Oppenheim was not molested by the Nazis and continued to live freely in Berlin. Perhaps he was too useful to them. In December 1935 he still professed optimism that, as he wrote in a letter to a nephew, by the time the 150th anniversary of the Oppenheim Bank came around in 1939 “the current unfriendliness with regard to the Jewish origins of the Oppenheims will have faded.” Marjorie Veronica Seton Williams, the Australian-born archaeologist, tells of visiting the Tel-Halaf Museum in 1937 and being shown around it by Oppenheim himself, followed by a manservant, who poured the pair a glass of wine every time they stopped. In 1939 Oppenheim made a further final expedition into the Middle East. A report in the New York Times, dated Istanbul, April 7 1941, tells of “three Reich plotters,” of whom Oppenheim, “a distinguished archaeologist and astute propagandist” was one, who “after gains in Iraq,” had sought support in Syria “for Hitler as ‘Protector of Islam,’” and had made “fantastic pedges” to the Arab population. Oppenheim was apparently willing to go to great lengths to ensure his survival, if that is how we are to interpret his active participation in propagandizing for the Third Reich.

122The first, richly illustrated and handsomely produced volume of his scholarly study of the Bedouins was published in Leipzig in 1939, under his own name. “Max, Freiherr von Oppenheim.” The second volume appeared in 1943, still under the Oppenheim name, even though, as early as 1887 that name had been deemed so “obviously semitic” by a Foreign Office official that he considered a regular diplomatic career impossible for anyone bearing it. The year 1943 also saw the publication with De Gruyter of Berlin, likewise under Oppenheim’s own name, of the magnificent first volume of his study of Tel-Halaf. In the Foreword, the author thanks the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft for financially supporting the publication of his work.

123Hoping perhaps to demonstrate his family’s continued devotion to what he called, in the letter to his nephew, “das Deutschtum,” Oppenheim even revived his earlier anti-British jihad plan. In July 1940 he sent a shortened version of it to the German Foreign Office. As France had by then been neutralized, the revised plan focused on provoking uprisings against the British in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, blocking the Suez Canal, and fomenting revolution in India. He recommended co-operation with the Palestinian leader Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1948, the setting up of a Palestinian state under al-Husseini, and the expulsion of all Jews who had not been residents of Palestine before the outbreak of war.

124Max von Oppenheim remained in Berlin until he was bombed out of his elegant apartment there toward the end of the Second World War. He moved to Dresden, where he survived the massive destruction of the city. His Tel-Halaf Museum in Berlin was also destroyed in a bombing raid, however. What remained of the collection was subsequently moved to Cologne. Oppenheim retired to Landshut in Lower Bavaria, not far from Munich, where he died in November 1946.

125Zur Mühlen’s account of the man she and her parents met or at least heard stories about more than two decades before the composition of her memoir appears to reflect some knowledge gained after her visit to Cairo. One cannot help wondering what she may have known, later still, of the last stage of his extraordinary career.

(Sources: Max Freiherr von Oppenheim, Vom Mittelmeer zum persischen Golf, 2 vols. [Berlin Dietrich Reimer, 1899–1900]; id., Die Beduinen, 4 vols., vol. 1 [Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1939], vol. 2 [Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1943]; id., Tell Halaf, 4 vols., vol. 1 [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1943]; Die Revolutionierung der islamischen Gebiete unserer Feinde [Denkschrift, Berlin, 1914, in Jäckh papers, microfilm 11747, Princeton University Library]; Werner Caskel, “Max Freiherr von Oppenheim, Nachruf,“Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft [1955], 101: 3–8; Peter Hopkins, On Secret Service East of Constantinople [London: John Murray, 1994], pp. 19, 78, 132; Donald M. McKale, “’The Kaiser’s Spy’: Max von Oppenheim and the Anglo-German Rivalry Before and During the First World War,” European History Quarterly, 27 [1997]: 199–220; R. L. Melka “Max Freiherr von Oppenheim: Sixty Years of Scholarship and Political Intrigue in the Middle East,” Middle Eastern Studies [1973] 9: 81–93; Lothar Rathmann, Stossrichtung Nahost 1914–1918: Zur Expansionspolitik des deutschen Imperialismus im ersten Weltkrieg [Berlin: Tütten & Loenig, 1962], pp, 28–30, 107–108, 189–93; Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, “Euro-Islam by ‘Jihad Made in Germany’,” in Nathalie Clayer and Eric Germain, eds., Islam in Inter-War Europe [New York: Columbia University Press, 1998], pp. 271–301, especially pp. 275–81, 293; M.V. Seton Williams, The Road to El-Aguzein [London: Kegan Paul International, 1988], pp. 71–72; Hew Strachan, The First World War [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], vol. 1, pp. 694–712, 770–72; Gabriele Teichmann in Neue Deutsche Biographie, 19, p. 559; Michael Stürmer, Gabriele Teichmann, and Wilhelm Treue, Wägen und Wagen: Sal. Oppenheim, Jr. & Cie. Geschichte einer Bank und einer Familie [Munich: Piper, 1989], pp. 371–73 et passim; Gabriele Teichmann and Gisela Völger, Faszination Orient: Max von Oppenheim, Forscher, Sammler, Diplomat [Cologne: DuMont, 2001]. In addition: http://www.oppenheim.de/​deen/​about_us_at_a_glance/​history. A somewhat dissenting view of the importance of Oppenheim’s role in the jihad strategy is offered by Marian Kent, The Great Powers and the Late Ottoman Empire [London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984], p. 121). See also Lionel Gossman, The Passion of Max von Oppenheim: Archaeology and Intrigue in the Middle East from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2013), https://www.openbookpublishers.com/​product/​163.

61 “Fantasia Kebir”

126Aïd el-Kebir, the Festival of Sacrifice, is a Muslim holiday celebrated worldwide to commemorate Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as an act of obedience to Allah. A lamb, representing the lamb or ram that was sacrificed in place of Isaac, is traditionally slaughtered on the day of the festival. German travelers and archaeologists in the second half of the nineteenth century refer to Aïd el-Kebir as “Fantasia Kebir.” During the night, it seems, there was much noisy celebration, music, and dancing.

62 Jihad

127“Dschehad” in Zur Mühlen’s text. The topic was in the air at the time. For more on Imperial German plans to incite the Muslim subjects of Britain, France, and Russia to Holy War against the infidel, see under ‘Oppenheim’ and ‘Paul Weitz.’ A most readable — and in the year 2018 — chilling account of these plans is given by Henry Morgenthau, American Ambassador in Constantinople at the time of World War I, in his book Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, first published in 1918.

In the early days, Wangenheim [Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim, German Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, 1912–1915] had explained to me one of Germany’s main purposes in forcing Turkey into the conflict. He made this explanation quietly and nonchalantly, as though it had been quite the most ordinary matter in the world. Sitting in his office, puffing away at his big black German cigar, he unfolded Germany’s scheme to arouse the whole fanatical Moslem world against the Christians. Germany had planned a real “holy war” as one means of destroying English and French influence in the world. “Turkey herself is really the important matter,” said Wangenheim. “her army is a small one… But the big thing is the Moslem world. If we can stir the Mohammedans up against the English and Russians, we can force them to make peace.”
What Wangenheim evidently meant by the “Big thing” became apparent on November 13, when the Sultan issued his declaration of war; this declaration was really an appeal for a
Jihad, or a “Holy War” against the infidel. Soon afterward the Sheik-ul-Islam published his proclamation, summoning the whole Moslem world to arise and massacre their Christian oppressors. “Oh, Moslems,” concluded this document, “Ye who are smitten with happiness and are on the verge of sacrificing your life and your goods for the cause of right…, gather now around the Imperial throne, obey the commands of the Almighty, who, in the Koran, promises us bliss in this and in the next world; embrace ye the foot of the Caliph’s throne and know ye that the state is at war with Russia, England, France, and their Allies, and that these are the enemies of Islam. The Chief of the believers, the Caliph, invites you all as Moslems to join in the Holy War!”
The religious leaders read this proclamation to their assembled congregations in the mosques; all the newspapers printed it conspicuously; it was broadcast in all the countries which had a large Mohammedan population — India, China, Persia, Egypt, Algiers, Tripoli, Morocco, and the like; in all these places it was read to the assembled multitudes and the populace was exhorted to obey the mandate. The Ikdam, the Turkish newspaper which had passed into German ownership, was constantly inciting the masses. “The deeds of our enemies,” wrote this Turco-German editor, “have brought down the wrath of God. A gleam of hope has appeared. All Mohammedans, young and old, men, women and children, must fulfil their duty so that the gleam may not fade away, but give light to us for ever. How many great things can be accomplished by the arms of vigorous men, by the aid of others, of women and children!… The time for action has come. We shall all have to fight with all our strength, with all our soul, with teeth and nails, with all the sinews of our bodies and of our spirits. If we do it, the deliverance of the subjected Mohammedan kingdoms is assured… Allah is our aid and the Prophet is our support.”
The Sultan’s proclamation was an official public document, and dealt with the proposed Holy War only in a general way, but about this time a secret pamphlet appeared which gave instructions to the faithful in more specific terms. […] It was printed in Arabic, the language of the Koran. It was a lengthy document […] full of quotations from the Koran, and its style was frenzied in its appeal to racial and religious hatred. It described a detailed plan of operations for the assassination and extermination of all Christians — except those of German nationality. A few extracts will portray its spirit: “O people of the faith and O beloved Moslems, consider even though but for a brief moment, the present condition of the Islamic world. For if you consider this but a little, you will weep long. You will behold a bewildering state of affairs which will cause the tear to fall and the fire of grief to blaze. You see the great country of India, which contains hundreds of millions of Moslems, fallen, because of religious divisions and weaknesses into the grasp of the enemies of God, the infidel English. You see forty millions of Moslems in Java shackled by the chains of captivity and of affliction under the rule of the Dutch. […] You see Egypt, Morocco, Tunis, Algeria, and the Sudan […] groaning in the grasp of the enemies of God and his apostle. […] Wherever you look you see that the enemies of the true religion, particularly the English, the Russians, and the French, have oppressed Islam and invaded its rights in every possible way. We cannot enumerate the insults we have received at the hands of these nations who desire totally to destroy Islam and drive all Mohammedans off the face of the earth. This tyranny has passed all endurable limits; the cup of our oppression is full to overflowing. […] In brief, the Moslems work and infidels eat; the Moslems are hungry and suffer and infidels gorge themselves and live in luxury. The world of Islam sinks down and goes backward, and the Christian world goes forward and is more and more exalted. The Moslems are enslaved and the infidels are the great rulers. This is all because the Moslems have abandoned the plan set forth in the Koran and ignored the Holy War which it commands. […] But the time has now come for the Holy War, and by this the land of Islam shall be for ever freed from the power of the infidels who oppress it. This holy war has now become a sacred duty. Know ye that the blood of infidels in the Islamic lands may be shed with impunity. […] The killing of infidels who rule over Islam has become a sacred duty, whether you do it secretly or openly, as the Koran has decreed: ‘Take them and kill them whenever you find them. Behold we have delivered them unto your hands and given you supreme power over them.’ He who kills even one unbeliever of those who rule over us, whether he does it secretly or openly, shall be rewarded by God. And let every Moslem, in whatever part of the world he may be, swear a solemn oath to kill at least three or four of the infidels who rule over him, for they are the enemies of God and of the faith. Let every Moslem know that his reward for doing so shall be doubled by the God who created heaven and earth. A Moslem who does this shall be saved from the terrors of the day of Judgment, of the resurrection of the dead. […] The time has come that we should rise up as the rising of one man, in one hand a sword, in the other a gun, in his pockets balls of fire and death-dealing missiles, and in his heart the light of the faith […]”
Specific instruction for carrying out this holy purpose follow. There shall be a “heart war” — every follower of the Prophet, that is, shall constantly nourish in his spirit a hatred of the infidel; a “speech war” — with tongue and pen every Moslem shall spread this same hatred wherever Mohammedans live; and a war of deed — fighting and killing the infidel wherever he shows his head…” The Holy War,” says the pamphlet, “will be of three forms. First, the individual war, which consists of the individual personal deed. This may be carried on with cutting, killing instruments, […] like the slaying of the English chief of police in India, and like the killing of one of the officials arriving in Mecca by Abi Busir (may God be pleased with him).” The document gives several other instances of assassination which the faithful are enjoined to imitate. Second, the believers are told to organize “bands,” and to go forth and slay Christians. The most useful are those organized and operating in secret. “It is to be hoped that the Islamic world of to-day will profit very greatly from such secret bands.” The third method is by “organized campaigns,” that is, by trained armies.

128Morgenthau goes on to explain that “in all parts of this incentive to murder and assassination there are indications that a German hand has exercised an editorial supervision.” Only those infidels “who rule over us” are to be slain. The Germans and Austrians, in short, are excluded. (Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story [Ann Arbor, MI: Gomidas Institute, 2000; orig. 1918], pp. 107–11) As Zur Mühlen implies, the plan for an Islamic Jihad against Germany’s enemies did not come close to meeting the expectations of its advocates.

(See Gottfried Hagen, Die Türkei im ersten Weltkrieg [Frankfurt a.M./ Bern/New York/Paris: Peter Lang, 1990], pp. 3–8, 26–44; Peter Heine, “Al-Ğihād: eine deutsche Propagandazeitung im 1. Weltkrieg, “Die Welt des Islams [1980], 20: 197–99; id., “C. Snouk Hurgronje versus C.H. Becker. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der angewandten Orientalistik,” ibid. [1984], 23/24: 378–87; Peter Hopkins, On Secret Service East of Constantinople. The Plan to Bring Down the British Empire [London: John Murray, 1994], pp. 54 ff.; Herbert Landolin Müller, Islam, ğihād (Heiliger Krieg) und Deutsches Reich [Frankfurt a.M./Bern/New York/Paris: Peter Lang, 1991], pp. 172–213; Ulrich Trumpeter, Germany and the Ottoman Empire 1914–1918 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968], pp. 117–21; and the text of the Proclamation and the fatwās justifying it, transl. by G. Lewis, “The Ottoman Proclamation of Jihād in 1914,“Islamic Quarterly [1975], 19: 157–63).

63 Baron Dummreicher

129André von Dumreicher was indeed a Württemberger, as Zur Mühlen noted. In 1899, on being honoured by the government of Württemberg for distinguished service abroad, he was described in the citation as “Major in the Egyptian Camel Corps, André von Dumreicher of Stuttgart.” Earlier members of his family had grown cotton and owned cotton mills in Egypt, and Napoleon, it is said, stayed at their house in Alexandria during the Egyptian campaign. He himself served for many years in Egypt, with ever widening responsibilities, as head of the Camel Corps section of the Egyptian Coastguard Administration. “In 1900,” he recounts, “I took over the five newly built coastguard stations between Alexandria and Soloun, at the border with Tripoli, and in 1905 I also took over command of the Camel Corps of the Suez Canal district and was appointed Director of the ‘Desert Directorate,’ which embraced the Libyan, Arabian, and Nubian deserts, as well as the Sinai peninsula, with a complement of 500 camels.”

130His chief responsibilities, in his own words, were “to prevent the smuggling of hashish and salt,” the Egyptian government having imposed a salt monopoly, of which, as it happens, Dumreicher did not approve, “to establish and maintain order in the desert areas bordering the Nile valley, and to prevent the illegal landing of pilgrims on the coast of the Red Sea and along the Suez Canal, chiefly on account of the danger of cholera.” He also took over the selection and purchase of camels for the Corps, after he succeeded in persuading the authorities that he was a better judge of the animals than the Veterinary Department. In addition, he supervised various building projects, including the construction of a new harbor for the sponge-fishing fleet and a new mosque in Mersa Matruh.

131Dumreicher was a good friend of the all-powerful British Consul-General in Cairo, Sir Eldon Gorst (1861–1911), to whose niece he was married. On the outbreak of war between Great Britain and Germany in 1914 he was protected by Kitchener, the newly appointed Secretary of the Army, but on Kitchener’s death in June 1916, he was interned in England. In 1931, two years after the appearance of Zur Mühlen’s memoir, von Dumreicher published Fahrten, Pfadfinder und Beduinen in den Wüsten Ägyptens (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag), which appeared simultaneously in English as Trackers and Smugglers in the Deserts of Egypt (London: Methuen; New York: Dial Press).

132This engaging and well-written book confirms Zur Mühlen’s brief description of the Camel Corps commander. He understands and admires the Bedouins among whom he lives and he also demonstrates great respect and affection for the 20 or so officers who served under him, both Egyptian and European, as well as for his men, many of whom came from the Sudan. His narrative is full of delightful anecdotes — signs of an independent temperament that was likely to appeal to Zur Mühlen. One of them in particular must surely have greatly pleased her if she heard him tell it:

Among the colonists [“mostly small hawkers and shopkeepers,” Dumreicher had explained, “anxious to trade with the fishermen and Bedouins, but also some unfortunate derelicts driven here, to Mersa Matruh, by starvation”], I was particularly impressed by a young Frenchman named E. because of his modesty and polite manners. He kept completely to himself, and I was not particularly curious about his earlier life. He traded in a small way with the Bedouins, was interested in cultivating barley, and made unfired bricks from a mixture of clay, mud, marl, and sand. With these he was able to build a better kind of hut.
After a few months the chief of police in Alexandria sent me a telegram inquiring whether I had a dangerous French anarchist named E. at Matruh. He had been recognized there by the Khedive’s French chauffeur. I replied that E. was my best colonist; whether he was an anarchist or not was not my concern; he was certainly no danger to anybody. Yes, I was told, but the French consulate wants him extradited from Egypt, because, besides being an anarchist, he is a deserter. I sent for E. and asked him if he was an anarchist. “Oui, Monsieur,” he replied. I asked him why. “Well, he had seen so much undeserved misery among the workers in France. He had also left France when he was about to be called up for army service because he considered it morally wrong, in case there should be a war, to have to shoot at one’s fellow men. He had come to Mersa Matruh in the hope that the Egyptian government would be less brutal than the French one.” That last was in fact the case, for I had advanced him money out of my Colonist Fund to help him build his little house. I promised him that I would protect him and that I would give him secret warning if he was about to be extradited so that he could go into hiding for a while. Thanks to my intervening with the various authorities, he was given permission to stay on in Matruh after he had promised me that he would not make anarchist propaganda. Whereupon he simply expressed his honest regret that a decent man like myself was not an anarchist and he made a sincere effort to convert me. He gave me the anarchist pamphlets he had smuggled into the country and, according to the terms of our agreement, could no longer distribute, and asked me to read them. E. had certainly never fabricated a bomb. But in putting together the various kinds of earth and soil to make his bricks, he had demonstrated that he was a professional. So I appointed him my architect for the construction of the many buildings the Coast Guard had to put up and later I was able to get him a good job with a big company in Cairo. Then he asked me for a letter of recommendation to the head of the municipality of Alexandria. I wrote in the letter: “E. is an anarchist but he is the only man of my acquaintance about whom I know for certain that he is more honourable than I.” With this recommendation he also got a good job working for the municipality. When E. maintained that I was the more honourable of the two of us, I asked him if he would tell a lie if that was necessary to save his life. He replied emphatically that he hoped not. I then said that he was in that case the more honourable of the two of us, because I would be willing to lie twice in order to save my life.” (Translated from the German text, p. 16)

133Dumreicher also published a small book in French (Colonel de Dumreicher Bey, Le Tourisme dans les déserts d’Égypte [Alexandria: La Cité du Livre; Paris: Larose, 1931]) on “developing tourism, encouraging agriculture as well as the raising of sheep and camels, and promoting geological and archaeological research in the Egyptian deserts.” The little volume also includes an extremely sympathetic account of “La Mentalité des nomades” (pp. 79–85) and, at the end, translations into French of highly favorable reviews of the author’s Trackers and Smugglers in the British Press (The Daily News and Chronicle, The Spectator, and Near East). The review in the first of these closes on a note very similar to that sounded in Zur Mühlen’s memoir: “He loved his work, his men, and the solitary desert life.” (p. 146)

(Sources: André von Dumreicher, Fahrten, Pfadfinder und Beduinen in den Wüsten Ägyptens [Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1931]; id., Le Tourisme dans les déserts d’Égypte [Alexandria: La Cité du Livre; Paris: Larose, 1931]; Archie Hunter, Power and Passion in Egypt: A Life of Sir Eldon Gorst 1861–1911 [London: I.B. Tauris, 2007]; https://www2.landesarchiv-bw.de/​ofs21/​olf/​struktur.php?besand=4026&klassi=&anzeigeKlassi=002.001.001; Durham University has several photographs of Dumreicher from the years 1905 and 1906 in its George Gillett Hunter Photographic collection).

64 Count K.

134Carl, Count zu Khevenhüller-Metsch, Austrian Consul in Beirut from 1898 to 1908, came from a family of diplomats. Rudolf zu Khevenhüller-Metsch (1844–1910), for instance, had been consul-general in Sofia (1879–1881), envoy to Belgrade (1881–1886) and Brussels (1888–1902), and finally, after the death of Foreign Minister Gustav Kálnoky, with whom he did not get on, Austrian ambassador in Paris (1903–1910). In general, while a posting to Beirut was assuredly anything but a great prize, the Levant was not unimportant to Austria at the time. Efforts were being made to promote trade with the region and Austria also had an interest in protecting the local Christians. One historian, citing a passage from one of Khevenhüller-Mertsch’s reports to the Foreign Ministry in Vienna, has described the records of the Austrian consuls in Beirut as a rich and lively source for the history of Lebanon. (Arthur C. von Breycha-Vauthier, Österreich in der Levante [Vienna and Munich: Herold Verlag, 1972], p. 33)

65 Governor of Lebanon

135Known as Muzzafar Pasha, the Governor of Lebanon from 1902 until his death in 1907, was born (circa 1840) Ladislas Czajkovski, the son of a Polish count.

136His father, who had been active in the Polish independence movement against Russia, had fled to Constantinople after the failure of the 1830 uprising, entered the service of the Sultan, acquired the rank of general, converted to Islam, and adopted the name of Sadik. He also renamed his two sons: Adam became Enver and Ladislas became Muzzafar, though they remained Roman Catholics. Sadik Pasha fought in the Crimean War (1856) on the Ottoman side. Adam (Enver) returned to Poland and had a career there as a military officer. After graduating from the prestigious Ecole militaire de Saint-Cyr in 1863 Muzzafar entered the cavalry corps of the Ottoman army. In 1867 he became a military aide to Sultan Abdul Aziz and accompanied him on his European tour of 1870. He fought in the 1877 war against Russia, became an aide to Abdul Hamid II, and served as a member of the military reforms and military inspection committees. Simultaneously, he was appointed commander of the Imperial Stable, a position which required the sultan’s confidence. In 1902 his name came up as a surprise candidate for the governorship of Mount Lebanon. Though his rivals, high officials in the Ottoman Foreign Ministry, were much better known in diplomatic circles, the failure of the parties concerned to agree on any other person than Muzzafar, determined the final choice, and in the autumn of 1902 he was appointed governor of Mount Lebanon for a term of five years with the rank of mushir (field marshal). His own sons held posts in the Ottoman Foreign Ministry.

(Source: Engin Akarli, The Long Peace: Ottoman Lebanon 1861–1920 [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993] pp. 64–71, 197–98 et passim; John P. Spagnolo, France & Ottoman Lebanon 1861–1914 [London: Ithaca Press, 1977; St. Antony’s Middle East Monographs, 7], pp. 222–28).

66 Stenka Razin

137Stepan Timofeyevich Razin (c. 1630–1671), a popular Russian folk hero, was the son of a Don Cossack leader. He led a following of poor newcomers to the Don region, mostly peasants escaping from serfdom, on a number of successful pillaging expeditions in the lower Volga region and on the shores of the Caspian Sea. These expeditions were extremely successful — Russian and Persian caravans were plundered, Persian commercial settlements were devastated, a Persian fleet was defeated, and Razin’s warriors won riches and glory. As he passed through the lower Volga cities of Astrakhan and Tsaritsyn, hundreds of townsmen, fugitive peasants, and even regular soldiers flocked to his standard. Having raised an army of seven to ten thousand, he announced a new campaign in 1670, aimed at settling scores with the boyars and officials of Tsar Alexei I, the “traitors and oppressors of the poor.” The towns of Saratov and Samara opened their gates to him, and Russian peasants and indigenous peoples rose up in revolt by the tens of thousands throughout the lower and middle Volga region. The rebels’ intention was to march on Moscow. They were defeated, however, when they besieged the town of Simbirsk. Stenka Razin fled to the Don region, but he was betrayed soon after by another Cossack leader, captured, delivered to Moscow in an iron cage, and executed on June 6, 1671.

138In the legend referred to by Zur Mühlen, Stenka Razin, taunted by his followers with having become soft and weak for love of a woman, tosses his new Persian princess bride into the Volga, exclaiming that “mother Volga” has never before received such a beautiful gift. For the popular song in which the legend is preserved, see https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=rXc4AXAm7l0&list=RDrXc4AXAm7l0&t=3

67 Freiherr v. d. G.

139The initials refer almost certainly to Wilhelm Leopold Colmar, Freiherr (Baron) von der Goltz (1843–1916), also known as Goltz-Pasha [seated], a high-ranking German army officer, a historian and theorist of war (his books were more widely read by French, British, and American military leaders between 1870 and the First World War than Clausewitz), and one of the most important players in the consolidation of German-Turkish relations in the critical decades leading up to the First World War. He had been seconded to Constantinople in 1883 as head of a German military mission requested by the Sultan for the purpose of reorganizing the Ottoman army after its defeat in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. Goltz spent twelve years in Turkey and appears to have carried out his mission with some success, for in the Greco-Turkish war of 1897 the Turkish army advanced to the gates of Athens and was halted only when Czar Nicolas II threatened to attack the Ottomans from eastern Anatolia unless the campaign was stopped. In return for his services Goltz was given the title of Pasha and in 1895 just before his return to Germany, the rank of Mushir (field-marshal) in the Ottoman army. He was in Turkey again several times between 1909 and 1913 before being sent back to Constantinople, as special adviser to the Sultan, soon after Turkey entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers. His power and influence in Turkish affairs led to disgruntlement on the part of some Turks, as Zur Mühlen suggests.

140The difficulty is that Goltz was never German Ambassador (Botschafter) in Constantinople, though that is how “Freiherr v. d. G.” is identified by Zur Mühlen. The Ambassador in Constantinople from 1897 until 1912 was Adolf, Freiherr Marschall von Bieberstein (1842–1912) and he was succeeded, from 1912 until 1916, by Hans, Freiherr von Wangenheim (1859–1915). In addition, the chief periods of Goltz’s residence in Turkey (1883–1896, 1909–1913, 1914–1916) do not coincide with the time of Zur Mühlen’s stay in Constantinople (1906, though no date is given in the text). It is, of course, possible that he was there on a shorter visit at the time, but I have not been able to verify this. It may therefore be that she is in fact referring to the Ambassador, Marschall von Bieberstein, but, writing almost a quarter of a century later and remembering Goltz’s reputation as a powerful force in Turkish affairs, has misnamed him Goltz. Alternatively, she is indeed referring to Goltz but, because of the major role he played in German-Ottoman relations, mistakenly remembers him as the Ambassador.

141Both men, as it happens, were fervent German nationalists. Marschall had taken a strongly imperialist position in general European politics. After the ill-conceived Jameson raid on the Transvaal Republic, he was responsible, according to Kaiser Wilhelm II himself, for drafting the telegram in which the Kaiser congratulated President Kruger and assured him that a free republic of the Transvaal was a major German interest. Writing much later, after he had been forced to abdicate in the aftermath of Germany’s defeat in World War I, and eager to prove that he “never had warlike ambitions,” the Kaiser claimed that, despite his strong sympathy with the Boers, he was “much worried at the violent excitement” which the raid had provoked in Germany and which had “also seized upon the higher classes of society.” In the tense situation, “the influence of such an energetic and eloquent personage as Herr von Marschall” — at the time “one of the secretaries of State” — and the willingness of Prince Hohenlohe, the Chancellor, to go along with him did Germany “an ill turn in this matter and damaged me seriously both in England and at home.” Knowing “how ignorant Freiherr Marschall and the Foreign Office were of English national psychology,” he had “sought to make clear the consequences such a step would have among the English.” However, “Marschall was not to be dissuaded,” and as the Chancellor then remarked that “I, as a constitutional ruler, must not stand out against the national consciousness and against my constitutional advisers,” he yielded. Marschall also advocated a strong naval policy for Germany — another position that was sure to be read as provocative by the British. It might have been easy enough for Zur Mühlen to confuse Goltz and Marschall.

(Sources: Neue deutsche Biographie, vol. 6, pp. 629–32; Ex-Kaiser William II, My Memoirs: 1878–1918 [London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne: Cassell, 1922], pp. 79–81).

68 Young Turks

142The Young Turks — so called on the model of earlier radical literary and political reform movements in France and Germany (Jeune France and Junges Deutschland) — were a coalition of various groups (Turkish nationalists, ethnic pluralists, Western-oriented secularists) agitating for reform in the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They demanded re-establishment of the constitutional monarchy set up under the short-lived 1876 constitution. The movement grew out of secret societies of progressive university students and military cadets that had been driven underground, along with all other forms of political dissent, after the 1876 constitution was annulled by Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1878. In 1902 a first congress of Ottoman advocates of reform was held in Paris, a second five years later in 1907. In 1908 the Young Turk Revolution successfully reversed the suspension of the constitution and reinstituted a parliament, thus initiating the so-called Second Constitutional Era in the Ottoman Empire. In power, the Young Turks were keen nationalists, eager to exploit German interest in Turkey for their own ends but resistant to German efforts to turn Turkey into a client state.

69 Count Szechenyi

143Edmund Georg Stephan Karl, Count Széchényi, born in 1839 into a large noble Hungarian family, is described in the Gothaisches Gräfliches Taschenbuch for 1900 (p. 819) as General-Chef des kaiserl. Ottomanischen Pompierskorps (Commander-in Chief of the Imperial Ottoman Fire Brigade) and as Adjutant-General of His Majesty the Sultan. Many members of his family had served in the Austro-Hungarian diplomatic corps. It is not clear how he came to occupy the position he held in Constantinople. The recently refurbished Fire Brigade Museum in present-day Istanbul bears his name.

70 Paul Weitz

144By the time the Great War broke out and Germany began exploiting the influence it had built up in Turkey to make trouble for Britain, France, and Russia (see “Jihad”), Paul Weitz had represented the respected Frankfurter Zeitung in Turkey for thirty years, according to Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador in Constantinople. This is not quite accurate, but close enough. Born in 1862, Weitz was first employed in the retail trade but soon gave it up for journalism. He found work in his native Regensburg, then in Vienna; then, on the outbreak of the Serbo — Bulgarian War in 1885, he went under his own steam to Belgrade and was hired as a correspondent by the London Daily News and the Vossische Zeitung. As of 1887, he was employed by the relatively liberal Frankfurter Zeitung, becoming the paper’s permanent correspondent in Belgrade two years later. His reports were often subject to censorship by the Serbian authorities and on one occasion he was expelled from the country. In 1896, he was appointed the FZ’s correspondent in Constantinople. But in Morgenthau’s view, he was “more than a journalist. He had the most intimate personal knowledge of Turkish affairs, and he was the confidant and adviser of the German Embassy. His duties there were actually semi-diplomatic. Weitz had really been one of the most successful agencies in the German penetration of Turkey; it was common talk that he knew every important man in the Turkish Empire, the best way to approach him, and his price.” “There was not a hidden recess to which he could not gain admittance.” (Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, p. 179, p. 20) “A particularly influential outpost of Pan-Germany,” as Morgenthau described him, “he was constantly at Wangenheim’s elbow, prompting, advising, informing.” (p. 20) (Wangenheim was the German Ambassador to the Porte from 1912 to 1915.) Although Wangenheim constantly looked to Weitz for information, “he did not always take his advice.” Thus in the important matter of the Armenian massacres Wangenheim took the view — which was also that of the Foreign Ministry in Berlin as a whole — that Germany should stand by its ally Turkey. Weitz, in contrast, was convinced that his country’s refusal to intervene was doing it irreparable damage and he “was constantly pressing his view on Wangenheim, but he made little progress.” On the contrary, he told Morgenthau, when he urged his view on Wangenheim, the latter “threw me twice out of the room.” (pp. 246–247) As it turned out Weitz was not far off the mark. German complicity in what has come to be known as the “Armenian genocide” was soon quite well documented and was exposed and condemned by German scholars themselves, notably by Hans Niemeyer, a Professor of Law at the University of Kiel, who was part of the defence team in the 1921 trial in Berlin of a young Armenian accused of having assassinated Talât, the former Turkish Interior Minister generally considered the architect of the genocide.

145Weitz was also well informed about Zionist efforts to settle Jews in Palestine — to which the Imperial German government was not always ill-disposed. In an article in the Frankfurter Zeitung he explained why Turkish officialdom was in two minds about the settlement of the Jews and in the end tried to halt it. Though the Ottomans appreciated the economic improvement brought about by Jewish settlement, he explained, they could not tolerate the erosion of their power that followed from the Jews’ insistence on holding on to whatever nationality they already had and thus giving more and more authority in the areas of settlement to the foreign consuls responsible for their protection. This process “went so far,” Weitz wrote, “that the Sublime Porte ceased sometimes to be master in its own country.” Nevertheless, Weitz and his newspaper supported Zionism “in view of the very promising commercial prospects” for Germany and recommended trying to reach an agreement with the Turks by emphasizing “the good relations between Ottoman Jewry and the Porte.”

146Weitz, in sum, at the time Zur Mühlen encountered him, was a figure to be reckoned with in the complex politics of the Near and Middle East.

(Sources: Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story [Ann Arbor: Gomidas Institute, 2000; originally published 1918], pp. 20, 179, 246–47; Geschichte der Frankfurter Zeitung [Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Frankfurter Zeitung, 1911], pp. 639, 640, 884; Isaiah Friedman, Germany, Turkey, Zionism [New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 1998; orig. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977] pp. 49, 256–59, 330–35; Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide [New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995], pp. 248–300).

71 Herr Gutmann

147Eugen Gutmann (1840–1925) was one of the founders, in 1872, of the Dresdner Bank. By 1906, when Zur Mühlen ran into “Herr Gutmann” in Therapia (Tarabya), the summer resort about seven miles north of Constantinople, the Bank, which had moved its headquarters to Berlin in 1884, had already taken over many other banks in Germany, had branches all over the country, and had opened offices in several foreign capitals. It is highly likely that the Dresdner Bank had contributed significantly to German commercial penetration of Turkey. In 1906, an affiliate, the Deutsche Orientbank, was founded. Zur Mühlen’s “Herr Gutmann” was doubtless there to oversee its operations in Turkey.

148In 1906, however, Eugen Gutmann was 66. A rather large portrait of him painted the following year by Max Liebermann (presently in the Berlin Stadtmuseum), shows a solid member of the cultivated German upper bourgeoisie, in a relaxed but imposing, almost Bismarckian pose. If this portrait bears any likeness to the subject, no one looking at Eugen Gutmann could have been surprised, as Zur Mühlen was, that “so young a man should know something about banking.” It is therefore almost certain that the Herr Gutmann in question was Eugen Gutmann’s son Herbert (1879–1942), who was only a little older than Zur Mühlen herself, but who had already served, at age 24, as Vice-President of the London branch of the Dresdner Bank and who was a partner with his father in the founding of the Deutsche Orientbank in 1906.

149Zur Mühlen might conceivably have met him again, many years after the publication of her memoir, in London, where both he and she sought refuge from the National Socialists. Accused of responsibility for the Dresdner Bank’s great losses in the financial crisis at the end of the 1920s, Herbert Gutmann was forced to resign from the board in 1931. In 1934 he was arrested by the S.S. — the family was Jewish — but succeeded in emigrating to England in 1936 on payment of a very large emigration tax. In 1939 his house, the Herbertshof, with a valuable collection of artworks, was seized, and in 1940 all his and his wife’s assets in Germany were confiscated. He died in 1942 in London, nine years before Zur Mühlen herself. The present-day Dresdner Bank runs a program for promoting the study of banking history to which it has given the name of Eugen Gutmann. There is no mention on the bank’s website of Herbert Gutmann or his fate.

72 The Loreley and its commander

150The Loreley was a yacht serving as a German station ship in Constantinople. For years the small, rather elegant stationnaire S.M.S. Loreley — she was 225 and a half feet long and 27 and a half feet wide — was the only ship of the Imperial German Navy permanently deployed in the Mediterranean. Built on the Clyde in 1884, she had been purchased from her first owner by the German Navy in 1896 to replace an older Loreley and was used chiefly for ceremonial functions.

151The commander who sought Zur Mühlen’s hand in marriage but did not please her at all might possibly have been Hans Humann (1878–1933). The son of the engineer and archaeologist Carl Humann, who discovered the Pergamon altar while building roads in Anatolia, Hans Humann was born in Smyrna and spent the first twelve years of his life in Turkey. A highly successful German naval officer, he was appointed naval attaché in Constantinople in 1913. On account of the long periods of time he spent in Turkey, his attachment to the country, his complete command of the Turkish language, and his exceptionally close friendship with the Turkish War Minister, Enver Pasha, with whom as an infant he had shared a wet-nurse, he was sometimes considered more Turkish than the Turks. As he was at the same time a particular protégé of the nationalist and Pan-Germanist Minister of the Navy, Admiral von Tirpitz, he was in an excellent position to serve as mediator between the Germans and the Turks. One observer noted that he “became the unofficial German envoy. […] He had direct access to the Kaiser’s entourage over the head of any ambassador. It was an outstanding position of extraordinary influence.” Though he is said to have been appointed commander of the Loreley only in 1913, he could conceivably have been on assignment in 1906 and have met Zur Mühlen. Certainly what we know of him (and of her) would make her dislike of him seem almost inevitable. A crucial player in German-Turkish diplomatic and military negotiations and in Turkey’s entering the War on the side of Germany in late 1914, he supported and justified Turkish action against Armenians. “Armenians and Turks cannot live together in this country,” he reportedly told American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau. “One of these races has to go. And I don’t blame the Turks for what they are doing to the Armenians. I think that they are entirely justified. The weaker nation must succumb.” To a report that the Armenians are being “more or less exterminated,” he is said to have responded, “This is harsh, but useful.” Count Wolff-Metternich who replaced von Wangenheim as German ambassador to Turkey and was far less disposed than his predecessor to find excuses for the massacres, described Humann as an “arch scoundrel.”

152Humann’s activities in the 1920s appear to confirm Zur Mühlen’s description of him, at the time she wrote her memoir (1929), as “today one of the leading lights of the German nationalists.” He is said to have participated in the unsuccessful 1920 Kapp-Putsch (a rightwing attempt to topple the Weimar Republic) and he was subsequently befriended by Hugo Stinnes, the influential rightwing industrialist. Stinnes set him up as one of the editors of the widely read Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, in the pages of which he advocated a return to the monarchy and justified the Armenian massacres. Another of his friends at that time was Franz von Papen. In his eulogy at Humann’s graveside in October 1933, von Papen, then vice-chancellor in Hitler’s government, praised him as a fighter for “the new Germany that we are today in the process of building.”

(Sources: http://de.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Hans_Humann; Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, 6th ed. revised [New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003], pp. 271–73); Ernst Jäckh, The Rising Crescent. Turkey Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow [New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944], pp. 117–120; the Jäckh papers, correspondence between Ernst Jäckh and Hans Humann, Princeton University Library, microfilms 11747).

73 Saharet

153Saharet (real name: Clarissa Campbell) was a celebrated dancer from Melbourne or nearby Ballarat in Australia who took New York by storm in 1897. Innovative and expressive female dancers were much in vogue at the time. Along with another dancer, who was also a sensation at the turn of the century — Chicago-born Lois Fuller — Saharet was as well known and as fêted in Europe as in the United States. Both were the subjects of portraits by prominent German artists — Fuller by Thomas Theodor Heine, Saharet by Franz von Stuck and Franz Lenbach. The best remembered of the dancers of this time is, of course, San Francisco-born Isadora Duncan, who spent her entire career in Europe.

74 Dannecker

154A native of the South German state of Württemberg and friend of the poet Friedrich Schiller, Johann Heinrich Dannecker (1758–1841) was one of a great generation of German neo-classical sculptors that also includes Gottfried von Schadow and Christian Friedich Tieck. Though these artists are less well known in the English-speaking world than their Italian contemporary Antonio Canova, Dannecker’s Ariadne mit dem Panther (in the Liebighaus, Frankfurt) was perhaps — along with Schadow’s sculpture of the two Prussian princesses (Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie) — the most popular sculpture in Germany in the nineteenth century. It is not obvious why Ariadne is described as “fat,” unless in comparison with Zur Mühlen herself, who, by her own account, was judged too thin. From her point of view, many people appeared “fett” or “rund” — terms that are used frequently in her portraits of others.

75 Niederwald monument

155The Niederwald monument at Rüdesheim am Rhein, to designs by the sculptor Johannes Schilling and the architect Karl Weisbach, was built to commemorate the founding of the German Empire in the aftermath of Prussia’s victory over France in the war of 1870–1871. The foundation stone was laid by the King of Prussia, as the newly proclaimed Kaiser Wilhelm I, on September 16, 1871. The central figure of Germania in the massive and busy composition holds the recovered crown of the Empire in one hand and the Imperial sword in the other. It is not surprising that Victor de Crenneville thought it ugly. It is. In addition, its message can hardly have appealed to an Austrian diplomat whose father had been a Field Commander at the time of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and had been honoured for his many services to the Habsburg Emperor. Austria’s defeat in that war effectively established the Prussian King, rather than the Austrian Emperor, in the role of leader of the movement to reunite the German peoples, a role confirmed by the Prussian victory over France and celebrated by the Niederwald Monument.

76 Nous l’avons eu, votre Rhin allemand

156A provocative poem indeed to recite at the Niederwald Monument! Victor de Crenneville was lucky that, unlike the Austrian aristocrat, the patriotic German tourists gathered there did not, apparently, know French. The poem he recited was by the French Romantic poet Alfred de Musset (1810–1857). Musset had been the librarian of the French Ministry of the Interior under the July Monarchy. The Minister at the time was the conservative politician and historian Adolphe Thiers, who, in 1840, after he had become Prime Minister, provoked a political and diplomatic crisis by reviving France’s claim that the Rhine was the country’s “natural” frontier on the east and that it therefore had a right to the territory west of the river. To the Germans, to whom “Father Rhine” was indissociable from the very being of Germany, this was an outrage and gave rise to many popular anti-French songs and poems, chief among them Nikolaus Becker’s “Rheinlied” and Max Schneckenburger’s “Die Wacht am Rhein.” Becker’s poem opens on the lines (repeated at the beginning of the third, fifth, and final stanzas):

Sie sollen ihn nicht haben,
Den freien deutschen Rhein.
(They shall not have it,/ The free German Rhine)

157Musset’s poem was an answer to those lines, with its repetition at the beginning of the first four stanzas of the riposte: “We have had it, your German Rhine.” It evokes past French victories over Germany under the Ancien Régime and under Napoleon. In the second stanza, the Rhine even seems (ultimate insult) to take on the character of a woman whom the French have “had.”

LE RHIN ALLEMAND
Réponse à la chanson de Becker

Nous l’avons eu, votre Rhin allemand,
Il a tenu dans notre verre.
Un couplet qu’on s’en va chantant
Efface-t-il la trace altière
Du pied de nos chevaux marqué dans votre sang ?

Nous l’avons eu, votre Rhin allemand.
Son sein porte une plaie ouverte,
Du jour où Condé triomphant
A déchiré sa robe verte.
Où le père a passé passera bien l’enfant.

Nous l’avons eu, votre Rhin allemand.
Que faisaient vos vertus germaines,
Quand notre César tout puissant
De son ombre couvrait vos plaines ?
Où donc est-il tombé ce dernier ossement ?

Nous l’avons eu, votre Rhin allemand.
Si vous oubliez votre histoire,
Vos jeunes filles, sûrement,
Ont mieux gardé notre mémoire ;
Elles nous ont versé votre petit vin blanc.

S’il est à vous, votre Rhin allemand,
Lavez-y donc votre livrée ;
Mais parlez-en moins fièrement.
Combien, au jour de la curée,
Etiez-vous de corbeaux contre l’aigle expirant ?

Qu’il coule en paix, votre Rhin allemand ;
Que vos cathédrales gothiques
S’y reflètent modestement ;
Mais craignez que vos airs bachiques
Ne réveillent les morts de leur repos sanglant.

77 Merano

158Until the end of the First World War Merano (“Meran” in German) was part of the Austrian province of Tyrol and for a time the capital of the Tyrol.

78 Herr von Pribam

159The name Pribam (sometimes written Pribram) appears to be that of a family or of several families from Bohemia. As is well known, Jews often took the name of the cities they came from (Frankfurt or Frankfurter, Hamburg or Hamburger, Wiener, etc.) and Pribram is a mining town about 50 miles south-west of Prague. It may well be, therefore, that most Pribams or Pribrams were Jewish or of Jewish origin. A number of them achieved some eminence — there are several doctors, a chemist, a biochemist, a well-known neurosurgeon and psychologist, a famous economist who worked for the Austrian government from 1909 until 1921, and a noted historian, Alfred Francis Pribram (1859–1942), who after a successful career at the University of Vienna, where he rose through the ranks from Privatdozent to Professor in the years 1887–1913, emigrated to England after the Anschluß and continued his career at the London School of Economics. Of the individuals I have been able to locate, however, only two could have been referred to around 1906–1907 as “old Herr von Pribam” or conceivably been the tutor of Victor, Count Crenneville. (Alfred Francis Pribram, for instance, was twelve years younger than the Count). These are Alfred Pribram (1841–1912), an eminent doctor and professor of medicine, mostly in Prague, and his brother Richard, a noted professor of chemistry, one time Dean and Rector of the University of Czernowitz (the capital of the Austrian duchy of Bukowina) who had been given the honorary title of Hofrat (court counsellor) in 1905, taught at the University of Vienna as of 1906, and was exactly the same age as Zur Mühlen’s father. It is possible that Richard Pribram retired to Merano and he did have one son — Bruno Oskar, born in 1887, hence about 19 at the time described, a student of chemistry in Vienna, later a surgeon and university professor — but if Richard Pribram wrote his memoirs they do not appear to have been published and there is no evidence that he had the literary interests Zur Mühlen attributes to him or that he “filled a rather high post in some ministry.” The identity of “old Herr von Pribam” thus remains, regrettably, a mystery.

79 A young Balt

160This was Viktor von zur Mühlen (1879–1950).

161Zur Mühlen’s future husband was born in Estonia, where a German Junker landowning class still dominated but had come under increasing pressure both from above, with the Russians favoring the substitution of Russian for German as the language of administration and encouraging the Orthodox Church at the expense of the German Lutheran Church, and from below, with the native Estonians increasingly restive and resentful of both Germans and Russians.

162Viktor von zur Mühlen’s father, Leo von zur Mühlen, had abandoned the study of medicine in order to take over the management of his parents’estate. He proved to be a good manager but was known as a domestic tyrant, strict with his wife and children and particularly harsh toward house servants and peasant labourers. A son and one of his brothers even tried to persuade him to leave the estate during the First World War, when there was a good deal of local peasant unrest, since his very presence, they thought, was enough to cause trouble. Leo von zur Mühlen’s upbringing of his five sons and two daughters must have left a mark on their character, for the marriages of all seven ended in divorce, an unusual pattern in the strictly observant Lutheran community to which they belonged. Even Leo and his wife separated after the end of the First World War.

163Viktor in particular appears to have taken after his father. His career was typical of the sons of the local German landowners. He attended the German Gymnasium, completed his military service with the Russian army as a cavalry reserve officer, got his training in estate management from his father on his property at Woiseck, and in 1908, the year of his marriage, bought the nearby estate of Eigstfer from his father. That is where he brought his young Viennese bride. He appears to have been strong-willed, resolute and authoritarian. During the First World War, for instance, disgusted by what he saw as the incompetence and corruption of the Russian administration, he noted in his diary: “Everthing is rotten. The best thing in such times is absolute monarchy.” Before that, during the 1905 Revolution, when bands of Estonian and Russian revolutionaries were wandering through the woods, attacking and setting fire to landowners’ houses, Viktor von zur Mühlen had responded by organizing an armed militia in the area in which his estate was situated. According to his wife at least, his interests were largely confined to farming, horses, dogs, and the hunt. He had no feeling, she claims, for literature or art and there were only two books in the entire house when she arrived — “the Bible and a pornographic novel.”

164One might well wonder what could have appealed to Zur Mühlen in such a man. To begin with, he seems to have been very good-looking. It is also likely that at the age of twenty-seven, he was not without charm and was not yet as gruff and domineering as his father. In addition, the family, of which Zur Mühlen paints a bleak portrait in her memoir, had (and continues to have) highly talented and even artistically gifted members. Zur Mühlen does make an exception in her memoir for “Uncle Max,” her father-in-law’s brother, who had given up his share of the estate in order to devote himself to his scientific interests and of whom she writes lovingly. She must also have known of an artist in the family, Rudolph von zur Mühlen (1845–1913), who drew and painted landscapes, seascapes, and scenes from the nearby city of Dorpat. She can hardly not have known of Raimund von zur Mühlen (1854–1931), who was generally regarded as the greatest singer of his day, particularly of Lieder, and who gave recitals all over Europe — including Vienna. Though he too had grown up on his family’s estate near Fellin in Estonia and, typically, suffered from his father’s domineering ways, he had, with the support of his mother and elder brother, run away to Berlin at the age of nineteen in order to pursue his love of music. He had studied with Stockhausen and Clara Schumann, who sometimes accompanied him in his recitals. According to the writer of his obituary in the British journal Music and Letters:

The first ‘Lieder-Abend’ given by Mühlen in Vienna was quite an event in musical circles. He started his programme with ‘Die Allmacht’; suffering agonies of mind at the failure he thought he must be when, at the end of the song, not a single person applauded. But his apprehension at those moments of silence was quite unfounded, for presently the whole audience rose as one man to give him an ovation, all the more impressive after that silent tribute of appreciation and recognition

165His singing of Brahms Lieder roused the composer to enthusiasm. This is how the same author describes the occasion:

Brahms turned to Mühlen and said: ‘Can you sing, and what will you sing?’ Mühlen answered: ‘One of your own songs, “Botschaft.”’ (This is one of the composer’s most difficult songs.) Brahms looked surprised, and smiled; but went to the piano. Neither singer nor pianist had any music, and Brahms was still more surprised as one Lied after another revealed Mühlen’s unique gift as interpreter; in the end he put his arms around him, and said: ‘At last, at last I have found my singer.’

166Raimund’s debut recital took place in 1878, he gave his first London recital in 1883, but deliberately ended his concert career soon after the death of his mother in 1904. In 1907 he emigrated to England and began a busy and much appreciated career there as a teacher, which ended only with his own death in 1931. In 1904 and then again in 1905, however, he had returned to the family estate in Estonia to run summer courses. It is hard to imagine that there was no talk in the family about this extraordinarily successful member.

167It is not impossible that when Hermynia met Viktor von zur Mühlen, her view of him was affected in some measure by what she — in all likelihood — knew about his musical relative. He, on his side, cannot at that time have been as devoid of imagination or as narrow-minded as he appears in the memoir. Otherwise, it is hard to conceive why he, on his side, was attracted to her. Her rank alone was not likely to impress the German Junker class he came from in Estonia, and her religion was no recommendation either. It should also be remembered that Zur Mühlen wrote her memoir twenty-two years after meeting Viktor, and sixteen years after the two had separated and she had left, for health reasons, for Davos, Switzerland. She may well, in writing it, have sought, at some level, to make her decision not to go back to him seem justifiable and in a way inevitable.

(Sources: Gladys Newberry, Music & Letters, 13.2 [Apr., 1932], pp. 215–17; http://www.ostdeutsche-biographie.de/​muehra04.htm; Manfred Altner, Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Eine Biographie [Bern: Peter Lang, 1997], pp. 42–47).

80 “Punishment expedition”

168The czarist regime responded to every protest action in the cities or in the countryside, especially at the time of the 1905 Russian Revolution and in the years following, with a “punishment expedition” against the workers or peasants. These occurred everywhere and frequently.

(Source: Ernest O.F. Ames, The Revolution in the Baltic Provinces of Russia [London: Independent Labour Party, 1907], pp. vi, 66; William E. Walling, Russia’s Message: The True World Import of the Revolution [New York: Doubleday, Page, 1908], pp. 243, 247).

81 Uriadnik

169Russian term for a village policeman. Note that Russian, not Estonian or German, is the language of officialdom.

82 Maximilian Harden

170Maximilian Harden (1861–1927), born Felix Ernst Witkowski, the son of a Jewish merchant in Berlin, had a reputation as a fearless, muckraking journalist, largely because of his public exposure, in Die Zukunft, the weekly newspaper he founded and edited, of a homosexual group of close advisers and members of the inner circle of Kaiser Wilhelm II, chief among them Prince Philipp zu Eulenberg and Count Kuno von Moltke, who, Harden claimed, exercised a nefarious influence on the Kaiser. Harden had been an admirer and strong supporter of Bismarck, whom Wilhelm had forced to resign in 1890. Eulenberg and his friends, in contrast, in Harden’s view, had introduced weakness and vacillation into German foreign policy, and were responsible in particular for the Moroccan crisis of 1906 and for a resolution of it that he considered humiliating and unfavorable to Germany. Many other prominent, high-placed advisers and military men were involved in the Eulenberg scandal, which led to a series of libel cases and which assumed something of the dimensions in Germany of the Dreyfus affair in France. To many — Zur Mühlen seems to have been among them — Harden was a hero for having dared to challenge those close to the seat of power. Harden and Die Zukunft did follow an independent line that was often critical of official policy. The paper was also open to innovation in the arts and published informed and favorable articles on modern writers and dramatists. Harden, however, frequently shifted position; the one constant appears to have been his nationalism. An article, translated into English and published in the New York Times on December 6, 1914, for instance, justifies Germany’s position at the time of the outbreak of war in the name of a high-minded vision of Germany’s world mission and of war as a glorious and legitimate means of expressing and fulfilling it. Nevertheless, Harden did support the signing of the peace treaty in 1918 and for that, no doubt, as well as for the damage done to the monarchy by his articles of 1906, an attempt was made on his life on July 3, 1922 — within days of the assassination of Walther Rathenau (another German-Jewish nationalist who had rallied to the Republic in 1918) — by members of one of the rightwing Freikorps (ex-servicemen’s militias). Harden was seriously injured, retired from journalism, and in 1923 moved to Switzerland, where a few years later he died.

83 Browning

171This refers, of course, to a pistol designed by the American firearms designer John Moses Browning. It was manufactured in Europe by companies in Belgium and Sweden. As of 1899, Browning pistols were in use not only in various armies and police forces, including the Imperial Russian police, but in the civilian population also.

84 Memoirs of a Singer

172“Le plus fameux livre érotique allemand,” according to the modern French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, was originally published in 1862 as Aus den Memoiren einer Sängerin (Altona: Verlagsbureau), with a second volume following in 1870. The work is a classic of erotic literature and has been frequently republished, both in the original German and in English and French translations — most recently in English in 1965, in French in 1970 and in German in 1995. It is usually attributed to Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient (1804–1860), “la célèbre cantatrice qui […] enthousiasma le public de son temps,” in the words, once again, of Apollinaire, who provides a list of 67 roles she sang in operas by — among others — Glück, Mozart, Beethoven, Grétry, Weber (who chose her for the role of Agathe in Der Freischütz), Cherubini, Spontini, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Auber, Halévy, and Wagner. She created the roles of Adriano in Wagner’s Rienzi, Senta in Der fliegende Holländer and Venus in Tannhäuser. She also won great acclaim as a singer of Lieder, as well as some notoriety for what Apollinaire describes as her “vie et carrière très agitées” and the “caractère violent” which “la portait aux extrêmes.” The authorship of the work characterized by Apollinaire as “the only feminine autobiography comparable with Rousseau’s Confessions or the celebrated Memoirs of Casanova” is, however, much disputed. In two Introductions he wrote for French translations of the work around 1913 Apollinaire goes over the evidence, discusses the views of German scholars, one of whom argues that the first part is indeed the work of Schröder-Devrient, while the second is an imitation of de Sade, and offers his own assessment.

(Sources: http://de.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Wilhelmine_Schröder-Devrient; Guillaume Apollinaire, Oeuvres en prose complètes [Paris: Gallimard, 1977], 3 vols., vol. 3, ed. Pierre Caizergues and Michel Décaudin, pp. 839–44, 1306–07).

85 Dorpat

173Dorpat is the German name of a city in south-eastern Estonia now known by its Estonian name, Tartu. Though smaller than the capital Reval (now Tallinn), it was for long considered the cultural capital of Estonia, with the region’s oldest University, founded in 1632 on the model of Uppsala in Sweden. In the early twentieth century, when Zur Mühlen visited it, it may have had a population of about 40,000. As in the rest of Estonia, which from 1729 until 1920 was a province of the Russian Empire, the German-speaking aristocracy was the ruling class, but in Dorpat it was the Baltic German bourgeoisie, the literati — as Zur Mühlen calls them, following local practice — that dominated culture, education, and local politics. Both the City Hall and the University buildings were designed by German architects and many, if not most of the students at the University were of German heritage, as was over 90% of the faculty. By the late nineteenth century, however, Estonian nationalists were trying to make Estonian culture a presence in the city (an Estonian national theater opened its doors in 1870), while, from above, the Russian administration officially restored the city’s Russian name, Yuryev, in 1893 (so it appears, for instance, in the Geografiya rossiskoy Imperii of P. Dvornikov and S. Sokolov, published in Moscow in 1912) and attempted to russify the University, by imposing Russian as the language of instruction. Zur Mühlen still refers to “Dorpat” not only for the sake of her German readers in 1929, but because that is what the city was naturally called in the only milieu she knew in Estonia. The bookstore she found there was obviously accustomed to a German-speaking clientele.

86 Marseillaise

174The following observation from an as yet unpublished paper by the historian Patrik von zur Mühlen, the great-nephew of Zur Mühlen’s husband, is pertinent here. Drawing attention to the literary character of Zur Mühlen’s memoir, that is, to the fact that her text is not a simple mirror image of reality but a creative reconfiguring of it, Von zur Mühlen writes: “Hermynia mentions that her husband had thrown out one of the servants for whistling the Marseillaise, whereupon she had sat down ostentatiously at the piano and played the song as loudly as she could. What she does not mention is that the Marseillaise, the song of the French Revolution, was strictly forbidden in the Russian Empire and that any playing or singing of it could result in deportation to Siberia. As the use of police informers was no less widespread in czarist Russia than later under the Soviets, Hermynia’s action had in fact put both the servant and her husband Viktor, who as proprietor of the estate exercised certain police functions, in the greatest danger. It is unlikely that Hermynia did not know this [at the time of writing up the episode], for Viktor must have explained his action to her after the event at least.”

87 Uncle Max

175“Max von zur Mühlen (1850–1918), ‘Uncle Max,’ was my great-grandfather. He was interested in science and gave up the large estate of Woiseck in favor of his younger brother Leo, Hermynia’s father-in-law. He let himself be bought out of his inheritance and lived as a private scholar. He gave up the idea of an academic career, the czarist regime having instituted instruction in Russian, instead of German, at Dorpat. His special field of study was ichtyology, and as a scientist he undertook research chiefly on the relation of water characteristics, climate, and other factors and on their impact on the populations of different species of fish — a very modern area of research. On 24 December, 1918 he was shot by Bolsheviks in the garden of his home.”

176[Translated by the editor from an e-mail kindly sent to him by Patrik von zur Mühlen, 7 September, 2009. “Max von zur Mühlen (1850–1918), ‘Onkel Max,’ war mein Urgroßvater. Er war naturwissenschaftlich interessiert und verzichtete auf das große Gut Woiseck zugunsten seines jüngeren Bruders Leo, des Schwiegervaters von Hermynia. Er ließ sich sein Erbe auszahlen und lebte als privater Wissenschaftler. Eine akademische Karriere verweigerte er, da das Zarenregime 1888 in Dorpat die russische Unterrichtssprache (anstelle der deutschen) eingeführt hatte. Sein Fachgebiet war die Ichtyologie, die Fischkunde, und als Wissenschaftler untersuchte er vor allem den Zusammenhang von Wasserqualität, Klima und anderen Faktoren und ihren Einfluss auf die Populationen verschiedener Fischarten, eigentlich eine sehr moderne Forschung. Er wurde am 24. Dezember 1918 von Bolschewiki im Garten seines Hauses erschossen.”].

88 Tchinovnik

177The Russian term for any government official or bureaucrat.

89 Sombart

178At the time Zur Mühlen is writing about, the economist and sociologist Werner Sombart (1863–1941) was seen as radically leftwing. Engels described him as the only German academic who understood Marx and he identified himself as a “convinced Marxist.” As a result of this reputation, he did not find it easy to get good academic positions. Despite his prolific output, when he was at last offered a chair in 1906, it was at the Berlin Handelshochschule or School of Commerce. He was finally appointed to a chair at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin in 1917. Even in some of his early books, however (e.g. Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, 1911; Händler und Helden, 1915), there are clear signs of his later turn, under the Weimar republic, to German nationalism. Though there was some ambivalence in his relation to National Socialism, there were many elements in his thinking that were entirely compatible with it (as in his Deutscher Sozialismus of 1934, for instance) and he continued to teach in Berlin until he died in 1941.

179The books that Hermynia is likely to have been interested in while she was living on her husband’s estate at Eigstfer are: Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung (first ed. 1896, followed by many further editions and many translations), and Der moderne Kapitalismus (1902).

90 Coppée

180François Coppée (1842–1908) was a minor but prolific French poet, dramatist, and author of short stories. His work was popular, sentimental, easy to read, and superficial. His facile poetic style (Intimités, 1867; Les Humbles, 1872; Contes en vers, 1881; Paroles sincères, 1890) was parodied by Rimbaud. One of his poems was, however, set to music by a great composer, Henri Duparc, who mostly set work by Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier. Coppée also wrote patriotic stories and poetry and was on the side of the anti-Dreyfusards at the time of the Affaire. La bonne Souffrance (1898) tells the story, in prose, of his return to the Roman Catholic Church. The dash before the word “indecent” indicates Zur Mühlen’s surprise and amusement that a writer she must have considered not exactly challenging could be so judged. Perhaps anything in French was assumed to be indecent in the milieu she is describing.

91 Stratz

181The reference is to Rudolf Stratz (1864–1935), one of the most prolific producers of popular novels in Germany in the period from about 1890 until his death in the mid-1930s. Strongly nationalist and rightwing in tone, many of his novels revolve around army officers. He also wrote a few plays and during the First World War turned out patriotic books and articles. Here are some of the works that might have been read in the reading circle described by Zur Mühlen (i.e. between 1908 and 1913 approximately): Unter den Linden, Berliner Novellen (1893); Arme Thea (1896); Der weiße Tod (1897); Die letzte Wahl (1899); Alt-Heidelberg, Du Feine: Roman einer Studentin (1902); Der Stern von Angora (1903); Gib mir die Hand (1904); Herzblut (1908); Für Dich (1908); Montblanc (1912). All of these novels, like the many that followed, went through numerous editions and most were translated into other languages — French, English, Dutch, Finnish. Even as it was being published in serial form, one of Stratz’s novels, Schloß Vogelöd was made into a film (English title: The Haunted Castle), by the great filmmaker Murnau in 1921.

92 Rudolf Herzog

182Before success made it possible for him to earn a living by his writing alone, Rudolf Herzog (1869–1943) was briefly editor of the Hamburger Neueste Nachrichten, then feuilleton editor of the Berliner Neueste Nachrichten. A producer of popular literature like Stratz, perhaps even more prolific, he turned out novels, short stories, and plays at a dizzying pace, as well as occasional volumes of verse, and at least one popular history (Preußens Geschichte, 1913). Like those of Stratz, his novels went through numerous editions (24 editions of Die Wiskottens, for instance, between 1905 and 1951) and some were translated into other languages. Politically, he was also, like Stratz, a rightwing nationalist. “In one of his novels, Die Kameraden (1922), the aristocratic hero collects bitter ex-officers on his landholdings and prepares a leadership group for the Free Corps… In another novel Herzog glorifies the Krupp family (Die Stoltenkamps und ihre Frauen, 1917) and in yet another he praises an entrepreneurial family who support Hindenburg and Ludendorff unquestioningly during the war and the reaction after it (Die Buben der Frau Optenberg, 1920).” (Lynda King) In 1932 he published an article strongly supportive of Hitler in the Völkische Beobachter. Among the novels that the circle might have read in the years between 1908 and 1913 are Frau Kunst (1893), Zum weißen Schwan (1897), Der Graf von Gleichen: Ein Gegenwartsroman (1901), Die vom Niederrhein (1903), Das Lebenslied (1904), Die Wiskottens (1905), Abenteuerer (1907), Hanseaten (1910), and Die Burgkinder (1911). Two volumes of poems might also have made an appearance in the circle: Aus aller frauen landen: lieder eines unstäten (1895) and Aus dem Märchenbuch der Liebe (1896).

(Sources: https://de.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Rudolf_Herzog; Lynda King, Best-Sellers by Design [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988], pp. 57, 216).

93 Gerhart Hauptmann

183Hauptmann (1862–1946), the son of an innkeeper and the grandson of Silesian weavers, revolutionized German theatre with the performance of his first play Vor Sonnenaufgang at the avant-garde Freie Bühne in Berlin in 1889. The artistic inspiration of the Freie Bühne — established as a theatre club in order to circumvent the Prussian censor — was the naturalist Théâtre Libre founded by Antoine in Paris in 1887. Hauptmann’s play brought naturalism and overt, realistic treatment of social problems to the German stage. (For comparison, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was first played in 1879, Ghosts in 1881, An Enemy of the People in 1882). His next important play, Die Weber (1892), a dramatization of an 1844 uprising of Silesian weavers against their exploiter, in the heyday of the putting-out system, was one of the first dramas in which a collective hero replaced the usual individual hero. “Like the canvases of Millet and the heroic figures of Meunier, The Weavers represent the epic of the age-long misery of labour, a profoundly stirring picture,” according to the celebrated anarchist and radical Emma Goldman (The Social Significance of the Modern Drama [Boston, 1914]). Hauptmann continued to write naturalist plays, but he also experimented with symbolism and fantasy, as in Hanneles Himmelfahrt (1893), which, not without some sentimentality, portrayed a poor, abused working-class child’s dying fantasies of redemption. Stanislavsky directed the production of this work in Moscow. Die versunkene Glocke (1897) was an enactment of the inner conflict in the life of an artist between the artistic aspiration that isolates him from his immediate human community, and the instinctive human solidarity that unites him with it. It combines naturalism and symbolism. Hauptmann continued to write plays (about 35 in all) into the 1930s, along with novels and novellas. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1912, probably the year in which the “‘intellectual’ woman, who was said to have had an affair… with the revolutionary tutor of her son, dared to contribute” his works to the reading circle attended by Zur Mühlen.

184Hauptmann remained in Germany throughout the Nazi regime. Though the Third Reich refused to allow him to receive the Schiller Prize, for which he was repeatedly recommended, nothing was done to prevent a complete seventeen-volume edition of his works from appearing in 1942. Both Hauptmann himself and the regime seem to have been content for him to be regarded as the grand old man of German letters.

94 Myedvyed

185The Myedvyed — “Myedvyed” is Russian for “Bear,” the animal representation of Russia — was an expensive restaurant opened on 1 October 1878 by a Belgian entrepreneur named Hiegel. It was located on 27 Bolshaya Konyushennaya Street, close to Nevski Prospekt, the great central avenue of the former Russian capital, in the building of the Demoute Hotel, which had been founded by a French immigrant in the 1760s and where Pushkin stayed in 1811 on his first visit to St. Petersburg and then again many times between 1827 and 1831. Other literary figures who stayed at the Demoute include the dramatist Griboyedov, the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz, and the great Russian liberal writers Turgenev and Alexander Herzen. In the entrance hall of the Myedvyed restaurant in the hotel, there was a large stuffed bear carrying a tray in its front paws. The restaurant itself had two very large dining rooms (with 100 and 150 tables) and 29 private dining rooms; there was a staff of 200, and an orchestra of 24 musicians. One of the dinners held there — in honour of the great actress M.G. Savina (1854–1915) had over 1,000 guests. Another dinner honoured the popular actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya (1864–1910), the co-founder, with Meyerhold, of a new company promoting symbolist theater; yet another, in 1902, marked the fifth anniversary of the great art nouveau journal Teatr i iskusstvo (Theatre and Art); and, in 1908, a celebration was held to honour A.S. Suvorin (1834–1912), the conservative editor of the newspaper Novoye vremya and the publisher of Chekhov. The Myedvyed, in short, was one of the largest and most distinguished venues in the Russian capital. Its character and size highlight the extraordinary humiliation imposed on the young woman in the episode recounted by Zur Mühlen.

(Sources: http://www.encspb.ru/​en/​article.php?kod=2804025933; Ю. Л. Алянский, Увеселительные заведения старого Петербурга [St. Petersburg: Avrora, 2003], pp. 212–213; В. Ковалевский, Душа деянием жива [St. Petersburg: Posokh, 1999] pp. 82–86).

95 Krasnoye syelo

186Krasnoye syelo is a town south-west of St. Petersburg to which many residents of the former Russian capital resorted in the summer. It was founded around 1714 when Peter the Great had a mill for linen (later paper) manufacture established on the site.

96 Peterhof

187Sometimes called the “Russian Versailles,” Peterhof is on the south shore of the Gulf of Finland, close to St. Petersburg. It is a vast ensemble of palaces and gardens, the first of which, Peter the Great’s relatively modest Monplaisir, dates from the early eighteenth century and was based on sketches made by Peter himself. The plans were then expanded and a grander palace was built a little further inland. After Peter, the Empresses Elizabeth and Catherine the Great made further additions to Peterhof’s architecture, fountains, and gardens, though Catherine subsequently moved the court to the no less imposing Tsarskoe syelo, south of St. Petersburg.

97 Duma

188In response to the unrest caused by the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War and the wave of uprisings, strikes and mutinies referred to as the 1905 Revolution, Czar Nicolas II announced the convocation of a Duma, or State Parliament, in August 1905. At first it was conceived as a purely advisory organ, but later in the year the Czar agreed to endow the Duma with legislative and oversight powers, and to provide for broad participation in it. The Duma, it seemed, was to be the lower house of a Russian parliament, the State Council of Imperial Russia the upper house. Nine months later, however, in May 1906, the Czar issued the “Fundamental Laws,” which stated that ministers could not be appointed by the Duma and were not responsible to it. Before it had even come into existence, therefore, the Duma was deprived of real executive power. Moreover, the Czar had the right to dismiss it and call new elections whenever he wished. The elections for the First Duma (April-June 1906) returned a significant bloc of moderate socialists and liberals who demanded further reforms. Within ten weeks it was dissolved. The Second Duma (February–June 1907) did not last much longer. The Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries elected a large number of deputies. This resulted in major conflicts both within the Duma between the Left and the Right and with the Czar. On June 1, Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin accused the Social Democrats of conspiring with members of the armed forces to prepare an uprising and demanded that the Duma exclude 55 Social Democratic deputies and strip 16 of them of parliamentary immunity. When this ultimatum was rejected by the Duma, it was dissolved by order of the Czar (the so-called Coup of June 7). Using emergency powers, Prime Minister Stolypin changed the electoral law and gave greater electoral weight to the votes of landowners and owners of city properties. This ensured that the Third Duma (1907–1912) would be dominated by gentry, landowners and businessmen. It was soon nicknamed “The Duma of the Lords and Lackeys.”

98 Novoye vremya

189Novoye vremya (New Age) was a newspaper published in St. Petersburg from 1868 to 1917. Until 1869 it came out five times a week; thereafter it was a daily and from 1881 on there were morning and evening editions. In 1891 a weekly illustrated supplement was added.

190It began life as a liberal publication. In 1872, for instance, it published an editorial welcoming the appearance in Russian of the first volume of Karl Marx’s Kapital, but after it was taken over by A.S. Suvorin in 1876, it acquired a reputation as a servile supporter of the government. Still, it was one of Russia’s most widely read newspapers, with a circulation of 60,000, and it published important writers, most famously Anton Chekhov, until he broke with Suvorin in the late 1890s. It was generally looked down on by the liberal intelligentsia of the early twentieth century and despised by the Bolsheviks. Immediately after the October Revolution, on November 8, 1917 (October 26 Old Style), Lenin shut it down.

99 Berchtold

191Leopold, Count Berchtold (1863–1942), an aristocrat with large estates in Hungary and Moravia, had entered the diplomatic corps in 1893, following what Zur Mühlen describes as the classic career path of aristocrats in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. He spent time at the embassies in London and Paris before being appointed Ambassador to Russia in 1906 and Foreign Minister in 1912. According to two recent historians of the Habsburg Monarchy, he was “hesitant and indecisive by nature” and fearful of any change in the status quo. “His views on the internal affairs of Austria were — typically for a conservative supporter of the dual monarchy system — simple, sober, and thoroughly pessimistic. He was intelligent, industrious, and charming, without being in the least domineering or ambitious. He had withdrawn from his post in St. Petersburg twice in order to have time for his private life and accepted Franz Joseph’s nomination as Foreign Minister only out of a feeling of duty to the Emperor. He was truly glad to be relieved of the burden of office in 1915.” (Adam Wandruszka and Peter Urbanitsch, Die Habsburgmonarchie 1848–1918, vol. VI/1 [Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1989] pp. 323, 386)

192Berchtold did, however, take a number of steps that may well have contributed to the outbreak of war in 1914. After the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by Serbian-backed nationalists in then Austrian-ruled Bosnia, it was Berchtold who, arguing that Russia would not come to Serbia’s aid, persuaded an apparently reluctant Franz Joseph to issue an unacceptable ultimatum to Serbia, and it was Berchtold who, as Foreign Minister, disregarded Serbia’s largely compliant reply and persuaded the Emperor to declare war.

100 General Keller

193This is Count Fyodor Arturovich Keller (1857–1918), who, not long after Zur Mühlen met him, was placed in command of the Tenth Cavalry Division and the Third Cavalry Corps of the Imperial Russian Army in the First World War. From the intimate correspondence (written in English) between Czar Nicholas II (“Nicky”) and his wife, the Empress Alexandra (“Alix” or sometimes “Wify”), a granddaughter of Queen Victoria), in which his name comes up frequently, it is clear that “our brave Keller” was devoted to the Romanoffs and enjoyed the trust and affection of the royal couple. In one letter (17.6.1916) the Empress reports to her husband that she has received a telegram from Keller in which he tells her that he has been wounded twice, once in each leg, but hopes “soon to return to the ranks for further service to Your Imperial Majesty.” She adds that she has heard from others “how the soldiers adore him & when he goes to the wounded, how each tries to sit up to see him better. He rides, followed by an immense banner with the image of the Saviour, & 40 cossacks, of wh. each has 4 St. George’s crosses, otherwise they don’t guard him — they say it is an imposing & emotioning picture. How glad I am for him — he always yearned for this great chance to prove to you his intense love, loyalty & gratitude.” After Nicholas’s forced abdication in the wake of the March Revolution of 1917, Keller refused to serve the Russian Provisional Government and subsequently saw action as a commander in the Western-supported, anti-Bolshevik Northwestern Army.

194At the beginning of the War, in 1914, Zur Mühlen’s “blond Russian giant” is said to have “participated in anti-Ukrainian pogroms in Galicia.” These were directed against the considerable Ukrainian population in Austrian-ruled Galicia — a hotbed of Ukrainian nationalism invaded by Russia in the early months of the War — and reflected the decision of the czarist administration to go back on the concessions it had made intermittently on matters such as the use of the Ukrainian language and to stamp out the Ukrainian autonomy movement once for all. Keller’s anti-Ukrainian zeal, however, did not prevent him from accepting appointment as commander of the army of Pavlo Skaropadski the Ukrainian “Hetman” or leader, who had come to power in April 1918 in a coup organized by a combination of wealthy landowners, the generals of the German and Austrian armies that had occupied Ukraine after the signing of the Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and anti-Bolshevik Russian officers. Skaropadski’s regime was itself toppled, however, after only a few months. A revolt in Eastern Ukraine by elements loyal to the pre-coup government, under the leadership of Symon Petliura, defeated Skaropadski’s army. Keller was killed in the course of the fighting.

(Sources: The Complete Wartime Correspondence of Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra, April 1914- March 1917, ed. Joseph T. Fuhrmann [Westport, CT: The Greenwood Press, 1999], pp. 23, 24–25, 48, 65, 195, 196, 412, 424, 429, 484, 501, 502, 507, 515, 519, 523; Michael Hrushevsky, A History of Ukraine, ed. O.J. Frederikson [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941]; Serhii Mazlakh and Vasyl’ Shakhrai, On the Current Situation in the Ukraine, ed. Peter J. Potichnyj, Introduction by Michael M. Luther [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970; orig. Ukrainian 1919, republished New York, 1967]; Anna Procyk, Russian Nationalism and Ukraine [Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1995]).

101 Sport im Bild

195Barnes gave this title only in English translation (as Ilustrated Sports), which makes it difficult to identify. The magazine’s German name (as given by Zur Mühlen in Ende und Anfang) was Sport im Bild. A weekly, Sport im Bild was launched in Berlin in 1899 in response to a growing interest in sports and games in Germany, acquired by Rudolf Mosse, the Jewish publisher of the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper in 1904, and shut down by the Nazis, because of its Jewish ownership in 1934. Erich Maria Remarque, the author of All Quiet on the Western Front (written in 1927 but not published until 1929) got a start as a professional writer when he was hired as a reporter and assistant editor of the weekly around the very time that Zur Mühlen was working on her memoir. His novel Station am Horizont (Station on the Horizon, not published separately until 1998), was serialized in Sport im Bild in 1927.

102 Die Woche

196One of the first illustrated magazines in German. It was launched in 1899 by the Berlin publisher August Scherl, at a time of intense competition among the three main Berlin newspaper and magazine publishers — Ullstein, Mosse, and Scherl — in response to the Ullsteins’1894 purchase, redesign, and mass marketing of the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung. Like the latter, Die Woche was generously illustrated and aimed at a mass market. A family magazine, it offered general interest articles and photographs, news of the fine arts and literature, and reports on woman’s fashions and household matters, along with serialized novels and the odd poem.

103 Semi-Gotha

197The Almanach de Gotha, first published in 1763, was and still is the recognized directory of the European nobility. The thrust of the Semi-Gotha or Weimarer Historisch-genealogisches Taschenbuch des gesamten Adels judäischen Ursprunges [Historical-Genealogical Directory of all noble families of Judaic origin] (Weimar: Kyffhäuser-Verlag, 1912) was overtly anti-Semitic — to expose the extent of the penetration of the European aristocracy by a racially alien element, the Jews. Zur Mühlen uses it with characteristic irony to lay claim to a Jewish ancestor.

104 Saint Ignatius Loyola

198It was quite widely believed at one time that the parents of the founder of the Jesuit order were Marranos — Spanish Sephardic Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity under threat of expulsion but continued to practice Judaism secretly. This idea was still being promoted in early 2009 in anti-Semitic websites, such as http://www.encspb.ru/​en/​article.php?kod=2804025933 or http://zioncrimefactory.wordpress.com (accessed27/4/2010).

199Even in 1912, before she met her longtime partner, the Jewish writer and translator Stefan Isidore Klein, whom she finally married in 1939, Zur Mühlen was obviously amused and not displeased to learn that one of her ancestors might be Jewish. It is also worth noting that in some of the völkisch (racist and nationalist) circles Zur Mühlen already detested, Jews and Jesuits, were lumped together as dangerous, rootless schemers in the service of foreign, un-German powers — i.e. the Rothschilds or the Pope.

105 Whistler’s book On the Gentle Art of Making Enemies

200The full title of the book by the painter James McNeill Whistler, as published in 1890 by William Heinemann in London and John W. Lovell in New York, continues: As pleasingly exemplified in many instances wherein the serious ones of this earth, carefully exasperated, have been prettily spurred on to unseemliness and indiscretion while overcome by an undue sense of right.

201Zur Mühlen’s father clearly knew his daughter well and felt confident — rightly — that she would take his teasing her about her tendency to high-minded indignation in good part. Whistler’s entertaining book consists of material relative to the famous libel suit he brought against Ruskin in 1877, as well as of numerous other more or less witty and malicious attacks on the artist in the press, chiefly by art critics, followed by the artist’s more or less witty and malicious responses in the form of letters or public lectures. The publishing history of this collection of jabs and counter-jabs contributed to its notoriety. Whistler had entrusted an American journalist in London by the name of Sheridan Ford with the task of collecting and arranging the material. He then decided to publish it and copyright it himself. Ford, who claimed that Whistler had given him publication rights, made repeated attempts, in London, New York, Antwerp, and Paris, to bring the book out, but in each case publication was stopped in the nick of time, so that in the end it was Whistler himself who oversaw and benefitted from the publication. This publication saga was itself well publicised in Britain, America, and Continental Europe.

(Source: E.R. and J. Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler [London: William Heinemann; Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1908]).

106 Attempt on the life of the king of Italy

202Assassination attempts had been made by anarchists against Umberto I of Italy — who was hated by the Left — in 1878 and again in 1900. The second of these was successful. Zur Mühlen is referring to yet another attempt that had just been made, on 14 March 1912, on the life of a reigning Italian monarch, Vittorio Emmanuele III. The king was not killed in the attack, but he was injured.

107 Livland

203The territory known as Livland — a traditional, but by Zur Mühlen’s time no longer current political designation — embraced part of present-day Latvia and the southern part of present-day Estonia, in which von zur Mühlen’s estate was situated.

108 Stepniak

204Sergei Michailovitch Stepniak (a.k.a. Kravchinski, 1851–1895), son of an army doctor, had a brief military career, reaching the rank of second lieutenant in the artillery by the age of 20. In 1871, moved by the misery of the Russian peasantry, he resigned his commission and joined the Narodniki, well-intentioned Russians of the upper classes, who aimed to bring socialist ideas to the peasants. His activities resulted in his arrest in 1874, but he was released shortly afterwards and went to the Balkans to take part in the Bosnian uprising against the Ottomans. He also participated around this time in the insurrection that the Italian anarchist Enrico Malatesta had incited in the province of Benevento, south of Rome. In 1878, back in Russia, he was involved in the assassination, on the streets of St. Petersburg, of the head of the Russian secret police and had to flee Russia, eventually settling in England where he set up the Friends of Russian Freedom and its print organ, the Russian Free Press. Always close in his political position to anarchists like Bakunin and Kropotkin, he gradually abandoned his earlier support for terrorist acts as an effective instrument of political change. His first book, La Russia sottoterranea: profili e bozzetti rivoluzionari dal vero (Milan, 1882) was written in Italian and published in English translation as Underground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life (1888). Other works written in exile include (in English) The Career of a Nihilist: A Novel (1885), Russia under the Czars (1885), and The Russian Peasantry (1888). Zur Mühlen could have found three of these works in German translation in Herr Krüger’s bookshop: Das Unterirdische Russland (Bern, 1884), Der russische Bauer (Stuttgart, 1893), and Die Laufbahn eines Nihilisten (Magdeburg, 1894).

205Stepniak was killed by a train at a level crossing near his home in Bedford Park, London, in 1895.

109 Kropotkin

206Pyotr Alekseyevitch Kropotkin (1842–1921), sometimes referred to as “the Anarchist Prince,” though he renounced his title of Prince at a young age, was born into a noble family which owned large estates and many serfs. He was admitted to the elite pazhski korpus — a combined military school and court institution reserved for 150 boys of high nobility. After a brief career in the army in the course of which he led a number of well regarded geographical survey expeditions, he became more and more interested in the workers’ movement and in 1872, on a visit to Switzerland, joined the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) which had been founded in London in 1864 in order to unite a variety of leftwing and trades union associations under a common umbrella. He went back to Russia with a large quantity of prohibited socialist pamphlets, which he proceeded to rewrite in Russian in terms intelligible to the uneducated. For his pains, he was arrested and imprisoned in the notorious Peter and Paul fortress, from which, however, he escaped in 1876. Returning to Switzerland, he established ties to the Jura Federation, a federalist and anarchist section of the IWA that had been expelled from that organization in 1872 but was still strong among the watchmaker artisans of French-speaking Switzerland. Its emphasis on “egalitarian relations… and independence of thought and expression” was closer to Kropotkin’s own ideals than the IWA’s increasing emphasis on discipline and central planning. In 1881, after the assassination of Czar Alexander II — which Kropotkin justified on the grounds that an explosion is more effective than a vote in inciting the workers to revolution — he was expelled from Switzerland. He settled for a time in France but was arrested there in 1883 on account of his membership of the IWA. Released in 1886, he moved to England, living in various suburbs of London and associating with English-speaking socialists like the writer and artist William Morris and the playwright George Bernard Shaw. He returned to Russia after the February 1917 Revolution but did not welcome the October Revolution. “This buries the revolution,” he said. The Bolsheviks, in his view, had shown how the revolution was not to be made, i.e. by authoritarian rather than libertarian methods. Kropotkin’s influence in Germany was considerable, especially in the climate of disillusionment at the end of the First World War, when not only the working class and soldiers returning from the front but well-meaning people from all classes espoused pacifism and socialism but rejected what they saw as the authoritarianism of the nascent Communist Party. Many of Kropotkin’s books were republished in multiple editions in those years.

207In Herr Krüger’s bookshop in 1912, Zur Mühlen might have found the following works by Prince Kropotkin in German translation:

208Revolutionäre Regierungen (Berlin, 1893; Anarchistische Bibliothek, 1); Die historiche Rolle des Staates (Berlin, 1896, transl. from the French, L’Etat, son rôle historique); Memoiren eines russischen Revolutionärs (Stuttgart, 1900, 1906, 1912); Landwirtschaft, Industrie und Handwerk, oder Die Vereinigung von Industrie und Landwirtschaft, geistiger und körperlicher Arbeit, translated by Gustav Landauer (Berlin, 1904); Gegenseitige Hilfe in der Tier-und Menschenwelt (Leipzig, 1904, 1908, 1910); Der Wohlstand für alle — Die Eroberung des Brotes (Berlin, 1906, transl. from the French, La Conquête du pain, 1892); Die Schreckenherrschaft in Russland (Stuttgart, 1909); Die große französische Revolution 1789–1793 (Leipzig, 1909, translated by Gustav Landauer). It is obvious why Herr Krüger, the bookseller, had to keep those books hidden away under lock and key.

110 Kennan

209The reference is to George Kennan (1845–1924). Though his fame has been eclipsed by that of his great-nephew of the same name (the late United States ambassador to the Soviet Union and world-renowned diplomat George Frost Kennan), the earlier Kennan also had a considerable influence on Western views of Russia. Growing up in Norwalk, Ohio, he was drawn like many in his generation to the West, in his case, to Alaska, which Russia was in the process (1867) of selling to the United States, and from where he crossed over into Siberia.

210He chronicled his experience of the Russian East and North in his Tent Life in Siberia and adventures among the Koraks and other tribes in Kamchatka and Northern Asia (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1870; London: Sampson Low, 1871). On his return from Siberia he pursued a career as a journalist, working as an Associated Press reporter in Washington, D.C. and writing for the New York Herald, the New York Times, and magazines such as Century, The Outlook, The Nation, and Forum. In 1885, he went back to Siberia in the company of an artist friend from Boston, George Frost, having been commissioned by Century magazine to travel around and write up whatever he could find out about the penal settlements in Siberia, the revolutionaries who had been exiled and imprisoned there, their treatment, and, in general, Russian government policy with regard to political dissidents. The product of Kennan’s investigations appeared in 1891, in two hefty volumes, profusely illustrated by Frost, of over 400 and over 500 pages respectively, as Siberia and the Exile System. Published simultaneously in New York by the Century Company and in London by J.R. Osgood, McIlvaine, this work was immediately translated into French and German and was cited by Tolstoi himself — whom Kennan twice interviewed. An excerpt from it, an article that had appeared in Century, no. 34, had already appeared in Russian in Geneva (a gathering place of Russian exiles and socialists) as Tyuryemnaya zhizn Russkikh Revolyutsionyerov [The Prison Life of Russian Revolutionaries] in 1889.

211Siberia and the Exile System is an extraordinarily well written, lively, engaging, and fair book. Kennan relates in the Preface that when he set out he “believed that the Russian government and the exile system had been greatly misrepresented by such writers as Stépniak and Prince Kropótkin” and that he had said as much in a talk to the American Geographical Society in New York in 1882. “I also believed,” he adds, “that the nihilists, terrorists, and political malcontents generally, who had so long kept Russia in a state of alarm and apprehension, were unreasonable and wrong-headed fanatics. […] In short all my prepossessions were favorable to the Russian government and unfavorable to the Russian revolutionists.” In fact, it was because those views of his were known, he explains, that he was able to travel in Siberia and was given access to places that would otherwise have been closed to unauthorized individuals. By the end of the second volume, however, Kennan had been thoroughly persuaded that “most of the Russian terrorists were nothing more, at first, than moderate liberals, or, at worst, peaceful socialistic propagandists, and [that] they were gradually transformed into revolutionists, and then into terrorists, by injustice, cruelty, illegality and contemptuous disregard by the Government of all their rights and feelings” (vol. 2, p. 455). As a consequence of the publication of his book, Kennan was banished from Russia in 1891 and when he tried to return in 1901, was ordered out of the country. In 1917 he was among a group of Americans who publicly welcomed the February Revolution of 1917 and the end of the czarist regime. The speeches at the meeting the group held were published immediately by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1917 as Greetings to the New Russia: addresses at a meeting held at the Hudson Theater, New York, April 23, 1917 under the auspices of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Washington, D.C.

212Kennan’s writings on Siberia were widely available in German translation. Individual chapters from Siberia and the Exile System even seem to have come out in German before the book appeared in English. (Along with seven appendices, there are 30 chapters in all in the book, some of which had appeared in the form of magazine articles in Century.) An indication of the author’s enormous success in Germany is given by the fact that two major popular series — Philipp Reclams Universalbibliothek in Leipzig and Meyers Volksbücher, also based in Leipzig, both offered his writings in several cheap paperback volumes. The large number of German public libraries holding copies — often multiple copies — of Kennan’s books and the frequent new editions put out by each publisher are a further sign of unusually wide dissemination. In addition, a number of different translators and a number of different publishers had a hand in the production and distribution of Kennan’s work in Germany. (The copyright situation seems quite murky.) Moreover, each publishing house chose its own title for its translation of Siberia and the Exile System. While Herr Krüger might not have had to conceal the translation of Tentlife in Siberia (Zeltleben in Siberien und Abenteuer unter den Korjäken und anderen Stämmen im Kamchatka und Nordasien [Leipzig: Reclams Universalbibliothek, nos. 2795–97; also Meyers Volksbücher, nos. 1192–96; and Berlin: Cronbach, 1890]), he was certainly well advised, in Russian-ruled Estonia, to keep the other titles out of sight. Had they been discovered, he would almost certainly have had first-hand experience of Siberia himself.

213He might well have had any or all of the following in his secret underground store:

  • Sibirien, nach dem im Century Magazine erschienenen Aufsätzen, transl. Georg Gästner (Halle a.d.S.: Hendel, 1890; Bibliothek der Gesamtliteratur des In- und Auslandes).

  • Sibirien, transl. E Kirchner (Berlin: Cronbach, 1890 [7th ed.],). Some editions have a subtitle: Briefe aus einem Todtenhause [Letters from a House of the Dead].

  • Sibirien und das Verbannungssystem, transl. Ottmar Dittrich (Leipzig and Vienna: Bibliographisches Institut, 1891). This was the version adopted for the Meyers Volksbücher series, nos. 886–93, circa 1899. It also appeared with the Bibliographisches Institut of Leipzig under a slightly different title: Russisches Gefängnisleben (1891).

  • Sibirien, transl. David Haek (Leipzig: Reclams Universalbibliothek, vol. 1, 1890 [nos. 2741–42]; vol. 2, 1890 [nos. 2775–76]; vol. 3, 1891 [no. 2883])

  • Aus Sibirien und Rußland: Neue Beiträge zur Kenntnis des Gefängnis- und Verbannungswesens, transl. Leopold Kutscher (Klagenfurt: Kleinmayr, 1892).

111 Rütten and Loening’s series called “Society”

214The series entitled “Die Gesellschaft” [Society] was launched by the distinguished Frankfurt publisher Rütten & Loening in 1906 with the philosopher Martin Buber as general editor. By the time it closed in 1912, it consisted of forty volumes, each by a leading scholar in the field in question. The first volume, on the proletariat, was the work of Werner Sombart (Das Proletariat, 1906). Subsequent volumes dealt with religion (Die Religion, 1906, by Georg Simmel), world trade (Der Weltverkehr, by Albrecht Wirth, 1906), language (Die Sprache, 1907, by the prolific novelist, playwright, essayist, and linguist Fritz Mauthner), revolution (Die Revolution, 1907, by the leftwing anarchist Gustav Landauer), parliament (Das Parlament, 1907, by Hellmuth von Gerlach), colonies (Die Kolonie, by Paul Rohrbach, 1907), the state (Der Staat, 1908, by Franz Oppenheimer), the church (Die Kirche, 1909, by Arthur Bonus), customs (Die Sitte, 1909 by Ferdinand Tönnies), the women’s movement (Die Frauenbewegung, by Ellen Key, 1909), eroticism (Die Erotik, 1910, by Nietzsche’s friend, Lou Andreas-Salomé), technology (Die Technik, by Julius Goldstein, 1912). The series also included monographs on the social and human impact of more mundane, everday, material phenomena, such as the department store, sport, crafts, the stock-exchange, and the newspaper. Not all the contributors would have been considered dangerous by the czarist authorities but a number assuredly would: e.g. Sombart, Landauer, Key.

112 Bebel

215A wood-turner by trade, August Bebel (1840–1913) collaborated with Wilhelm Liebknecht in founding the political party that ultimately became the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands or SPD). He led the Party and represented it in the Reichstag for many years. His antimilitarism and his social program earned him the enmity of Bismarck and in 1872, he and Liebknecht — the only members of the North German parliament not to vote credits for the war with France and later, in 1871, outspoken defenders of the Paris Commune — were charged with treason and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. The effect of this was to solidify Bebel’s popularity and leadership of the Social Democrats — he was sometimes referred to as “der Arbeiterkaiser” [“the emperor of the workers”] — and ensure that he would be reelected to the Reichstag. By 1912 the Social Democrats, embodied by Bebel, had become the largest political party in Germany. A pragmatic Marxist — he had a small factory of his own and justified his participation in an economic system he rejected on the grounds that it gave him the independence he needed to pursue his political goals — he constantly tried to mediate between the left and the right wings of the SPD. Had he lived, it is highly likely that he would again have been one of the few who refused to vote credits for the 1914 war. Bebel was the author of a number of books — on the German Peasant War, on the French “Utopian Socialist” Charles Fourier, on French culture from the 16th to the 18th century — but the work that is likely to have been in Herr Krüger’s underground collection is the popular Die Frau und der Sozialismus. First published in 1879, this work was explicitly banned under the Anti-Socialist law in Germany (in effect from 1878 to 1890). Nevertheless it circulated widely, went through numerous editions and was translated into many languages, including English (Woman under Socialism, 1904, translated from the 33rd German edition).

113 Island of Moon

216“Insel Moon” in Zur Mühlen‘s German original. “Muhu” or “Muhumaa” in Estonian. Situated at the northern end of the entrance to the Gulf of Riga, it is one of many Estonian islands in the Baltic Sea.

114 Poor Konrad

217“Poor Konrad” (“Der arme Konrad”) was a term used, partly in contempt, to describe the poor, downtrodden peasant of the late Middle Ages. The “Poor Konrad Revolt” — a precursor of the German Peasant Revolt ten years later — broke out in 1514 in Beutelsbach, Württemberg, in protest against new taxes imposed by the ruling Duke Ulrich, which fell most heavily on the poor. The leader of the revolt, Peter Gaiss, presented himself as “Poor Konrad” i.e. as representing all the peasants. The revolt was crushed and its leaders beheaded.

115 Stolypin

218Pyotr Stolypin (1862–1911), the son of a large Russian landowner, joined the Ministry of State Domains on graduating from St. Petersburg University in 1885. In 1902 he was appointed governor of Grodno province and the following year of Saratov province. Thanks to his ruthless and effective suppression of peasant unrest there in 1905, he gained the reputation of being the only governor who, in a period of widespread revolt, had been able to keep a firm grip on his province. His success against the revolutionaries in Saratov led in 1906 to his appointment as Minister of the Interior, then, a few months later, Prime Minister. In this latter capacity, Stolypin introduced reforms aimed at giving peasants greater opportunity to acquire land. The plan was to create a stable group of prosperous farmers or kulaks with an investment in the established order, who would form a natural conservative political force. At the same time there was no let-up in his policy of ruthless suppression of revolutionaries. A new court system was instituted that made it easier to arrest and convict them. Between 1906 and 1909 so many suspects — over 3,000 — were convicted by these special courts and executed that the hangman’s noose came to be known in Russia as “Stolypin’s necktie.” In politics he was responsible for the emasculation of the Duma. (see under ‘Duma’) He got Nicholas II to dissolve the first Duma in 1906, and introduced changes designed to make the second Duma more pliant. After dissolving the second Duma also, in June 1907, he changed the voting system in such a way that the nobility and the wealthy were favored and the Duma was made into little more than an instrument for legitimizing government action. In September 1911, despite a police warning of an assassination plot, Stolypin went to Kiev, and on September 14, while attending a performance in the Kiev Opera House, and in the presence of the Czar and his family, he was shot, once in the arm and once in the chest, by an individual who was both a revolutionary and an agent of the Okhrana or secret police. He died four days later.

116 Citizen of an “enemy” country

219By her marriage to Viktor von zur Mühlen, who, though of German heritage, was Russian by nationality (Estonia being still at the time a province of the Russian Empire), Zur Mühlen had herself become Russian, and therefore a citizen of a country that, in the First World War, was an “enemy” of her native Austria-Hungary.

117 The Gotha

220The Almanach de Gotha, first published in 1763, was and still is the recognized directory of the European nobility. The following description is from a no longer available official web-page. (For a similar, longer version, see http://www.almanachdegotha.org/​id266.html):

The Gotha Book entered the language in its own right with the phrase ‘the entire Gotha was there.’ Historically it has charted the ruling royal and princely houses of Europe; coming to an end only with the Soviet occupation of the former Saxon Duchies of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in 1945.
The Almanach de Gotha made its debut in Saxe-Coburg in 1763, the Court which, during the 1760’s under Duke Friedrich III and later under Duke Ernest II, attracted the likes of Voltaire and which in the mid 1800’s produced Prince Albert as consort for Queen Victoria. The Gotha’s own familiar crown was stamped on the cover of what was to become the ultimate power register of the ruling classes. As the publisher was not to be moved by government decrees or bribes to include or exclude and refused to compromise the integrity of the volume, those not listed in its pages found their ambitions thwarted, and Pretenders’ claims were left in ruins.
Napoleon’s reaction was typical. On 20 October 1807 the Emperor wrote to his Foreign Minister, de Champagny: ‘Monsieur de Champagny, this year’s Almanach de Gotha is badly done. I protest. There should be more of the French Nobility I have created and less of the German Princes who are no longer sovereign. Furthermore, the Imperial Family of Bonaparte should appear before all other royal dynasties, and let it be clear that we and not the Bourbons are the House of France. Summon the Minister of the Interior of Gotha at once so that I personally may order these changes’.
Unmoved, the Almanach de Gotha simply produced two editions the following year, the first the extremely rare “Edition for France — at His Imperial Majesty’s Request” and the other “The Gotha — Correct in All Detail.” Historically the Gotha was the determining instrument when it came to matters of protocol. Not only were orders of precedence easily checked, but marriages between parties not listed in the same Gotha section were often considered unequal at some courts, participants thereby loosing dynastic privileges and sometimes title and rank. The term morganatic applied to such marriages; it derived from the High German morgangeba, a gift by a groom to his bride on the morning following their wedding. It indicated that this was the full and only entitlement that the wife could expect from her new husband. Morganatic marriages were often called ‘left hand marriages’ due to the fact that inequality in rank required the groom to use his left hand instead of the right during the wedding ceremony.

118 Moissi

221Alexander Moissi (1879–1935), born in Albania, grew up in Vienna where his career as one of the most acclaimed European stage actors of his time began. He then moved to Berlin as a protégé of the great director Max Reinhardt. In 1911, he accompanied Reinhardt’s troupe to Russia, where his interpretation of the role of Oedipus won high praise from the influential Marxist critic and future Soviet “Commissar of Enlightenment,” Anatoly Lunacharsky.

222In her autobiography, Elisabeth Bergner, an internationally celebrated actress of the time, writes of him with affection and with the greatest respect not only for his extraordinary artistic talent but for his qualities as a human being. “Aside from his crazy chasing after women,” she recalls, “he was one of the finest, kindest, most modest and most lovable people I ever met in the world of stage and screen. And never, not once in the many years we knew each other, from our first meeting in Zurich until much later in Vienna and Berlin, did I ever hear him say a bad word about others. That is something very rare indeed in theatre and film circles.” (Bewundert viel und viel gescholten… Elisabeth Bergners unordentliche Erinnerungen [Munich: Bertelsmann, 1978], p. 34) Though his repertoire encompassed the entire range of European drama from the ancients to Strindberg, Chekhov, and Pirandello, Moissi’s most famous role was as Fedya (Fyodor Protasov) in Tolstoi’s The Living Corpse (Zhivoy Trup, also sometimes referred to in English as Redemption), first produced after the author’s death at the Moscow Art Theatre, under Stanislavsky’s direction, in 1911. He performed this role, in which Zur Mühlen saw him in Davos in 1917, 1400 times all over Europe, as well as in North and South America. By reporting that news of the Revolution in Russia distracted the Davos audience from a performance by an artist such as Moissi in his most famous role, Zur Mühlen obviously intended to emphasize its enormous impact.

119 K.P.D.

223In the old Imperial Austria the initials K.P.D. signified Kaiserliche Palast-Dame — from the French Dame du palais — i.e. lady-in-waiting to the Empress. The reference to Marie Louise is to Archduchess Marie-Louise, daughter of the Austrian Emperor Franz I, who was married to Napoleon in 1810, at the age of eighteen, thus becoming Empress of the French. After the fall of Napoleon in 1814, she returned to Vienna along with her son, the King of Rome, but by the terms of the Treaty of Fontainebleau (1814) she retained her title of Empress.

224By 1929, when Hermynia Zur Mühlen wrote her memoir, the initials K.P.D. signified Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands — German Communist Party. Zur Mühlen was a member of the Party throughout the 1920s. She resigned in the early 1930s, around the time of the first Stalinist purges and the banishment of Trotsky.

120 Leonid Andreyev

225Leonid Andreyev (1871–1919) won an international reputation with The Red Laugh (1904), a ferocious indictment of war inspired by the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. It was immediately translated into English and published by Unwin in London in 1905. Republished in the United States in 1915 it was hailed in the New York Times (4 July 1915) as probably “the most vivid piece of war realism in any language.” Andreyev’s other writings — in particular his short stories and plays — were widely translated and continue to be republished to this day. Gorki, who discovered him, was one of his great admirers. Both Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, the two giants of twentieth-century Russian theatre, directed plays by him in Moscow and St. Petersburg respectively. Though Andreyev was not as supportive of the Russian Revolution as Gorki — he wrote several critical pieces from his exile in Finland — he was treated as a major Russian writer even in the old Soviet Union. New editions and translations of his works continue to appear in many languages and there is a very substantial body of critical writing about him, again in many languages. One of his plays, He Who Gets Slapped (1915), was made into a Hollywood movie in 1924.

121 Andreas Latzko

226Born and educated in Hungary, Andreas Latzko (1876–1943) wrote first in Hungarian but soon switched to German. In 1901 a short play by him was put on in Berlin. When World War I broke out he was in the East (Egypt, India, Ceylon, Java) preparing to write books and articles on what he had observed there. As a reserve officer in the Imperial army, he returned to Europe and was posted to the then border area between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Kingdom of Italy. He almost immediately fell ill with malaria and then suffered severe shell-shock during one of the many inconclusive engagements between the Italians and the Austro-Hungarians along the Isonzo river in 1916. After a few months in an army hospital he was sent to the Swiss health resort of Davos to recuperate. Here, where Zur Mühlen and her partner Stefan Klein, who had also been raised in Hungary, could well have met him, he wrote the stories that make up his Menschen im Krieg [Men in War], published anonymously by the Rascher-Verlag in Zurich in 1917 and in English, French, and Dutch translation the following year. The book was soon translated into a dozen more languages, including even Yiddish and Esperanto, and became an enormous worldwide success. Reviewing it in Die Fackel shortly after its publication the acerbic Viennese critic Karl Kraus hailed it as one of the most powerful documents about the Great War and about humanity in general, while the New York Times described it as “a bitter attack on the by-products of the Teutonic military idea.” In 1918 Latzko published another series of anti-war stories, Friedensgericht [The Judgement of Peace], in which he described the lives of German soldiers on the Western Front. This was also widely translated. In 1920, he contributed a paper on “Women in War” to the International Socialist Women’s Conference in Bern. During his stay in Switzerland, Latzko became friendly with Stefan Zweig and Romain Rolland, to whom — “my compatriot in the love of man” — Friedensgericht was dedicated. At the end of the War, Latzko moved to Munich, the capital of the short-lived Räterepublik or Soviet Republic of Bavaria. When it collapsed he returned to Austria and settled in Salzburg, where he worked as a journalist. In 1931 he moved to Amsterdam (his papers and correspondence are still preserved at the University of Amsterdam), but like many other Jewish writers soon had to seek refuge in the United States. He died, impoverished, in New York, in 1943. Latzko wrote a number of books in the 1930s but none had the success or the impact of the first two, which continue to be republished to this day.

122 Leonhard Frank

227Leonhard Frank (1882–1961) began a productive literary career with short stories in the avant-garde journal Pan. He gained acclaim in 1914 with his first novel Die Räuberbande [English translation, The Robber Band, 1928) which won the Fontane Prize. The following year, however, he created a scandal when, as a socialist and confirmed pacifist, he was outraged by a Social Democratic journalist’s loudly proclaiming in a Berlin café that the sinking of the British passenger liner Lusitania (with the loss of 1198 lives) by a German U-boat was “the most heroic feat in human history” and slapped him in the face. As a result, he had to go into exile in Switzerland (1915–1918), where he finished Die Ursache [The Cause of the Crime], a novel critical of the death penalty, and also wrote a series of pacifist short-stories, published together under the title Der Mensch ist gut [Man is Good] in 1917 and then republished by the Rascher Verlag in Zurich in 1918. The book, translated into many languages, was a huge success, and led to Frank’s being awarded the Kleist Prize by Heinrich Mann in November 1918. Just before that, it had been given a reading in her Berlin home, before some 300 guests, by the celebrated actress Tilla Durieux (Käte Kollwitz was in the audience and describes the episode in her diaries), after which the assembled guests had to be held back from marching to the Potsdamer Platz to protest against the war.

228Like Latzko, Frank was drawn to Munich on the establishment of the Räterepublik there under Kurt Eisner and Gustav Landauer and was wounded in the fighting that accompanied its brutal suppression. He returned to Berlin, where he continued to enjoy success as a prolific novelist (Der Bürger [1924; Engl tr. 1930], Im Letzten Wagen [1925; Engl. transl. 1934], Carl und Anna [1927; Engl. transl. 1929], Absturtz [1929], Brüder und Schwester [1929]), playwright, and finally screen-writer. He wrote the screen-play for the film Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff [Dmitri Karamazov Murderer], based on the Dostoievski character and worked with the Russian-born director Victor Trivas on Niemandsland [No Man’s Land], an anti-war film that was savagely attacked by nationalists and National Socialists and was soon banned by the German government under pressure from those groups.

229When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Frank left Germany first for Zurich, then London, and finally Paris. His books were burned in Germany and his German citizenship was taken away. On the outbreak of war in 1939, he was interned by the French authorities, as were all German exiles, but he managed to escape and made his way to Marseilles where he lived in constant danger and deprivation until, with the help of the Emergency Rescue Committee, founded in New York by — among others — Thomas and Erika Mann, he was able to cross the Pyrenees into Spain and reach Portugal from where he set sail for the U.S.

230Frank found work as a screenwriter for Warner Brothers in Hollywood but did not have a successful career in the U.S. Moreover, as he was considered a “violently pacifist” communist, he was continually under observation by the FBI and the immigration authorities. He returned to Germany after the war and resumed his literary career, but with much less success than before the war. Though he received many honours in recognition of his work and his stand against National Socialism (the Silver Medal of the City of Würzburg, where he was born in 1952; the Culture Prize of the City of Nürnberg in 1953; the National Prize of the German Democratic Republic in 1955; the Service Medal of the German Federal Republic; an honorary degree from the Humboldt University in East Berlin in 1957; and, from the Soviet Union, the Tolstoi Medal in 1960) and a street was named after him in the city of Leipzig for having been a “bourgeois democratic antifascist writer,” he continued to be the object of FBI surveillance, even in Germany, while in the Federal Republic he was regarded with some reserve because of his close contacts with and frequent trips to East Germany, his constant re-examination of the Nazi era, and his obstinate pointing to the successful careers, in the Federal Republic, of former National Socialists.

123 Henri Barbusse

231In the decade before the Great War, Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) made a modest name for himself in Paris literary circles as a writer of poetry and the author of the novel L’Enfer (1908), which tells of what a young man in a Paris boardinghouse observes when he spies on his neighbours through a hole in his bedroom wall. On the outbreak of war in 1914, though aged 41, a pacifist, and in poor health, he enlisted in the French army but by 1917 had been invalided out of active service. In the preceding year he published Le Feu, a vivid account of the horrendous carnage of the war and at the same time a moving portrait of the men who endured it. The book created a sensation, won the Prix Goncourt, and was immediately translated into English (Under Fire, 1917) and then into many other languages (Chinese, Czech, Dutch, German, Japanese, Russian, Turkish, Yiddish to name a few). After the war, Barbusse visited Moscow, married a Russian woman and joined the Communist Party. Thanks to the huge success of Le Feu, the earlier L’Enfer was now translated into English (The Inferno, 1918) and other languages, as were the politically inspired novels and other writings he now began to produce: Nous autres (1918; We Others, 1918), Clarté (1919; Light, 1919), Les Enchaînements (1924; Chains, 1925), Les Judas de Jésus (1927; Jesus, 1927), Faits divers (1928; Thus and Thus, 1928). He also turned out many purely political tracts calling for the overthrow of capitalism and an end to imperialist wars. The birth of Soviet Russia, he declared, in words that would have resonated with Zur Mühlen in those same years, was “the greatest and most beautiful phenomenon in world history.” However, unlike Zur Mühlen who left the Communist Party after Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union and the harsh rule of Stalin began (though she never renounced her socialism), Barbusse became an apologist for Stalin and just before his death, wrote an admiring biography of the Soviet leader.

124 Rudolf Jeremias Kreutz

232Rudolf Jeremias Kreutz, originally Křiž (1876–1949), graduated from the military academy in Vienna and served as an officer in the Imperial army and in the Imperial War Ministry. Even at this stage in his life, however, he was publishing witty satirical sketches and verses (Vom grinsenden Leben [Of the Smirking Life], 1911; Aus dem Affenkasten der Welt [From the Monkey-Box of the World], 1914; both illustrated by the talented Viennese caricaturist Fritz Schönpflug). His reputation as a writer was such that on the appearance of his anonymously published novel, Quo vadis Austria? (1913), which pilloried the corruption and inefficiency of the Austrian military, he himself was asked to respond to it with a counter-novel. The outbreak of the First World War relieved him of this task, though it later served as the topic of a satire (1929) and a comedy (1932), Der befohlene k. und k. Roman (The Commissioned Royal and Imperial Novel). In November 1914, Kreutz was wounded and taken prisoner by the Russians. During his captivity in Siberia, he became a convinced pacifist. Two novels, Die große Phrase (1919 [Big Talk]), and Die einsame Flamme (1920 [The Solitary Flame]), reflect his new anti-war stance. Both seem to have been published first (1918) in Danish and Swedish translation. Rascher Verlag in Zurich then put out the German text of Die große Phrase, a scathing indictment of the Austrian high command’s conduct of the war on the eastern front, in 1919. An English translation (from the Swedish) also appeared in 1919, under a different title, Captain Zillner, https://archive.org/​details/​captainzillnerhu00kreurich

233Back in Austria and in retirement from the army, Kreutz used his literary talent to spread his ideas for a new society in a world at peace (Der neue Mensch [1920; The New Man], Die Krise des Pazifismus, des Antisemitismus, der Ironie, 1931). He also expressed himself in poetry (Gesänge der Erde [1933; Songs of the Earth]). In 1933, at a general meeting of the P.E.N. Club, he put forward a resolution, signed by 25 writers, condemning the inhumanity of the National Socialist regime in Germany. His books were banned in Germany as a result. After the Anschluß in 1938, he was banned from publishing in Austria too and in 1944 was imprisoned for several months. He resumed his literary career after the War with the publication of a volume of poems, two volumes of short stories and, posthumously, Ich war ein Österreicher, an anti-Nazi, Austrian nationalist novel written during the War years.

125 Arbeiter-Zeitung

234Launched in 1889 by veteran Austrian Social Democrat Victor Adler as a socialist workers’ newspaper, it was banned after the February 1934 disturbances in Vienna (see below). Publication resumed in 1945, when it served as the organ of the Austrian Socialist Party.

126 Schiller Marmorek

235Schiller Marmorek, who was Jewish, was the art critic of the journal Kleine Blätter and one of the editors of the Arbeiter-Zeitung. He translated Clémenceau’s Au Pied du Sinai (1898) into German as Jüdische Gestalten (1924) and George Soulié de Morant’s French translations of Chinese tales as Der chinesische Dekameron (1925). He fled Austria for Czechoslovakia after the 3-day Austrian revolution of February 1934 (see note below) and finally made his way to the U.S.

(Source: Herbert Exenberger, “’Bis uns als Vaterland geschenkt der Staub, der unter den Schuhn uns hängt’: Sozialistische Schriftsteller im Exil,” in Johann Holzner, Sigurd Scheichl, Wolgang Wiesenmüller, eds., Eine schwierige Heimkehr. Österreichische Literatur im Exil, 198–1945 [Innsbrücker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft, Germanistische Reihe, vol. 40, 1991], pp. 171, 174, 177, 178).

127 Julius Braunthal

236As a prominent socialist activist and member of the outlawed Social Democratic militia, the “Republikanischer Schutzbund,” Braunthal (b. 1891), who, like Marmorek, was Jewish, was among those arrested in February 1934, but he managed to reach Belgium shortly afterwards and in 1938 moved to England, where he lived until his death in 1972, and where he had an active political and literary career. His papers, preserved at the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis in Amsterdam, contain exchanges of letters with Karl Kautsky, Thomas Mann, Karl Mannheim, Karl Popper, and a host of liberal or leftwing British figures, including H.N. Brailsford, Fenner Brockway, G.D.H. Cole, Michael Foot, G.L. Gooch, Kingsley Martin, Raymond Postgate, and R.H. Tawney. From 1941 until 1948 he was the editor of International Socialist Forum. In Austria he had published Die Arbeiterräte in Deutschösterreich (1919), Die europäische Krise und der Sozialismus (1920), Die kranke Welt (1922), Vom Kommunismus zum Imperialismus. Bilder aus dem bolschewistischen Georgien (1922), and he had been one of the editors of the Arbeiter-Zeitung. In England, where many of his books were published by the left-leaning Victor Gollancz, his Need Germany Survive? (1943) carried an introduction by Harold Laski; In Search of the Millennium (1945) had an introduction by H.N. Brailsford; The Paradox of Nationalism: An Epilogue to the Nuremberg Trials (1946) had an introduction by Leonard Woolf; and The Tragedy of Austria (1948) was introduced by Michael Foot. The first volume of a 3-volume History of the International appeared in 1966. Braunthal was an editor of Die Zeitung, a daily, later a weekly, which was published in London from 1941 until 1945 and to which Zur Mühlen contributed a number of feuilletons.

128 February 1934

237For four days, from 12 to 15 February 1934, civil war raged in several parts of Austria. The rightwing Austrian government, under Chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss, had shut down the Parliament in March 1933, was governing by decree, and aimed to transform the Austrian Republic into a corporate state on the model of Mussolini’s Italy. While the Social Democratic left was paralysed by the leadership’s extreme caution and unwillingness to support calls for action from the left wing of the Party and from some grassroots workers’ groups, the Heimwehr, an extreme rightwing paramilitary organization, had carried out acts of violence against Social Democrats and members of the Schutzbund or Social Democratic defense league, but the perpetrators had been released without punishment by the courts. Angry calls for mass protest and industrial action were resisted by the leaders of the Social Democratic Party. Following an attack by the Heimwehr on Social Democratic Party premises in Linz, however, and house searches and arrests of Party members, protest turned violent. The working class districts of Vienna and some other Austrian cities rose up. But the Social Democratic Party leadership failed to guide and organize the revolt, a call for a general strike was not answered, and significant segments of the working class stood back from the fray. The combined forces of the police and the military succeeded in putting down the uprising. The leaders of the Social Democratic Party were arrested and imprisoned or fled the country. Chancellor Dollfuss, who planned to maintain Austrian independence from Nazi Germany and to associate his country rather with Mussolini’s Italy, was himself assassinated by Nazi agents five months later.

238For excellent accounts of the failed February revolution, see G.E.R. Gedy, Betrayal in Central Europe. Austria and Czechoslovakia: The Fallen Bastions (New York: Harper Brothers, 1939); Otto Leichter, Glanz und Elend der Ersten Republik. Wie es zum österreichischen Bürgerkrieg kam (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1964); and the moving, highly personal, day by day account of Ernst Fischer in his Erinnerungen und Reflexionen (Reibeck bei Hamburg: Rohwolt, 1969).

129 Gsur Verlag

239The Gsur Verlag, which published Zur Mühlen’s novel, was a courageous player in Austrian resistance to National Socialism. Established in January 1930, it got its name from one of its two founders, Gusti Gsur, a Viennese businesswoman. She withdrew only a few months later, leaving the firm entirely in the hands of its co-founder, the sociologist, historian, and future Vice-Mayor of Vienna, Ernst Karl Winter.

240During a first phase (1930–1933), the books published by Gsur Verlag reflected Winter’s strongly Catholic and conservative politics, which went hand in hand with a deep and enduring commitment to the idea of Austria as a distinct nation and culture and not simply a branch of a larger German Volk (as the Nazis claimed), and increasingly, in face of the growing power and influence of National Socialism in Germany, to the idea that Austria had a special mission to stand up for the traditional values Germans had once shared with other European nations. As early as the Spring of 1932, before Hitler had become Chancellor and when there was as yet no broad-based campaign against National Socialism, the Gsur Verlag brought out two volumes by the Franciscan Father Zyrill Fischer — Die Hakenkreuzler [Followers of the Swastika] and Die Nazisozis, an extract from that work. In Winter’s own words, these two publications “marked the first attempt in Austria to combat National Socialism from a Catholic point of view and were accepted for publication for that very reason by the Gsur Verlag, the goals of which are not, in the first instance, commercial, but intellectual and spiritual.” (Wiener Politische Blätter, 1, no. 4 [3 December, 1933], p. 242; on Fischer and his work, see Martin Kugler, Die frühe Diagnose des Nationalsozialismus: Christlich motivierter Widerstand in der österreichischen Publizistik [Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1995]). In November 1932 the Gsur press published another book, Der Nazispiegel, in the same anti-Nazi vein (in fact it was so close to its predecessors that there was some question of plagiarism) by an author (Alfred Missong) writing under the pseudonym of Thomas Murner, the celebrated early sixteenth-century Catholic satirist and formidable critic of Luther. In April of the following year, Winter began publication through the Gsur Verlag of a bi-monthly periodical, Wiener Politische Blätter, the very first number of which was immediately banned in Germany, where the National Socialists were now in power.

  • 1 The term Arbeiterschaft, as distinct from Arbeiterklasse, in the title of this collection of articl (...)

241In 1935 the Gsur Verlag announced a new series of publications. Winter explained the policy guiding it in an article in his Wiener Politische Blätter (3, no. 5, 13 October 1935): “In the spirit of the orientation of our… publications to date, we shall publish literary, political, and scholarly works in three areas. In area A we shall follow the social line begun by the book Arbeiterschaft und Staat [by Winter himself]1 In area B we shall continue the Austrian line hitherto represented by four books in the series ‘Austrian Religion and Culture’ and by the study of Rudolph IV [also by Winter himself]. Area C will continue the anti-National Socialist line established by the writings of Thomas Murner.”

242Within 15 months eight such anti-Nazi works appeared, of which the first was a witty satire of the “Blood and Soil” theme dear to the Nazis — this was Müller. Chronik einer deutschen Sippe (1935) by Walter Mehring, a well-known writer of satirical prose and verse and of songs for the Berlin cabarets, who, like Zur Mühlen, had fled Germany for Austria in 1933 — and the second was Zur Mühlen’s Unsere Töchter die Nazinen. The German ambassador to Austria, Franz von Papen, communicated his extreme displeasure at both publications in the form of protests to the Austrian Chancellor’s office. About Mehring’s book he declared: “In this novel, with its general anti-National Socialist tenor and special aim of ridiculing the meaning of blood and soil in the life of the people, the author has produced a concoction that can only be described as downright pornographic and that demeans and insults German culture in the most outrageous manner.” There followed a diplomatically couched demand that the book be banned and all copies confiscated as quickly as possible. While the Austrian side appears not to have acted on this demand, it found a way to respond positively, without appearing to have simply yielded to pressure from a foreign state, to a similar demand made a day or two later that Zur Mühlen’s book be banned. (See below, the essay “Remembering Hermynia Zur Mühlen: A Tribute,” note 34) These setbacks did not prevent the Gsur Verlag from continuing to publish books in area C — among them Die Judenfrage in Deutschland (1936) by Peter Drucker, who after leaving Germany in 1933 for England, then the U.S., became a well known writer, in English, on issues of management and social policy, holding positions at Bennington College (1942–49), New York University (where he was professor of management, 1950–71) and the Management School (now named after him) of the Claremont Graduate University in California (1971 until his death in 2005).

243With the banning of an important Beiheft of the Wiener Politische Blätter, written by Winter himself, the Gsur Verlag reached the end of its short road. Winter had been appointed third vice-mayor of Vienna by the Dolfuss administration in 1934 after the suppression of the February uprising, in the hope that he would be able to win support for the regime in the working class, whose interests he had always defended. Soon afterwards, Dolfuss’s commitment to Austrian independence from Germany resulted in his assassination by Nazi agents. Winter, who remained deeply opposed to German designs on Austria (as well as to National Socialism and anti-Semitism), finally came to believe that only a revival of the monarchy under Otto Habsburg could save Austria. Hence the Beiheft, entitled Monarchie und Arbeiterschaft, which appeared on October 1, 1936. By the end of the month it had been banned by a police order as “dangerous to public peace, order, and security,” and all further publication of the Politische Blätter was also forbidden. An additional consequence was that Winter had to step down as vice-mayor of Vienna. These developments were greeted with joy not only in the German embassy but among Austrian Nazis and their sympathhizers, the regular targets of Winter’s criticisms. According to the official organ of the Austrian extreme Right, the Heimatschützer, Winter’s Monarchie und Arbeiterschaft “contains Popular Front slogans and constitutes a threat to the state.” This, it was explained, “is consistent with the author’s position that he ‘feels humanly close to Dr. Bauer’ [Otto Bauer, the leader of the Social Democratic Party, with whom Winter did in fact enjoy a cordial relationship]. Dr. Winter praises Bolshevism in this publication.”

244In view of the ban on further publication of the Politische Blätter, Winter ceded his official authorization to operate a publishing house to the Austrian Catholic League. Gsur & Co. survived for a while as a name, but after Winter’s departure from Vienna for Zurich at the time of the Anschluß in 1938 the firm was officially dissolved.

245The career of the scholar, writer and politician who, as founder and head of the Gsur Company, agreed to publish Zur Mühlen’s book has been admirably summarized by Franz Richard Reiter in his Foreword to E.K. Winter. Ein Katholik zwischen Österreichs Fronten 1933–1938 by K.H. Heinz, Winter’s chief editor at the Gsur Verlag:

  • 2 Otto Habsburg was the Crown Prince, the son of Karl, the last Emperor of Austria. As ranks and titl (...)

Winter’s main goal was always the same: to defend Austria against absorption by Germany. and the National Socialist threat to liquidate it. His leading idea was also always the same: to bring about a reconciliation of workers, state, and church.
The
means proposed by Winter varied according to circumstances, however. At the beginning of his energetic political activity there are the letters to President Miklas, whom he urges and expects to defend the parliamentary constitution. When his hopes in this respect are dashed, he encourages Otto Bauer to combat any move to outlaw the Social Democrats — and thus weaken the front against Hitler Germany — with armed resistance. When the Social Democratic Party is banned on February 12, 1934, however, Winter accepts from his student society brother and onetime regimental comrade Dollfuss — with whom, as in other cases, despite sharp disagreements, he maintained a long established friendship — the charge of winning the support of the workers for the new state. As third Vice-Mayor of Vienna, Winter is now the representative of the established political order. At the same time, he also takes an oppositional stance towards it — about which he always expresses himself openly. “Aktion Winter,” then “Österreichische Arbeiteraktion” [Austrian Workers’ Action], is the name the Vice-Mayor gives to his efforts to promote an understanding between left and right. After little more than a year Die Aktion, a weekly paper he has been putting out, is banned. With the conclusion of the 1936 agreement between Austria and Germany, Winter finally recognizes that it will be impossible to win the support of the workers for the current Austrian state. In Dr. Otto Habsburg2 he comes to see someone “without any baggage” who might be capable of uniting all Austrians in a single popular front. It is this last way out for Austria in his view that he expounds in the Beiheft to the Wiener Politische Blätter. The booklet, entitled Monarchie und Arbeiterschaft is banned, just as Die Aktion and some previous numbers of the Politische Blätter had been. But this time Winter himself becomes the object of direct action. On October 24, 1936 he is dismissed from his post of Vice-Mayor and the Wiener Politische Blätter are banned permanently. Just before Hitler’s occupation of Austria, Winter makes one last attempt to persuade Schuschnigg [Dolfuss’s successor as President] that Austrians must take up arms to prevent the liquidation of their country. To no avail.

Winter flees to the United States to escape the National Socialists. It is 1955 before he returns to Austria. Despite his scholarly qualifications he does not obtain a professorship in his native land. On February 12, 1959, Ernst Karl Winter was quietly buried.
– Karl Hans Heinz,
E K. Winter: ein Katholik zwischen Österreichs Fronten 1933–38 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1984), Vorwort, pp. 11–13.

246Winter’s difficult, perhaps untenable position — between his deep Christian faith, with its rejection of violence, and his commitment to redressing the wrongs suffered by the working class and to defending Austria’s independence against Germany — is reflected in the novel Barabbas. Erzählung aus der Zeit Christi by Andreas Hemberger, published by the Gsur Verlag in 1936 (Dutch translation, Rotterdam, 1938; English translation, revised by Emery Bekessy, New York, 1946; Danish translation, 1948). The central conflict of the novel is between Barabbas, the power-hungry but popular robber, murderer, and advocate of violence as the only means of liberating Israel from Roman oppression and bringing about a just social and economic order, and Christ’s teaching of love and forgiveness.

247Though Winter taught sociology and political philosophy at the New School in New York City during his years of exile, his application for a post at the University of Graz at the end of the War was unsuccessful. The courageous publisher of Unsere Töchter die Nazinen, who finally made the decision to return to his native land, thus appears to have experienced the same fate in post-War Austria as the novel’s author, who chose to die in exile: indifference, at best.

130 Hlinka

248Andrej Hlinka (1864–1938), a Catholic priest, was the leader of the Slovak People’s Party, which sought autonomy for Slovakia, in the 1920s and 30s. He was considered a national hero in the fascist puppet republic of Slovakia during World War II. The Hlinka Guard was the Party’s militia (1938–45).

131 Hacha

249Emil Hácha (1872–1945), a Czech lawyer, became the third President of Czechoslovakia, taking office in 1938 after the forced resgination of Beneš. He was the first and only State President of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

132 Tuka

250Vojtech Tuka (1880–1946), a constitutional lawyer, challenged the unity of the Czech state and led the Slovak People’s Party’s radical wing, which demanded complete independence for Slovakia. Imprisoned on a charge of espionage in 1928, he was released in 1938, became Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of the puppet Slovak Republic (1940–45), and in that capacity energetically pursued a policy of persecution and deportation of Slovak Jews.

133 Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung

251It might seem odd that carrying a copy of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung could be intended as a sign that the bearer was not a Nazi. Since its founding in 1861, the paper had consistently pursued a conservative line and been close to the centres of power. Refounded near the end of the First World War, ostensibly to give the collapsing regime a more democratic profile, it was acquired soon afterwards (1920) by the extreme right-wing industrialist Hugo Stinnes and in 1922 was briefly banned for having supported the Kapp-Putsch, a right-wing attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the paper continued to represent the views of the extreme right. In 1933, however, it was almost banned again because of an article that had enraged Hitler. The Sinnes family appointed a new editor, Karl Silex, who appears to have thought that hewing to a conservative pro-government line would ensure a modicum of independence for the paper. In fact, the slightest deviation from the official Nazi Party line resulted in run-ins with the Propaganda Ministry and several issues of the paper were banned. Carrying the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung could thus be construed as an assertion of independence, however restrained and timid.

134 Marianka

252Marianka in Came the Stranger is a simple, hardworking, devoutly and sincerely (Catholic) Christian peasant woman who follows the moral precepts of the Gospels without question and without fear.

Notas finales

1 The term Arbeiterschaft, as distinct from Arbeiterklasse, in the title of this collection of articles and other documents, which appeared in 1934, was in itself programmatic in that it marked a rejection of the Marxist view of society as historically divided into conflicting classes and proposed instead a view of the workers as an essential element of an organic Standesgesellschaft — a society made up of different component parts, each of which, being necessary to the wellbeing of the whole, deserves equitable and just treatment by the state. This was also the view of society held by the rightwing Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss, who appointed Winter Vice-Mayor of Vienna after the uprising of February 1934 and to whose memory (after his assassination by Nazi agents in July 1934) Winter dedicated the second volume (1936) of his social, historical and political study Rudolph IV von Österreich (the first volume had appeared in 1934), except that Winter was more generously and sincerely concerned with the welfare of the workers than most advocates of the Standesgesellschaft, including Dolfuss.

2 Otto Habsburg was the Crown Prince, the son of Karl, the last Emperor of Austria. As ranks and titles of nobility were abolished under the constitution of the Austrian Republic, the “von” was dropped from his name.

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