THE PASSION OF MAX VON OPPENHEIM Lionel Gossman is M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Romance Languages (Emeritus) at Princeton University. Most of his work has been on seventeenth and eighteenth-century French literature, nineteenth-century European cultural history, and the theory and practice of historiography. His publications include Men and Masks: A Study of Molière ; Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment: The World and Work of La Curne de Sainte- Palaye ; French Society and Culture: Background for 18th Century Literature; Augustin Thierry and Liberal Historiography ; The Empire Unpossess’d: An Essay on Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall”; Between History and Literature ; Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas; The Making of a Romantic Icon: The Religious Context of Friedrich Overbeck’s “Italia und Germania” ; Figuring History ; and several edited volumes: The Charles Sanders Peirce Symposium on Semiotics and the Arts ; Building a Profession: Autobiographical Perspectives on the Beginnings of Comparative Literature in the United States (with Mihai Spariosu); Geneva-Zurich-Basel: History, Culture, and National Identity , and Begegnungen mit Jacob Burckhardt (with Andreas Cesana). He is also the author of Brownshirt Princess: A Study of the ‘Nazi Conscience’ , and the editor and translator of The End and the Beginning: The Book of My Life by Hermynia Zur Mühlen, both published by OBP. The Passion of Max von Oppenheim Archaeology and Intrigue in the Middle East from Wilhelm II to Hitler Lionel Gossman Unless otherwise stated, all contents of this book are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 unported license available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ © 2013 Lionel Gossman. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that she endorses you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Gossman, Lionel. The Passion of Max von Oppenheim: Archaeology and Intrigue in the Middle East from Wilhelm II to Hitler. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2014, http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0030 Further details about CC BY licenses are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available on our website at: http://www.openbookpublishers.com/9781909254206 ISBN Paperback: 978-1-909254-20-6 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-909254-21-3 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-909254-22-0 ISBN Digital ebook (epub version): 978-1-909254-23-7 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi version): 978-1-909254-24-4 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0030 Cover image: A new Haroun Al Raschid. A Dream of Baghdad, Made in Germany , cartoon by Leonard Raven-Hill, Punch (25 January, 1911). Princeton University Library. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders; any omissions or errors will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) Certified. Printed in the United Kingdom and United States by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers In fond and grateful memory of my teachers, Miss McCallum (Pollokshields Primary School, Glasgow), Miss Ross (Largs Higher Grade School, Ayrshire), Miss Gibson and Miss Forsyth (Eastwood Secondary School, Renfrewshire), Alan M. Boase and Norman Cohn (Glasgow University), Jean Frappier (Paris) and Jean Seznec (Oxford). Table of Contents Dedication v Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xiii Note on Translations xiii Foreword xvii INTRODUCTION xxiii I. FAMILY BACKGROUND, DIPLOMATIC CAREER, ROLE IN WORLD WAR I 1 1. The Oppenheims 3 2. The Charm of the Orient 13 3. Attaché in Cairo. “The Kaiser’s Spy” 33 4. The Spectre of Pan-Islamism and Jihad . The Background of Oppenheim’s 1914 Denkschrift betreffend die Revolutionierung der islamischen Gebiete Unserer Feinde 47 5. Oppenheim’s 1914 Denkschrift 81 6. Promoter of German Economic Expansion and the Berlin-Baghdad Railway 107 II. THE ARCHAEOLOGIST: TELL HALAF 117 7. Discovery and Excavation, Publications and Critical Reception 119 8. Financial Difficulties. The Fate of the Tell Halaf Finds 147 viii The Passion of Max von Oppenheim III. “THE KAISER’S SPY” UNDER NATIONAL SOCIALISM. “LEBEN IM NS-STAAT” 159 9. Questions 161 10. The Oppenheims and their Bank under National Socialism 163 11. Waldemar and Friedrich Carl von Oppenheim, so-called “Quarter-Jews,” during the National Socialist Regime: Work for the Abwehr (German Counter-Intelligence) and Association with the Conservative “ Widerstand ” (German Resistance) 171 12. Max von Oppenheim, “Half-Jew,” during the National Socialist Regime 205 Oppenheim and the Race Question 205 Support of the Regime 222 13. Plotting for Nazi Germany. Oppenheim’s Role in the Middle East Policy of the Third Reich 231 14. Max von Oppenheim’s Last Years 277 IV. MAX VON OPPENHEIM’S RELATION TO NATIONAL SOCIALISM IN CONTEXT. SOME RESPONSES OF “NON-ARYAN” GERMANS TO NATIONAL SOCIALISM 283 15. Two Jewish Organizations: the Verband nationaldeutscher Juden ( Association of German National Jews ) and the Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten ( Jewish War Veterans Association ) 285 16. Some Individuals: Schoeps, Pevsner, Kantorowicz, Landmann 293 17. By Way of Conclusion 325 APPENDIX of originals and translations of passages quoted 337 INDEX OF NAMES 379 Illustrations Frontispiece. “Mein Zelt” (My Tent). Dr. Max Freiherr xvi von Oppenheim, Vom Mittelmeer zum Persischen Golf durch den Haurān, die Syrische Wüste und Mesopotamien (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1899), vol. 1, frontispiece. 1.1 Portrait of Salomon Oppenheim jr., founder of the Oppenheim 4 bank. Artist unknown (before 1828). Wikimedia Commons. Original in colour. 1.2 Synagogue in the Glockengasse, funded by the Oppenheim 5 family, 1861. Lithograph by J. Hoegg from a water colour by Carl Emanuel Conrad (1810–1873). Wikimedia Commons. 1.3 Alexander Duncker, Die ländlichen Wohnsitze, Schlösser und 8 Residenzen der Ritterschaftlichen Grundbesitzer in der Preussischen Monarchie, in naturgetreuen künstlerisch ausgeführten, farbigen Darstellungen nebst begleitendem Text (Berlin: Alexander Duncker, 1857–1883), vol. 9 (1866–1867), Plate 530. Original in colour. 2.1 “Bedouin Women.” Dr. Max Freiherr von Oppenheim, 24 Vom Mittelmeer zum Persischen Golf durch den Haurān, die Syrische Wüste und Mesopotamien (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1899), vol. 2, facing p. 124. 2.2 “Bedouin Minstrels.” Dr. Max Freiherr von Oppenheim, 24 Vom Mittelmeer zum Persischen Golf durch den Haurān, die Syrische Wüste und Mesopotamien (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1899), vol. 2, p. 127. 2.3 “Syrian Villagers.” Dr. Max Freiherr von Oppenheim, Vom Mittelmeer zum Persischen Golf, vol. 1, facing p. 254. 24 Mittelmeer zum Persischen Golf. Ibid., vol. 1, facing p. 254. x The Passion of Max von Oppenheim 5.1 Al-Ğihād — El Dschihad, Zeitung für die muhammedanischen 88 Kriegsgefangenen (a fortnightly newspaper published in Arabic and other languages by the Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient for Muslim prisoners-of-war, beginning on 1 March, 1915), Arabic issue, no. 21, 4 November, 1915, front page. Courtesy of Staatsbibliothek, Munich (2 H. un.app. 42t). All rights reserved. 7.1 Tell Halaf. “The Pole Goddess,” excavated in 1899. 137 Dr. Max Freiherr von Oppenheim, “Bericht über eine im Jahr 1899 ausgeführte Forschungsreise in der asiatischen Türkei,” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin , 36, 2 (1901): 69–99. Plate 16. 7.2 Tell Halaf. “The Goddess with the Veil.” Dr. Max Freiherr von 138 Oppenheim, “Der Tell Halaf und die verschleierte Göttin,” Der Alte Orient , 10, 1 (1908): 43. Plate 12. 7.3 Tell Halaf. “Sphinx.” Berlin, Pergamon Museum. Wikimedia 143 Commons. Photograph by Z. Thomas. CC-BY-SA. 7.4 Tell Halaf. “Enthroned Goddess.” Illustrated London News , 145 October 25, 1930, p. 707. 8.1 Façade of Aleppo National Museum, showing plaster casts 148 of caryatids shipped to Berlin by Max von Oppenheim. Wikimedia Commons. 8.2 Illustrated London News , October 25, 1930, front page, showing 149 caryatids from Tell Halaf in newly opened Tell Halaf Museum. 8.3 Tell Halaf. Orthostat. “Seated Figure holding a lotus flower.” 154 New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1943 (43.135.1) © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. All Rights Reserved. 8.4 Tell Halaf. Orthostat. “Lion-hunt scene.” New York, 155 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1943 (43.135.2) © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. All Rights Reserved. 8.5 Tell Halaf. Orthostat. “Two heroes.” Baltimore, MD, 155 The Walters Art Museum, accession no. 21.18. © The Walters Art Museum. All Rights Reserved. Illustrations xi 8.6 Tell Halaf. Orthostat. “Winged goddess.” Baltimore, MD, 155 The Walters Art Museum, accession no. 21.16. © The Walters Art Museum. All Rights Reserved. 14.1 Max von Oppenheim (left) and his faithful manservant 279 Sommer. Photograph sent at end of World War II by Oppenheim to his former collaborator Ernst Herzfeld at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. © Smithsonian Institution. All Rights Reserved. Acknowledgments My thanks to David Hogge, Head of Archives, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., for seeking out and scanning material relevant to Oppenheim in the Myron Bement Smith and Ernst Herzfeld papers. Thanks also to the staff of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and the Metropolitan Museum in New York for their assistance in unravelling the fate of the orthostats Oppenheim brought to New York in the 1930s.To my friends and colleagues in Princeton—Walter Hinderer, Christoph and Flora Kimmich, and Peter Paret—and to Professor Susannah Heschel of Dartmouth College, one of the referees of the manuscript, I am indebted for their interest in the project as well as for practical suggestions and advice. As on previous occasions, I have benefited greatly from the sagacity and good counsel of Alessandra Tosi and Corin Throsby at Open Book Publishers. A note on translations All translations from German and French are by the author, unless otherwise indicated. In the case of very short passages, the original and a translation are often given side by side in the text. Longer passages are cited most commonly in translation, but occasionally in the original language. In the first case, the original is reproduced, in the second an English translation is provided in an appendix arranged by page number and located at the end of the volume. I have done the state some service, and they know’t; No more of that. I pray you, in your letters, When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate... Shakespeare, Othello , Act V, scene 2 You never know what will start off a Jehad! John Buchan, Greenmantle (1916) Frontispiece. “My Tent” (Max von Oppenheim in the desert). “Mein Zelt” (My Tent). Dr. Max Freiherr von Oppenheim, Vom Mittelmeer zum Persischen Golf durch den Haurān, die Syrische Wüste und Mesopotamien (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1899), vol. 1, frontispiece. Foreword I am neither an archaeologist nor a scholar of the Middle East. I came across the figure of Baron Max von Oppenheim while preparing a new translation and edition of an autobiographical memoir by Hermynia Zur Mühlen, the daughter of an Austrian aristocrat and minor diplomat, who had accompanied her father to Cairo in 1906 and who tells of hearing much talk there of the mysterious Baron. I included him among the figures of whom I prepared thumbnail sketches for my edition of Zur Mühlen’s memoir ( The End and the Beginning [Cambridge, England: Open Book Publishers, 2010] pp. 214–20). The sketch of Oppenheim turned out to be rather longer than most, because of the enigmatic and intriguing character of the individual and because I had become sufficiently curious about him to have already begun some quite serious research on him. I found that, besides references to him in works on the archaeology and ethnology of the Middle East, Oppenheim figures quite prominently in the considerable literature on German-Turkish relations just before and during the First World War and on German war strategies in 1914. In addition, Princeton’s Firestone Library is one of the few libraries in the United States that holds a copy, on microfilm, of the important “Denkschrift betreffend die Revolutionierung der islamischen Gebiete unserer Feinde” (“Memorandum concerning the Fomenting of Revolutions in the Islamic Territories of our Enemies”), which Oppenheim prepared for the Auswärtiges Amt , the German Foreign Office, immediately after the outbreak of war in 1914. The microfilm was made from a version of this memo preserved among the papers, now in the Beinecke Library at Yale, of Ernst Jäckh, a journalist, author of an important book on Turkey, founder in 1912 of a German-Turkish society, and associate of Oppenheim’s in promoting Turkish-German collaboration in the First xviii The Passion of Max von Oppenheim World War. 1 The memo lays out in detail a strategy for inciting a religious jihad among the Muslim subjects of Germany’s enemies—the British, the French, and the Russians—against their colonial masters. At the end of January 2011, I was alerted by an English colleague who teaches in Germany that Oppenheim had become the topic of many articles in the German press in connection with an exhibition, just opened at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, of the 3,000 year-old artefacts and sculptures Oppenheim brought back from his important excavations at Tell Halaf in northern Syria. Subsequently I found that the English and American media had also picked up on the exhibition. 2 The Tell Halaf artefacts had been housed in a makeshift museum that Oppenheim himself had created in the 1920s out of a disused factory in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, after the Pergamon Museum, to which he had offered them, declined to purchase them, allegedly for lack of funds. When the Tell Halaf Museum was hit by an incendiary bomb during one of the allied air-raids on the German capital in late 1943, the combination of the extreme heat from the 1 Ernst Jäckh papers, Yale. Princeton University Library, Microfilm 11747, folder 47. Jäckh took a somewhat different view from Oppenheim of Turkey’s eventual role in the War. He was convinced that Turkey would enter the War on the side of the Central Powers and he agreed with Oppenheim that this would create a “bloc separating the Allies in the West and in the East, and thus preventing any joint action,” and would “draw off Russian, French, and British strength from Germany’s fronts—to the Caucasus front, the Dardanelles and the Mesopotamian and Egyptian fronts.” The total number of enemy troops thus affected, he thought, might amount to about one million. In a memorandum to the German Foreign Office, written on 6 August 1914, he made no mention, however, of fomenting a Muslim jihad against the Allies. A supporter of the modernizing movement in Turkey, he almost certainly had reservations about stirring up old religious passions, even while recognizing the value to Germany of such a strategy. (The memorandum is quoted in Ernst Jäckh, The Rising Crescent. Turkey Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow [New York: Farrar and Reinhart, 1944], pp. 122–23; see also Malte Fuhrmann, “Germany’s Adventures in the Orient,” in Volker Langbehn and Mohammed Salama, eds., German Colonialism. Race, the Holocaust and Postwar Germany [New York: Columbia University Press, 2011], pp. 123–45 [p. 136]). Jäckh moved in a different direction from Oppenheim after the War. He became a supporter of the Weimar republic, helped to found the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik in Berlin, and left Germany for Britain after Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933. In 1940 he took up a teaching position at Columbia University, where he was one of the founders of the University’s Middle East Institute. He died in New York City in 1959. Oppenheim, in contrast, as we shall see, remained in Germany throughout the years of National Socialism and contributed to the formulation and execution of the regime’s Middle Eastern policy. 2 See, for instance: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,741928,00.html. See also: http://www.gerettete-goetter.de/index.php?node_id=1;http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ culturepicturegalleries/8316294/Ancient-Syrian-sculptures-destroyed-in-World-War-II- reconstructed-from-fragments.html; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12308854; [All links in footnotes active on 30 September, 2012]. Foreword xix fire and the cold water used to extinguish it resulted in the shattering of the sculptures into 27,000 pieces of basalt, many no larger than a human thumb. Oppenheim arranged for the rubble to be salvaged in the hope that one day the sculptures might be recreated. Thirty of them have now been reconstituted—a stunning achievement of restoration by the team of conservators who worked on the project for about a decade. The Pergamon Museum exhibition brought Oppenheim’s discoveries at Tell Halaf back again into public view, more prominently than ever. As a result, Oppenheim himself has also come back into public view—in a new guise: no longer the “Kaiser’s Spy,” as he was referred to by his British contemporaries in Cairo at the time of Zur Mühlen’s visit, at the Foreign Office in London, and by most British writers on the First World War ever since, but rather as a hero of German archaeology, comparable with two other great amateurs, Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy, and Carl Humann, the excavator of Pergamon. In April 2011, I came upon a lively TV docudrama about Oppenheim, based on a text written by Gisela Graichen, the author of Schliemanns Erben (Bergisch Gladbach: Lübbe, 2001). Oppenheim is seen here again, above all, as a passionate explorer of ancient civilizations, though his political activities are not entirely overlooked and he is also presented as a kind of German Lawrence of Arabia—amateur political intriguer and amateur archaeologist combined. In fact, his one encounter with T.E. Lawrence, which is described in Lawrence’s correspondence, is the occasion of a re-enacted scene in the film. 3 On the other hand, a reviewer in the Journal of the American Oriental Society of a recently published, short, illustrated book about Oppenheim with the upbeat title Der Tell Halaf und sein Ausgräber Max Freiherr von Oppenheim: Kopf hoch! Mut hoch! und Humor hoch! [ Tell Halaf and its Excavator, Baron Max von Oppenheim: Head high! Chin up! Keep smiling! ] describes the book’s hero as “the last of the great amateur archaeological explorers of the Near East” and makes no mention of his career as a government agent or as the instigator of a policy of deliberately inciting religious passion and exploiting it for secular geopolitical and military ends. 4 The luxury Geneva Mont Blanc company even produced an 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uthdw5EPTWA&feature=related; http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=ZazXd8mKmNM&feature=related; http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=WybwzYa1SN4&feature=related. 4 Gary Beckman in Journal of the American Oriental Society , 123 (2003): 253. Cf. the very different view of Oppenheim as having “initiated the creation of global political Islam” in its modern form (“made in Europe by non-Muslims, exported to, adapted in, and globalized beyond the Muslim lands”) presented by Wolfgang Schwanitz, “Euro-Islam by ‘ Jihad Made in Germany ’,” in Nathalie Clayer and Eric Germain, eds., Islam in Interwar Europe (London: Hurst, 2008), pp. 271–301 (p. 301). See also Schwanitz, “Die