THE BERLIN-BAGHDAD EXPRESS:
George Walden
The Observer
Sunday 18 July 2010
The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898-1918 by
Sean McMeekinThe roots of conflict in the Middle East go back to the
‘half-mad imperial enterprise’ of Germany’s last Kaiser Wilhelm II,
finds George Walden
In 2002, a commentator in the Cairo newspaper Al-Akhbar wrote of
Hitler and the Holocaust in terms that Iran’s President Ahmadinejad
might envy: “If only you had done it, brother, if only it had really
happened, so that the world could sigh in relief!” Sean McMeekin’s
book helps us understand how such a pearl of murderous mendacity
could ever have been uttered. Islamic ties to National Socialism can
be traced back as far as Kaiser “Hajji” Wilhelm II (German emperor
from 1888-1918) who, for not especially religious reasons, became
infatuated with the Muslim world.
The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for
World Power, 1898-1918 by Sean McMeekin 496pp, Allen Lane, £25.00 Buy
The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for
World Power, 1898-1918 at the Guardian bookshop It was Wilhelm who
persuaded Turkey into joining the first world war with a mixture
of gold, blandishments and promises. These included not just the
recovery of territory and the championing of Constantinople against
its religious rival, Mecca, but a jihad to liberate all Muslims under
British domination. The result would be a world where Islamism and
a German empire would peaceably blend.
“A half-mad imperial enterprise of fin-de-siècle Europe,” is McMeekin’s
description. The Rasputin of the piece was Baron von Oppenheim, a man
of protean hatreds, not only towards the entente powers (the British,
French and Russians), but most notably towards himself. A self-loathing
Jew of pathological proportions, every word of his title was a lie:
he was neither a baron, a “von”, nor in the dynastic or religious
sense an Oppenheim. The wealthy grandson of Salomon Oppenheim,
founder of the great bank, he lived as a harem-keeping Arab and
filled the emperor’s ear with anti-British and antisemitic bile,
and chaotic dreams of empire.
After his attempts to goad Muslims into massacring the infidel came to
not very much, Oppenheim was, by the 1930s, on the Nazis’ payroll,
introducing his fanatically Jew-hating friend Amin al-Husseini,
Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (appointed by the British) to Hitler. It
was Husseini who helped Heinrich Himmler form Muslim SS units in the
Balkans; they proceeded to murder 12,600 of Bosnia’s 14,000 Jews.
Third in a book rich in antiheroes is Abdul Hamid II, Ottoman Sultan
from 1876 to 1909 and paranoid reactionary, eventually dethroned and
imprisoned by the Young Turks revolt in 1909. McMeekin suggests that
it was in part the failure of the British to support the reformists
that kept Turkish ties with Germany in place after Hamid’s fall.
McMeekin is scathing about British blindness. A more imaginative
approach to the Young Turks could have changed this aspect of the war:
Germany’s ties with Turkey were predominantly with the reactionaries
and our influence with the forces for change could have weakened
Berlin’s position. The reasons we failed to see the future were
culpably stupid: a distrust of the Young Turks based on crazy rumours
about their supposedly Jewish connections.
The Berlin-Baghdad railway runs like a thread through the whole
calamitous tale. Strategically, its aim was to bind Turkey and the
Germans together, while sabotaging Britain’s links with India by
threatening Suez, and providing Germany with its own shortcut to the
east through Basra.Its construction, begun in 1903, was repeatedly
delayed for financial and technical reasons: 27 tunnels were required,
many of them kilometres long through the Taurus mountains. The only
concern the Germans manifested about their Turkish allies’ infamous
massacre and deportation of Armenians in 1915 was that it delayed
construction further. Despite massive injections of German cash,
the railway was only completed in 1940.
McMeekin talks of this aspect of the first world war as the new
great game, and its ironies and anomalies were endless, especially
from today’s viewpoint. To ingratiate themselves with the Arabs,
at one point the Germans and the British were competing to subsidise
the purest strain of Islam. Then there is the idea of Catholic and
Protestant Germany issuing vicious propaganda inciting Muslims to
massacre their Christian brothers. And though they failed to stir up
holy war, the Germans had better luck in dispatching Lenin back home
to cripple Russia’s war effort. Unfortunately for Berlin it was this,
together with Germany’s success in bringing Turkey into the war,
that hastened the downfall of the Romanovs and the onset of the
Bolshevik era.
McMeekin’s book is also rich in farce. The Bedouins Oppenheim was
keen to recruit for his jihad were unreliable holy warriors, given
to shouting “Allahu Akbar” so loudly before battle they gave away
their position. Muslim recruits to the SS taught about the closeness
of Nazi and Muslim ideals responded so well that some began to see
the Fuhrer as the second prophet.
The biggest winners in this theatre, the author believes, were the
Bolsheviks and the Turks, who regained lost territories as well
as their independence. For Britain, there was little more than
the poisoned inheritance of Mesopotamia and Palestine. McMeekin is
hard on everyone involved, but especially the Germans. To encourage
reactionary Islam, squandering a fortune in bribes in the process,
and help the Bolshevik revolution succeed while losing the war,
does not say much for the abilities of the Kaiser and his lieutenants.
The roots of current catastrophes in the Middle East, he writes,
are conventionally attributed to the postwar cynicism of the entente
powers. There are reasons for this, but McMeekin wonders why Germany’s
responsibility is missing. To me, it appears as another example of
Anglo-American puritan guilt-grabbing, a perverted form of spiritual
pride illustrated by our tendency to beat our breasts louder than
anyone else.
McMeekin has written a powerful, overdue book that for many will open
up a whole new side to the first world war, while forcing us to be
less reticent in confronting indelicate matters, such as the origins
of Nazi-Islamist links.
From: A. Papazian