On the Margins

On the Margins Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Muslim Minorities Editorial Board Jørgen S. Nielsen (University of Copenhagen) Aminah McCloud (DePaul University, Chicago) Jörn Thielmann (Erlangen University) volume 34 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/mumi Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access On the Margins Jews and Muslims in Interwar Berlin By Gerdien Jonker leiden | boston Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. Further information and the complete license text can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ The terms of the CC license apply only to the original material. The use of material from other sources (indicated by a reference) such as diagrams, illustrations, photos and text samples may require further permission from the respective copyright holder. Cover illustration: The hiking club in Grunewald, 1934. PA Oettinger, courtesy Suhail Ahmad. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jonker, Gerdien, author. Title: On the margins : Jews and Muslims in interwar Berlin / by Gerdien Jonker. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2020] | Series: Muslim minorities, 1570–7571 ; volume 34 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019051623 (print) | LCCN 2019051624 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004418738 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004421813 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Jews--Germany--Berlin--Social conditions--20th century. | Muslims--Germany--Berlin--Social conditions--20th century. | Muslims --Cultural assimilation--Germany--Berlin. | Jews --Cultural assimilation --Germany--Berlin. | Judaism--Relations--Islam. | Islam --Relations--Judaism. | Social integration--Germany--Berlin. | Berlin (Germany)--Ethnic relations. Classification: LCC DS134.3 .J65 2020 (print) | LCC DS134.3 (ebook) | DDC 305.892/404315509042--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051623 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051624 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1570-7571 ISBN 978-90-04-41873-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-42181-3 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Gerdien Jonker. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schoningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use and to authorize dissemination by means of offprints, legitimate photocopies, microform editions, reprints, translations, and secondary information sources, such as abstracting and indexing services including databases. Requests for commercial re-use, use of parts of the publication, and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Every advance in culture, it has been said, commences with a new period of migration and movement of populations. … One of the consequences of migration is to create a situation in which the same individual finds himself striving to live in two diverse cultural groups. The effect is to produce an unstable character – a personality type with characteristic forms of behaviour. This is the ‘marginal man’. … It is in the mind of the marginal man – where the changes and fusions of culture are going on – that we can best study the processes of civilization and of progress. ROBERT E. PARK, Human Migration and Marginal Man (1928) ∵ Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Contents Acknowledgements IX List of Illustrations XI Glossary XII Map of Muslim and Jewish Places in West Berlin Introduction 1 1 Contents of the Book 4 2 Approaches 5 3 Muslims and Jews, or Migrants and Minorities? 4 Global Imaginings 11 5 The Sources 15 XVI 6 Part 1 The Setting 1 Crossroads 23 1 Migrants and Minorities in the European Metropoles 2 German Imperial Politics 32 3 Contact Zones in Berlin 35 4 A Muslim Ecumene in the West 39 5 Echoes in Berlin Society 44 6 On Being Neighbours 47 2 The Spaces in Between 52 1 A Survey of Indian Missions in Weimar Berlin 2 Experimenting with Indian Secularism 57 3 Glimpses from Private Archives 60 4 The Visual Archive 62 5 Lucie Hecht’s Memories of the Indian Bureau 6 Shared Goals 75 27 53 71 Part 2 Case Studies 3 The Hiking Club: S.M. Abdullah and the Oettinger Women 1 Islam in Berlin during the Weimar Republic 84 2 The Founding of the German–Muslim Society 89 81 Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access viii Contents 3 New Men and New Women 95 4 After Hitler’s Seizure of Power 102 4 An Artist’s View: Lisa Oettinger between ‘Civilizations’ 108 1 1937: Establishing a Muslim Household with Jewish Heirlooms 2 1957: Looking Back 116 3 Links with the Jewish Past 119 4 Links with the Mughal Past 122 5 How Memory Creates a Family 126 5 The Sting of Desire: Hugo Marcus’s Theology of Male Friendship 1 Coming of Age around 1900 132 2 The Novelist 139 3 The Muslim Theorist 144 4 Looking for a Friend 149 129 152 6 The Rebels: Luba Derczanska and Her Friends 1 A Jewish Girl from Vilna 153 2 Russian Berlin 156 3 The Jewish Network 160 4 Micro Strategies of Globalization 169 5 The Journey Home 174 7 An Indian Muslim in Jewish Berlin: Khwaja Abdul Hamied 1 In the Footsteps of Muslim Modernists 182 2 Among Indian Revolutionaries in Berlin 187 3 Gateways to German Society 193 4 The Journey Home 196 5 Forging the Connection 200 6 Solidarity on the Margins 202 Summary and Conclusion 111 180 207 Archival Materials, Websites, Copyrights of Images References 220 Index of Names 239 General Index 244 217 Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Acknowledgements This book took seven years to record and without the people I met underway it would never have surfaced. My heartfelt thanks go to Christina Anisah Rani and Suhail Ahmad in England, Yusuf K. Hamied in Mumbai, Harald Hecht in Sweden, Myriam Mahdi in Berlin, and Azeez Amir in Berlin who supported me in every possible way, entrusting me with the papers and photographs in their possession, and sharing their memories with me. Marat Gibatdinov looked for traces of the Derczanski family in Russian archives. Noah Benninga tried to find out what happened to Esther Tenenbaum after she left Berlin in the direction of Jerusalem. Judith Berlowitz helped establish missing parts in the different genealogies, of which there were many. Maria-Magdalena Fuchs enlightened me on the topic of Muslim modernism in Lahore around 1900. Razak Khan helped me understand the different place of male homosexuality in European and Indian society. Botakoz Kassymbekova translated the Russian letters, explaining to me the finer points of Russian endearments. Sophie Lichtenstein beautifully rendered the Yiddish texts into German. Martina Voigt traced the Jewish families who survived with the help of the Soliman sisters. Margaret Green and Connie Valkin, themselves descendants of the Manelowicz family in Vilna, read the Hamied chapters and offered invaluable advice. At various stages of the manuscript, audiences inside and outside Germany listened to me struggling with individual chapters. Two anonymous reviewers took upon themselves the hardships of reading through a manuscript that merges disciplines usually at odds with one another. Jason and Selina Cohen of Oxford Publishing Services edited the manuscript and made it ready for printing. Brill editor Nienke Brienen-Molenaar accompanied the process with cheerful confidence. The German Research Council gave me generous support. Theresa Wobbe read all the chapters. Her never faltering curiosity has been of the essence. This is the place to thank every single one of you. Berlin, June 2019 Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Illustrations 1 Map of Muslim and Jewish places in West Berlin XVI–XVII 2.1 The Indian Bureau, c.1925 64 2.2 Ahmadiyya missionary Sadruddin at a meeting with the Indian Bureau, c.1926 67 2.3 Indian–German couples in the mosque garden, c.1929 69 2.4 Eid al-Fitr at the mosque, 1929 70 2.5 Zakir Husain behind the spinning wheel in Berlin-Halensee, c.1925 74 3.1 (3 photographs). S.M. Abdullah’s first visit to the Oettinger home, 1928 85 3.2 The founding board of the German–Muslim Society, 1930 90 3.3 The Ahmadiyya community, c.1935 94 3.4 Young men in the mosque kitchen, Eid al-Fitr 1933 99 4.1 Lisa’s trunks in Woking 117 5.1 Marcus and his students, c.1924 147 6.1 Luba Derczanska at the age of 21 157 6.2 The Red Club, 1926 172 6.3 Luba with Bulganin and Khruhchev in Bombay, 1953 179 7.1 Hamied’s hand-drawn map of ‘Hindustan’ 181 7.2 Hamied, student leader and rebel, 1921 187 Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Glossary abajee adab Ahmadiyya Al mu’tamar al islamiya al ‘amn amajee Anjuman Ishaat we Islam Lahore Aryan Begum Berliner chali Cheder Chinchpokli Chinesien civilization paradigm Comintern Di Yidishe Stime Deutsch-Moslemische Gesellschaft Earlkönig Ehefähigkeitszeugnis Eid-al-Adha father (Urdu) behaviour (Arab) Islamic etiquette followers of Ahmad (Urdu), Indian Muslim reform movement General Islamic Congress mother (Urdu) Ahmadiyya Movement for the Propagation of Islam noble; the supposed speakers of an archaic IndoEuropean language; identifier of a racist ideology honorific title for Muslim women in Northern India a person who identifies with Berlin (German); Berliniy-ha (Persian); Berlini (Urdu); Berlintschik (Yiddish) empty (Urdu) Hebrew primary school Jewish cemetery in Mumbai for survivors of the holocaust exotic China (German), a fictitious place in German songs and literature a belief in equality between world civilizations, first launched as a concept by the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) Communist International or Third International, organization that advocated world communism (1919–1943) The Yiddish Voice, expressionist Yiddish journal published in Kaunas in the 1920s (German-Muslim Society), German organization for converts in the Ahmadiyya mosque King of the shadows (German), German mythological figure; famous Schubert song certificate from the authorities of one’s home country stating that there is no legal impediment to entering a marriage in Germany Muslim sacrificial festival Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Glossary xiii Eid-al-Fitr Muslim festival at the end of the fasting month of Ramadan Memorial of Silent Heroes (German), museum commemorating the Berliners who helped Jews survive the holocaust process of interaction and integration among people, companies, and governments worldwide grandmother (German) a person who knows the Qur’an by heart legislation (Hebrew), the Jewish legal tradition; Jewish law strike, the countrywide suspension of economic activity that Gandhi prop0sed enlightenment (Hebrew), the acculturation of the European Jewry as envisioned by Moses Mendelsohn (1729–1786) Indian woman (Yiddish) the essence of Hinduism Academy for Jewish Studies in Berlin in the tradition of Haskalah breaking fast (Arabic), meal after sundown during the month of Ramadan exploration (Arabic), the process of the canonization of the Islamic tradition renewal (Arabic), Muslim educational reform (National Islamic University) near Delhi the defence of Islam through an appeal to intellect and rationality; refining the inner self; legitimate war in defence of Islam Muslim non-believer forbidden (Hebrew), Jewish legal food prescriptions deriving from Halacha sermon Long Market (Urdu), a Muslim bazaar within the city walls of old Lahore life reform (German), various protests against the Prussian military spirit, a romantic yearning for nature and a natural way of living, and the wish to shape one’s life towards individual fulfilment people living from air (Yiddish), self-description of Jewish refugees in Berlin Gedenkstätte Stille Helden globalization Grossmuttchen Hafiz Halacha hartal Haskalah Hinde Hindutva Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums iftar ijtihad jadid Jamia Millia Islamia jihad kafir kashrut Khutbah Lange Mandi Lebensreform Luftmenschen Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access xiv Luftschutz tut not Mahlzeit Kollege! Mazdaznan Mischling Mirza Modernism Mughal mujaddid mu’tazilites Nachrichtendienst für den Orient Naqib-ul Wali nu! Ordensburg Ostjuden pogrom purdah Raja Reichsmark restitution Rosh Hashanah Glossary air protection is needed (German), suborganization of voluntary Nazi firemen may it go down well, comrade! Popular expression among German communists religious movement founded by Otto Hanisch in 1890, merging Zoroastrism, Christianity and tantric Hinduism. The prescription of a vegetarian diet, bowel cleansing, yoga and meditation gained popularity among life reformers in search of alternative healing methods of mixed race (German), legal term for a child with one Jewish parent nobleman (Persian), member of the Muslim elite in Northern India rationalist movement in Muslim British India that identified with the mu’tazilites Muslim ruling class in the sub-continent (1586–1858) reformer of the age (Arabic), Islamic term for a person who brings renewal to the religion Muslims who adhere to the Islamic rational tradition that places man at the centre of history News Service for the Orient, German government body that collected information about the enemy during the First World War one who studies the ways of those near to God (Arabic), honorific title well! Popular Yiddish turn of phrase Nazi elite school Jews from the East (German), refugees from the 1920 pogroms in Eastern Europe demolition (Russian), violent attack on Jewish minority populations in Russia and Poland, sometimes bordering on genocide the practice of screening women from men or strangers, especially by means of a curtain. king, ruler, Hindu honorific title currency used in Germany between 1924 and 1948 payments for damage or loss of property during the Second World War head of the year (Hebrew), Jewish New Year Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Glossary Scheunenviertel sharia Sheikh shura Sufism Tagdid Theravada Theosophy typus inversus ulema Uranian Verein der Inder in Zentraleuropa Vilnerkes Volk Volksgenossen Wandervögel Yiddishkeit zamindar xv Barn Quarter (German), an extremely poor part of Berlin in which Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe settled law practice (Arabic), the Islamic legal tradition, Islamic law head of a Sufi lodge, honorific title consultation, Muslim council Islamic mysticism renewal (Arabic), the merging of traditional with Western knowledge School of the Oldest (Pali), southern tradition of Buddhism wisdom of the divine (Latin), a mix of religious studies and magic, also called modern spirituality, of which Elena Blavatski (1831–1889) was the leader. With Henry Olcott she founded the Theosophical Movement in 1875. In India, the movement inspired the reform of both Buddhism and Hinduism, and in the West, it encouraged experimenting with ‘eastern’ religions man who turns to his own type (Latin), a term introduced by Hans Blüher (1888–1955) to stress that men who engage in male sexual relations are more masculine than other men Muslim scholarly elite term borrowed from Greek philosophy to indicate the ancient roots of sexual relations between men (Association of Indians in Central Europe), organization of Indian students in Berlin the inhabitants of Vilna (Yiddish) the racial community (German), part of Nazi ideology members of the Volk (German), those who belong as opposed to those who are excluded wandering birds (German), hiking movement in the romantic tradition associated with the concept of Lebensreform the essence of being Yiddish (Yiddish) the landed gentry of Northern India (Urdu) Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Map of Muslim and Jewish places in West Berlin Figure 1 Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Key to Map of Muslim and Jewish places in West Berlin Muslim Public Places Restaurants, jazz bars and entertainment 1 Hotel Tempo, Kurfürstendamm 59 2 Alhambra Cinema, Kurfürstendamm 68 3 Soliman’s Circus School, Kurfürstendamm 169 4 Café Cosmopolitan, Grolmanstraße 35 5 Restaurant Orient, Grolmanstraße 47 6 Ciro Bar, Rankestraße 31 7 Restaurants Azarbaidzan and Shark, Uhlandstraße 20/21 8 Carlton-Bar, Uhlandstraße 171 9 Sherbini Bar, Uhlandstraße 173 10 Hindustan House, Uhlandstraße 179 11 Restaurant Humboldt, Fasanenstraße 23 12 Restaurant Orient, Fasanenstraße 74 13 Djamil-Bar, Fasanenstraße 74 14 Restaurant am Hohenzollernplatz, Fasanenstraße 55 15 Soliman’s Orientalisches Café am Halensee, Am Halensee Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Mosques and missions 16 Lahore-Ahmadiyya Mosque, Brienner Straße 7/8 17 Deutsch-Moslemische Gesellschaft, Brienner Straße 7/8 18 Sufi Lodge Hazrat Pir Inayat Khan, Sächsische Straße 10 19 The India News Service and Information Bureau Ltd., Am Halensee 20 Ahmadiyya-Qadiani Mosque, Witzlebenstraße Organizations 21 Mai’at Sha’a’iv Islamiyya (MSI), Brienner Straße 7/8 22 Berlin Branch of The Islamic World Conference, Brienner Straße 7/8 23 24 25 26 Islam Institute, Fasanenstraße 23 Ma’ahad-ul-Islam zu Berlin, Paulsborner Straße 20 Zentrales Islam-Institut Deutschland, Joachim-Friedrich-Straße 17 Association of Urdu Students, Am Halensee Jewish Public Places Synagogues, baths and schools 1 Franzensbader Straße 7/8 2 Markgraf-Albrecht-Straße 11/12 3 Prinzregentenstraße 69/70 4 Fasanenstraße 79/80 5 Pestalozzistraße 14/15 6 Behaimstraße 11 7 Kantstraße 125 8 Bleibtreustraße 2 9 Bleibtreustraße 50 Organizations 10 Verein jüdischer Frontsoldaten, Kurfürstendamm 200 11 Sitz der zentralen jüdischen Organisationen, Kantstraße 158 12 Haus der zionistischen Organisationen, Meinekestraße 14 13 Gesellschaft deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, Ludwigkirchstraße 44 Café Houses 14 Romanisches Café, Am Breitscheidplatz 15 Café des Westens, Kurfürstendamm 225 Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Introduction This book is a spinoff from my previous one, The Ahmadiyya Quest for Religious Progress. While conducting research on the Lahore-Ahmadiyya Muslim reform movement, which was operating in Berlin during the interwar years, I came across a curious photograph. Taken in Berlin in 1935, it depicts a group of boys and girls standing and kneeling on a Persian carpet, which, judging from its size, was a prayer mat. The children are frozen, as if in a still-life, in a garden with a meadow and some shrubbery. Their ages range from about six to sixteen and they look exactly like children did at that time and in that place. The boys are wearing short trousers and wide collars and the girls have ribbons in their bobbed hair. They tilt their smiling faces to the camera. A vaguely proprietorial looking man in a three-piece suit is posing next to the carpet with his hands casually shoved into his back pockets. The caption reads, ‘Muslim children receive religious instruction from the Imam of the Berlin Mosque, Dr S.M. Abdullah’.1 Through my research I already knew Dr Abdullah.2 I had learned that his predecessor had built a mosque in Berlin in 1924, that he had invited the Berlin population to join hands between ‘East and West’, and that, when taking his place in 1928, Abdullah had encouraged intellectual exchange and intercultural marriage. In the photographs featuring the mosque community, I had noted an increase in mixed couples with babies in their arms.3 Now, for the first time, I wondered whether those children were still alive. Although unable to trace any of the children in the actual photograph, during my research I was able to establish contact with some of their descendants in a wide range of geographical places, including Warsaw, Stockholm, Woking, Jerusalem, Mumbai and Cape Town. With some, I conducted lengthy email exchanges in which they shared their memories and sent me letters and photographs. Others I was able to meet. During those visits I was shown the various heirlooms they kept in their homes and listened to their stories. Four times I faced the towering task of making an in-depth analysis of a collection of papers and documents. 1 Moslemische Revue, (3) 2, 1935. The picture was reproduced in Gerdien Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest for Religious Progress: Missionizing Europe 1900–1965 (Leiden – Boston: Brill, 2016) 180. 2 Biographical note in Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest, 57–60. For a summary of the LahoreAhmadiyya Movement, see Chapter 3. 3 Moslemische Revue, (2), 1929, p. 3; 1930 (1) 2. © GERDIEN JONKER, ���� | doi:10.1163/97890044�1813_00� Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 2 Introduction There is a growing literature on the shared interests of Jews and Muslims in the twentieth century, in places ranging from the Russian Empire and Baltic Sea countries to Morocco and Palestine.4 In such different regions, under particular historical circumstances, Jews and Muslims saw themselves ‘as groups with intertwined histories, cultures, beliefs, even blood’.5 Nonetheless, finding references to Muslims in Jewish family archives and vice versa in Berlin in the interwar years, came to me as a surprise and, after my first such discovery, I deliberately started to look for more. The search brought to light a small network that covered a series of overlapping circles. Although Jews and Muslims in interwar Europe have been studied independently, with each new find it became increasingly evident that the relationships between them had been overlooked. In this study, I propose to describe the micro and macro religious histories that their meetings implied. I apply the term network in a pragmatic sense here.6 It is crucial that the communication happened in a defined space and time, occurred at different levels and included several friendship circles and personal networks. I found photographs of mixed (Jewish and Muslim) couples at iftar meals, New Year dances, and marriage parties. I read letters that described their friendship and student circles, and in the course of my research I learned about personal networks, work contexts and regular places of meeting. The exploration of shared interests showed in every document. Assumptions presented themselves. With each meeting and each private archive, it became increasingly obvious that the encounters between Jews and Muslims in the interwar years had encompassed visions of the world at large and had been given shape in the participants’ private lives. In its different activities, the group seemed to encircle the same amalgam of topics, in which religious renewal, reform of the self, political independence, and equality 4 Michael Brenner, Jews and Muslims in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015); Jonathan Marc Gribetz, Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist–Arab Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Vincent Lemire, Jerusalem 1900: la ville sainte à l’age des possibles (Paris: Colin, 2013); Jessica Marglin, Across the Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); and Ivan Svanberg and David Westerlund (eds) Muslim Tatar Minorities in the Baltic Sea Regions (Leiden: Brill, 2016) explore a number of intersections between Tatars and their Jewish neighbours, including help given to Jews during the Holocaust. See Gerdien Jonker’s (2018) book review of Svanberg and Westerlund in Journal of Muslims in Europe, 7 1–4. 5 Gribetz, Defining Neighbors, 235. 6 Manuel Castells, ‘Toward a sociology of the network society’, Contemporary Sociology, 29 (2000), 693–9; Camille Roth and Jean-Philippe Cointret, ‘Social and semantic coevolution in knowledge networks’, Social Networks, 32 (2010), 16–29. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Introduction 3 between civilizations were central. While trying to realize those aims in their personal lives, the protagonists embarked on an adventure to transcend borders, geographies, religious traditions and conventional expectations to achieve cross-border cooperation. Focusing on a future in which injustice, discrimination and unequal treatment (of people and of civilizations) would have disappeared, they not only discussed and developed all kinds of projects, but also took part in sporting events, arranged dances and had love affairs. In other words, they behaved like any international student group would behave today, except that at that time there were no precedents to follow. By including their landladies, neighbours, doctors and dentists in their circle – in Lucie Hecht’s case even her parents and their friends – over a period of approximately sixteen years, from 1923 to 1939, Muslim émigrés in Berlin and some of their Jewish neighbours formed a network, albeit a somewhat fragile one. Although the world outside this network seldom appears in the documents, in 1933 it was clear to all involved that their meetings had been taking place in the shadow of other, larger happenings in Berlin. As Jews became threatened, their friendships with Muslims gradually moved underground. The catastrophe took its course. After the war, the network existed only in the memories of those who had survived it; the magnanimous dream of a cosmopolitan group of avant-garde people ready to change the world had evaporated. Afterwards, they even found it difficult to explain what it had all been about to their children. From the start, it was my intention to gain an overview of the width and diversity of this encounter. The endeavour stood in sharp contrast to the historical depth that some of the archives disclosed. The narrative tension it caused became particularly painful in the case of the Oettinger family. Their history has been laid down in my book, which translates as The Heart must have Something to Hope for: A Family History of Jews, Christians, and Muslims.7 Because the experiences of the Oettinger family throw such a sharp light on the encounter between Muslims and Jews in Berlin, it is summarized below. The documents and papers that the Oettingers had kept since the midnineteenth century show four generations of Prussian Jews trying to flee discrimination and find emancipation. Each generation of the Oettinger family seems to have taken decisions that threw the next onto an ever more daring 7 Gerdien Jonker, ‘Etwas Hoffen muß das Herz’: Eine Familiengeschichte von Juden, Christen, und Muslime (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2018). The story of Lisa Oettinger’s heirlooms was originally published in Gerdien Jonker, ‘Lisa’s things: matching Jewish–German and Indian– Muslim traditions’, in Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra (eds) Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement (Ithaca: Cornell, 2017), 279–310. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 4 Introduction course. Great-grandmother Bertha designed imaginative lace patterns from which her husband made his fortune. Grandmother Johanna experimented with international cuisine and designed her home with Oriental flair. Mother Emilia embraced the ‘life reform’ movement (Lebensreform) and explored a range of different religions. Lisa and Susanna Oettinger, born in Berlin in 1908 and 1910 respectively, found their way into the Ahmadiyya mosque and joined its vibrant community. The two converted to Islam, found (and lost) Indian lovers and husbands, and planned their futures as emancipated women in Muslim India. In 1933, Susanna had a daughter out of wedlock whom she called Anisah Oettinger and whom she brought into the mosque community. Very soon, however, she became the victim of Nazi legislation against the Jews and was, along with the rest of the Jewish population, excluded from German society and, consequently, Anisah spent most of her childhood in hiding. Miraculously, with support and Red Cross packages from Abdullah, she, her mother and grandmother all survived the war. Eighty years after those dramatic events, by which time I had seen the documents and heard Anisah tell her story, I decided to put my original focus aside for a moment to make way for the voices of the Oettinger family over the course four generations: their experiences encompassed their attempts as Jews to assimilate into mainstream German society in the age of the German colonial empire, experiments with the life reform movement and its association with a reformed, cosmopolitan form of Islam at the time of the Weimar Republic, survival strategies during the Nazi terror and, finally, a new beginning in barren postwar England.8 Understanding that story has been at the heart of my attempt to find an inroad into the wide range of intersections between Jews and Muslims in Berlin. 1 Contents of the Book In this study, I look at the Jews and Muslims in interwar Berlin who sought opportunities to interact with one another. Over a period of almost twenty years, they developed a web of contacts that allowed them to explore a network of friends, neighbours, business partners and lovers. German politics set the switches for their encounters, while the urban setting of West Berlin provided the contact zone. During my research a number of stories surfaced of Egyptians, 8 Jonker, Etwas Hoffen, 94–122 is published here as Chapter 3. Chapter 4 is a reprint of Jonker, ‘Lisa’s things’. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Introduction 5 Persians and Indians helping Jews during the Nazi persecution and it becomes clear that their connections were based on solidarity and a firm wish to continue and deepen their friendships. Although their initial meetings often occurred in fleeting contexts, the Indian missions in Berlin were what served to crystallize them, not least because their message spoke to the Jewish minority from the heart. The European Jews and Indian Muslims, around whom this study revolves, had some important characteristics in common. Treated as minorities in their home countries, and living on the margins of society in Berlin, both groups inhabited the outer fringes of their respective traditions. In Chapter 1, I describe the political framework and urban context in which it became possible for Muslims and Jews to interconnect. In Chapter 2, I look at the Muslim Indian missions in Berlin and ask why it was that Indians set up missions to cater to Germans, whereas Tatars, Persians and Arabs did not. I then go on, by looking at five case studies, to examine these encounters from the viewpoints of the actors involved, juxtaposing male and female views, and visions of global equality with more down-to-earth personal relationships. The latter reveal the in between spaces in which the protagonists interacted and recreated their lives together. In the Summary and Conclusion, I once again revisit the narrow interlude of time wedged between the great catastrophes of the twentieth century in which these people were able to discover their shared interests. 2 Approaches Before launching into this history, it is necessary to say something about the questions that governed the research and the methods applied to it. The questions covered three general areas – intergenerational transmission (the protagonists’ origins and what they brought with them); crossroads of encounter (the topography and choices of professions, partners and religious or political engagements); and the perspectives of the descendants. The research that unfolded uncovered an extraordinary wealth of material, which at times bordered on the overwhelming. To keep abreast of such abundance, I applied a mix of methods. First, unifying time and place helped keep in check the narrative strands that went in every possible geographical and historical direction. Second, depending on the source materials, I gave as much attention to matters of transmission between generations as to the crossroads of the encounters. Sometimes the descendants’ retroactive understandings helped to put the two into perspective. Third, I treated memory on a par with historical reconstruction. In fact, using history and memory as two distinct entries into the same Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 6 Introduction past helped bring the stories to life. Fourth, wherever possible, I visited the places where ‘things happened’ to stimulate my historical imagination. Fifth, a systematic comparison of group photographs helped disclose the scope and width of the network more than any description in the written materials could possibly have done. On the following pages, I examine two canvasses in some detail. Because they serve to balance assumptions and field observations in the later chapters, the topics involved have a bearing on the overall framework of the book. The first addresses the question of with whom are we dealing, Muslims and Jews, or migrants and minorities? The second discusses their global imaginings on questions of equality, of which the protagonists’ personal situation was one cornerstone, and equality among civilizations the other. 3 Muslims and Jews, or Migrants and Minorities? The first canvas depicts the combination of religious advancement and geographical change that the protagonists embraced. It shows Muslim and Jewish religious reform in the nineteenth century when people were distancing themselves from their traditions and places of origin, were crossing religious and physical borders, were becoming foreigners on the margins of another society, and fusing with a different culture. For the men and women in this study, these were the moments that governed their decision making. What they had in common was a hunger for change. Nevertheless, when bearers of different traditions mix, questions of origin, loyalty and intergenerational transmittance inevitably surface. The canvas touches on the opposing loyalties that necessarily arise whenever one explores the margins. How did the actors deal with their respective traditions when engaging, or even fusing, with one another? As the case studies reveal, in one way or another, they all addressed this dilemma. The sociologist Robert E. Park saw the ideal prototype for the advance of culture in the concept of ‘marginal man’. Migrants create situations in which they face the task of keeping loyal to the way things were done at home, yet they adapt to the otherness of their new surroundings. What may happen in such situations is what Park called ‘the fusion of civilizations’: newcomers and the natives who are willing to receive them may create something new together. The people whom Park observed in Chicago in the interwar period arrived from five different continents.9 The central characters in this study met in 9 Robert E. Park, ‘Human migration and the marginal man’, American Journal of Sociology, 33 (6) 1928, 881–93. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 7 Introduction Berlin in the same period. Unlike the former, their mix included Muslim émigrés from the colonized world, Jewish refugees from the Russian borderlands, and German Jews. Although the latter were the hosts, on their home ground so to speak, the German majority despised them and subjected them to manifold discrimination. Because there were also artists, emancipated women and homosexual men in their ranks, German Jews faced not one, but multiple exclusions. These then are the Jews and Muslims who will make their entry in this study. A range of different scholarly works pertain to them, including those on Muslim Modernism in India, the Jewish Haskalah in Germany, and communist Jews in Russia. To orient the reader, I offer a short introduction to each area. This is the place to stress that these different literatures are put into conversation for the first time here. Reading them together helps to outline the mental spaces the protagonists shared. They raise the question of whether the fusion that Park saw happening in Chicago was also happening in interwar Berlin. And, if so, where did it intersect? ... In nineteenth-century British India, the modernization of the indigenous populations began with the issue of religious reform, which for Muslims took the form of Muslim Modernism and adaptation to Western education.10 In northern India, Ahmadiyya missionaries were towering figures in that respect. Their founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad challenged the Christian missions, criticized the Christian religion, and offered himself as a ‘reformer of the century’ (mujaddid) in its stead. Moreover, in challenging the Christian theology of death and crucifixion, Ahmad claimed that the God of the Muslims was still alive, and that He was speaking to him in his dreams and visions.11 Ahmad’s followers not only read his publications but also studied at Islamia College in Lahore. In combining religious and ‘worldly’ subjects, this college encouraged its pupils to counter the notions of a rigid, inflexible tradition and, if needs be (and that need was indeed felt), to act as religious authorities 10 11 Aziz Ahmad, Islamic Modernism in India and Pakistan, 1857–1964 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967); Avril Powell, ‘Islamic Modernism and women’s status: the influence of Syed Ameer Ali’, in Avril A. Powell and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley (eds) Rhetoric and Reality: Gender and the Colonial Experience in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006); Muhammad Aslam Syed, Muslim Response to the West: Muslim Historiography in India 1857–1914 (New Delhi: Adam Publishers and Distributors, 2006). Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest, 12–35. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 8 Introduction themselves.12 Before being sent to Europe, Abdullah and the other Ahmadiyya missionaries studied and afterwards taught at Islamia College. Khwaja Sadruddin (1881–1981) immersed himself in didactics. Fazlul Karim Khan Durrani (1894–1946) became a sociologist. S.M. Abdullah (1898–1956) and his assistant Imam Azeez Ur-Rahman Mirza (1903–1937) would later enrol in Berlin University to write their dissertations in chemistry.13 These missionaries were not part of the religious ulema. They were religious reformers by choice and deliberately engaged in modernizing Islam from a platform outside the Islamic tradition. Muslim Indian students in Aligarh College near Delhi were modernists as a matter of course; their teachers were convinced that only a rational approach to Islam in combination with the creation of a secular space would allow Indian independence to happen. A deeply felt historical experience fired their conviction. These modernists ‘felt that the intellectual debasement of Muslims, largely responsible for their political decline, had started from the moment when theological speculation was put to an end and the doors of intellectual discovery (ijtihad) were closed’.14 The modernists in Lahore differed from those at Aligarh over the degree of secularism they thought that Indian society should obtain. Nonetheless, all Muslim Indians in Berlin upheld the rational tradition of the mu’tazilites who, a thousand years before, had subjected Islamic tradition to rational questioning, and they were convinced that Muslim India needed to revive that tradition to revive Islam.15 We shall see how, in his endeavour to produce a German translation of the Quran that met the requirements of a modern age, Sadruddin sat down with other mu’tazilite translators in the Berlin mosque. Zakir Husain and his friends turned to the mosque for prayer and supported him (see Chapters 1, 2 and 7). ... Religious reform in Jewish Europe began with the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, which, around 1850, held the Jewish communities in Germany in 12 13 14 15 Maria-Magdalena Fuchs, Islamic Modernism in Colonial Punjab: The Anjuman-i Himayat-i Islam Lahore 1884–1920 (Princeton: dissertation 2019). Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest, 36–63. Syed, Muslim Response, 8, 34–70. David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 204–52. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 9 Introduction its grip.16 Initially, the debate addressed the need for adaptation, which included translating the Hebrew prayer book into German, introducing organs into synagogues, recognizing the need for a secular sphere by separating the state and religion, and acculturating Jews into German society. In the 1870s, by which time the older generation had died away, many Jewish children were being baptized. All the German-Jewish protagonists of this study – Emilia, Lisa and Susanna Oettinger, Hugo Marcus, Gerda Philipsborn and Lucie Hecht – were born into Berlin families that had already distanced themselves from Jewish traditions and were living secular lives. Inspired by the wish to become accepted as Germans, many Jews nonetheless felt uncomfortable in church. Although themselves baptized Jews, Lisa and Susanna’s parents thoughtfully left the box for religion empty when registering their daughters in the family book.17 Like many other German Jews of the secularized generation, his daughters experimented with a mixture of Theosophy and the life reform movement to shape their religious individualism before embracing Islam in the Berlin mosque (Chapters 3 and 4). Likewise, Hugo Marcus joined the youth movement and embraced the back-to-nature cult. To shape his nascent individuality, he also declared his love for men. Gripped by the religious turn in the 1920s, he finally concluded that embracing Islam was the natural continuation of the form of Judaism he had experienced at home (Chapter 5).18 ... Unlike the German Jewry, Luba Derczanska and her friends were born in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, on the borderlands between imperial Russia and the Prussian and Habsburg empires. Their families still faithfully adhered to the Jewish religious rites and spoke Yiddish, the Jewish tongue, at home. During her studies in Berlin, Luba Derczanska neither experimented with religious alternatives nor converted to Islam. Like most young Jews in Russia, she supported the Bolshevik revolution. Because of her commitment to fight imperial power and the discrimination it imposed, subjects with which she was intimately familiar from being a Jew in Russia, once she settled in Berlin, Luba Derczanska joined the Indian Bureau, or more formally the India News and 16 17 18 Ismar Ellbogen and Eleanore Sterling, Die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland (Berlin: Jüdische Buchvereinigung, 1935) 203; Abraham Geiger, Nachgelassene Schriften Band 1, edited by Ludwig Geiger (Berlin: Louis Gerschel Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1875); Arno Herzig, Jüdische Geschichte in Deutschland (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2002); Christoph Schulte, Die jüdische Aufklärung (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2002). Jonker, Etwas Hoffen, 20–37, 84–86. Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest, 144, offers his conversion story. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 10 Introduction Information Bureau Ltd, the mission that organized the anti-colonial struggle on a worldwide scale. She became involved in the bureau’s activities, made friends with Indian Muslims, and found a Muslim partner for life. In Luba Derczanska we meet an agnostic who nonetheless sought to honour the tradition of her parents. Engaged to a Muslim man who took his religion seriously may have favoured that approach. It certainly accounts for the fact that the two sanctified their marriage in no less than two religious institutions, of which the mosque in Berlin was one and the reformist synagogue in Vilna the other (Chapters 6 and 7). Because the people in this study belonged to religious minorities in their respective countries and could neither determine nor influence majority opinion, they saw themselves very differently from how others viewed them. Desperately wanting to be good Europeans, Jews throughout Europe were turning away from Judaism to embrace other creeds – Christianity and high culture in Germany and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Nevertheless, as Maria Stepanova put it in Nach dem Gedächtnis (After Memory), whether assimilation or revolution, ‘the twentieth century has shown that nothing a Jew could do with himself – his offspring, his immortal soul, or his perishable body – changed anything in his contract with the outer world. … In the termination camps they were all considered to be of the same ilk, atheists and baptized Jews included’.19 On a different level, despite the huge effort to establish equality between the Muslim minority and the Hindu majority in India and to create a secular Indian society together, Hindus turned their Muslim Indian counterparts into an isolated ethnic minority, branding them as foreigners and invaders, and decrying them as undesirables. In modern India, Indian Muslims are under attack.20 Back in the interwar period, whatever words Jews and Muslims found to lift their minority status to a different level, whether they positioned themselves as Europeans, non-Jewish Jews, modernists, Hindustanis, or citizens of the world, in the face of the massive aggression that followed it seems to have been to no avail. However, the people who engaged with each other in Berlin did not yet know about that future. They acted as if they could re-create their own anew. It is that moment of creativity that this study wishes to convey. 19 20 Maria Stepanova, Pamjati, Pamjati (Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2017). German translation, Nach dem Gedächtnis. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2018). The quotation was taken from the German publication, p. 181 (author translation). Paul R. Brass, Forms of Collective Violence: Riots, Pogroms and Genocide in Modern India (Palam Vihar: Three Essays Collective, 2006); Rajmonan Gandhi, ‘Hindus and Muslims’, in Rajmonan Gandhi, Eight Lives. A Study of the Hindu–Muslim Encounter (New York: State University Press, 1986), 1–18; Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Introduction 4 11 Global Imaginings Focusing as they do on the circulation and exchange of things, people, ideas and institutions across continents, projections and imaginings of the world as one interconnected space are the bread and butter of global historians.21 Although historians have been aware of trans-connections for much of human history, in the nineteenth century large swathes of the inhabited world experienced trans-local, transnational, trans-continental, transcultural and transreligious interactions as never before.22 Whether in China, British India, North Africa or Europe, the colonization of the world saw the growth of a middle class that reached across continents to share their ideas and knowledge in a manner hitherto unknown. As Christopher Bayly noted, ‘as world events became more interconnected and interdependent, so forms of human action adjusted to one another’.23 Setting the switches for a new narrative of world history, Bayly stressed that adjustment occurred ‘not only in great institutions as churches, royal courts, and systems of justice, but also in the ways in which people dressed, spoke, ate, and managed relations within families’.24 This is what happened in Berlin in the interwar years, a European metropolis in which Jews and Muslims met on the margins of German society. Although Muslim missions from India played a key role in the encounter, Arabs and Persians were part of it as well. The way in which the local Jewish minority responded to their messages is of the essence here. To describe this peculiar range of actors, imagining themselves on the world stage while building networks on the ground, I borrow from global historians and will focus on the microcosm that sprung into existence.25 Focusing on a microcosm enables one 21 22 23 24 25 C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad and Olivier Janz, Transnationale Geschichte. Themen: Tendenzen und Theorien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010); Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Presenjit Duara, Viren Murthy and Andrew Sartori, A Companion to Global Historical Thought (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell 2014); Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: Norton, 2014); Douglas Northrop, A Companion to World History (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012); Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19 Jahrhunderts (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2009); Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt, 14–22. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1. See Tonio Andrade, ‘A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Towards a Global Microhistory’, Journal of World History, 21 (4) 2010, 573–91; Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (New York: Anchor Books, 2006); Angelika Epple, ‘Calling for a practice turn in global history: practices as drivers of globalizations’, Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 12 Introduction to trace the micro strategies that the protagonists developed to negotiate the challenges they encountered. In doing so, it is germane to follow Linda Colley’s advice, which was ‘to examine how a momentous and disruptive moment in global history was experienced’ and, for that, she singled out one woman with an extended family.26 Here, however, I propose to trace five parallel lives. The flip side of the coin, or so global historians say, was that colonial administrations, Christian missions, Western businesses and travellers all took good care to ensure that the colonized peoples adjusted to Western civilization (with British civilization as its top standard) and not the other way around; for that reason the power relationship was lopsided, one that was imposed by some and had to be endured by others.27 However, colonial rulers were not omnipotent. The peoples they ruled found crafty means to push them back. Along the axis of power stretching from West to East, interconnectedness simply had very different impacts for those involved. As we shall see in Chapter 1, this state of affairs propelled Arab, Persian, Tatar and Indian activists and students from the colonies to continental Europe, especially to Berlin, which was one metropolis outside the British Empire in which they were welcomed and treated as equals. In Chapter 2, I go on to explain that the Indians also set up missions in Berlin with purposes ranging from introducing religious reform, overthrowing political regimes and supporting anti-Western pan movements. They had good reasons to do so. At the top of the axis, on the European side, the desire for world rule rubbed shoulders with a craving for self-enrichment. As the rulers of the biggest empire, the British, claiming to be the heirs to the highest civilization ever, legitimized their grip on world power. At the bottom of the axis, in the places where they governed their colonies and emptied them of their riches, Muslim Indians fought for an equal place beside the Hindu majority population, for they feared 26 27 History and Theory, 57 (3) 2018, 390–407; Anne Gerritsen, ‘Scales of a local: the place of locality in a globalizing world’, in Douglas Northrop (ed.) A Companion to World History (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 213–26; Baz Lecocq, ‘Awad El Djouh: a story of slave trade in the mid twentieth century’, in Iva Peša and Jan-Bart Gewald (eds) Magnifying Perspectives: Contributions to History, A Festschrift for Robert Ross. Leiden: African Studies Centre, 149–65; Hans Medick, ‘Turning global? Microhistory in extension’, Historische Anthropologie, 24 (2) 2016, 241–51; Matti Peltonen, ‘Clues, margins, and monads: the micromacro link in historical research’, History and Theory, 40 (2001) 347–59; Lara Putnam, ‘To study fragments/whole: microhistory and the Atlantic world’, Journal of Social History, 39 (3) 2006, 615–30; Marcia Schenk and Jiyoon Kim, ‘A conversation about global lives in global history’, L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques, 18, 2018. Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, 300. Hunt, Writing History, 44–78. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Introduction 13 that the British system of divide and rule would not leave enough place for them. Arriving in Germany with a message of civilizational equality, the Muslim Indian missions sent a powerful signal to the badly treated Jewish minority, a signal that Muslim émigrés from the Arabic and Persian speaking world failed to send. Some of the missions pressed for religious reform, others preached world revolution, but they all addressed the pressing question of civilizational equality. For their Jewish neighbours, the missions worked like magnets, drawing communists, members of the life reform (Lebensreform) movement and emancipated women in their wake. Although the wider setting of the Indian–German encounter has been the subject of several studies, none of these has addressed its religious dimension, yet Muslim Indians set up more religious than political initiatives. Moreover, the religious reformers and the communists did not shy away from joining hands. In fact, it was their politics of open borders that set the switches for the encounter that forms the subject of this book. What the protagonists in the case studies had in common, their entry pass into the network so to say, was their conviction that ‘equal coexistence’ was possible. The term harks back to a philosophical concept addressing the equal coexistence of world civilizations.28 In the age of empire, when colonizers claimed that theirs was the highest civilization, colonized peoples fought to have their own traditions and histories acknowledged, claiming that all civilizations, wherever they happened to have matured, were on a par. In the encounter between Jews and Muslims in Berlin in the 1920s, this was the message that the protagonists adopted and the message that gave shape to the details of their lives. Ever since the ‘civilization paradigm’ gained currency in the 1880s, and irrespective of whether the protagonists were born in Berlin, Vilna, Aligarh, or Lahore, it became part of their mental horizon and reassured them that, although they belonged to religious groups that were treated as minorities in their own countries, and although they were threatened with violence and discrimination, all people were equal and each of their ‘civilizations’ could hold up to the test when compared with another. Global historians have coined this work in progress ‘the civilization paradigm’, and they have noted that it was held in high esteem in India. Building on German philosophical thought, the philosopher and poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) developed a form of writing history in which he juxtaposed ‘the 28 This concept was first launched by Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–1791). For a short overview of its genesis, see Conrad, What is Global History?, 37–47. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 14 Introduction material West’ against ‘the spiritual Orient’.29 Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) based his concepts of civil disobedience and non-cooperation on it. On arriving in Berlin, the first booklet that the Muslim Indian student leader and follower of Gandhi, Zakir Husain (1897–1969), published was a collection of Gandhi’s latest speeches in German.30 Forty years on, in a letter he wrote to President Nasser during the Arab–Israeli conflict, Khwaja Abdul Hamied (1898–1972), Husain’s friend from the days of the Non-Cooperation Movement, defended the equal coexistence of Jews and Muslims, which formed the basis of this conviction and was his own lived experience.31 An acknowledgement of fundamental equality compels one to keep one’s borders open. The realization that the network surrounded itself with fuzzy borders fitted in with my other findings.32 Whoever participated in it was ready to loosen the ropes and launch into the border crossings that would surely not only change the world but also secure their future. Wherever world regions and world religions were at stake, or whenever differences in upbringing, expectations and habitus presented themselves, the protagonists’ belief in fundamental equality helped to soften the line between ‘us’ and ‘them’. For marginalized peoples trying to move onto the global stage, this was the bottom line. It made the meeting of Jews and Muslims stand out from all other transcultural encounters in interwar Germany. Some of those others embraced the great ‘pan’ ideas of their time – pan-Arabism, pan-Islam, pan-Indian – and developed ideas that were decisively anti-Western.33 Others still, in search of stable political models, embraced totalitarian visions. Indians, Persians and 29 30 31 32 33 Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Zakir Husain and Alfred Ehrentreich (eds) Die Botschaft des Mahatma Gandhi (BerlinSchlachtensee: Volkserzieher-Verlag, 1924). Reproduced in Khwaja Abdul Hamied, A Life to Remember: An Autobiography (Bombay: Lalvani Press, 1972), 331–8. The literature on fuzzy and solid borders is immense. I notably benefited from Jörg Baberowski, ‘Selbstbilder und Fremdbilder: Repräsentationen sozialer Ordnungen im Wandel’, in Jörg Baberowski, Hartmut Kaelble and Jürgen Schriewer (eds) Selbstbilder und Fremdbilder: Repräsentationen sozialer Ordnungen im Wandel (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2008), 9–17; Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Anchor Books, 1967); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Knopf, 1978); Rudolph Stichweh, ‘Selbstbeschreibung der Weltgesellschaft’, in Jörg Baberowski et al. (eds) Selbstbilder und Fremdbilder: Repräsentationen sozialer Ordnungen im Wandel (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2008), 21–53; Tzvetan Todorov, Die Eroberung Amerikas: Das Problem des Anderen (Frankfurt am Main, 2002); Andreas Wimmer, ‘The making and unmaking of ethnic boundaries: a multilevel process theory’, American Journal of Sociology, 113 (4) 2008, 970–1022. Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 15 Introduction Arabs studying in Berlin in the 1930s befriended the Nazis, joined their organizations and, in the war, collaborated with them.34 The encounter that is lent visibility here existed in the shadow of the large ideologies of the day, but it certainly failed to win the contest. Fusing cultures and traditions was not on the agenda of the powers to be. However, rather than considering themselves the victims, the Jews and Muslims in Berlin recognized one another as minorities. In Europe, Jewish minorities were facing mounting discrimination. In British India, the former Muslim ruling class had been reduced to a minority among many and, despite the huge effort of peaceful resistance against the British, the Hindu and Muslim populations were drifting apart. Learning about each other in Berlin seemed to produce a creative intersection, or so this study suggests. However short-lived their activities, the traces they left behind offer a helpful example of actors who are unafraid to envision a common future against the reigning ideologies of their time, who manage to keep their borders open, and to join forces against all the odds. 5 The Sources Working with private archives raises questions of a systematic nature. Of such archives, it is impossible to separate description from the manner in which they were discovered and how the sites were accessed. Tracing them depends on many factors, of which luck may be paramount for a good portion of them. Also, once discovered, private archives are not automatically accessible to the researcher. Because they came into existence as a result of emotional bonds and often include a mixture of wanted and unwanted memories, why would their owners allow a stranger to pry into them? Likewise, if descendants decided to protect their collections, they did so for a reason, usually to honour their parents. Although the supplicant at the kitchen table was encouraged to share that reason, it made mining private archives a fragile enterprise from the start. A brief summary to each in turn concludes this Introduction. ... Hugo Marcus’s involvement in the mosque and its networks lasted longest of all, namely from 1923 to 1939, and even continued from a distance after he had fled from Berlin. When he died in 1966, he left behind in orderly stacks against the walls of his room the writings of a lifetime – notebooks, handwritten letters 34 Motadel, Islam and Nazi Germany’s War. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 16 Introduction and corrected prints.35 W.R. Corti, a Swiss activist with plans to set up an archive on German philosophers, collected the papers. Since the archive never materialized, after his death Corti’s wife donated the papers to the Swiss National Library in Zurich, which stored them in 40 containers in the order that Marcus had intended and only summarily listed their contents. Because Marcus divided the papers into very broad categories, such as ‘private’, ‘manuscripts’, ‘typescripts’, ‘lectures’, ‘translations’, anybody wanting to discover the details of his involvement in the mosque inevitably has to read them all. They include letters and articles pertaining to his work as mosque manager; short stories describing his relationships with men inside and outside the mosque; different versions of his conversion narrative; restitution claims detailing his persecution by the Nazis; and letters received. Marcus envisaged the merging of two equal civilizations, which from his perspective found their apotheosis in European philosophy on the one hand and Islamic theology on the other. Notes on his personal network retreat behind that aim. Photograph albums one searches for in vain (Chapter 5). Lucie Hecht worked as a translator for the Indian Bureau and related communist organizations in Berlin between 1923 and 1933. For the rest of her life she kept the papers that she had been able to rescue from that period. In a telephone call, her nephew Harald Hecht told me how, when she died in 1981, he flew to Germany to take care of her apartment. Alas, unaware of his aunt’s history, he disposed of the contents of her flat as quickly as possible. Lucie Hecht’s archive would have been irreparably lost, but for Horst Krüger, a scholar at the East Berlin Academy of Sciences. In the 1960s, Krüger, in search of information on the Indian Bureau, wrote to Lucie Hecht and she responded with a long description on the inner workings of the bureau, to which she added newspaper clippings, articles she had translated, photographs and short descriptions of people she once befriended, and copies of her Indian letters. Lucie Hecht’s focus had been on group building. A group photograph with names on the back discloses her personal network, connecting the Indians of the bureau with her parents and their friends in Potsdam, including scientists from the nearby Einstein research centre. Although the correspondence survived in the Krüger papers, it was insufficient for an individual case study. However, whenever the Indian Bureau is discussed, Lucie’s views are given ample coverage (Chapters 2 and 6).36 35 36 Private archive of Hugo Marcus (c.1890–1966) in the W.R. Corti Papers, Zentralbibiothek, Zurich, Switzerland. Lucie Hecht’s private collection in the Horst Krüger Papers, Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin, box 33, 240–1, box 60, 433. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Introduction 17 The Hamied family’s private papers are kept in the archive of the family firm in Mumbai.37 Its main source materials, which focus on the period between 1925 and 1929, disclose the views of Khwaja Abdul Hamied and Luba Derczanska respectively, revealing information about their personal and overlapping networks. The archive consists of a trove of 650 letters in six different languages. Luba and Hamied conducted a private correspondence in German and English with one another. Letters in Yiddish, Polish and Russian that Luba Derczanska received from family and friends in Vilna and Moscow before the war throw light on her Jewish communist past, as do the photographs and letters from her best friend in Berlin, the experimental biologist Esther Tenenbaum. A handful of letters in Urdu help to open up a view on the couple’s relationship with the Hamied family in Aligarh. The archive also contains Hamied’s memoir which he left behind unfinished when he died in 1972, depicting amongst others his Jewish teachers and friends. A private photograph album with names written underneath each picture shows the faces of the people mentioned in the letters and reveals at least two personal networks – Luba’s Jewish circle and Hamied’s revolutionary Indian one. It is here that the faces of the Ahmadiyya missionaries also make their entry – on outings together and receptions in the Ahmadiyya mosque (Chapters 6 and 7). The next find occurred within the precincts of the Lahore Ahmadiyya mosque in Berlin.38 During the course of renovation work in 2017, some inbuilt cupboards were found that housed parts of the prewar mosque archive (1928– 39). These files, which contain correspondence, invitations, records of marriages and conversions, information about lectures, and the mission journal, offer a view from the perspective of Abdullah as the main mosque administrator. Since it was his job to network, the researcher comes across communications that veer in several religious directions. For example, there are records of contacts with the Inayath Khan Sufi Lodge, the Theosophical Society of Germany, the Buddhist House in Berlin, as well as with the Jewish Reform community, also in Berlin. Unfortunately, Abdullah’s private correspondence was destroyed when the Ahmadiyya mosque in Woking, where he lived after the war, changed hands in the 1960s. A small consolation is that the six private photograph albums he left behind in Berlin fully disclose what the files do not, namely the scope and width of his personal network. Abdullah was a methodical man. One of the albums is dedicated to the Oettingers, another to Rolf Baron von Ehrenfels with whom he undertook a tour through India in the 37 38 Private Hamied family archive (c.1900–89), Cipla Archive, Mumbai. The Ahmadiyya mosque archive (1928–2004) is presently being processed to become part of the National Archive of Berlin. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 18 Introduction 1930s, and yet another to the community members with whom he and his wife used to play tennis or went on outings together. The fourth album is of photographs of receptions with famous personalities; and the fifth records a visit to Berlin by his brothers and cousins. Across the albums, there are also several photographs of members of the Indian Bureau, most notably V. Chattopadhyaya, commonly referred to as Chatto (Chapters 2 and 3). The most curious archive of all is that of the Oettinger family.39 Lisa Oettinger participated in the network between 1929 and 1937, at which point she and her future husband left for Lahore. Her son was given custody of two large trunks from the Lahore bazaar, which Lisa packed for him in the 1950s. Its contents were designed to press upon him that he was heir to two equal civilizations, the one Jewish, the other Muslim, a fact he should never forget. Lisa was an artist. She focused her heritage on merging the two civilizations in one collection. Stacked like a jigsaw puzzle, the trunks contain the lace and artworks of her Jewish ancestors; a specimen of Mughal art she received from her husband’s family in Lahore; paper jottings stating which ancestor produced what, and inevitably closing with the exhortation that it ‘must stay in the family’; family documents and letters; and photograph albums. No less than five of the latter contained pictures of the mosque community in the 1930s, which showed the Oettinger sisters at iftar gatherings and other festive occasions, rowing with their friends, or receiving them at home. As in Abdullah’s photograph albums, members of the Indian Bureau, including Chatto, as Virendranath Chattopadhyaya’s associates fondly referred to him, regularly make their appearance (Chapters 3 and 4). Besides the collections enumerated here, several other private archives were consulted, though in ways that were less systematic. The most important among these is the private archive of the Soliman family,40 a family of circus artists who, around 1900, were entertaining the whole of Berlin with a variety of distractions, including a circus, an Oriental café and the very first cinemas Berlin had ever seen. The three Soliman brothers all married German women – Mohamed married Martha Westphal, Abdel Aziz Gertrud Schweigler, and Omar Else X. When a mosque was erected in their neighbourhood, they regularly went there to pray. However, although the members of the Soliman family could be counted among the Lahore Ahmadiyya mosque’s regular worshippers, 39 40 Private Oettinger family archives (c.1860–2000), Woking and Hassocks, U.K. Susanna Oettinger took care of her mother and daughter during the war. They miraculously survived, as did the papers in their possession. However, after the war Susanna refused to refer to the war period for the rest of her life. The documents and photos she inherited from her mother were found in a box under her bed after her death. Private Soliman archive, Berlin (c.1900–70s). Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 19 Introduction and for three generations they solemnized their mixed marriages there, they did not participate in its community life. Perhaps the mosque’s life-reform views of lived Islam – lectures, tea parties, tennis matches and country hikes – ill-suited their own idea of Islam. The Soliman archive contains the papers, documents and photographs of three generations and covers the period from 1900 to the 1970s. Alas, it was not possible to view it in its entirety, but what I did see enriches our knowledge of Muslims in Berlin in the interwar years. We will return to this archive on different occasions. ... Between them, the archives disclose an extraordinary wealth of material. The questions I raised at the beginning of this Introduction, touching on matters of intergenerational transmission, crossroads of encounter, and the perspectives of the descendants, helped to order them and make a manageable selection. Nonetheless, what we have before us now are mere beams of light on a landscape, which for the most part remains in the dark. The archives offer enough material though with which to start drawing a map of communications and highlighting its raison d’être. Should other collections come to light in the future, they will help to fill the blanks. The journey into discovering the friendships and values that Muslims and Jews shared in the interwar period has only just begun. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Part 1 The Setting ∵ Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Chapter 1 Crossroads In 1918, the world was in a bad way. The First World War had ushered in the European powers’ scramble to build empires and achieve economic and military supremacy at any cost. By the time a peace treaty was finally concluded, no fewer than four empires had vanished from the face of Europe, but hostilities were yet to cease. While the German, Habsburg and Ottoman empires were being dismembered and revolution was destroying the Russian one, a new war over territorial rights, which lasted until 1923, was erupting in the borderlands between Russia, Poland and the Baltic states. Millions of Jews who had lived in those borderlands for centuries became the target of pogroms and ethnic cleansing.1 In addition, Tatar and other Muslim minorities in Russia were also discovering that the new Soviet state that succeeded the Russian Empire was suppressing their historical claims to a religious and cultural identity.2 At the same time, the British and French were occupying large swathes of the former Ottoman empire – the British claimed Sudan, Egypt, Palestine and Jordan, and the French Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. North Africans and Indians who had laid down their lives to secure war victories for ‘their’ empires, discovered that, once the peace treaty was signed, those very empires had conveniently forgotten their promises to accord them citizen rights and self-government. Iraqi villagers opposing British occupation were subjected to aerial bombing. In 1919, British forces opened fire on a peaceful protest against the occupation of the Indian city of Amritsar, which ended with hundreds dead and thousands wounded.3 1 Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History. Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 369–80. For the situation of Jews in the borderlands, see Franziska Davies, Martin Schulze and Michael Brenner (eds) Jews and Muslims in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, Religious Cultures in Modern Europe, vol. 6 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015); Henry Morgenthau Sr, Mission of the United States to Poland. Paris, 3 October 1919, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/ Mission_of_The_United_States_to_Poland:_Henry_Morgenthau,_Sr._report. 2 On Tatars and other Muslim peoples in the Soviet Union, see Michael Kemper, Anke von Kügelgen and Dmitriy Yermakov (eds) Muslim Culture in Russia and Central Asia from the 18th to the Early 20th Centuries, Islamic Studies, vol. 200 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1996); Hiroaki Kuromiya and Georges Mamoulia, The Eurasian Triangle: Russia, the Caucasus and Japan, 1904–1944 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016). 3 Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, 380–93, map of the dismembered Ottoman empire on p. 383. © GERDIEN JONKER, ���� | doi:10.1163/97890044�1813_003 Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 24 Chapter 1 Amid this chaos, Germany became a focus for revolutionary forces. After its defeat in the war and loss of its empire, a feeble government, reeling from the effects of disastrous imperial policies and unable to establish itself in the capital, set up parliament in the provincial town of Weimar; and the population’s trust in the authorities dwindled to zero. In the early years of the Weimar Republic, between 1918 and 1923, attempts at uprisings shook the country. Expecting a communist revolution in Germany to break out at any moment, Moscow transferred the Communist International (Comintern) to Berlin. In its wake, a steady flow of Russian communists settled in the German capital and, in turn, attracted communist sympathizers to the city from across Europe.4 In Munich, Adolf Hitler gathered disappointed returnees from the front and roused them into bitter resistance.5 November 1923 saw numerous forces simultaneously coalescing. With the Soviet daily newspaper Pravda expectantly noting how ‘the air smells of revolution’, two well-stocked weapon caches intended to support the imminent uprising were discovered in Berlin.6 In the south of Germany Hitler was instigating his famous Beer Hall Putsch while, on the western border, the French were marching into the Rhine region to press their claim for restitution payments from Germany. As if this were not enough, a stock exchange crash of unprecedented magnitude was bringing untold financial instability and leaving middle-class families penniless overnight. Widely circulated reports were emerging of harried German citizens rushing to the shops with wheelbarrows full of banknotes. There were also reports of Germans plastering banknotes on the walls of their apartments. Into this theatre of disruption Berlin received a stream of migrants and refugees from eastern Europe. Some 360,000 ‘White Russians’, having fled the revolution, sought temporary refuge in Berlin. In their wake came 63,500 Jews, who had been a target of both ‘white’ and communist attacks.7 Moscow dispatched 4 Politik 19. Rußland, Bd 1–5, Bolschewismus, Kommunismus (3. Internationale), AA PA R 31.706–10. 5 Vanessa Conze, Das Europa der Deutschen: Ideen von Europa in Deutschland zwischen Reichstradition und Westorientierung 1920–1970 (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2005), 25–100; Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, ‘Suchbewegungen in der Moderne: Religion im politischen Feld der Weimarer Republik’, in Friedrich Graf (ed.) Religion und Gesellschaft: Europa im 20 Jahrhundert (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007), 177; Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities. A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 327–400. 6 Politik 19. Rußland Kommunistische Waffenlager in Berlin (1923–1925), AA PA R 31.813 k (6.10.1923). 7 Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (eds) Yiddish in Weimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture (London: Modern Humanities Research, 2010); Gertrud Pickhan, Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Crossroads 25 its own personnel into these Russian-speaking exile populations to prepare for the, in their view, inevitable communist revolutionary takeover. Yet more Russians had been present in Berlin since the commencement of hostilities, among them 18,000 Tatar soldiers who had spent the war in Muslim prisonerof-war camps south of Berlin. When the camps were disbanded at the end of the war, these soldiers refused to return to Russia because of the altered political state of the country they had left behind.8 At the same time, another stream of migrants arrived from the Middle East and South Asian subcontinent. Envoys from Afghanistan and Persia, both of which countries had supported the Germans during the First World War, arrived at the border expecting assistance in return for their former loyalty.9 An uncertain number of Muslim travellers drifted between Berlin and other western European capitals rallying support for their anti-colonial cause, expecting sympathy and backing from the Germans, who had lost control of their own imperial subjects and were looking for ways of thwarting the British. Last but not least, approximately 5000 students from Persia, Afghanistan, the Arabspeaking countries, Turkey, Tatarstan and India arrived with the intention of completing their studies at German universities and engaging in the exchange of knowledge.10 8 9 10 Transit und Transformation: Osteuropäisch-jüdische Migranten in Berlin 1918–1939 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010); Karl Schlögel, Das russische Berlin: Ostbahnhof Europas. (Munich: Pantheon/Verlagsgruppe Random House, 2007); Karl Schlögel and Karl-Konrad Tschäpe, Die russische Revolution und das Schicksal der russischen Juden: Eine Debatte in Berlin 1922/23 (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2014), 67. Sebastian Cwiklinski, ‘Between national and religious solidarities: the Tatars in Germany and Poland in the inter-war period’, in Nathalie Clayer and Eric Germain (eds) Islam in Inter­War Europe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 64–89; Gerhard Höpp, Muslime in der Mark: Als Kriegsgefangene und Internierte in Wünsdorf und Zossen, 1914– 1924 (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1997). Politik 2. Afghanistan, Bd 1 (1920–1923), AA PA R 77.898. On Afghans see Marjan Wardaki, Knowledge­Seekers between Afghanistan and Germany: Negotiation, Exchange, and the Production of Technical and Scientific Ideas, 1919–1945 (dissertation in progress). On Arabs see Gerhard Höpp, ‘Die Sache ist von immenser Wichtigkeit … Arabische Studenten in Berlin’ (1989), Ms. in Gerhard Höpp Papers (Berlin); Gerhard Höpp, Muslim Periodicals as Information Sources about Islamic Life in Germany, 1915–1945 (Berlin: Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, 2000); Gerhard Höpp, ‘Zwischen Universität und Straße: Ägyptische Studenten in Deutschland 1849–1945’, in Konrad Schliephake and Ghazi Shanneik (eds) Die Beziehungen zwischen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und der Republik Ägypten (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2002), 31–42. On Indians see Lothar Günther and Hans-Joachim Rehmer, Inder, Indien und Berlin (Berlin: LothusVerlag, 1999); Douglas T. McGetchin, ‘Asian anti-imperialism and leftist antagonism in Weimar Germany’, in Joanne Miyang Cho, Eric Kurlander and Douglas T. McGetchin (eds) Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India: Kindred Spirits in the Nineteenth Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 26 Chapter 1 Faced with few options, the Weimar government attempted to enact a treaty with Moscow that would normalize relations and clear the way for the critically needed export of German goods to the Soviet Union.11 Consequently, the Foreign Office turned a blind eye to any relationships that Muslim émigrés struck up with Russians. The diplomats responsible for monitoring the traffic between the students and Moscow contented themselves with observing that ‘the exodus of Egyptian students to Berlin’ was merely a result of intensive propaganda by the Egyptian National Party.12 They also observed that, although Persians sometimes acted as ‘Bolshevist agents’, they also pursued their studies in Germany,13 and that, true, Indians served as a cover-up for the sprawling communist network in Berlin but also opened doors for German exports to India.14 Urgent requests by the British to put a stop to what they considered subversive activities were simply ignored.15 It came as no surprise that the India Office in London judged these developments to be dangerous and London set up an ‘Interdepartmental Committee 11 12 13 14 15 and Twentieth Centuries (London: Routledge, 2014), 129–39; Benjamin Zachariah, ‘Indian political activists in Germany, 1914–1945’, in Joanne Miyang Cho, Eric Kurlander and Douglas T. McGetchin (eds) Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India: Kin­ dred Spirits in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Routledge, 2014), 141–55. On Persians see Mohammad Alsulami, ‘Iranian journals in Berlin during the interwar period’, in Götz Nordbruch and Umar Ryad (eds) Transnational Islam in Interwar Europe: Muslim Activists and Thinkers (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 157–81; Antoine Fleury, La pénétration allemande au Moyen­Orient 1919–1939 (Paris: Brill, 1977); George Lenczowski, Russia and the West in Iran, 1918–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1949); Ahmad Mahrat, Die deutsch­persischen Beziehungen von 1918–1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1977); Bernard Vernier, La politique islamique de L’Allemagne (Paris: Paul Hartmann, 1939). On Tatars see Sebastian Cwiklinski, Die Wolga an der Spree: Tataren und Baschkiren in Berlin (Berlin: Die Ausländerbeauftragte, 1998); Iskander Giljazow, Muslime in Deutsch­ land: Von den zwanziger Jahren bis zum ‘islamischen Fakor’ während dem zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Gerhard Höpp archive, 1990); Höpp, Muslime in der Mark. And on the Turks see Ingeborg Böer, Ruth Haerkötter and Petra Kappert, Türken in Berlin 1871–1945 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2002). The Treaty of Rapallo re-established diplomatic and economic traffic between the two countries and was concluded in 1922; see Sebastian Haffner, Der Teufelspakt: 50 Jahre deutsch–russische Beziehungen (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1968). Höpp, ‘Die Sache’, 1. Politik 2. Iran iii. Politische Beziehungen Persiens zu Deutschland (1929–32), AA PA R 78.106. Politik 26. Indien, AA PA R 77.461 (1921–24) on the Indian Information Bureau. Politik 26. Indien, AA PA R 77.461 contains articles in the British press and urgent letters from the India Office in London on the bureau’s revolutionary activities but is uncritical of them. See, for instance, the memorandum from the British Embassy in Berlin of 25 August 1923, and the internal correspondence that follows. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 27 Crossroads on Eastern Unrest’.16 In Cairo, the Egyptian National Party’s money transfers were thwarted.17 In Amritsar, where a crowd had gathered after two nationalists were arrested, Brigadier-General Rex Dyer, before ordering his men to open fire on the demonstrators, declared that, ‘you people talk against the government, and persons educated in Germany … talk sedition. I shall uproot all these’. The colonial government in Delhi backed his actions.18 The postwar German capital had become a city beyond such control. It was therefore possible not only to conspire and agitate but also to explore the in between spaces in which to mix, interact, engage with other cultures and exchange ideas. Unlike Paris or London, the allure of Berlin during the Weimar Republic grew for Muslim intellectuals eager to escape the constraints of the British Empire. In Berlin, Muslims from diverse places and cultural traditions met and engaged intellectually not only with Germans, but also with one another. A confluence of factors and conditions created an environment that was conducive to such contacts, that allowed them to engage in projects together and, often, to foster lifelong friendships. 1 Migrants and Minorities in the European Metropoles Over the last decade, the phenomenon of Muslims travelling to the main interwar European metropoles of London, Paris and Berlin, as well as to some smaller European countries such as the Netherlands, Lithuania, BosniaHerzegovina, and Albania, has received fresh scholarly attention.19 In addition, a number of scholars have explored the subject of European converts to Islam in the first half of the twentieth century, thus pinpointing one possible European reaction to the presence of Muslims.20 However, a systematic comparison of the actors and of the political and societal settings in which they were received is yet to be undertaken. However, to evaluate the situation in Berlin, it 16 17 18 19 20 Höpp, ‘Die Sache’, 4. Höpp, ‘Die Sache’, 5. Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (London: Abacus, 1997), 474. Bekim Agai, Umar Ryad and Mehdi Sajid (eds) Muslims in Interwar Europe: A Transcul­ tural Historical Perspective (Leiden – Boston: Brill, 2015); Nathalie Clayer and Eric Germain (eds) Islam and Inter­War Europe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Götz Nordbruch and Umar Ryad (eds) Transnational Islam in Interwar Europe: Muslim Activists and Thinkers (New York: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2014). Jamie Gilham, Loyal Enemies: British Converts to Islam, 1850–1950 (London: Hurst, 2014); Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest; Geoffrey Nash (ed.) Marmaduke Pickthall: Islam and the Modern World (Leiden – Boston: Brill, 2017). Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 28 Chapter 1 is necessary to establish under what conditions Muslim students could engage with local populations in other metropoles. A short survey of such dynamics in London and Paris during the period in question is therefore tentatively offered here. In London, the epicentre of an empire that presided over the lives of 98 million Muslims, the number of actual Muslim students was negligible. Around 1900, no more than 1000 Indians were allowed to complete their studies at British universities, a number that grew to a mere 7128 in 1932.21 The British maintained a strict watch on student agitation (no more than a few hundred are reported to have attended nationalist meetings in 1932);22 they also ensured the strict segregation of the Indians from the rest of the population.23 Persian students, whom the Shah regularly sent to European universities in an attempt to Westernize the country, were discouraged from settling in London.24 Apart from employing 70,000 unskilled North African menial workers, Paris emerged as the European base from which Latin American, Chinese and Vietnamese activists established organizations to prepare for independence. The civil rights advocate Roger N. Baldwin, passing through in 1927, saw ‘a huge mass of migrants’ and dubbed Paris ‘a hotbed of anti-imperialism with global reverberations’.25 Baldwin was sufficiently impressed to postulate that, ‘never in history have so many of them from so many lands found refuge in one place’.26 However, he overlooked an important fact. Although the French governed an empire on the opposite shore of the Mediterranean in which 20 million Muslim subjects resided,27 scarcely any Muslim students were permitted to study in the capital. In fact, the number of North African students in Paris never exceeded 270.28 Like the British, the French closely scrutinized the foreigners in their midst, be they ‘protégés’ or ‘anti-imperialists’. The French scholar of Islam Bernard Vernier systematically counted the number of Muslim students living in France 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 184, 294. Schneer, London 1900, 294. Shompa Lahiri, Indians in Britain: Anglo–Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 1880–1930 (London: Routledge, 2013), xiv–xvi. In 1932, there were 80 Persian students in London, see Fleury, La pénétration allemande, 215. Michael Goebel, Anti­Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Na­ tionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 5, student numbers on 120–1. Quoted in Goebel, Anti­Imperial Metropolis, 3, 314. Bouda Etemad, La possession du monde: Poids et mésures de la colonisation (xviii–xx siè­ cles) (Brussels: Éditions complexe, 2000), 236. Goebel, Anti­Imperial Metropolis, 25–30, 120–1. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Crossroads 29 and Germany in the 1930s and estimated that 1031 Persian students were arriving on an annual basis. He also noted that they were forced to live in dormitories under close police observation.29 The German Empire, by contrast, governed far smaller Muslim populations and, apart from a handful of travellers to the Orient who brought back Romantic descriptions of mosques, Bedouins and mesmerizing deserts, the Germans seldom had any contact with them. Thus, when the Muslim students, almost all of whom were male,30 continued to arrive throughout the 1920s, the wellread middle-class population projected lofty images of ‘Oriental wisdom’ and ‘the meeting of East and West’ onto them. For their part, young German intellectuals sought reprieve from their humiliating predicament of having been defeated in a war and then labelled belligerents. The proclamation of the Weimar Republic following the Kaiser’s abdication precipitated armed revolt from both left and right-wing political activists. Amidst this national turmoil, German intellectuals opted for a middle road that allowed them to transcend the hard-edged boundaries that had emerged in the postwar European political imagination. Oriental studies and Theosophy became popular. The scriptures, religions and people from the East were regarded as ‘wise’ and a revelation. German intellectuals were likewise drawn to the study of Islam. In this setting, Muslim students, particularly from India, were received with much enthusiasm.31 The Jewish refugees lacked the powerful resources of the Muslim newcomers, namely social standing and money. The majority of eastern European Jews who arrived in the West were desperately poor. The only resources they brought with them were energy, intellect and the will to change their precarious situation.32 Nonetheless, the friendship that the Germans offered to the Muslims was not extended to the Jews. Not only in Berlin, but also in Paris and London they were viewed with that mixture of prejudice and distaste so typical of Europe’s history of anti-Semitism.33 29 30 31 32 33 Vernier, La politique islamique, 39. See also Fleury, La pénétration allemande, 215. Apart from the daughters of Tatar scholars. Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest, 94–119; Suzanne L. Marchand, ‘Eastern wisdom in an era of Western despair: Orientalism in 1920s central Europe’, in Peter E. Gordon and John P. McCormick (eds) Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 341–61. For Berlin, see Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Berlin Transit: Jüdische Migranten aus Osteuropa in den 1920er Jahren (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012); for London see Mark Mazower, What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home (London: Penguin Random House, 2017); for Paris see Luc Boltanski, La Cache (Paris: édition Stock, 2015). William I. Brustein, Roots of Hate: Anti­Semitism in Europe before the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 30 Chapter 1 Whether Tatars and Jews from Soviet Russia, or Muslims from various colonial empires, the newcomers wholeheartedly identified with Berlin; the Persians called themselves Berliniy­ha (Berliners)34 and the Indians likewise described themselves as Berlini.35 The Berlin air not only smelled of revolution, but also emitted a feeling of inclusive self-identification with an extremely diverse group of people, which certainly helped to create the ‘contact zones’ that soon emerged as sites of social and intellectual exchange. Marie Louise Pratt introduced the term ‘contact zones’ to describe the fluid fields of cross-cultural interaction in colonial India, in which, according to her analysis, it was possible ‘to move suddenly and unexpectedly from a position of similarity to one of difference’.36 In the context of Berlin in the interwar period, such contact zones might well have functioned in a contradictory way. In other words, it was possible ‘to move suddenly and unexpectedly’ from a position on the outside to one on the inside. In fact, there is ample evidence to support such an understanding of Berlin in the interwar years. The Jewish communist Ilja Ehrenburg, for instance, resorted to a biblical reference to describe his surprise at discovering that meetings that would have been impossible anywhere else just happened in Berlin. As he put it, ‘there was a place in Berlin that reminded me of Noah’s Ark because it peacefully gathered good and bad. It was an average German coffee house, where on Fridays Russian writers met’.37 Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, who was himself a refugee from St Petersburg, used the word Berlintschik to describe the refugee scene.38 As we shall continue to see, in some of the case studies Indians interacted with Jewish communists from Russia and other European countries (Chapters 6 and 7), whereas in others they engaged with German Jews and the transnational Muslim scene (Chapters 3, 4, and 5). Some of those engagements developed against a horizon of revolution and anti-colonial political activity, while others, using the instruments of the ‘modernists’, and reformist Islam, focused 34 35 36 37 38 Berliniy­ha: Andishamanzadan Irani dar Berlin (The Berliner: Persian Thinkers in Berlin) (University of California, 1979) offers an in-depth description of Persians and their activities in Berlin during the years 1915–30. Khwaja Abdul Hamied, A Life to Remember: An Autobiography (Bombay: Lalvani Press, 1972), 35. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). https://db-artmag.de/archiv/07/d/thema-enke.html. Simon Dubnow, Buch des Lebens: Erinnerungen und Gedanken. Materialien zur Geschichte meiner Zeit, vol. 3 (Göttingen: VandenHoeck & Ruprecht 2005), 71ff. The term had been in use among Haskalah thinkers since the time of Moses Mendelsohn (1729–86), the great reformer of Jewish tradition. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Crossroads 31 on Lebensreform (reform of the self) and personal refinement.39 Although depicted as self-evident in the letters and writings housed in the various private archives, those engagements were of a fragile, transient nature, for they depended on a whole string of factors and conditions that, in the interwar period, happened to coalesce. Although there was nothing inevitable about Indians, German Jewish intellectuals, eastern European communists and Muslims from around the globe engaging with one another, certain factors clearly made it easier. To begin with, Muslim travellers from India and the Middle East were not attuned to Europe’s history of anti-Semitism because, in the Muslim world, ideas about religious coexistence and sharing religious spaces differed from both one another and from those that were prevalent in Europe.40 In addition and equally important was the fact that the German Jewish middle classes had developed a keen interest in the Orient. Not only did German Jewish scholars discover parallels between Sharia and Halacha Muslim and Jewish religious legal codes,41 but some of them also travelled to India to teach at Muslim universities. For example, Gotlieb Wilhelm Leitner taught at Lahore University and Joseph Horovitz held a post at the Anglo-Muslim University of Aligarh.42 Meanwhile, the Jewish ‘Renaissance’ of 1900 adopted a distinctly Oriental flavour,43 with Jewish poets and painters romanticizing ‘the Morning Land’ – the region bordering the eastern Mediterranean, which they regarded as a shared space of origin 39 40 41 42 43 For an explanation of these terms, see the Introduction. Dionigi Albera and Maria Couroucli, Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean: Chris­ tians, Muslims, and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012); Anna Bigelow Sharing the Sacred: Practicing Pluralism in Muslim Northern India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); www.sharedsacredsitetes.net. Susannah Heschel, ‘German–Jewish scholarship on Islam as a tool for de-Orientalizing Judaism’, New German Critique, 117 (2012), 91–109; Martin Kramer, The Jewish Discovery of Islam: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lewis (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Centre for Middle Eastern and African Studies, 1999); Michael M. Laskier and Yaacov Lev (eds) The Convergence of Judaism and Islam: Religious, Scientific, and Cultural Dimensions (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011); Raphael Patai, Ignaz Goldziher and His Oriental Diary: A Trans­ lation and Psychological Portrait (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987). Heschel‚ ‘German–Jewish scholarship’; Gudrun Jäger, ‘Orientalistik jenseits aller Nationalismen: Der jüdische Gelehrte Josef Horovitz und sein Verständnis von Annäherung zwischen Judentum und Islam’, Wissenschafts­ und Universitätsgeschichte: Forschung Frankfurt, 3–4 (2004), 80–3; Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest, 30–3; Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar (eds) Orientalism and the Jews (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2005); Amit Levy‚ ‘Der wissenschaftliche Nachlass von Joseph Horovitz’, Archives of German– Jewish Scholarship (Marbach: Deutsches Literatur-Archiv Marbach, 2018), 28–33. Inka Bertz, ‘Eine neue Kunst für ein altes Volk’: Die jüdische Renaissance in Berlin 1900 bis 1924. Ausstellungsmagazin Jüdisches Museum (Berlin: Berlin Museum, 1991). Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 32 Chapter 1 in which Christians and Muslims cohabited and in which Jewish people had their roots. German Jews at that time and place were transfiguring the notion of shared origins into romantic images. For example, the poet Else LaskerSchüler, who wrote ‘I dance in the mosque’,44 drew pictures of herself in Oriental costume and encased the lovers in her poems with a blend of biblical and Oriental myths.45 The most important factor, however, the one that set the levers for the emergence of a zone of contact, lay in the Islam-centred politics of several generations of German politicians. The imperial politics of former times had established an ideological framework in which Muslims were encouraged to opt for Germany, and Germans – be they Jewish or Christian – eyed the newcomers with curiosity. Weimar politicians continued along that path by establishing an infrastructure for the Muslim newcomers, which included not only housing, building plots and tennis courts, but also student grants, language courses and joint chambers of commerce with Bukhara, Egypt and Persia. What the Muslims encountered at university and in the homes of their German hosts, what made them feel welcome and ready to establish and maintain friendships, was the special affinity that the Germans had long promised to people in the Muslim world and which will be described in the following pages. 2 German Imperial Politics In colonial matters Germany was a latecomer and the ways in which it attempted to expand its territory and power mirror this.46 When, in 1884, the leading colonial powers carved up the rest of the world between them, the Germans were given some territories in sub-Saharan Africa and far eastern New Guinea. However, as offshore territories to which to export goods, these acquisitions fell far short of German expectations. Given that the British had 44 45 46 Else Lasker-Schüler, ‘Ich tanze in der Moschee’, in Die Nächte von Tino von Bagdad (Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1919), 7–8. Sigrid Bauschinger, The Berlin Moderns: Else Lasker­Schüler and Café Culture (Berlin: Metropolis, 2000), 72–8. For this section, I benefited greatly from Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colo­ nialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Volker Berghahn, ‘German colonialism and imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler: review essay’, German Studies Review, 40 (1) 2017, 147–82; Klaus Hildebrand, Das vergan­ gene Reich. Deutsche Außenpolitik von Bismarck bis Hitler 1871–1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1995); Francis R. Nicosia, Nazi Germany and the Arab World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Crossroads 33 colonized most of the world’s territories and peoples, followed closely by the Russians and French, and sorely in need of fresh markets for its commodities, Germany sought out new lands in which to establish strategic relations. This constituted the beginning of the German politics of ‘middle Europe’, which foresaw close economic and military cooperation between the countries of central Europe under Germany’s leadership.47 Cultivating friendships with Muslim peoples across the globe while simultaneously building an infrastructure for emerging nation-states in the Middle East appeared to offer a promising alternative. For that reason, from the beginning of the German empire to the end of the Second World War, a succession of German governments engaged intensely with the Muslim world. At the beginning of this period, Germany signed treaties with the Ottoman Empire to modernize the latter’s army and develop export structures, while simultaneously offering assistance to the new nation-states emerging to the south, such as Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq. When, in 1898, Kaiser Wilhelm ii visited Jerusalem, he famously also visited Damascus to swear eternal friendship on Saladin’s grave to all the Muslim peoples. The First World War marked a shift in this outlook. The German and Ottoman empires became comrades-in-arms and pan-Islamism advanced to a key stage in German politics. Their joint declaration of jihad against the British was a strategic attempt to raise the masses against the enemy (it failed); wherever Muslim soldiers appeared on European battlegrounds, their prisoners of war were treated cautiously.48 Everywhere in the Middle East, Germans were supporting local insurgents behind the enemy lines, giving them training, weapons and information. The Nachrichtendienst für den Orient (News Service for the Orient or NfO) in Berlin set up Iraqi, Iranian, Afghan, Tatar and Indian ‘national committees’ to serve as intermediaries and as possible political actors after the war.49 Contemporary observations clearly spelled out the stakes.50 As the influential Orientalist Hugo Grothe (born 1869) observed, ‘shared German–Turkish interests … are vital for our future. They are neither accidental nor a constellation 47 48 49 50 Friedrich Naumann’s Mittel­Europa (1915) provided the cornerstone of a German politics that envisaged the eventual colonization of eastern Europe, https://archive.org/details/ centraleurope00naumgoog/page/n8. Höpp, Muslime in der Mark. Wolfdieter Bihl, Die Kaukasuspolitik der Mittelmächte (ii) (Wien: Böhlau, 1992), 23–8. C.H. Becker, Deutschtürkische Interessengemeinschaft (Bonn: Verlag Friedrich Cohen, 1914); Arthur Dix, ‘Das Ende des kolonialpolitischen Zeitalters?’ Koloniale Rundschau (Berlin: Reimers, 1918), 223–33; Hugo Grothe, Deutschland, die Türkei und der Islam: Ein Beitrag zu der Grundlinie der deutschen Weltpolitik im islamischen Orient (Leipzig: Verlag von Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 34 Chapter 1 of the moment, but result from the deepest tendencies of the World Empires England and Russia’.51 What the Germans hoped to achieve through the war, he thought, were ‘export markets, economic and cultural exchange, and the development of mutual interests’.52 The friendship the Kaiser had offered to the Muslim peoples took the shape of a very concrete ‘German–Turkish friendship’, envisioning a future in which the two peoples would become entwined on many social levels.53 Consequently, the infrastructure was constructed to pave the way for an extensive population exchange. In 1916, the newly founded German–Turkish Society enrolled 300 Turkish apprentices in German schools. It likewise took care of 350 orphans who received free schooling and education in German workshops, and 450 skilled workers were selected to receive additional training in German industries.54 The society, backed by Ottoman war minister Enver Pasha and German commanders-in-chief Liman von Sanders and Von der Goltz Pasha, and flanked by German industrialists, envisaged that from 1918 onwards, the hundreds of arrivals would become thousands. In addition, the exchange would not be limited to the groups already under consideration, for university students and nurses in training were scheduled to follow.55 Once again, the two governments concluded official treaties to solidify the proceedings.56 A mosque built in Berlin’s old city centre (Kupfergraben) and financed out of the pockets of the two sovereigns, was to symbolize the bond.57 However, events did not turn out exactly as envisaged. With the arrival of American soldiers onto European battlefields, the Germans and Turks lost the war and their respective empires. The local Muslim insurgents behind the British enemy lines, whom Germany had previously supported, were suddenly abandoned and forced to fend for themselves. The ‘national committees’ no 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 G. Hirzel, 1914); Albrecht Wirth, Die Geschichte des Weltkriegs (I) (Stuttgart: Union Deutscher Verlagsgesellschaft, 1917), 277. Grothe, Deutschland, 6. Grothe, Deutschland, 17. Carl Anton Schäfer, Deutsch–türkischer Freundschaft (Stuttgart: Deutscher Verlagsanstalt, 1914). Schäfer, Deutsch–türkischer Freundschaft. Hans Hermann Russack, Türkische Jugend in Deutschland: Bericht der Deutsch–Türkischen Vereinigung. (Berlin: Selbstverlag, 1918). Cf. Halil Halid, ‘Soziale Dienste, Bildungsstätten und deutsche Zähigkeit in Zeiten des Mangels: Eine Recherche an der Heimatfront’, in Ingeborg Böer, Ruth Haerkötter and Petra Kappert (eds) Türken in Berlin 1871–1945 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2002), 143–61. Verträge zwischen dem deutschen Reiche und dem Osmanischen Reiche (Contracts between the German Reich and the Ottoman Empire) (Berlin: Reichstag ii, 1917). Bihl, Die Kaukasuspolitik, 23. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Crossroads 35 longer had a function and the Indians, Persians, Tatars and Egyptians who had engaged in them found themselves stranded in Berlin. The way in which the war effort came to naught left Germany tottering on the brink of civil war. To underline their utter defeat, the victorious powers forbade the two former empires to continue their relationship. In 1919, the last of the German soldiers were pulled out of Constantinople58 and just 5000 Turks remained in Berlin.59 For some time, diplomats in Berlin continued to correspond with their counterparts in Ankara,60 but in retrospect, many felt that Germany had exploited Turkey during their dalliance, ‘as if squeezing the juice from a lemon that is later discarded’.61 This was the moment in which young intellectuals from all over the Muslim world, perceiving Germany to be their friend, migrated to German-speaking cities. Their first destination tended to be Berlin, but other university cities like Munich, Vienna, Stuttgart, Zurich, Geneva, Frankfurt, Bonn, Hamburg, Leipzig, Breslau and Königsberg also attracted sizeable foreign student populations.62 In contrast to Paris and London, these were cities without residents from the colonies. In fact, as we know from memoirs and private letters, the Muslim students were often the very first foreigners from outside Europe with whom Germans mixed. An amalgam of political and personal reasons informed the students’ choice. It was a widely held belief that Germany was an avowed friend of ‘the Muslims’ and its universities were considered among the best in the world. The country possessed advanced technology and industry and German thinkers, especially Goethe and Nietzsche, appeared high on the students’ reading lists. With the doors to social and intellectual exchange within the German-speaking realm open, Muslim intellectuals travelled there readily. 3 Contact Zones in Berlin There was one neighbourhood in Berlin that helped the encounter more than any other place in the capital. This was the borough of Wilmersdorf, which was 58 59 60 61 62 Politik 3. Türkei. Deutschtum im Ausland, AA PA R 78.577 (2 March 1932). Politik 2. Türkei. Politische Beziehungen der Türkei zu Deutschland (1920–23) AA PA R 78.484 (22 April 1922). Politik 2. Türkei. Politische Beziehungen der Türkei zu Deustchland (26 April 1922 et passim). Politik 3. Türkei. Deutschtum im Ausland. The German text of the quotation runs, ‘Deutschland hat Türkei ausgenutzt wie Zitrone die man auspresst und Schale fortwirft’ (2 April 1930). Vernier, La politique islamique, 25–51. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 36 Chapter 1 then in the process of being developed. In 1911, Ludwig Meidner painted a picture of the U-Bahn subway being constructed through the wasteland that would soon be transformed into the rapidly expanding suburb. The painting depicts a moonscape of sandy pits and dunes in which people were arduously labouring, the houses and fencing of the encroaching city already on the horizon.63 A decade later, spacious apartments for affluent middle-class families lined the streets of Wilmersdorf and many of the courtyards were converted into artists’ studios. The area’s topography was unusual in that the popular Kurfürstendamm, one of Berlin’s most famous avenues, with its lively bars and every form of entertainment, lay to one side, and Grunewald, an area of woods and lakes that forms a natural border for the city was on the other. This newly established area became the social space in which bohemians gathered and to which the families that were thriving during the empire, moved (Figure 1: Map of Muslim and Jewish places in West Berlin, pp. xvi-xvii). Unencumbered by any of the traditional or religious structures that commonly dampen the emergence of social dynamism, the cultural and religious infrastructure that materialized in Wilmersdorf was something of a novelty in Berlin. By the middle of the 1920s, 13.5 per cent of the newcomers were Jewish and no fewer than five Jewish schools opened their doors. A municipal synagogue was erected on Prinzregentenstrasse and a large number of secular Jewish organizations moved into the side streets of Kurfürstendamm.64 Jewish families became a well-known fixture of Wilmersdorf street life, and Egyptian, Persian and Indian students moved in as their neighbours. The Islam Institute, a self-organized body of Muslim students headed by Muhammad Abd-an-Nafi Shalabi, was assigned a villa on Fasanenstrasse along with a government subsidy.65 Indians fixed their missions in the still empty spaces. An Indian from Lahore, Sadruddin undertook to build a mosque on a garden plot behind Fehrbelliner Platz that the municipality had offered to the Lahore-Ahmadiyya organization.66 Johannes Steinmann and Baron von Barany, acting on behalf 63 64 65 66 Ludwig Meidner, ‘U-Bahn Bau in Berlin-Wilmersdorf’ (1911), Stadtmuseum Berlin. https:// sammlung-online.stadtmuseum.de/Details/Index/172435. Udo Christoffel (ed.) Berlin Wilmersdorf: Ein Stadtteilbuch (Berlin: Kunstamt Wilmersdorf, 1981); Carolin Hilker-Siebenhaar, Wegweiser durch das jüdische Berlin (Berlin: Nicolai, 1987), 149–52, 230–45. Fasanenstrasse 23. There is no file in the registry offices, but a description of the opening ceremony plus a photograph of the main actors was published in Die Islamische Gegen­ wart (1927), 1–4. Briennerstrasse 8–10, registry office Berlin-Charlottenburg No. 8769. A description of the opening ceremony plus a photograph of the community was published in the Mosle­ mische Revue, 1 (1925), 1. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Crossroads 37 of Hazrat Pir Inayat Khan, established a Sufi Lodge in a nearby private apartment.67 The Hindustan Association of Central Europe, which Zakir Husain and Muhammad Mujeeb led and the Foreign Office backed, purchased a ‘clubhouse’ on Halensee, in which the India News Service and Information Bureau (henceforth Indian Bureau), headed by V. Chattopadhyaya, settled.68 Only the Berlin Islamic Community, set up by the Indian revolutionaries Jabbar and Sattar Khairi, lacked the means to move into the neighbourhood.69 From reading across different sources, it is clear that Wilmersdorf and the adjacent quarter of Charlottenburg harboured a number of Muslim and Jewish organizations and meeting places, among them a mosque, a Sufi Lodge, several synagogues, umbrella organizations, student bodies, cultural and commercial clubs, as well as numerous bars, restaurants, jazz clubs and other places of entertainment.70 Vibrant entertainment, at which the Egyptians excelled, was available to the left and right of Kurfürstendamm. A jazz musician, Abdel-Aziz Helmi-Hammad ran the renowned Carlton Bar at Uhlandstrasse 171, a stately building with a portico and four sturdy pillars facing the street. Other jazz establishments with in-house orchestras were the Ciro Bar run by Mostapha Ciro and the Sherbini Bar run by Mostafa Sherbini.71 67 68 69 70 71 Sächsische Strasse 10, registry office Berlin-Charlottenburg, 94 VR 4635. Politik 26. Indien, AA PA R 77.461 (1921–1924), memorandum of the British embassy in Berlin (25 August 1923). The registry offices kept track of the ups and downs of this organization, VR B Rep. 042/Nr 26590, as did the Foreign Office. Diplomats of the Weimar republic closely observed both the political (Politik 26. Indien, AA PA R 77.461 et passim) and religious (Politik 16. Kirchen und Religionsgemeinschaften/Islam, AA PA R 77.456 et passim) activities of these Indians. Persians also received a good deal of attention (Politik 2 Persien. AA PA R 901/ 25950; Politische Beziehungen Persiens zu Deutschland, Bd. 1–8, AA PA R 78.106 et passim). The Afghan file was rather thin (Politik 2. Afghanistan Bd. 1–4, AA PA R 77.898 et passim) and the Tatars and Turks attracted hardly any attention at all (Politik 2. Politische Beziehungen der Türkei zu Deutschland Bd. 1–5, AA PA R 78.484 et passim). Of all the Muslims in Germany, the Egyptians received the most attention, partly because they sent 500 students a year who needed attention and partly because the Weimar republic exported a lot of goods to Egypt (Politik 2. Ägypten. AA PA R 901 / 25934). When the Nazis gained power and politics vis-à-vis the Muslim world were stepped up, the files grew fast. Vera Bendt, Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, Thomas Jersch and Nicola Galliner (eds) Wegweiser durch das jüdische Berlin (Berlin: Nicolai, 1987); Helmut Engel, Stefi Jersch-Wenzel and Wilhelm Treue (eds) Geschichtslandschaft Berlin Part ii: Charlottenburg: Der neue Westen (Berlin: Nicolai, 1985); Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest, 63–93, complemented by the sources for this book; Andreas Nachama, Julius H. Schoeps and Hermann Simon (eds) Juden in Berlin (Berlin: Henschel, 2001); Johannes Schnelle, ‘… und im Inneren empfängt einen der Orient’. Camil Ağazadə und seine Orientrestaurants im Berlin der Zwischenkriegszeit (Berlin: Humboldt University, 2019). See Figure 1 in this book. Höpp, ‘Die Sache’; Höpp, ‘Zwischen Universität und Strasse’. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 38 Chapter 1 The bohemian watering holes – Café Josti, Café Léon, Café des Westens and the Romanisches Café – were in the lower parts of Kurfürstendamm around Kaiser-Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche. The Soliman family, circus artists and tight rope specialists by profession, controlled the upper reaches of the boulevard. There, Abdel Aziz ran a ballet school, Omar produced a children’s show and Mohamed had set up Berlin’s first ever wax museum and cinema complex. Some of the many cinemas that the Soliman women ran only closed their doors 1961.72 The iron laws of financial necessity dictated how first contacts were established. Agnes Smedley, a renowned international communist who worked for the Indian Bureau in the 1920s, claimed to have seen Prussian heads of family approaching foreign-looking young men in the street to enquire if they still needed a room73 because, after the financial crash, erstwhile wealthy families, sorely in need of foreign currency, were having to take in foreign boarders. For the Marcus family, the crisis began when Poland nationalized all the Prussian factories within its borders. As I mention in Chapter 5, by 1921, Hugo Marcus was teaching German and philosophy to Indian students. Being one of those Germans who could explain the work of Nietzsche to them, they brought him to the mosque and, once introduced, Marcus and his group of Indian students became enamoured with one another and thus began many long friendships. Some years later, the same pattern of events occurred in the Oettinger family when its female members began their lifelong friendship with Dr Abdullah. The photographs in Chapter 3 convey the awkwardness and intense curiosity that accompanied their initial encounters. A study of the many and detailed lists of addresses in the registry files reveals that Indians, Persians and Egyptians preferred to reside in rooms in either Wilmersdorf, or on the opposite side of Kurfürstendamm in Charlottenburg. The Indian novelist Vikram Seth describes just such an arrangement in a moving account of his great uncle Shanti Seth. When he first arrived in Berlin, Shanti was clutching a slip of paper containing an address on Mommsenstrasse that another student had given to him. When he went to find out what the address held in store, he stumbled upon the Caros, a secular Jewish family who provided him with a room and a place at their dinner table, and who wholeheartedly adopted him as friend of the family. From then on, Shanti shared their sailing tours and tennis matches in summer and skiing holidays in winter. 72 73 Private Soliman family archive; see also Frank Gesemann and Gerhard Höpp, Araber in Berlin (Berlin: Der Ausländerbeauftragte, 1998), 7–46. Ruth Price, The Lives of Agnes Smedley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 117. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Crossroads 39 After the Second World War, he married Henny Caro, the eldest daughter and only member of her family to have survive the war.74 On the streets, at home, in seminar rooms, jazz bars and the mosque, a multi-layered contact zone soon grew up around these people’s many shared interests. First, it was essential to secure foreign currency. There was also a need for private German lessons. There were families who adopted foreign students into their midst; there were clusters of friends who played tennis or went sailing at weekends; and there were Muslim political and religious events to which Germans were invited. Besides, as we shall see in the next chapter, the Indian missions promoted a form of reformist Islam that endeavoured to elicit a real contribution from the local population. Whoever participated in it, the contact zone offered many opportunities to move ‘suddenly and unexpectedly’ from the position of being an outsider to one of being an insider. In later chapters, I shall examine more closely the strategic advantages of making that move. In the meanwhile, the internal Muslim perspective still needs looking into before moving on to the perceptions of the neighbours. 4 A Muslim Ecumene in the West Whatever opportunities there might have been to meet their German neighbours, the Arabs, Afghans, Persians, Tatars, Turks and Indians first and foremost engaged socially with one another; what they discovered was a substantial Muslim community deriving from practically every corner of the globe. On 29 May 1922, Eid al-Fitr was celebrated at a military base 30 miles outside Berlin where a small wooden mosque remained from a former Muslim prisonerof-war camp. In preparation for the festival, Jabbar and Sattar Khairi, the two revolutionary Indians in the ‘Indian National Committee’ during the war who afterwards were marooned in Berlin, issued invitations. In response, it would appear that every Muslim who happened to be in Germany at that moment, whether the remaining Turks, former prisoners of war, newly arrived students, businessmen, political exiles, stranded revolutionaries, or the Turkish, Persian, Afghan and Egyptian ambassadors and their personnel made an appearance.75 Abdul Jabbar Khairi, the initiator and founder of the Berlin Islamic Community, afterwards claimed that no fewer than ‘42 different Muslim nations’ had 74 75 Vikram Seth, Two Lives: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). Berlin-Charlottenburg Registry Office, VR B Rep. 042/Nr 26590, 7–40; Jonker, The Ahmadi­ yya Quest, 70–2. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 40 Chapter 1 been assembled.76 The Ahmadiyya missionary Sadruddin wrote home to Lahore that he had seen a crowd of 15,000 men.77 It was a true Muslim global moment and, to all appearances, the first one ever in a Western country. Acting as imam, Abdul Jabbar Khairi informed this audience of his plan to launch a Muslim organization that would further Muslim interests in Europe, a plan to which all present readily agreed. Thus, the Islamische Gemeinde Berlin (Muslim Community of Berlin) was born. What is of interest here is the shuffling that followed for positions.78 The ‘first choice of delegates’, arrived at through consultation (shura) on 29 May, consisted of a list of 16 names of Arabs, Indians, the Persian deputy ambassador,79 and two Germans.80 A week later, the list was altered to include the Turkish ambassador81 and a well-known Tatar scholar.82 In November, when the community met again to celebrate Eid al-Adha, another attempt was made to establish a balanced list. The shura list that was finally presented to the registry office included two Tatars, two Persians, five Indians, a number of Egyptians and other North Africans, one central European83 and one woman.84 During the 1923 Eid al-Fitr, the struggle to establish a shura that would mirror the global dimension of Muslims in Berlin continued. The new list now included the Afghan ambassador,85 the founder of the Islam Institute,86 and no less than five Tatar nobles and scholars.87 It was considered important to 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest, 71 fn. 41. For Jabbar Khairi, see Heike Liebau, ‘Networks of knowledge production: South Asian Muslims and German scholars in Berlin (1915–1930)’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (cssaame) (forthcoming 2020). Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest, 82. What follows is drawn from an analysis of the membership lists in the ‘Islamische Gemeinde Berlin’ file in the Berlin-Charlottenburg Registry Office, VR B Rep. 042/No. 26590, 7–40. Professor Dr Mirza Hassan, deputy ambassador to Berlin 1921–32. Dr Khalid Banning, the prosecutor general, and Dr Muhamed Brugsch, son of the famous Orientalist, agreed to do the necessary paperwork. Dr Schükry Bey, ambassador to Berlin until 1924. Ramazan Kurtmemett (n.d.). Esad Bey or Lev Nussimbaum (1906–1943) was a young Jewish refugee from Kiev who simply embraced Islam in the Turkish Embassy. See Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest, 141–2; Tom Reiss, The Orientalist. Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life (New York: Random House, 2005). Adelheid Capelle (n.d.) was the wife of the Indian revolutionary Hidayet Ahmed Khan. Her Muslim adopted name was Nur Bandi. Khulam Siddiq Khan, ambassador to Berlin 1922–25. The Syrian Haj Mohammed Abdul Nafi Tschelebi (1901–33). Among them Chalid Pasha (Prince of Dagestan and president of the shura), Melki Dzaforoff and Agha Bala Golieff. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Crossroads 41 represent the different geographical areas, not only because of the rural Muslim traditions that could be found within them, but also because each of the travellers introduced to Berlin specific traditions and trains of thought on Muslim renewal (jadid). In the years to come, an incremental process of discovery and inclusion became the established pattern for Muslim cooperation, one moreover in which Tatars advanced as the leading force to keep the global dimension afloat. Although there were the inevitable quarrels and fallouts, it is remarkable to what lengths the different national groups would go time and time again to accommodate one another. Towards achieving that aim, establishing proportional representation was considered key but difficult. The Uzbek scholar Alimcan Idris (1887–1959) seems to have been the leading force behind that initiative,88 which a number of Muslim organizations supported. Its workings are best explained by looking at the proceedings of the Berlin branch of the Al mu’tamar al islamiya al ‘amn (General Islamic Congress), the weekly minutes of which detail how things were done.89 Taken over a period of eight months, from October 1932 to May 1933, the minutes show that, after ten years of experience with a transnational but continuously fluctuating Muslim community, a certain inclusive routine had been established. To set up the Berlin branch, six representatives of the Islamische Gemeinde Berlin and four from the Lahore-Ahmadiyya mosque organized a founding meeting, at which their first act was to appoint the Arab religious scholar Dr Said Ali Chodscha as an independent president.90 The group then reached out to renowned Tatar scholars who lived in exile in Berlin. It won over Dr Rahmati91 and Musa Carullah92 as acting theologians, asking them to draw up a list of rotating preachers for the Friday Khutbah (held in the Ahmadiyya 88 89 90 91 92 Initially a member of the Tatar National Committee and imam of the Muslim prisoner-ofwar camp near Berlin, Alimcan Idris worked for 35 years to anchor Muslim religious life in Germany. The congress took place in Jerusalem in 1931, after which branches were established in the main centres of the Muslim world. The publications of the congress are still housed in the mosque library of the Lahore-Ahmadiyya mosque at Briennerstrasse. The protocols were filed in the Berlin-Schöneberg registry office, VR 9 E 1.33. Dates not known. He was one of the rotating preachers in the Ahmadiyya mosque and published in the mosque journal. Gabdul-Rashit Rahmatulla (1900–64), linguist and specialist of Central Asia manuscript literature (Turfan). He was co-opted as a scholar in the Turfan Research of the Prussian Academy of Science. Musa Carullah Bigiev (1875–1949), who acquired the name of ‘the Islamic Luther’, translated the Quran into the Tatar language. He was considered a beacon of Muslim educational reform. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 42 Chapter 1 mosque).93 Because Tatars more than any of the other Muslim group excelled in reformist education, in the months following this settlement 13 more Tatars were co-opted and assigned responsibility for educating children and teaching converts.94 The group responsible for preparations for the Eid al-Adha festival, however, was again a carefully chosen international assortment of one Tatar, two Persians, two Arabs, one Indian and one German (the convert Hugo Marcus).95 Looking back on this odd transnational mix of religious scholars, linguists, diplomats, students, journalists and political entrepreneurs, in which Shi’ites peacefully rubbed shoulders with Sunni Muslims, one is impressed by their will to establish a durable Muslim infrastructure in the West. Their aim, or so I suggest, was not to fight Western hegemony but to create a place outside the empire, outside the reach of the conservative ulema, in which to launch the mission of Muslim reform; Europeans were invited to join them provided their presence furthered their aims. Seema Alavi’s discovery that transnational Muslim configurations consisted of much more than anti-Westernism validated this suggestion.96 However, whereas Alavi presents Mecca as the centre of Muslim renewal, Muslims in interwar Berlin embarked on an attempt to place the German capital on the Muslim map. The discussions that took place in the Ahmadiyya mosque on translating the Quran were an integral part of this venture.97 In the winter of 1924 and 1925, Ahmed Zeki Velidi Togan (1890–1970), a linguist and renowned expert on central Asian manuscripts, was on a tour of western European capitals and made a stopover in Berlin. During his stay there, both the Tatar and German scientific communities went out of their way to accommodate him. Alimcan Idris threw dinner parties at his home, where Togan met many students from Turkestan. He received invitations to speak at the Oriental Club, and leading German Orientalists, among them Eduard Sachau, Theodor Noldeke, F. W.K. Muller, Albert von Le Coq, and Gotlieb Weil, the director of the Staatsbibliothek (State Library) Oriental department, 93 94 95 96 97 Berlin-Schöneberg registry office, VR 9 E 1.33, protocols 1–3. Berlin-Schöneberg registry office, VR 9 E 1.33, protocols 6–9, 19. Berlin-Schöneberg registry office, VR 9 E 1.33, protocol, 13. Seema Alavi, Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). The following draws on a voluminous chapter called ‘Our Life in Berlin’ in Zeki Velidi Togan, Memoirs: National Existence and Cultural Struggles of Turkestan and Other Muslim Eastern Turks (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2012), 435–75. The memoirs were first published in Turkish (Hatirilar, Istanbul, 1967). Togan claims that they relied on the copious notes he took during his time in Berlin. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Crossroads 43 consulted him. However, as Togan claims in his memoir, his most important encounter was with Finnish Tatars from Helsinki who came to Berlin to discuss with him the details of their translation of the Quran into Finnish. In advance, the translator, Georg Pimonow, himself a Finnish convert to Islam who received financial and other assistance from the merchants Zinahtullah Ahsen and Imadeddin, prepared 57 questions on topics relating to his translation of the Quran for which he still sought answers. A working group formed in the Ahmadiyya mosque, in which the aforementioned Uzbek Alimcan Idris, the Tatar Dr Yakub Sinkevic,98 the Indian Sadruddin,99 and the Persian Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh100 were invited to assist Togan in this important task. When Togan suggested that the Finnish Tatars also invite Professor Noldeke, who after all ‘was in Berlin and alive’, their translator retorted, ‘I read the writings of Europeans, among them Noldeke and Goldziher; there is nothing I can learn from them. It is important for me to learn the ideas of Muslim Intellectuals’.101 The translators’ questions all targeted the historicity of the Quran. They were, as Togan phrased it, ‘of a Mu’tazili reasoning’, which is the rational tradition in Islamic theology that harked back to Greek philosophy and with which Togan declared himself to be on good terms,102 as to all appearances were the other scholars present. Soon after the Finnish encounter, Sadruddin began his own translation of the Quran into German. When it was finally published in 1939, a number of commentaries under the heading ‘foreign sources of Islam’, which basically addressed the historicity of the Quran, offended the Ahmadiyya community in Lahore.103 In the scholarly surroundings of Muslim Berlin, this scholar had felt free to investigate the subject. In Lahore, however, where conservative and liberal forces continued to grapple with one another, there was less space for such unencumbered scholarly enquiry.104 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 At the time of the Quran consultation, Dr Yakub Sinkevic (1884–1966), was head mufti of the Polish Tatars, a linguist and a Turfan specialist. Sadruddin (1880–1980), was an education teacher at Islamia College in Lahore before he migrated to Europe. At the time of the Quran consultation he headed the Ahmadiyya mosque in Berlin. Sayyed Hassan Taqizadeh (1878–1970), a Shi’ite scholar from Tabriz, during the First World War headed the Persian National Committee. At the time of the Quran consultation he engaged in knowledge transfer via Persian journals he published in Berlin. Togan, Memoirs, 469. Togan, Memoirs, 469, 471; cf. Alnoor Dhanani, The Physical Theory of Kalam: Atoms, Space, and Void in Basrian Mu‘tazili Cosmology (Leiden – New York – Köln: E.J. Brill, 1994). Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest, 205–6. Dietrich Reetz, Islam in the Public Sphere: Religious Groups in India, 1900–1947. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 44 Chapter 1 Having made the Quran available as a text to European audiences, one can safely conclude that the transnational Muslim community in Berlin, represented through its leading scholars, felt sufficiently confident to lift the art of Quranic interpretation to the level of modern historical scholarship, and that they did so without the assistance of the German specialists in town. Togan, for his part, was satisfied with the outcome. As he noted, ‘Pimonow’s translation was published in a good package by Zinahtullah Ahsen. According to those scholars who speak Finnish, it is one of the best Kur’an translations in Europe’.105 5 Echoes in Berlin Society Did any Muslim religious activities feature in Berlin’s daily papers? The answer is yes, but with reservations. Muslim public life was only visible to the German public gaze if it was glamorous or involved a scandal of some sort. The Foreign Office and building authority archives, plus Lisa Oettinger’s private possessions, contain substantial collections of paper clippings that report on such events. When, for instance, Mubarak Ali, the representative of the competing Ahmadiyya branch in Qadian in North India, who had been posted on a mission to Berlin, was preparing to lay the foundation stone of what was to be a representative mosque in the centre of Charlottenburg, the daily papers were clearly very interested. Journalists commented on Mubarak Ali’s personal appearance (‘elegant, modest, and sympathetic’) and on his affluent style (‘the renowned millionaire’). They described his far-reaching plans for what was going to be a centre for Muslim students, with libraries, study rooms and separate dormitories for Muslim women, with an attractive restaurant for the general public and, of course, the majestic mosque itself, replete with domes and minarets.106 The papers carefully noted that the Afghan and Turkish ambassadors, the German secretary of state, and several Berlin University professors had honoured the ceremony with their presence. Amid the unrest that held Germany in its grip, the capital was experiencing a rare global moment and, as the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung noted, ‘the exotic flair of Berlin is now in progress’. 105 106 Togan, Memoirs, 471. In its archives, the building authorities kept clippings from 7 and 8 August 1923 of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung; and of the 7 August 1923 of the Berliner Lokal­Anzeiger; Vos­ sische Zeitung; Berliner Tageblatt; Berliner Börsen­Commentar. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Crossroads 45 Unfortunately, Mubarak Ali had to postpone his building operations shortly thereafter because he lost all his capital in the crash and, within just a year, his mosque project had been consigned to history. However, in 1925, the press closely followed the erection of another mosque, that of the Ahmadiyya branch from Lahore, this time on garden land in Wilmersdorf. Once the dome of the mosque was visible, the Berlin daily papers regularly reported on the annual Muslim festivals that took place within its walls. From 1930, these festivals were also broadcast on the radio. The newspapers carried photographs of sheep being slaughtered in the mosque garden, of hundreds of shoes at the entrance to the mosque, and of an exuberant mosque community on its steps.107 Although little understood, the press relished any public quarrels among the Muslims. It so happened that the Egyptians strongly opposed the Ahmadiyya building venture, not because the Ahmadiyya community supported Muslim reform of a kind that had already received a good deal of criticism in India, but because they initially broadcasted their thoughts in English, a language that the Egyptians associated with the British oppressor. Accusing the Ahmadiyya of British sympathies, the Egyptians therefore craftily disrupted the foundation laying ceremonies and did not stop shouting until the police stepped in.108 However, what counted most among the Muslim community, its transnational character, the steady creation of religious infrastructures, and the translations of the Quran into European languages, were bypassed. At best, the media depicted Muslims as the bringers of international flair to the city, at worst as troublemakers who should best be sent home. At close range, the Muslim ‘friends’ were treated cursorily. Moreover, by the time the First World War had ended, any former fond memories of German–Turkish friendship had fallen into a black pit. There was, however, one exception. While still a city reporter tracking down curious or pitiable refugees, newcomers and other city dwellers, Joseph Roth also sought out the group of 5000 Ottoman subjects who remained in Berlin after the war had been lost. His sketch, ‘The Club of Poor Turks’, opens a window onto a world otherwise ignored by the German press: There are very many rich Turks in Berlin. They live in the western part of town. They visit the stock exchange between eleven and twelve in the morning and make a lot of money. Between eleven and twelve at night 107 108 Collection of clippings on the Lahore-Ahmadiyya mosque (1929–34) in the private archive of Lisa Oettinger. Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest, 79–80. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 46 Chapter 1 you can trace them to the liquor dens of West Berlin where they spout the Quran and get rid of their money again. Even more money is lost in the opium dens, where they study the comings and goings of the harem at their leisure. I know a Turk who came from Constantinople to Berlin especially to observe life in a harem. And he swore to me that Constantinople is not nearly as Turkish as Berlin.109 With his ethnographical descriptions of the Turks of west Berlin, Joseph Roth deftly captured the nightlife around Kurfürstendamm. He also traced the remnants of the skilled workers who had been sent to Germany some years previously to receive additional training. He assured his readers that, ‘sure, there are still Turkish craftsmen around’, but that: Those people are simply not Turks but Berliners. Because their stork knew nothing about architectural styles, they so happen to have been born behind the Aghia Sophia instead of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtni­ skirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church). These stray Berlin Turks marry German women, resole German shoes, and sing ‘the God who made the iron grow’, just like the Germans do. I personally know an Egyptian, Abdul Rahim Miligi, of the famous Miligi clan in Cairo, who is as dark as the darkness of his country and an orthodox Muslim, who leads a bourgeois and happy family life in Berlin with a pious, white Dutch woman, with whom he has blond, Lutheran children.110 Joseph Roth, the Jewish author who dedicated a large part of his life to describing the poor and dispossessed Jews of eastern Europe, found in ‘the Turks’ (the Ottoman Empire once stretched from the Black Sea to Egypt) a curious contradiction that set his imagination in motion. The Muslims he stumbled upon on Kurfürstendamm had adjusted to Berlin in ways that most eastern European Jews would never accept. The Turks, as Roth noted, had become Berliners. They looked, sang, spoke, and yes, lived exactly like their neighbours. Before the arrival of the Persians and Indians, even before the arrival of Russian Jews, the Ottomans identified with Berlin. 109 110 Joseph Roth, ‘Der Club der armen Turken’, Neue Berliner Zeitung, 30 June 1920. Reprinted in Joseph Roth, Das journalistische Werk Bd. 1, 1915–1923 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2009); and in Gert Mattenklott, Jüdisches Städtebild Berlin (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1997), 213–5. Translation by the author. Roth, ‘Der Club der armen Turken’. The Kaiser-Wilhelm Memorial Church stands on the boundary between Wilmersdorf and Charlottenburg, where it dominates the lower part of Kurfürstendamm. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Crossroads 6 47 On Being Neighbours It is time to ask what that peculiar notion of a Berliner really meant. What elements went into its construction? Why did Persians and Indians refer to themselves as such? Despite all its chaos, Berlin seems to have been a city in which people immediately felt at home. As Ilja Ehrenburg had noted, it functioned as a kind of Noah’s Ark in which people from very different backgrounds could coexist peacefully. Berlin had the capacity to transform people. It gobbled up foreigners and spat out a species of homo sapiens wishing for nothing more than to marry and settle down with a German woman. In due course, staff members of national committees, former inmates of disbanded Muslim prisoner-of-war camps, students and political activists were added to the artisans about whom Joseph Roth wrote in the Berlin daily newspapers. Even the religious leaders, of which better-known examples include Seyyid Hassan Taqizadeh, Schükry Bey, Abdul Sattar Khairi and Hazrat Pir Inayat Khan, shared the wish to intermarry. Indeed, a good proportion of the Muslim immigrant population seemed to be following a trend to settle down in German society by marrying into it. Wherever one looks, in registry files, memoirs and not least the private archives that form the basis of this book, the reader comes across Muslim men anchoring themselves through marriage and German (European) women eager to break conventions by marrying Muslim men. Love certainly played a part but, for the Germans, a desire for the exotic was an additional factor. Hugo Marcus, for whom women were not an option and homosexual relationships illusory at best, placed the concept of desire high on his list of philosophical explorations. His texts clearly spoke from the heart to a good part of the community (Chapter 5). In her path-breaking article, ‘Making the empire respectable’, Ann Stoler draws attention to the supremacy of the white male, which was widespread in the colonial world. Only white Western males, Stoler concludes, were entitled to dominate indigenous women sexually, or, as she put it, ‘sexuality illustrates the iconography of power’.111 In this colonial powerplay, indigenous males were considered sexually dangerous. Whether Indian or African, they were accused of ‘primitive’ sexual urges and ‘uncontrollable lust’.112 Approaching a white woman carried the risk of a public flogging. Although outside the colonies, in 111 112 Ann Stoler, ‘Making the empire respectable: the politics of race and sexual morality in 20th-century colonial cultures’, American Ethnologist, 16 (1989), 634–60, quotation on p. 635. Stoler, ‘Making the empire respectable’, 641. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 48 Chapter 1 London and Paris, flogging was not condoned, Muslim students from the colonies remained strictly segregated in those cities. Not so in Berlin. While Indians, Egyptians and North Africans may have been penalized for such behaviour in their home countries, in the German capital they were greeted with open arms. Intermarriage, which had nothing to do with German politics but derived from the Romantic ideals of the German middle classes, rose significantly after the First World War, from approximately 3.5 per cent in 1910 to 6.5 per cent in 1925.113 Although a number of different nationalities engaged in such marriages, there were certainly many Tatars, Indians and Egyptians among them. Intermarriage helped them to adjust to their foreign surroundings; it turned them, as Joseph Roth readily noted, into Berliners. Nonetheless, the issue of intermarriage split public opinion. Although Muslim–German marriage was an example of the extent to which German society was willing to accept the foreigners in its midst, German registrars did their utmost to prevent such marriages taking place. Match-making across boundaries was met with racist eugenic reservations, especially if Islam were involved, and registrars did everything in their power to prevent such marriages taking place.114 The Civil Registrar (Der Standesbeamte), depicted Muslims as members of a semi-civilized nation, and marrying them was deemed ‘highly undesirable’. German registrars even felt it their duty to warn ‘foolish German girls’ and save them from ‘an utterly gloomy future’. Miscegenation with Muslims, the journal repeated time and again, was ‘not in the interest of girls of white race and culture’.115 The registrars may have warned the couples, but they could not prevent them from marrying – and marry they did. A curious fact came to light at the beginning of the Second World War, when, faced with the British military authorities in Egypt having taken high Nazi officials into custody, the Germans registered the Egyptians in Germany with a view to selecting hostages to exchange.116 During the registration it came to light that every single one of the 400 Egyptians who remained in Germany had married a German woman. 113 114 115 116 Christoph Lorke, ‘(Un-)Ordnungen der Moderne: Grenzüberschreitende Paare und das deutsche Standesamtwesen in der Weimarer Republic’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte (2017), 259–97, n. 11; Christoph Lorke‚ ‘Challenging authorities through ‘undesired’ marriages: administrational logics of handling cross-border couples in Germany, 1880–1930’, Journal of Migration Studies, 4 (1), 2018, 54–78. Lorke, ‘Challenging authorities’. Lorke, ‘Challenging authorities’. Ägyptische Zivilgefangene in Deutschland (AA PA R 41.394 + 41.395); Deutsche Zivilinternierte in Ägypten (AA PA R 41.766). Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 49 Crossroads The lists that the Foreign Office, the Egyptian embassy, and the Gestapo respectively compiled contain all the familiar names associated with ‘Orient’ and ‘entertainment’ in the Weimar Republic – for instance, the ballet master from Kurfürstendamm Abdel Aziz Soliman and the jazz musician Abdel-Aziz Helmi-Hammad. Thanks to such records, Abdul Rahim Miligi, of whom Joseph Roth had painted a fleeting portrait, suddenly became a fully-fledged person with a very real family; his wife was called Gertrud and they had two children, Emil and Sadika. Much to the chagrin of the Nazi government, some of the wives applied for permission to leave Germany and ‘return home’, as the letter writers put it. Having been apolitical all their lives, they did not want to be drawn into it now. Other women argued that their husbands should be left alone because of their loyalty to the Nazis.117 However, whatever the couples’ political position, the moment of their visibility also became the moment in which cosmopolitan Muslim Berlin, with its many institutions and attempts at Muslim reform, with its lively panoply of entertainment and intellectual exchange, disappeared from the city for good. No structural moment of encounter between Tatars, Persians, Egyptians and their Jewish neighbours in Berlin could be discovered. That is to say, no Tatar, Persian, or Egyptian organizations, either religious or secular, were creating spaces into which to invite Jews. But many Jewish families had Muslim lodgers, neighbours ran into one another at the cobblers or carpenters. Young Jewish Berliners visited the jazz clubs and liquor dens, as did the Egyptians. As Joseph Roth’s story illustrates, it was not too difficult to meet. Jews and Muslims became friendly and some young people married across the religious divide. Under the extreme duress of the Jewish persecution, new friendships were formed and some Muslim Berliners helped to rescue Jewish Berliners from the Holocaust. In that respect, there is a clear indication that Persians, Afghans and Egyptians, although supporting the Nazi Regime, did not join the Nazi frenzy but kept their own standards of human behaviour. In the chapters ahead, the engagement of Muslim Indians with European Jews will be discussed in detail. This chapter may be concluded by mentioning the names of those Egyptians, Persians and Afghans who helped save Jewish lives. First, jazz musician Mostafa Sherbini, the owner of the Sherbini Bar, was married to Yvonne Solman, whom the Gestapo identified as a Jew, but because she held an Egyptian passport she was allowed to leave the country. Likewise, 117 Ägyptische Zivilgefangene in Deutschland (AA PA R 41.395), 40–3. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 50 Chapter 1 Jewish Liesbet Loszynski from Königsberg appeared to have a Palestinian passport, so she too was allowed to leave.118 In 1941, during a nightly air raid, Afghan diplomat Abdul Dowleh met Ursula Heidemann in a bomb shelter on the corner of Uhlandstrasse and Düsseldorferstrasse in Wilmersdorf. It was reportedly love at first sight and, although Ursula was Jewish and earmarked for deportation, the Afghan embassy obtained official approval for the couple to marry and, although remaining in Germany, they somehow survived.119 The year 1941 was also when Laura and Hosein met.120 Laura was on the verge of being deported and Hosein, an attaché in the Persian embassy was desperately keen to marry her. Since their initial encounter had taken place at a reception thrown by Mufti Al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader whom the Nazi government had entrusted with training Muslim army chaplains, they turned to the Mufti for help. Al-Husseini was the face of Muslim support in Nazi Berlin. Apart from his engagement with Muslim soldiers in German armies, he headed the Islamic Central Institute (Islamische Zentralinstitut), the organization the Nazis had set up as a platform from which to organize their Arab collaborators and Al-Husseini served as the Friday preacher in the mosque after the Ahmadi missionaries had left the country.121 More than any other Muslim, he was in a position to pull strings and so he did. The couple acquired official permission to conclude a Sharia marriage in the Ahmadiyya mosque and they eventually survived the war. Perhaps following their example, in 1943 jazz musician Abdul-Aziz HelmiHammad, owner of the Carlton Bar, secretly married Jewish Anna Boros at a night-time Muslim ceremony in the home of his good friend Dr Muhammad (Mod) Helmy, with Ahmed Muhamed Riad and Hamed Al-Safty, board members of the Islamic Central Institute, as their witnesses. By then, Anna had already gone into hiding, but was still working as a nurse in Mod Helmy’s 118 119 120 121 See in AA PA R 41.394. The story was discovered by descendants of the Heidemann family during research for a so-called Stolperstein (stumbling block), the little copper stone that is laid in front of Berlin houses in memory of the former Jewish inhabitants. Private communication by Volkhard Mosler (June 2017). A search in the restitution files accidently brought this couple to the surface. Private communication with Anja Reich, 18 February 2019. Because of ongoing research, their names were changed. Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest, 107–9. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Crossroads 51 medical practice. Although Nazi bureaucrats gave no credence to Sharia marriage certificates, with the help of her friends she too survived.122 Stretching out a helping hand to people in distress is a sign of good neighbourly relations and, in that respect, the Solimans played a pivotal role. Myriam Mahdi, the last survivor of the Soliman family in Berlin, remembered how her aunts Myriam, Hamida and Fadila, the owners of three cinemas in West Berlin, used to warn any Jews in the audience whenever they sighted the secret police nearby.123 These were the years in which young Jews in hiding spent their days in the cinema, a dangerous practice that the Soliman sisters went along with but that the Gestapo used to its own ends.124 There are letters of thanks in the Soliman archive testifying that the sisters helped to ensure the survival of William and Ruth Baum and of the Baron family. Rosa Tannenbaum, an old school friend of one of the sisters was, however, discovered and deported on 4 March 1943.125 It is noteworthy that the names quoted above surfaced by accident, either in the context of local acts of remembrance or as part of a privately nursed family memory. Perhaps more names will surface in the future. The relationships that Afghans, Egyptians, Persians had with Jews may have been accidental but they were no means unfriendly. It seems more relevant that the Jews and Muslims of this chapter recognized each other as Berliners, and engaged in the tumultuous city to a greater extent than their German neighbours. 122 123 124 125 This story accidentally came to light during through research undertaken by the medical doctor who inherited Helmy’s medical practice after he died. See Igal Avidan, Mod Helmy: Wie ein arabischer Arzt in Berlin Juden vor der Gestapo rettete (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2017); Ronen Steinke, Der Muslim und die Jüdin: Die Geschichte einer Rettung (Berlin: Piper, 2018). https://www.panama-verlag.de/shop/Produkt/welt-im-licht-kino-berlin/. Interview with Myriam Mahdi in Berlin (18 March 2016). Peter Wyden, Stella (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). Soliman Private Archive. With thanks to Martina Voigt of Gedenkstätte Stille Helden in Berlin for confirming Myriam Mahdi’s account with a search through the different sources. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access Chapter 2 The Spaces in Between Before launching into the case studies, this chapter endeavours to offer a review of Indian missions in Berlin. Towards this aim, it addresses state archives safeguarding information on Indians next to the memoirs and private archives of various individuals, asking what kind of knowledge the sources reveal. Once this archival topography is established, I examine the group photographs that the private archives revealed. Apart from giving faces to the people who appear in the book, the photographs also reveal details about their relationships and networks that the archivists cannot ‘see’. Originating from private albums once belonging to key actors in the Indian network, the photographs provide important clues to questions about negotiating space. To understand how the Indian missions established contact with one another, how communists, nationalists, religious activists and secular intellectuals reached out to local actors, how the Germans received them, what they discussed, and how transnational networks were consequently forged between India and Germany, it is important to offset the observations of the Foreign Office against the private papers of the actors concerned. Researchers have consulted the Foreign Office before on the topic of Indians in Berlin, but because their focus was mainly on ‘revolutionaries’, they failed to examine the files on the Indians’ religious activities. It is only when they were examined in relation to one another that the files disclose a fuller picture. Nonetheless, despite attempting to enlarge the canvas, blank spots of necessity remain. First, the Foreign Office ignored minor players like Inayat Khan’s Sufi Lodge and the Hindustan Association of Central Europe. Consequently, we lack an outside perspective of those two organizations. It did not help either that the Nazis destroyed the registry files of the Sufi Lodge and Indian Bureau. All that remains is a notice, added in 1946 to the file on the Sufi Lodge, that this organization was closed in 1933 because of its ‘international character’ and the many Jews in its ranks.1 The private and family archives give insider perspectives on the Indian Bureau, the Hindustan Association of Central Europe, and the Lahore-Ahmadiyya mosque respectively. Although no such archive surfaced from within the Islamische Gemeinde Berlin, we nonetheless have an inside view. This comes from 1 File of the Sufi Lodge of Inayat Khan, 95 VR 4635 (1925–1933). Registry Office BerlinCharlottenburg. © GERDIEN JONKER, ���� | doi:10.1163/97890044�1813_004 Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 53 The Spaces in Between two famous Jewish converts to Islam, Leopold Weiss (later Muhammad Asad), and Lev Nussimbaum (also known as Esad Bey or Kurban Said), who joined the Gemeinde in the 1920s. Leopold Weiss, a journalist, lived predominantly in the Middle East from where he sent articles on the Muslim world to the Islam Echo, the journal of the Gemeinde, but as far as we know, he never described the Gemeinde itself.2 However, Lev Nussimbaum did. Under the pseudonym of Kurban Said, he wrote a novel about an Ottoman princess who arrived in Berlin to study linguistics with the famous German Turcologist Willi Bang but in practice spent her days in the Muslim establishments around Kurfürstendamm.3 The princess meets the Khairi brothers who are sitting in a smoke filled den and plotting the Islamic world revolution. She enters the elegant Orient Club with its illustrious visitors, listens to jazz in the Orient restaurant, and visits the coffee house on Uhlandstrasse where the missionary Sadruddin is standing behind the counter. An intimate connoisseur of Muslims in Berlin, and highly sceptical of them at the time of writing, Lev Nussimbaum left us some rare portrayals of the Indian actors who will be introduced in this chapter. Viewed together, all these sources convey to us how the Indian missions in Berlin communicated and, through these, how the network as was wrought. The chapter forms a prelude to the case studies which continue to illustrate that (and why) Jews were among the missions’ most active members. 1 A Survey of Indian Missions in Weimar Berlin The Indians in Berlin during the interwar years left a broad paper trail, not least because the Germans kept a close watch on their activities. The German Foreign Office is a leading source. First, initial attention focused on the Indian insurgents who in the First World War made up part of the Indian National Committee, which the wartime German government funded and directed. During the war, with German support and with a view to revolutionizing the masses in India, the committee acquired the backing of 56 Hindustani (Hindu and Muslim) aristocrats.4 2 A narrative of their conversion to Islam can be found in Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest, 141–4; Reiss, The Orientalist; Günther Windhager, Leopold Weiss alias Muhammad Asad: Von Gali­ cien nach Arabien 1900–1927 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2002). 3 Kurban Said, The Girl from the Golden Horn (New York: Barnes & Nobel, 2001). Originally published as Das Mädchen vom Goldenen Horn (Vienna: Zinnen-Verlag, 1938). 4 Heike Liebau (2010) ‘“Unternehmungen und Aufwiegelungen”: Unabhängigkeitskomitee in den Akten des Politischen Archivs des Auswärtigen Amts (1914–1920)’, Archival Reflexicon. www.projekt-mida; Franziska Roy, Heike Liebau and Ravi Ahuja (eds) ‘When the War Began Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 54 Chapter 2 However, when left stranded in Berlin, most of these insurgents then turned to Moscow for a new political opportunity to continue serving the cause of the Indian people. The Russians co-opted M.N. Roy, a prominent committee member and the first to be accepted into the Russian Communist Party, and sent him to Tashkent where, in 1920, the Communist Party of India was founded.5 Other committee members, among them Moulvi Barakatullah, Muhammed Umar, the brothers Abdul Jabbar and Abdul Sattar Khairi, V. Chattopadhyaya and Tarachand Roy, travelled to Moscow in 1921 to see if and how the Russians could help them fulfil their aims.6 In the end, though, they remained in Berlin and took advantage of the fact that the city was outside the British Empire to launch their political activities. Second, the Foreign Office also kept close track of the transnational organizations that followed suit. In 1921, V. Chattopadhyaya set up the Indian Bureau as a transnational platform between India and Germany.7 Under his leadership, it provided a meeting place for other committee members, offered help to students arriving daily from India, commissioned translations and reached out to German industries in search of a foothold in India. When the Third International, the Soviet Union’s brainchild to bring other countries into the communist struggle, decided to move headquarters to Berlin, the Indian Bureau was incorporated into the city’s sprawling communist network.8 Third, diplomats kept a watch on the activities of Abdul Jabbar and Abdul Sattar Khairi, two members of the Indian National Committee who embraced pan-Islamism through setting up the Berlin Islamic Community (Islamische Gemeinde Berlin) in 1923.9 The place and time were well chosen for that. Not only from India but from every corner of the Muslim world, students flocked to Berlin. In fact, in the interwar period, Berlin became the main meeting place to prepare for independence outside the empire. Rallying for the organization during the Eid festival of 1923, Abdul Jabbar Khairi claimed to have gathered as many as 45 Muslim ‘nations’ under its roof, not to mention the German and other European Muslims. It was an important international moment, which, 5 6 7 8 9 We Heard of Several Kings’: South Asian Prisoners in World War i Germany (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2011), 106. Kris Manjapra, M.N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge, 2010). Nirode K. Barooah, Chatto: The Life and Times of an Indian anti­Imperialist in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). AA PA R 77.461 (1921–1926). AA PA R 31.707 (1922–1930); Barooah, Chatto. AA PA R 78.240 (1924–1928); R 85.281 (1926–1934); R 78.241 (1929–1931); R 78.242 (1932–1936); R 10.4801 (1936–1939). Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access The Spaces in Between 55 Khairi asserted, would not only raise awareness among the Indian masses but would also revolutionize the entire Muslim community across the globe.10 Fourth, when Ahmadiyya missionaries from Lahore arrived in Berlin in April 1923, diplomats opened a new file on the newcomers, which they labelled ‘Churches and Religious Communities: Islam’.11 This is to say that, since Ahmadiyya missionaries did not engage in any political activities, they were assigned to the ‘Church’ section. In his very first letter to the Foreign Office, Sadruddin came straight to the point by writing, ‘I have enough money with me for the erection of a mosque which I must quickly set up here, for the Muslims here have no church to attend’.12 German civil servants, for their part, were quick to establish that the Lahore-Ahmadiyya Movement, although a Muslim sect, seemed to be a peaceful organization that fitted in well with German intentions to create a harmonious, democratic society. Ahmadiyya, the reports said, had abolished jihad as war and instead laid emphasis on efforts to civilize oneself. When the Germans also discovered that Ahmadiyya missionaries told Muslims to obey existing governments, whether Muslim or otherwise, they found them an attractive plot on the outskirts of Berlin-Wilmersdorf on which to build. Soon, the dome of the first mosque that Berlin had ever witnessed appeared over the treetops of Fehrbelliner Platz. Six years after it had opened its doors, the missionaries founded a suborganization through which to express the intensive Muslim–German networking in which they engaged, namely the German–Muslim Society (Deutsch–Moslemische Gesellschaft).13 Fifth, one Indian organization to escape diplomatic scrutiny was the Hindustan Association of Central Europe (Verein der Inder in Zentraleuropa). Founded in 1923 by Zakir Husain, it offered an academic rather than a political forum. Seeing Hindus and Muslims as equal members of a future Indian state, it kept its distance from the high-flying missions of the other three such organizations. The association was mainly occupied with engaging in an intellectual encounter with German society and translating key concepts from one cultural tradition to the other.14 On arriving in Berlin, Zakir Husain made sure that Gandhi’s most recent speeches were translated into German and his friend Abid Hussain translated the literature on Germany’s latest pedagogical reforms into Urdu. Their mutual friend Gerda Philipsborn took those ideas to 10 11 12 13 14 Register Office VR B Rep. 042/Nr 26590 (1922–1955). AA PA R 77.456 (1923). Politik Indien 16/Kirchen und Religionsgemeinschaften: Islam. AA PA R 77.456 (5 March 1923). AA PA R 78.241 (1928–31); Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest, 63–76. Razak Khan, The German Connection: Actors, Institutions, Networks, and the Reformation of Modern South Asian Islam. Special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (cssaame), forthcoming 2021. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 56 Chapter 2 India where she set up a Waldorf kindergarten at the Jamia Millia Islamia university. Another feature of the Hindustan Association was that it sought a separation between religion and the nation, in this case the Indian nation. This did not mean that it turned its back on religion; on the contrary, its suborganization, the Association of Urdu Students assigned its Muslim members a private space in which to engage in Muslim festivals.15 Photographs of these gatherings betray its active role in getting Germans, Indians, Jews and Muslims around the same table. Sixth, and last, the other mission to remain under the radar was the Sufi Lodge, initiated in 1925 by the musical genius Inayat Khan (1882–1927), himself descended from a long line of Sufi masters in the Punjab and the founder of Universal Sufism. According to the scant evidence available in the registry office, the lodge recruited well-to-do Germans into its ranks who, after Khan’s death, appointed the Persian Hossein Kazemzadeh Iranschär (1884–1962), a revolutionary and a member of the Persian National Committee in Berlin during the First World War, as their Sufi master.16 When the Sufi Lodge closed down in 1933, both master and pupils joined the Ahmadiyya mosque. This then is the list of Indian missions in Berlin, as seen through the lens of the state archives and beyond. However, much more was going on behind the scenes. In June 1924, for instance, diplomats noted that the Indian Bureau had folded because of ‘lack of money’, which a letter from Chatto himself, stating that another Indian organization in Berlin-Halensee had taken over the work, corroborated.17 The previous year, British Intelligence discovered that a certain Hindustan Association had purchased a new clubhouse near Halensee and, on the Berlin Foreign Office’s recommendation, had given the lease to Chatto. British Intelligence also asked the Germans what measures they intended to take.18 For state security reasons, German diplomats kept their silence. After all, the British had barred German industry from India, a punishing measure that deeply hurt the German economy.19 The Indian Bureau, however, was forging a whole new web of relationships between Germans and Indians, one that pointed to a promising future together. There is still a footnote to this. In 1924, German Buddhists set up the Buddhist House in Berlin-Frohnau. There were already pre-existing ties with Theravada Buddhism in Ceylon and some German Buddhists had already travelled 15 16 17 18 19 Private Hamied archive, Mumbai, File D02015-11-01 (1925–1927), examples 34 and 50. Berlin-Charlottenburg registry office, 94 VR 4635. AA PA R 77.461 (10 June 1924). AA PA R 77.461 (25 August 1923). AA PA R 30.615 (1921–1926). Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access The Spaces in Between 57 to the island to set up their own Buddhist convent. The Ahmadiyya mosque and the Buddhist House were in regular communication.20 In the eyes of the Berlin public, the Buddhist House counted as yet another Indian mission. Until 1954, however, when the newly founded state of Sri Lanka set up the ‘Buddhist Mission to Germany’, it remained a purely German enterprise. 2 Experimenting with Indian Secularism With this archival material at hand, it becomes possible to enquire into the nature of the network that Indian intellectuals created in Berlin. For a start, they arrived in the city with a religious and cultural self-understanding in their luggage that differed from that of other Muslims. Having grown up in multireligious India around 1900, Indians were still familiar with the practice of pluralism that had once been what Dumont called ‘the cement of Mughal power’, and that continued to exist under British rule, although in ways that had become much more precarious.21 Drawing from that self-understanding, Indian intellectuals took great care to establish relations with a large range of groups. In the previous chapter, I explained how they merged with the transnational Muslim community, which was in the process of creating its own religious infrastructure. In this chapter, I shall show how the Indians cultivated ties among themselves – Muslims with Hindus, and Ahmadiyya missionaries with devout communists. As the case studies demonstrate, the Indians also wove a web of relations with Europeans. At this point in the text, it is noted that Muslim Indians in Berlin created spaces for encounters that differed from those of other Muslim organizations and explicitly drew in non-Muslims. Surely, Egyptians, Persians and Turks also brought their experiences of interreligious coexistence in their luggage,22 but the ways in which Indians reached out to Christians and Jews in Berlin was not always understood. Some 20 21 22 Bhikkhu Bhodi, Promoting Buddhism in Europe. www.BuddhaSasana (2000); Paul Dahlke, ‘Unser Haus’, in Paul Dahlke et al. (1926) Die Brockensammlung: Zeitschrift für ange­ wandten Buddhismus (Berlin-Frohnau: New Buddhist Publishing House), 4–6, 89–93; Hellmuth Hecker, Lebensbilder deutscher Buddhisten: Ein Bio­Bibliographisches Hand­ buch. Vol. i: Die Gründer (1990) and Vol. ii: Die Nachfolger (1992) (Konstanz: Universität Konstanz); Gerdien Jonker, ‘Das Archiv des Buddhistischen Hauses in Berlin-Frohnau’. Projekt-Mida.de/reflexicon (2019). It is interesting to note that Jewish interest in Budtdhism was considerable. See Sebastian Musch, Jewish Responses to Buddhism in German Culture, 1890–1940 (London: Routledge, forthcoming, 2019). Bigelow, Sharing the Sacred; Louis Dumont, ‘Nationalism and communalism’, in Louis Dumont, Religion, Politics and History in India (Paris: Mouton, 1970) 30–70. Albera and Couroucli, Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 58 Chapter 2 Muslims in Berlin even viewed Indian practices of inclusion with abhorrence. In 1924, for instance, the Egyptian political activist Mansur Rifat fumed against the Ahmadiyya missionaries with whom he shared the Berlin space. Scolding the founder of the Ahmadiyya movement for being ‘crazy’ and ‘paranoid’, Rifat thought he had proof that Ahmadis ‘now cunningly and sneakily shelter themselves under the most vicious and false accusations of the Moslems by appealing to the Christians and Jews’.23 The bone of contention, or so it seems, was the Ahmadiyya community’s declared loyalty to the British, a loyalty that Arabs, especially Egyptians, abhorred. In one of his many political pamphlets, Rifat noted that ‘Muslims connect the idea of bloody wars with the coming of Mahdi, as he shall kill all Christians and Jews and extend the religion of Islam with the sword and spare no one who shall not accept Islam’.24 By this, Rifat meant that the struggle for political independence would not halt in the face of violence and that the British better beware. England was the enemy, and Muslims who tried to puncture that image of the enemy were clearly suspect. In this contested field, the transnational Muslim community in Berlin often pitted political perceptions of the freedom struggle against the equally political practice of inclusion. As was explained in the previous chapter, it took all the mediation skills that some of the Muslim actors could muster to keep the community together. When considering the Indian missions in Berlin in their entirety – there were six plus two suborganizations – a different interpretation becomes possible. There were three Muslim missions (if one counts Mubarak Ali’s aborted attempt to build a mosque on behalf of Ahmadiyya-Qadiani, their number rises to four), two Hindu–Muslim political associations and one academic organization. Thus, operating with the language and symbols of politics, a portion of the Indian National Committee crew who remained in Berlin after the war, the revolutionary Indian Bureau, and the much more moderate Hindustan Association of Central Europe joined hands to create a shared secular space in which German and European communists collaborated with the Indians. Operating with the language and symbols of religion, by contrast, Jabbar Khairi’s pan-Islamist movement, which he lodged in the Berlin Islamic Community, the Lahore-Ahmadiyya mission, and the Sufi Lodge of Inayat Khan, 23 24 Mansur Rifat, Total Demoralisation of the Ahmadiyya Sect: Further Evidence in Regard to their Activities as British Agents and Menace to Islam (Pamphlet No. iii) (Berlin: Morgenund Abendland-Verlag, 1924) 1, 5. The complete collection of Rifat’s pamphlets can still be found in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. Rifat, Total Demoralisation, 5. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access The Spaces in Between 59 each created a shared religious space in which Germans and Europeans were heartily welcomed. In the religious milieu, the Indian activists and members of the German life reform movement shared knowledge and engaged in social exchanges. In the political milieu, Indian activism became fused with European communism. Notwithstanding their considerable differences, the two worlds interacted with each other at different levels. In hindsight, it seemed odd that communists should have cooperated with religious believers and vice versa. However, all Indians shared a common background and fields of social experience, which they brought to a new level through their perception of ‘Hindustan’ as a model for Indian secularism. The Indian perception of secularism is neither the separation of church and state nor the development of private forms of religion, as in Europe.25 Drawing on Ashis Nandi, Anna Bigelow described it as the ‘equality of distribution of state services to all religious communities and equal representation and respect in the public sphere’.26 Indian secularism, she holds, builds on the received knowledge that, for the last 500 years, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Jews and Muslims learned to maintain a religious equilibrium through creating shared religious spaces. Often starting from the tomb of a local Muslim saint, India’s inhabitants developed practices of pluralism, using storytelling, symbolic gestures, and local politics as their instruments. Bigelow outlines the creation of shared spaces as a process through which each religious group adds its own achievements and, through those, holds its own stakes. In that manner, shared spaces were able to grow into ‘key sites of the town’s moral past’, conveying to the inhabitants who they were and, consequently, how to navigate a shared future.27 In the 1920s, Indians were aware that shared spaces were delicate structures that needed the support of those in power. It is therefore conceivable that the Indians in Berlin adopted the idea of secular practices as a way of stabilizing and guiding India’s pluralism. Viewed from that angle, the behavioural practices they encountered and the spaces they created fused to offer a new airing 25 26 27 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993); Peter L. Berger (ed.) The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999); Grace Davie, Europe: The Exceptional Case. Parameters of Faith in the Modern World (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002). Bigelow, Sharing the Sacred, 5. Bigelow, Sharing the Sacred, 7. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 60 Chapter 2 of the old received wisdom that one should share one’s space with others, whoever those others might be.28 3 Glimpses from Private Archives A word about the difference between state and private archives is perhaps again appropriate. State archives reflect governmental and administrative views and interests. They store the stream of the day-to-day decisions that are made when civil servants administer the law. In effect, they constitute the country’s political memory. Whether through border controls, diplomatic observations, police actions or changes in a person’s civil status, individuals are captured in that memory whenever their actions coincide with the routine work of the state. Private archives, by contrast, arise from emotional bonds.29 During their lifetime, individuals amass birth certificates, school reports, diaries, letters, manuscripts, photograph albums, books with inscriptions and stacks of crumbling musical notes – things that pertain to particular stages of their lives and that convey their emotions. Most private archives deliberately emphasize the cherished occasions, leaving aside the less pleasing aspects of a person’s life. Often enough they include a random collection of things that had been stored away in cupboards or at the backs of drawers and had remained there for years on end. Once the owner dies, their continuation becomes fragile. Unless steps are taken to safeguard these memories, the objects in which they are embedded are usually thrown away. Of course, exceptions occur. When people grow into public figures, their private archives provide a basis for memoirs and biographies. Such was the case with Khwaja Abdul Hamied, who studied in Berlin in the 1920s. He moved in and out of the Hindustan and Urdu associations, the Indian Bureau and the Ahmadiyya mosque, only to return to India with a well stitched up Jewish 28 29 Many of the Ahmadiyya mosque’s early publications associate ‘democracy’ with every participant being allowed to have his or her say and being listened to. See Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest, 119–25. Later in his life, one visitor to the mosque, Khwaja Abdul Hamied, recaptured his thoughts on sharing space in several publications, including K.A. Hamied, What is Hindi? (Bombay: Alisons & Company, 1956); and Khwaja Abdul Hamied, A Life to Remember: An Autobiography (Bombay: Lalvani Press, 1972). Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access The Spaces in Between 61 network that changed both his career and his private life. Hamied’s memoirs explain how all that came to pass.30 The personal archives of some of the Indian and German students in Berlin at the time reveal that there were others among Hamied’s circle of friends whose recollections have attracted attention. Zakir Husain, who became the fifth president of independent India, has been honoured with several biographies.31 The life of Gerda Philipsborn, the German Jewish singer who befriended Zakir Husain and followed him to India, was lovingly portrayed after her untimely death.32 Indian ornithologist Salim Ali wrote an intriguing account of his career as India’s first bird man.33 Muhammad Asad described his journey from being the heir to a dynasty of rabbis in Galicia to becoming a Muslim scholar in Lahore.34 Barely a trace remains of the Ahmadiyya intellectuals Sadruddin and F.K. Khan Durrani,35 though Dr Sheikh Abdullah, the third imam in the Ahmadiyya mosque, is remembered in an impressive collection of obituaries.36 Writing was not the only medium through which to keep memories alive. Lisa Oettinger, one of the first female artists to enter the art academy in Berlin, launched headlong into a cosmopolitan lifestyle by marrying the assistant imam of the Ahmadiyya mosque, Azeez Ur-Rahman Mirza. Later in her life, she bequeathed two trunks full of annotated objects to her son explaining that he was heir not to one, but to two cultures – her own German Jewish heritage and his father’s Mughal one. What one sees time and time again in the photographs is that couples were marrying across religious divides, in this case the one between Muslims and Jews. The general German enthusiasm for such marriages has attracted little scholarly attention. Kris Manjapra mentions a number of mixed couples in 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 Khwaja Abdul Hamied, A Life to Remember: An Autobiography (Bombay: Lalvani Press, 1972). Ziaul Hassan Faruqui, Dr Zakir Hussain: Quest for Truth (New Delhi: S.B. Nangia, 1999); M. Mujeeb, Dr Zakir Husain: A Biography (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1972); A.G. Noorani, President Zakir Husain: A Quest for Excellence (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1967); Ali B. Sheikh, Zakir Husain: Life and Times (Delhi: Zakir Books, 1991). Anita Kashap, ‘Gerda Philipsborn: obituary’, The Jewish Advocate, Delhi, 1943. Reprinted in Gene Dannen, ‘A Physicist’s Lost Love: Leo Szilard and Gerda Philipsborn’. www.dannen .com/lostlove. 26 January 2015. Salim Ali, The Fall of a Sparrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Muhammad Asad, The Road to Mecca (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954). Jonker, Ahmadiyya Quest, 54–7. Mahmudah Abdullah, ‘My loving husband’, in Anon., ‘Obituary: Dr Abdullah Shaikh Muhammad’, The Light, 35 (special issue) 1956, 26 August, 6–7. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 62 Chapter 2 passing.37 In his outstanding work on interwar Paris, Michael Goebel records the number of French colonial marriages that took place in that city and noted that 5000 of the 60,000 North Africans living there entered into liaisons with French women, but that fewer than 700 actually married them.38 Both authors regard cross-cultural relationships as mere outlets for sex and love. Such things happen, they seem to imply, but do not really have much to do with global networking. In Germany, however, it was by no means a trivial phenomenon. Rather, marrying across cultural and religious divides seems to have been a stable feature of the kind of cosmopolitics in which Germans engaged. Especially among the bourgeois and fashionable classes in Germany and India, marrying outside one’s cultural and religious world was believed to be an enabling means of connecting ‘East and West’, perpetuating a network of familial relationships that outlasted the marriage partners’ lives. Ahmadiyya missionaries in Berlin catered to this trend by offering legal advice and preparing the necessary paperwork that allowed couples to enter the union.39 Of course, Indians and Germans, Hindus and Muslims, Christians and Jews constituted categories that could not be discarded, but by turning themselves into ‘citizens of the world’, as some of their gravestones remind us,40 the partners tried very hard to overcome them. 4 The Visual Archive Emilia Oettinger and her daughters Lisa and Susanna, Azeez Ur-Rahman Mirza, S.M. Abdullah, Khwaja Abdul Hamied, and Luba Derczanska are only some of those who engaged in the encounter between Jews and Muslims in the interwar period. We are familiar with their faces from photographs of the Ahmadiyya community, farewells at train stations, meetings with important visitors, private and public Eid festivals, student gatherings, lectures in the Ahmadiyya mosque, sports events and outings. Being the heyday of photography, hundreds of photographs to document events have made their way into dozens of photograph albums. 37 38 39 40 Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 97. Goebel, Anti­Imperial Metropolis, 91. The mosque archive in Berlin contained hundreds of documents on mixed marriages. As in Woking’s Muslim Burial Ground at Brookwood Cemetery, Woking (UK), among others. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access The Spaces in Between 63 Some of these photograph albums have resurfaced in recent years. I stumbled across six in the possession of Lisa Oettinger’s son41 and four more had survived in the mosque archive that seem to have belonged to Imam Abdullah and another was found among the possessions of Khwaja Abdul Hamied’s children. In all, 11 albums and several loose photographs came to light. The Oettinger and Abdullah albums contain snapshots of life in and around the Ahmadiyya mosque – they show community gatherings, Eid festivals, evening lectures, afternoon teas, garden parties, tennis matches, and eager guests congregating around food-laden tables. The viewer can see Indian men and German women who are obviously couples and, looking at their faces in the photographs, it soon becomes apparent that such couples sought out each other’s company: they form joyous little bands of friends whose stories await discovery. Likewise, the Hamied album provides snapshots of life in the Hindustan Association of Central Europe, with faces around the table at an Eid festival then reappearing in group photos marking some important event. When such albums come to light, they typically confront the viewer with an array of family members, friends and cherished acquaintances. The owners of the albums usually selected the photographs long after they had been taken, placed them in chronological order and inked in half-forgotten names on the side to keep the memory alive. The resultant gallery of personal highlights is an illustration of the owners’ narratives about themselves, their contemporaries and their circumstances. For us, who have no access to that memory, such albums merely function as a spotlight on an otherwise lost past, encircling significant moments of personal encounter and leaving everything else – homesickness, misery, enemies, foes – in the dark. Still, there remains a lot to see and a survey of the group photographs that are scattered among the pages drives home the obvious point, namely that many more actors were engaged in the network than those we know by name. At this point, I present a handful of these photographs for examination. I selected the first because most of the dramatis personae are listed on the side, thus providing an important means of identifying not only the people in the photograph, but also those in other photographs that I chose because they showed odd combinations of actors, albeit presumably not odd to the actors themselves. However, for us born later in time, depending on what the written sources tell us, seeing these faces side by side may come as a revelation. This is because the photographs prove not only that the Hindustan Association was in communication with both the Indian Bureau and the Lahore-Ahmadiyya community, but also that they show how the Ahmadiyya missionaries went about 41 Jonker, ‘Lisa’s things’, 279–310. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 64 Chapter 2 Figure 2.1 The Indian Bureau, c.1925 establishing their contacts and, once established, how far those networks reached. When Zakir Husain left Berlin in 1926 to join the Jamia Millia Islamia (National Islamic University) in Delhi, the Hindustan Association of Central Europe, of which he had been the founder, could not have helped but feel the void; at least, filing through Hamied’s private photograph collection gives that impression. The album, which depicts Hamied’s very own ‘Berlin’ moment, starts with pictures of his sea passage from Bombay to Trieste before moving on to his first room in Berlin, his first love, Luba, and his friends from the NonCooperation Movement days in Aligarh, Zakir Husain, Abid Hussain and Muhammad Mujeeb. We see him on boat tours, enjoying picnics and with his fellow students in the laboratory. In the early group of photographs Hamied is still one of many. It is only when Zakir Husain left Berlin and Tarachand Roy took over as president of the Hindustan Association of Central Europe that he gradually moved centre stage.42 In September 1926, Hamied took the initiative and, as he describes in his memoir, organized that year’s Eid festival, to which ‘I invited some important 42 The photograph album in the private Hamied archive has 34 pages and 117 photographs. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access The Spaces in Between 65 people and friends living in Berlin’.43 His memoir includes a photograph of that event, which shows a number of men and women, both Indian and European, sitting around a festive table. In his private album, however, this photograph is followed by the one printed above, which shows the same group of people, this time with their names recorded on the side (Figure 2.1).44 The text around the photograph reads as follows: Standing left to right: Mr Muhammed Umar, Mehdi Hasan, Mr Nambiar, ?, ?, Mr Chattopadhyaya, ?, ?, Professor Tarachand (Roy), ?, Mr Shahidi, Rauf Malik. Sitting left to right: ?, Dr Hamied, Fräulein Luba, Nizamuddin, ?, ?, Agnes Smedley the famous communist, Mrs Surasini, Mrs Shahidi, Mrs Jacob, Mrs P/Frada, Barkat Ali. With respect to his reference to ‘important people and friends’, we know that Nizamuddin and Shahidi were Hamied’s closest friends and that his fiancée Luba befriended the communist women Mrs Jacob and the P/Frada sisters Sonia and Dunia. We also know that Mr Shahidi had married a well-known convert who in the Lahore-Ahmadiyya mosque was known as Hildegard Rahel Scharf.45 This then was his circle of friends – Indian Muslim men and their non-Muslim European spouses – whom he invited to celebrate Eid (only Nizamuddin’s fiancée, Estusia Tenenbaum is missing from the picture). Hamied doubtlessly counted V. Chattopadhyaya as among these ‘important people’, describing him as ‘a brilliant man’ and ‘very well-known among the official circles in Berlin’.46 In the photograph, he is standing behind his lover Agnes Smedley and his sister Surasini. The latter married his closest ally, the journalist A.C.N. Nambiar who, after the war, became Indian ambassador in Bonn. As we know from the biographies of German communists who worked for Chatto, this quartet made up the inner core of the Indian Bureau, of which Chatto was the ‘soul’.47 Many Indians came and went, the biographers relate, but the paid officers were all European communists, men like Louis Gibarti 43 44 45 46 47 Khwaja Abdul Hamied, A Life to Remember: An Autobiography (Bombay: Lalvani Press, 1972), 55. Private Hamied archive, photograph album, 22–3. The question marks are his. Hildegard Scharf, Irma Gohl and Huda J. Schneider, ‘Drei Europäerinnen bekennen sich zum Islam’, Moslemische Revue, 1 (1931), 53–9. Hamied, A Life to Remember, 35. Margarete Buber-Neumann, Von Potsdam nach Moskau: Stationen eines Irrwegs (Cologne: Edition Hohenheim, 1981), 93–106; Babette Gross, Willy Münzenberg, eine politische Biog­ raphie (Frankfurt am Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1967), 197. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 66 Chapter 2 and Joseph Langyel, who in 1926 were already starting to prepare for the League against Imperialism, which was launched at the International Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism in Brussels in 1927.48 It is an educated guess that some of the European-looking faces against which there is a question mark are theirs. If this is correct, it would throw some light on the nature of Hamied’s relationship with the Indian Bureau. He seems to have been familiar with the ‘important people’, even jotting down that Agnes Smedley was ‘the famous communist’, but later in life he could no longer recall the names of the more ordinary supporters. The group photograph depicts the relationship between the Hindustan Association and the Indian Bureau at a specific moment in time, namely the first Eid festival after Zakir Husain left Germany. Hamied thought it appropriate to assemble ex-members of the Indian National Committee (M. Umar, Chatto, Tarachand Roy and Barakatullah), Indian students (Hasan, Shahidi, Malik and Nizamuddin), and European communists (Luba Derczanska, Agnes Smedley, Mrs Jacob, Sonia P/Frada, maybe also Louis Gibarti and Joseph Langyel) around the festival table. Question marks notwithstanding, it can be noted that around the table to celebrate the end of Ramadan is a mixed group of communists, their sympathizers, Hindus, Muslims, Indians, Europeans, men and women. Is there someone in the photograph whose presence attests to a link with the pan-Islamist brethren in the Berlin Islamic Community? According to the organization’s membership records, none of the people identified in the photograph had ever claimed to be a member.49 However, when, in June 1928, students in it challenged Abdul Jabbar Khairi’s authoritarian, non-transparent leadership, Abdul Rauf Malik and the Hamied couple (Hamied had recently married Luba Derczanska in the Ahmadiyya mosque) were among the signatories.50 The example makes clear that the Indian Muslim–German network stretched and overlapped in every direction, but that foes did not necessarily invite each other. Although no Ahmadiyya missionaries seem to have been invited, links to the Ahmadiyya mosque are easy to detect. An examination of the Moslemische Revue shows that, a year earlier, Khwaja Abdul Hamied, a well-versed Hafiz, had recited the Quran at the opening ceremony and that ‘Professor Barakatullah, the famous Indian scholar’ was among the distinguished speakers at the 48 49 50 Buber-Neumann, Von Potsdam nach Moskau, 102–7. Among the women collaborators she counted Agnes Smedley, Lucie Hecht and herself. Register Office, VR B Rep. 042/N. 26590, 59–64. Register Office Berlin-Charlottenburg, VR B Rep. 042/Nr. 26590, 30–47. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access The Spaces in Between 67 Figure 2.2 Ahmadiyya missionary Sadruddin at a meeting with the Indian Bureau, c.1926 mosque’s 1926 Eid reception.51 The following pictures show that, among those who responded to Hamied’s invitation, not only he and Barakatullah but also the Shahidi couple formed a bridge between the non-religious communists of the Indian Bureau and the religious intellectuals of this Muslim reform organization. The above photograph is also from the Hamied album (Figure 2.2). It was of poor quality to begin with and has deteriorated over time, but it is still possible to discern 12 Indian men in their winter coats, hats in hand, with no women present. The artificial grotto behind them suggests that they are in one of the princely gardens surrounding Berlin, a popular tourist attraction even today. Khwaja Abdul Hamied (note the little beard that in his memoir he claimed to have shaved off in December 1926) poses in the centre. To his left we see Sadruddin, easily recognizable by his turban, which in Berlin was the hallmark of the Ahmadiyya missionary. To his right stands Chatto, recognizable by the typical slant of his head and the moustache that would soon become highly fashionable in Germany. These three men make up the centre of the group and the accompanying inscription reads ‘Moulvi Sadruddin, Berlin 1926’, suggesting that the gathering was to mark the occasion of receiving the missionary into their midst.52 Why did Hamied include this photograph in his gallery of recollections? The composition of the group suggests that it was he who introduced the Hindu leader of the Indian Bureau to the Muslim missionary. From its position in the album, tucked between several group photos of Indians (Muslims and Hindus), we may assume that this was a moment of some importance. Although a chemist by profession and more interested in securing a position in a German 51 52 Moslemische Revue (1925/2) 1; Moslemische Revue (1926/2): 49. Hamied private archive, photograph album, p. 6. Winter 1925 seems to be a more likely date. Zakir Husain is absent, but still wearing a beard. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 68 Chapter 2 chemical plant than in the political in-fighting around him, Hamied was deeply interested in the German–Indian intellectual exchange and, like his friend Abid Hussain, attended Professor Spranger’s lectures. The lessons he learned there about the German educational environment shaped both his professional and personal life. He must have detected that Chatto and Sadruddin had views in common, namely a belief in international brotherhood and the future of an Indian nation-state steeped in socialism. In his biography of Chatto, Nirode Barooah is clear that, though acting within a Bolshevist framework steered by Moscow, Chatto was in effect a nationalist rather than a communist.53 Starting from a different place, Sadruddin wrote articles that explored the connection between internationalism and international religion. What humanity really needed, he stressed, was a common bond that would enable everyone to have the same rights, duties and options. For this Ahmadiyya intellectual, there was not a shadow of doubt that this bond should be Islam. Whereas Europe was still pursuing the petty and small-minded aim of nationalism, Islam offered a model of universal mankind that allowed for brotherhood, justice, equality and democracy.54 These were lofty ideas, but this was a time and place in which many lofty ideas permeated the public discourse. The Indians in Berlin searched in every direction for ideas and allies to help them overcome the East–West divide with a view to embarking on a future together. Chatto developed models for a socialist nation-state that India might adopt after the war, while Sadruddin sought to introduce religion into the intellectual debate, which he saw as a stepping stone towards an internationalism that would encompass Hindus and Muslims alike. We do not know what was said during that meeting, but it must have been important because, in the following years, the Indian Bureau and the Ahmadiyya community stabilized their relationship. Imam Khan Durrani, who in June 1926 came to replace Sadruddin, did not leave any private possessions from which to draw conclusions about his personal relationships with other Indians in Berlin,55 but he did, however, hand his address book over to his successor Abdullah. On his arrival in Berlin in June 1928, one of the first things this missionary organized was a get-together with Chatto. A snapshot commemorating 53 54 55 Barooah, Chatto, 157–77. Sadruddin, ‘Was hat der Islam der Menschheit gebracht?’ Moslemische Revue, 1, (1925) 2–11. www.durrani-dreams.com. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 69 The Spaces in Between Figure 2.3 Indian–German couples in the mosque garden, c.1929 the occasion survives in Abdullah’s private photograph album with a handwritten date, ‘6 July 1928’ (Figure 2.3).56 Abdullah stands third from the left, an amiable Chatto at his side. The two men are surrounded by no less than four mixed couples. We recognize Shahidi standing on the far right, while his wife Hildegard Scharf, the one with the white frizzy hair, sits in front of him. Nizamuddin is the young man in the middle with the flower in his pocket. His fiancée, Estusia Tenenbaum, sits on the far left with a flower between her lips. Standing behind her is a man who often appears in the mosque photographs of this period. He could be M.A. Faruqui, a dedicated Ahmadi who explored the intellectual currents flowing between Islam and communism in the mosque’s publications and who married a German woman.57 Until 1933, the couple attended every mosque event and came to the annual meetings of the German–Muslim Society. However, once the Nazis came to power, they left the country in a hurry, along with most other people who had openly sympathized with socialism or communism, and who had 56 57 Ahmadiyya Mosque archive, Berlin, photograph album, Abdullah. His main publications are still in the mosque library. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 70 Chapter 2 Figure 2.4 Eid al-Fitr at the mosque, 1929 expressed their ideas in the Weimar period.58 The album does not tell us why the group had gathered, but the venue (the mosque garden), everybody’s fine clothes and the flowers all point to a wedding ceremony. Whether or not that was the case, it is nonetheless worth noting that the occasion called for the presence of V. Chattopadhyaya. The last photograph to testify to the vibrant relationship between the Indian Bureau and the Ahmadiyya mosque was taken on the occasion of Eid 1929 (Figure 2.4).59 This time the venue is the mission house next to the mosque, featuring a table around which 14 people are assembled. It is only a wobbly shot, but we can discern Chatto sitting at the front of the table and facing Hugo Marcus, the imam’s right-hand man and the main theorist of European Islam. Sitting next to them are two, yet unidentified, Indians. Behind them, Lisa Oettinger looks at the camera. Two places down we notice her mother Emilia Oettinger next to Abdullah, the one with the blinking spectacles. The woman at the far end of the table is Frau A. Faruqui. A festive flower arrangement almost hides her 58 59 The names of the fourth couple, the thin man with the spectacles and the woman in the buttoned dress, still await identification. Ahmadiyya mosque archive, Berlin, photograph album Abdullah. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 71 The Spaces in Between husband from sight. In the middle of the table we still recognize Albert Seiler on the right, Susanna Oettinger, G. von Gutzkow and Werner Schubert on the left – all converts or enthused ‘friends of Islam’, whose faces are familiar from the pages of the mission journal. Incidentally, the choice of guests suggests that the participants are celebrating yet another event. One month earlier, Hugo Marcus, Emilia Oettinger, G. von Gutzkow and Werner Schubert had set up a board to help Abdullah found the German–Muslim Society, the convert organization to promote Ahmadiyya ideas in interwar Berlin. The Faruquis, the Oettinger daughters and Seiler had been present to approve the board.60 Who we perceive in the photograph then is the inner mosque community sitting around the Eid table. They have just agreed to shape a future in which Muslim and European traditions of intellectual exchange will be merged. Their tools are the reform of the self and the creation of a ‘New Man’, through which the ‘religion of the future’ will emerge. Again, any clue as to why they should invite Chatto is unavailable. All we can see is that he is sitting there, a comfortable smile on his face, witnessing the most significant moment in the history of the mosque. 5 Lucie Hecht’s Memories of the Indian Bureau First and foremost, the photographs reveal information about the Indians’ network in Berlin, which, if anything, was characterized by fuzzy borders and the deliberate interference of Europeans. Furthermore, the photographs clarify that Jewish men and women joined them and, as the case studies show, Lisa Oettinger, Hugo Marcus and Luba Derczanska made further inroads. Now is the time to look at Lucie Hecht’s involvement in the Indian Bureau. Glimpses of its inner workings, which Lucie shared with Horst Krüger in the 1960s, help fill in some of the remaining blanks. By placing Lucie Hecht in her personal network, a tentative portrait is offered here. Lucie Hecht(1898–1981) was the second child of a Jewish couple in PotsdamNowawes, a commuter town near the gates of Berlin. Her father Salo Ernst Hecht ran a medical practice for the poor, which enabled him to provide for his family and, at some point, even purchase a small villa. His wife Olga Löwenhain bore him three children. After the First World War, Lucie Hecht studied languages at Berlin University, but during the bank crash of 1923, she abandoned her studies to work as a short-hand typist to help support her family. By accident, she found a job in the Indian Bureau, about which she knew nothing. 60 Register Office Berlin-Charlottenburg, VR B Rep. 042/Nr 26590 (1922–1955), 1–10. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 72 Chapter 2 As soon as she entered the premises, however, she became deeply involved in the Indian independence struggle. In her letters to Horst Krüger, she claims to have dealt with the translation work, helped organize the first Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism in Brussels in 1927 and, after that event, became an ardent supporter of the League against Imperialism. Lucie was devoted to Chatto and stayed with him until the bureau was dissolved and he left for Moscow in 1932. Several sources claim that she had a romantic relationship with him.61 From her letters, it seems that she possessed a good measure of the romantic, revolutionizing zeal that Germans of the time reserved for Eastern peoples and their ideas. Full immersion in a movement that strove to rescue ‘oppressed peoples’ suited her admirably and to Krüger she wrote that she was ‘electrified’. The letters still show some of the breathlessness with which she was propelled forward, doing secretarial work during the day, taking Chatto’s dictation in the evening and translating deep into the night.62 Her description of ‘the silent, isolated house, framed by pillars under a vaulted roof, with tall stained-glass windows through which the daylight broke and scattered’63 perfectly captures the mood of the Indian Bureau in BerlinHalensee. In her letters, she refers to Chatto as ‘a magnetic personality’, ‘always on the road for India’s freedom’, and as its ‘soul’: Chatto, himself a Hindu of the Brahmin caste, possessed little of the passivity and shy gentleness of the other Hindus, whose daily life was limited by strict regulations of an ethical-religious nature. … He was actively ‘fierce’, always on the move, sparkling in his conviction, convincing because he lived, did, was, what he believed in.64 His vitality, Lucie Hecht writes, also attracted Muslim Indian students, ‘first dozens of them, then by the hundreds’.65 Among them was Zakir Husain, who later became the president of India: he was ‘an outstanding personality. He was 61 62 63 64 65 Barooah, Chatto, 214, 224; Price, The Lives of Agnes Smedley, 145, 451. Lucie Hecht’s private collection in the Horst Krüger papers, Box 33, 240–1, box 60, 433–3. Their correspondence was conducted between 1967 and 1968. It contains two letters from Krüger to Hecht, four letters (32 typed pages) from Hecht to Krüger, one letter from Hecht to Suhasini Chatto, a handful of photographs, and several documents. Letter written between 24 April and 16 May 1967, 3. Letter written between 24 April and 16 May 1967, 5. Letter written between 24 April and 16 May 1967, 5. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access The Spaces in Between 73 often in Halensee, arriving with that bold, lively step of the Mohammedans, towering above the tender, darker Hindu students with his fierce personality’.66 Her recollections of Zakir Husain and Chatto immersed in debate on the future of India summarizes her understanding of what stood at the core in Halensee: In this struggle, Chatto, the ‘warlike’ Hindu, and Zakir Husain, the ‘peaceful’ Muslim, found one other. When standing together on the platform, deep in discussion, the unity between Hindus and Muslims was achieved at the highest possible level. How often Chatto would place his hand on Husain’s shoulder as if he were knighting him or put his arm around him as if he were his son.67 To underline that dedication, she sent Krüger a photograph of Zakir Husain, taken in the Indian Bureau’s garden in Halensee in 1925. It depicts a young man in Indian dress behind a spinning wheel, which was the symbol of Gandhi and Hindutva. Her byline runs: ‘Zakir Husein – here behind the spinning wheel – as Gandhi’s most loyal and devout disciple. An inspired personality, kind and gentle, deeply interested, thoughtful and taciturn most of the time, but full of inner fire’ (Figure 2.5).68 The intensity of Lucie Hecht’s dedication to the Indian cause was something that the Indians could not wholly comprehend. Muhammad Mujeeb, for instance, painted a portrait of her that conveys something of the cultural distance with which he encountered the German engagement: Fraulein Hecht was a spinster of an uncertain age, but nearer forty than thirty. … For me it was an act of courage to look at her, and I do not remember having ever spoken to her. But she was so utterly dedicated that she thought all the time of what she could do for Dr Zakir Husain. She translated his thesis and typed it for him, apart from other miscellaneous work. This was all she could do, but for her it was obviously not enough.69 Mujeeb penned those lines in the official biography of Zakir Husain, India’s recently deceased president. Since the Zakir Husain Memorial Committee and 66 67 68 69 Letter written between 24 April and 16 May 1967, 5. Letter written between 24 April and 16 May 1967, 7. Letter written between 4 October 1967 and 3 February 1968. See Figure 2.5. Photograph in Horst Krüger papers, Box 33, 240–1. Mujeeb, Dr Zakir Husain, 38. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 74 Chapter 2 Figure 2.5 Zakir Husain behind the spinning wheel in Berlin-Halensee, c.1925 the minister of education commissioned him to write it, we may assume that his recollections were no mere slip of the tongue.70 His portrayal of Lucie Hecht may have been a standing joke among friends in Berlin, but putting it in the biography turned it into canonized knowledge. Mujeeb makes it acutely clear that Indian relationships with German women, whether Jewish or not, had their limits if the women’s involvement was at stake.71 Through her attachment to the Indian Bureau and her translation work, Lucie Hecht related to a wide circle of people. Her personal network included the Chatto siblings Virendranath, Suhasini, Mrinalini, Harin and Saroyino Naidu; the Hindu poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore; Muslim Indian students such as Zakir Husain, Abid Hussain, Muhammad Mujeeb, Khwaja Abdul Hamied, Ishaq Shahidi and Ahmad Nizamuddin; the Indian political activists A.C.N. Nambiar, Rauf Malik and Mehdi Hassan; and the communists Karl 70 71 Mujeeb, Dr Zakir Husain, Preface. Gerda Philipsborn’s dedication to Zakir Husain and the Millia Jamia Islamia in Delhi seems to have posed another riddle. See Mujeeb, Dr Zakir Husain, 36–9, 54–5. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access The Spaces in Between 75 Radek, Willi Münzenberg, Babette Gross and her sister Margarethe BuberNeumann, Agnes Smedley, Louis Gibarti and Professor Vladigerrow.72 Besides, she befriended the other Jewish women in the Indian Bureau, among them Luba Derczanska, Esther Tenenbaum, Sonia and Dunia P/Frada, and Gerda Philipsborn.73 The photographs in her collection make it plain that Lucie Hecht used to bring the Indians to her parents’ home in Potsdam. Salo and Olga threw tea parties for them to which they also invited their Jewish neighbours. Their own circle included the staff of the Einstein Tower, the observatory in the ‘Albert Einstein Science Park’ not far from where the Hechts lived. Lucie befriended its director Erwin Finlay Freundlich and his wife Käthe Hirschberg.74 In the evenings, or so she notes, she often went over to do translation work for them. Her best friends, however, were the Chatto siblings. As she wrote in a letter to Krüger, whenever she went to the observatory on business calls, she used to tow them along with her.75 When examining Luba Derczanska’s personal network in Chapter 6, we shall see that the two had many friends in common and that their personal networks partly overlapped. However, whereas Luba also befriended women from the mosque, Lucie Hecht’s contacts with Muslims remained limited to the Indian Bureau. She appears in the photograph with the three Jewish– Muslim couples at a New Year dance in 1925 (Chapter 6), but in the iftar and related mosque photos, she is nowhere to be seen. 6 Shared Goals To conclude this survey of the spaces in between, we must return once more to the web of contacts that was spun between the mosque and the Indian Bureau. What could a Muslim reform movement such as the Ahmadiyya offer to a Hindu nationalist like V. Chattopadhyaya that was valuable enough to sustain a relationship over many years? What tied the Indian Bureau to the mosque? The answer must be sought in the goals the two organizations held in common. 72 73 74 75 Their names and descriptions of them are scattered throughout her letters. Luba Derczanska’s correspondence in the Hamied private archive. In her letter to Suhasini Chatto, she gives details of her parents’ fate and that of their friends during the Nazi persecution. Letter dated 10 March 1967. Private collection of Lucie Hecht in the Horst Krüger papers. One memorable photograph in the collection shows the whole group in the back garden of the Hecht mansion. Chatto is sitting next to Lucie and his siblings are lying down at their feet. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 76 Chapter 2 There were basically three such goals. The first of these was student assistance. From the beginning, the Indian Bureau explicitly claimed that its raison d’être was to provide official papers, accommodation and an infrastructure for newly arriving Indian students.76 Roy even dourly suggested that Chatto could fix them up with doctoral degrees before they had even finished their studies.77 The circle in which the people in the Indian Bureau mixed consisted mainly of Indian students, students from eastern Europe and German communists. The Lahore-Ahmadiyya mission also made it its business to reach out to students. It sought out young Germans in search of self-realization for which it offered them that rare mixture of individual piety and intellectualism that touched a raw nerve in postwar Germany. Their rapidly growing circle included students, artists and the highly fashionable life reformers. These were Germans who engaged in remodelling their lives along the principle of ‘life reform’, a form of individualization for which they used their bodies as an experimental field, which covered food, clothing, sexuality, body building and religion. It offered a point of entry through which Ahmadiyya intellectuals could introduce their central conviction, born of generations of Mughal aristocrats, that whoever wished to change the world should start by working on their own self.78 The second goal was cross-cultural marriage. The Ahmadiyya mosque explicitly addressed what other Indian organizations practised, namely the cross-cultural relationships blossoming almost everywhere. The mosque’s imams, Sadruddin, Khan Durrani and Abdullah, each preached, lectured and wrote on gender relations and on the problems that cross-cultural relationships might bring. In fact, the mosque facilitated a large percentage of the cross-cultural marriages79 of couples who had met in either the Indian Bureau or the mosque. From the photographs, we know that Chatto’s presence was required at quite a number of them. The third and last goal was to do with visions of India’s future. A group of young people who looked optimistically into a future together drifted between the Ahmadiyya mosque and the Indian Bureau, but their reasons for doing so varied. The Indians had come to Berlin on a mission to convert the Germans to their way of thinking, and the Germans had allowed themselves to be attracted by it. In this push–pull between India and Germany, the Indian nationalists developed visions of India’s future; the Indian religious reformers envisaged a future in which the adherents of different religions would join hands; German 76 77 78 79 AA PA R 77.461 (29 December 1921). Barooah, Chatto, 176. Jonker, The Ahmadiyya Quest, 94–148. The Ahmadiyya mosque archive contains hundreds of marriage certificates. Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 77 The Spaces in Between bohemia contemplated ‘wisdom from the East’; German women wanted independence while supporting the Indian cause; and German Jews sought to transcend their borders. In this mixture, India’s future provided the screen onto which these people could project their very different dreams. For as long as none were realized, the boundaries between them would remain fuzzy. In the chapters that follow, those common goals will resurface time and again. Here is the place to say that their fearless approach aptly illustrates the place of Indians in the Muslim–Jewish entanglement. Approaching the subject of cross-cultural and cross-religious bonding, and addressing the ‘future man’ this would engender, Indians opened up an in between space for downto-earth, everyday practices, of which the web of relations between the mosque and the Indian Bureau was just one. ... In the interwar years, Berlin was a creative place to be. Until the Nazis came to power, the political future was still open for discussion and cross-cultural (emotional and intellectual) encounters bloomed. The unique approach of the Indian associations and organizations brought political activism, religious reform and secular practices into the equation without eroding intellectualism. The political and religious activism of the Indians forged connections between domains of knowledge and its transfer. The Lahore-Ahmadiyya mosque, in particular, provided South Asian Muslims with an intellectual space that paved the way for cross-cultural, even cross-religious, bonding. No wonder intellectuals like Chatto, who was neither a Muslim nor in any sense religious, but cared for Indians and the future of India, cherished the relationship. This chapter has provided an introduction to Indian networking in interwar Berlin by offering an overview of the available primary sources. Scholars on Indians in Berlin have long studied Foreign Office records, but have so far ignored the religious files. The private archives introduced fresh information ‘from below’ into the text. It has been my aim to link the two sources of information – public and private – to create a broader picture, one that addresses not only organizations and ideologies but also questions of who knew whom, how the network was wrought and how people located themselves within it. In drawing this picture, the available sources did not necessary converge at pre-given points. For example, the Foreign Office surveillance of Indian organizations was purely from the point of view of security. Several government departments collected reports merely to show that they complied with governmental rules and regulations. The private archives, however, were on a very different footing, for the information they supplied tended to be highly Gerdien Jonker - 978-90-04-42181-3 Downloaded from Brill.com12/07/2021 12:21:32PM via free access 78 Chapter 2 subjective. The differences between the perspectives of outsiders and insiders are much like beams of light that keep missing each other, and it was only through studying the photographs that the links between the organizations and actors could be established. Matching unknown faces to the names that appear in memoirs, on membership lists and in state archives is a daunting task. Nonetheless, it soon became apparent that state archives and p