Thesis | Ernst Jäckh and the Search for German Cultural Hegemony in the Ottoman Empire

Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm Jaeckh (b.1875 in Urach , d. 1959 in New York City ) was a journalist , managing director of the Deutsche Werkbund, journalist and professor at the German University of Politics in Berlin, the New Commonwealth Institute in London and Columbia University in New York City . Was known mainly for Jaeckh its commitment to a liberal parliamentary democracy in Germany after 1918 and for his propagandistic support of the Young Turk Revolution in German media.

See also: his book on Ottoman Turkey Der aufsteigende Halbmond. 1909, Politik als Wissenschaft. 1930 and Der goldene Pflug. Lebensernte eines Weltbürgers. Stuttgart 1954

Mavi Boncuk |

Ernst Jäckh and the Search for German Cultural Hegemony in the Ottoman Empire
Griffin, George William, III
Degree Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, German/History (dual), 2009.
Abstract
This thesis assesses German involvement in the Ottoman Empire through the role of the German cultural impresario Ernst Jäckh, who worked as an academic and publicist in Germany, Turkey, Great Britain, and the United States, and became the central figure in promoting a strategic German-Turkish alliance in the years before the First World War. A confidant of Friedrich Naumann, the champion of German soft power imperialism in Central Europe, Jäckh advocated the using “Peaceful Imperialism” to build cultural bonds between Germans and Turks through intercultural exchange, building a modern infrastructure and education system, and reorganizing the military. This would give Germany a needed ally in the region without the burdens of direct colonial rule. The thesis draws on monographs and Jäckh's extensive published and unpublished papers to provide a general history of German involvement in the Ottoman Empire. It further addresses German “Peaceful Imperialism,” German involvement in the Armenian genocide, and the role of German liberals during the Wilhelmine era. Jäckh and other liberal figures involved in Wilhelmine “Peaceful Imperialism” supported German nationalism even though many would later support a democratic Germany. Moreover, “Peaceful Imperialism” anticipated the soft power nation building of great powers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The question of German culpability in the Armenian genocide remains inconclusive. Some Germans supported or ignored the liquidation of the Armenians while others opposed it and were sympathetic to the Armenians. There is, however, a link between völkisch ideas and genocide in Germany and Turkey. Long before National Socialism, cultural and political elites could not imagine peaceful co-existence of ethnic groups in one polity, envisioning future wars in which one nation vanquishes another. While German involvement in the Ottoman Empire was only one possible source of the idea of a mono-ethnic Turkish state (realized after the empire's demise), the Armenian genocide involved some tactics that the Germans had used against indigenous peoples in Southwest Africa.

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