Friedrich Schrader (b. November 19, 1865 Wolmirstedt, Prussia – d. August 28, 1922) was a
German philologist of oriental languages, orientalist, art historian, writer,
social democrat, translator and journalist.
He also used the pseudonym
Ischtiraki (Arabic/Ottoman for "the socialist"). He lived from 1891
until 1918 in Istanbul.
Studies in Magdeburg and
Halle (1865-1891)
Born in Wolmirstedt, Prussia,
Friedrich Schrader passed his Abitur at the Domgymnasium Magdeburg. After
studies of Oriental Languages and art history at the University of Halle he
wrote his Ph. D. thesis on a translation of the "Karmapradipa" (an
important Vedic sutra) into German. The work was done under the supervision of
Professor Richard Pischel, at that time the most eminent scholar on vedic
languages.
Teacher in Constantinople
(1891-1907)
In 1891 Schrader took a
position as a lecturer for German language and literature at Robert College in
Bebek, close to Constantinople, where he lived with his family on the campus.
Around 1900 he was "professeur" at a French-Armenian lycée in Pera,
the European quarter of Constantinople (today Istanbul-Beyoğlu). Starting from
the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, Schrader began to translate contemporary
Turkish literature and to write articles about it in German journals and
newspapers such as Das Literarische Echo and Frankfurter Zeitung.
Beginnings as a journalist
From 1900, Schrader worked as
a foreign correspondent for different German newspapers and journals. In the
same period he published several articles in the official newspaper of the
German SPD (Social Democratic Party), Vorwärts and in the theoretical journal
of the party, Die Neue Zeit. In the articles, which he published under the
pseudonym "Ischtiraki", he strongly criticized the official German
policy in the Ottoman Empire, especially the focus on exploitation of economic
and military-strategic interests while neglecting cultural exchange between the
two nations and not engaging in the development of a modern civil society in
the Ottoman Empire.
1907-1917 (Second
Constitutional Era)
The Russian Commercial
College in Baku, where Schrader taught from 1907 until 1908
From 1907 until 1908 Schrader
worked as a lecturer at the Russian Commercial College in Baku, and undertook
field studies in the Caucasus region. One of his research topics were the
Persian temples close to Baku located at natural gas sources, which are used
for ritual flames.
In 1908-1917 Schrader, after
the Ottoman revolution of 1908, returned to Constantinople and became, after
some failed attempts to found a bilingual Turkish-German newspaper with Young
Turkish friends (because the Turkish parts had to be printed with Arabic
letters, the production costs became too high [1] ), co-founder and deputy
Editor-in-chief for the bilingual (French-German) Constantinople-based daily
newspaper Osmanischer Lloyd (French title Lloyd Ottoman). The paper was
co-financed by the consortium running the Baghdad Railway project, the German
Foreign Office, and the Berlin-based Bleichröder Bank. Schrader's feuilleton
contributions about literature, arts, monuments and history of Constantinople
were re-printed in many leading German daily newspapers (Frankfurter Zeitung,
Kölnische Zeitung, Magdeburgische Zeitung), being collected in 1917 in the book
Konstantinopel in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart.
Starting from 1908, Schrader
lived with his second wife, who had Bulgarian Sephardic background and was
raised in the Anglican Orphanage for Jewish girls in Istanbul-Ortakoy (operated
by the London Jew's Society), and his three sons in an apartment in the Dogan
Apartmani in Beyoğlu.
In a letter to the
headquarters of the World Zionist Organisation in Berlin, Richard Lichtheim[2],
the WZO representative in Constantinople in 1913-17 wrote in November 1913:
"Dr Schrader is a
remarkable "Mensch", who might be useful for us. I visited him
privately yesterday, and want to report some details about the conversation
with him, since he is valuable for our political relations. Dr Schrader lives
in Constantinople since 20 years and has been since the foundation of
"Osmanischer Lloyd" the columnist of that paper. He claims that the
(German) embassy here (in Constantinople) as well as the German
"Auswärtiges Amt" (Foreign Office) were quite anti-semitic and didn't
have any understanding of the importance of the Jews in the Orient for the
German Cause (das Deutschtum).
(According to Schrader, )The
former ambassador Marschall von Bieberstein had this understanding, the current
ambassador von Wangenheim is an insignificant person, with whom also the German
businesspeople were not satisfied, since he didn't show any understanding for
their interests.
[...] Dr Schrader expressed
himself with great sharpness, and even if he is exaggerating because of some
personal causes ( he is very democratic and pro-Jewish, his wife is Spaniolic
and baptized as a small child ) his opinion is quite remarkable, since he
should especially know this question well regarding his position and his
experience. I will keep in touch with him."
— Richard Lichtheim an das Zionistische Aktionskommittee
in Berlin, 13.11.1913 [3]
In 1916 and 1917, when the
policy of the Young Turks regarding ethnic minorities became increasingly
evident, also tensions rose within the German community regarding the relation
to the Turkish leadership. A Swiss colleague at the newspaper and younger
mentee of Schrader, Max Rudolf Kaufmann, who shared Schrader's critical views
on the German Turkish alliance, was arrested by the Turkish authorities after
some of his letters home had been opened by Turkish intelligence, deported to
Ankara, and later sent back to Germany, where he however was hired by Eugen
Mittwoch for his Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient.
In 1917 Schrader himself was
fired from his post as deputy editor at the Osmanischer Lloyd. To get rid of
him, his opponents used an internal conflict with his editor-in-chief, Max
Übelhör. Because of Schrader's eminent network in Istanbul and his profound
knowledge, he was regarded however indispensable for the paper and continued to
work as a freelancer for them until November, 1918.
Schrader was a fierce critic
of the destruction of the multi-cultural Ottoman society and culture by
competing ethnic nationalist ideologies, largely promoted by European
intellectuals. He wrote in 1919
Also abroad, we must not, as
we have done so far, always stick to the party, which pursues the rape of
important cultural elements on behalf of its own national hegemony. This will
always take revenge, like it has taken revenge in Turkey. We should not have
been "more Turkish than the Turk".
— Friedrich Schrader, Flüchtlingsreise, 1919[4]
Expert for the protection of monuments in Istanbul (1917-1918)
After 1917, Schrader could
now focus on his historical and architectural interests. He published the book
"Konstantinopel in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart" in 1917 in Tübingen,
Germany. In parallel, he became a member of the Constantinople Municipal
Commission for the Registration and Listing of Islamic and Byzantine monuments
(which included the well-known Armenian photographer Hagop Iskender, at that
time owner of the photography company Sabah and Joaillier. With a team of
Turkish experts Schrader systematically catalogized monuments in the city
threatened by the impact of war activities. Using archeological investigations,
research, and interviews with locals, information about the monuments was
systematically gathered, while the monuments were photographed by Iskender.
Valuable artefacts were recovered and preserved in the Archeological Museum of
the city. The work remained unfinished since Schrader was forced to leave
Constantinople after the German-Ottoman capitulation in November 1918.
In 1919, Schrader published a
brief summary of the activities in a German journal,[5] the whereabouts of the
recorded and collected material is unknown.
Journalist in Berlin
(1919-1922)
In 1918-19 Schrader escaped
from internment by the Allies by ship to Odessa. He left his ill wife and a
male child in Constantinople. Since she was member of the Church of England
(see remarks above), she was protected from deportation by the Canon of the
Archbishop of Canterbury in Constantinople, Rev. Frew. His two older sons, who
were serving in the German-Turkish navy, were both demobilized to Germany. From
Odessa Friedrich travelled in a railroad freight car through the war-ravaged
Ukraine to Brest-Litovsk, where he reached the German front line. In his diary,
published in Germany in 1919, he described several dangerous situations in
connection with the various civil war factions, but also the very warm
reception and strong support the refugees receive by the local Jewish
population.
In Berlin, Schrader tried in
vain to obtain employment in academia or diplomacy. From 1919 to 1920 he worked
for the SPD-owned theoretical journal Die Neue Zeit, which had been the
internationally most important Socialist and Marxist publication since the
1880s. In several articles Schrader voiced his criticism of the failed German
Middle East policies before and during the First World War, especially in
relation with the support for the Young Turkish regime and its attitude towards
non-Muslim minorities. In an article published in 1920, Die Ägyptische Frage ("The
Egyptian Question"), Schrader warned about possibly fateful and negative
results of the Anglo-French colonial politics in the former Ottoman provinces
Egypt, Palestine and Syria after World War I.
Schrader spent the last two
years of his life in Berlin as freelance journalist, mainly writing for
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (DAZ), which was in the early years of the Weimar
Republic still a liberal centre-right publication supporting the consolidation
of Germany in the Weimar Republic (the foreign policy editor and later editor
in chief at that time was Paul Lensch, a former SPD politician and associate of
Parvus and Rosa Luxemburg).
Schrader died in August 1922
in Berlin, few weeks after DAZ had published his historic novel Im Banne von
Byzanz.
Works
Konstantinopel in
Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (1917) ("Constantinople - Past and
Present")
translated into Turkish and
re-published by Remzi Kitabevi in 2015: ISBN 978-975-14-1675-9 )
Eine Flüchtlingsreise durch
die Ukraine - Tagebuchblätter meiner Flucht aus Konstantinopel (1919) ("A
refugee voyage through Ukraine - diary of my flight from Constantinople")
Im Banne von Byzanz (1922,
novel, published in "Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung") ("Mesmerized
by Byzantium")
Selected journal articles
Neutürkisches Schrifttum: Das
Literarische Echo, Band 3, 1900, S. 1686-1690
Ischtiraki, 1900, Das
geistige Leben in der Türkei und das jetzige Regime: Die Neue Zeit, Jahrgang
18, Band 2, pp. 548–555
Ischtiraki, 1900, Vom
Goldenen Horn: Vorwärts, Unterhaltungsbeilage, 31. Mai 1900 – 1. Juni 1900
Die Kunstdenkmäler
Konstantinopels: Der Neue Orient, 1919, Band 5, S. 302-304 und 352-354
Politisches Leben in der
Türkei: Die Neue Zeit, 1919, Jahrgang 37, Band 2, pp. 460–466
Das Handwerk bei den
Osmanli-Türken: Die Neue Zeit, 1919, Jahrgang 38, Band 1, pp. 163–168
Die Lage der ackerbauenden
Klasse in der Türkei: Die Neue Zeit, 1920, Jahrgang 38, Band 1, pp. 317–319
Das Jungtürkische Lausanner
Programm: Die Neue Zeit, 1920, Jahrgang 38, Band 2, pp. 6–11, 31-35
Die ägyptische Frage: Die
Neue Zeit, 1920, Jahrgang 38, Band 2, pp. 172 – 177
Sources
Ceyda Nurtsch, 2018, One of
Turkey's Germans: qantara.de, 22. June 2018,
Link
Martin Hartmann, 1910,
Unpolitische Briefe aus der Türkei: Leipzig, Verlag Rudolf Haupt
Otto Flake, 1914, Aus
Konstantinopel: Neue Rundschau, 15. Jg., Bd. 2, S. 1666 - 1687 (reprinted in:
Das Logbuch, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt, 1917
Max Rudolf Kaufmann, Eine
literarische Entdeckung - Schraders „Konstantinopel“: Mitteilungen der
Deutsch-Türkischen Gesellschaft, Heft 17, 1957, S. 13-14 ISSN 0415-5289
Çelik Gülersoy,
Bibliographie: „Istanbul“ de Friedrich Schrader: Touring Et Automobile Club de
Turquie: Janvier 1959, pp. 31–32
N.N., Nachruf auf Dr.
Friedrich Schrader, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 30. August 1922
And, Metin, Mesrutiyet
Döneminde - Türk Tiyatrosu 1908-1923: Türkiye Is Bankasi Kültür Yayinlari -
108, Ankara, 1971 (in Turkish language, mentions a memorial event staged by
Schrader in 1909 in Istanbul on the occasion of the 150th death anniversary of
Friedrich Schiller)
One of Turkey's Germans
The orientalist and journalist Friedrich Schrader was one of the
first and most active cultural mediators between Germany and Turkey. Today, the
founder of the "Osmanischer Lloyd[*]" has been largely forgotten. By
Ceyda Nurtsch
Constantinople, 19th November 1918:
fat-bellied ships move through the cold fog that lies over the Bosphorus. Their
Union Jacks make it abundantly clear to the world that "the sick man of
the Bosphorus" has been vanquished, along with his allies, the German
Empire and Austria-Hungary. The new masters of the mouldering Ottoman empire
are England, France and Italy.
The population of Constantinople, as
Europeans still called Istanbul in the 19th century, had come out into the
streets to celebrate Turkeyʹs entry into the war, euphoric and
waving brightly-coloured flags. But for many of them war and defeat ultimately
meant only suffering, displacement, expulsion and even annihilation. It also
meant the first death of Constantinopleʹs unusual cosmopolitan society
and the legendarily vibrant quarter of Pera.
The end of the war also brought a
fateful change for the many thousands of Germans who had made their home in the
colourful mix of nationalities on the banks of the Bosphorus. When the
victorious British feared that Germany might exert its influence there, they
ordered the expatsʹ deportation. The Germans were forced to leave their
"Kospoli", as some of them affectionately called their new home city.
It was the end of the first chapter of the German presence on the Bosphorus.
Schrader, the
"Turkeideutscher"
One of these
"Turkeideutschen" (Turkey Germans), as they called themselves, was
the Orientalist and journalist Friedrich Schrader. Born in 1865 in
Sachsen-Anhalt, he studied philology, oriental studies and art history before
taking a doctorate in Indology.
He moved to Istanbul in 1892 to teach
German language and literature at the American Robert College. There, he lived
in Bebek, at the time a neighbourhood with hardly any development on the
European side of the Bosphorus, with his first wife, Pauline and his son,
Wolfgang. After Paulineʹs death in 1902, she was buried in the Protestant cemetery in
Ferikoy and Schrader married Fannitsa, a Bulgarian Jew by birth.
During his Istanbul years, Schrader
penned notes that we can read today as personal contemporary documents,
suffused with their authorʹs kind-hearted nature. This is how he
described the mood in the German expat community after the war, in his book Eine
Fluchtlingsreise durch die Ukraine (A refugeeʹs journey through
the Ukraine), published in 1919, in which he tells of his spectacular flight
from Istanbul to Berlin:
"And so the armistice came
and in the agreement, the 19th article read: ʹAll German
and Austro-Hungarian subjects are to be evacuated within one month. [...]ʹ And however
wildly the mood then wavered between fear and hope, it became ever clearer that
the Entente would not draw back from their demand that German and
Austro-Hungarian subjects be deported."
But prior to this, Schraderʹs network
included not only influential Germans like Paul Lange, the royal director of
music at the Ottoman court, but Istanbulʹs cultural elite. Acquainted
with writers and poets like Tevfik Fikret, he translated their work into
German.
The last years of the Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire, founded in 1299,
collapsed in November 1922, when the last sultan, Mehmed VI, was sent into
exile. The First World War had been a disaster for the empire, with British and
allied forces capturing Baghdad, Damascus and Jerusalem. A new government, the
Turkish Grand National Assembly, was set up in 1920 in Ankara, which then
became the Turkish capital. Constantinople, formerly the imperial capital, was
renamed Istanbul in 1930. By Dave Burke
A window on everyday life in Istanbul
After spending a year away in Baku
with his son Wolfgang, he returned to Istanbul and in 1908 founded the French
and German daily newspaper Osmanischer Lloyd. The paper was aimed
at the German-speaking expat community and the economically-dominant francophone
Levantine audience in multilingual Istanbul, as Schraderʹs son
Wolfgang recalled in notes written in 1979:
"In autumn 1908, having
returned to NEW TURKEY, Father took over the German daily newspaper of the same
name – NEUE TURKEI – or as this paper was called thereafter: OSMANISCHER
LLOYD, and ʹLloyd Ottomanʹ for the
French part, since alongside Turkish, French had become the language in
Constantinopleʹs Pera quarter."
In his feature articles, Schrader
described everyday life, for example, the "little boys and girls who,
under the supervision of the good hodja, are inducted into the mysteries of the
ʹElif Beʹ."
Today, his collected articles are available digitally in the volume Konstantinopel
im Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Constantinople past and present)
and have also been translated into Turkish. But Friedrich Schrader was
also politically active. He was in touch with the political elite of the Young
Turks, whom he essentially supported, but whose policy on minorities he also
clearly criticised, along with the attitude of Germany, for – among other
things – failing to encourage sufficient cultural exchange.
A "friend to the Turks"
Friedrich Schraderʹs
descriptions, which he went on writing until his death in Berlin in 1922, rank
alongside Istanbul tales by other Europeans, such as Lady Montagu in the 18th
century, or Pierre Loti in the 19th. And yet they stand out for their
captivating style, their realism and their authorʹs great depth
of knowledge. Friedrich Schrader, described by the Turkish media as a
"friend to the Turks," cannot be accused of describing an Orient that
never existed, as the Turkish writer Nazım Hikmet said of Pierre Loti.
These days, Jochen Schrader looks
after his great-grandfather Friedrich and his grandfather Wolfgangʹs estates of
books, notebook jottings and photos. "Like a lot of older people, my
grandfather would tell the same stories again and again, and at the time we
simply werenʹt interested enough to ask questions," he says. Now Jochen
Schrader gives lectures about his familyʹs history, including topics
such as his grandfatherʹs part in the Battle of Gallipoli.
While in recent years discussion of
refugee deals, arms exports and the imprisonment of Germans in Turkey have
placed a strain on German-Turkish relations, Schraderʹs articles
shed light on a lesser-known aspect of the two countries and – particularly in
light of the wave of academics, artists and journalists emigrating to Germany
from Turkey since the attempted coup in 2016 – recall an almost forgotten
chapter in the history of German migration.
Ceyda Nurtsch
© Qantara.de 2018
Translated from the German by Ruth
Martin
[*] Ottoman Lloyd
The Osmanischer Lloyd | Ottoman Lloyd
(French Lloyd Ottoman) was a daily newspaper in Ottoman Constantinople which
was founded after the Young Turk Revolution in 1908 and existed until 1918.
The daily newspaper was part of the
German influence policy on the Ottomans and conceptually managed by the News
Agency for the Orient (NfO). It was published in German and French.
The newspaper had several
editors-in-chief:
November 1908 to March 1914: E. M.
Grünwald, he left the editorial office after unsolvable disputes with the
ambassador Baron Hans von Wangenheim, who had been in office since 1912
April 1914 to mid-November 1915: Karl
Müller-Poyritz
mid-November 1915 to May 1916:
Schwedler
June 1916 to August 1917: Max Übelhör
[**]who had a legal dispute with Friedrich Schrader
September 1917 to September 1918:
Silbermann
September to November 30, 1918:
Wilhelm Feldmann (publicist, foreign correspondent)
The first edition appeared on
November 18, 1908, the last on October 7, 1918.
[**] Max Übelhör (b. August 27, 1881
in Constance, d. May 10, 1963 in Oberkirch (Baden)) was a German journalist and
writer. Übelhör was editor-in-chief of the Istanbul newspaper “Ottoman Lloyd”
from 1916 to 1917 and became known as a satirist and writer in the 1920s,
partly using the pseudonym Max Oxentott.
Übelhör grew up in Constance, from
1886 in Thann in Alsace and in Mannheim as the child of a higher postal
official. He graduated from high school in Mannheim in 1900 and then went to
Geneva and Paris, where he studied history and economics. In 1908 he did his
doctorate in Zurich on the local press. He then became a private tutor for
Prince Hans von Pleß at Pleß Castle in Upper Silesia. Schloss Pleß served from
April 1915 to February 1916 as the large headquarters of the German General
Staff.
After military service (he
volunteered and lost an eye on the western front), he became editor-in-chief of
the Constantinople daily Ottoman Lloyd, probably in 1916, probably due to his
good relationships in "the highest circles" by the Pleß family. At
that time, the German position in Constantinople, which was still strongly
multi-ethnic at the time, had become more difficult due to the increasing
involvement of Germany in the crimes of the nationalist young Turkish regime.
As a journalist and editor (in contrast to his predecessor EM Grunwald, who was
the deputy editor-in-chief of the Vossische Zeitung), who was completely
inexperienced and had no idea of the complex situation on the
ground, very quickly came into conflict with the German embassy in
Constantinople ( Wangenheim had just died and had been replaced by the Catholic
and therefore stronger sympathy for the Metternich who was persecuted by the
Turkish persecuted Christians) as well as with his deputy Dr. Friedrich
Schrader (who had taught at Robert College in the United States and at a
Francophone Armenian lyceum and was married to a Bulgarian Jew). After a
delegation trip to Beirut, the consul general there complained to the Federal
Foreign Office about evil hearing, who had made an article derogatory and
insulting to sexist about Francophone Christian "Levantines". The
dispute with Dr. Schrader escalated when he testified against an Armenian
woman, Madame Nishanian, against him before the consular court. Since the
newspaper was a semi-official propaganda body financed by the Federal Foreign
Office and the investors in the Baghdad Railway, there were fears in Berlin
that Germany's reputation in the Ottoman Empire would be affected by this
affair. Therefore, in the summer of 1917, Übelhör was released on the
instructions of the Foreign Minister and returned to Germany. [1]
In the 1920s, Übelhör lived in
Constance, where he founded the satirical magazine Skorpion in 1923 and also
worked for the Simplicissimus from 1924. During this time he wrote several
satirical novels. In 1925 he moved to Le Blanc Mesnil near Paris, where he
wrote crime, espionage and adventure novels. In 1939 he was expelled from Paris
and married a wealthy childhood friend in Constance.
From 1943, Übelhör lived in
Oberkirch, where he worked as a translator for the French military government
after 1945 and died in 1963. He corresponded with Arno Schmidt, who wanted to
reissue some of his works. [2] His memories of life remained unfinished, the
material was largely destroyed after his death. A rest of the estate can be
found today in the Oberkirch Local History Museum.
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