Johannes Lepsius, Oriental Missionary: Approaching a German Protestant Biography of the Belle Epoque
Presentation at the international conference “Johannes Lepsius and Dealing with the Armenian Genocide” on 26/27 November 2010 at the House of Brandenburg-Prussian History in Potsdam.
Wide arches of history are often only visible in retrospect. Some contemporaries of the 1910s felt and wrote that it would take generations to adequately look back on their period of upheaval in the European and Middle Eastern Old World. However, the generation of that time, including Johannes Lepsius, had to act and raise their voice in the present moment.
We were born around a century later and, not least, in a relatively calm Germany, to reflect on the experience of the original disaster at that time, about ways into it and how to deal with it, including that of Lepsius.
An original actor, contemporary witness and contemporary historian, Lepsius also included religion and the Middle East in his time horizon more than was usual in historical and social science at that time. If he was still alive today as a Methuselah, he would have reason to be amazed that at least one of the big questions that had bothered him, namely the German one, has found a constructive answer step by step after another catastrophe and in doing so preserves a holy terror over his own final crash. He did not experience this anymore and did not anticipate it. But you may also be amazed that his heartfelt concern, the Armenians in Turkey, has once again become an issue after the interwar period, which left so much in aporia, had buried it.
As a first stage of my presentation, I would like to take up Lepsius's threefold self-image as a German, Protestant and Oriental missionary of the Belle Epoque in order to relate it to what we could call a former Protestant international — an informal network of missionary institutions, people and discourses. The second stop is supposed to be a kind of clip of his high expectation of a peaceful synthesis of Protestant Orient Mission and German Oriental Policy on the eve of World War I; third station finally, just briefly, the World War and the period after that, when two of Lepsius's historical coordinates, Wilhelmine Germany and the previous Protestant International, were omitted.
The aim of this brief rapprochement is to set a framework that does justice to Lepsius, his interconnectedness and his last decade of life marked by aporia — and, last but not least, allows us to approach 2015 in a witty way.
1.
First stop. Because “too detached from life,” and out of “hunger for God,” as he wrote, the young doctor of philosophy turned to the parish profession and in 1884 he held a first position as an assistant preacher for the German-speaking community in Jerusalem. His father Karl Richard Lepsius, died in the same year, was an Egyptologist and pioneer of a scientific approach to the Orient, which included expeditions and field research.
With Jerusalem, Johannes Lepsius got to know a city that reflected religious heritage in its cityscape and its inhabitants like no other. This included the Armenians and their cathedral, which is almost one and a half millennia old. From then on, the threatened future of the Ottoman world and its Christians drove him away and he could no longer separate himself from his self-image as a Christian. In Jerusalem, he also came into contact with the English-speaking missionary world, which included local organizations that were committed to the mission of Jews. Your modern Protestant slogan Restoration of the Jews postulated a Jewish return to Palestine, a turn to the historic and future Christ, and the reestablishment of an Israel of Jews.
At the same time, Lepsius took on the challenge of operating an Orient Mission. That was his name for a Protestant mission in the mostly Islamic Middle East. The search for a Christian-Muslim bridge occupied him throughout his life — although he had in mind not a conversion but a kind of Islamic reform and conversion to early sources of Islam. Initially, this was nothing more than a type of Jewish Christianity for pagans.
In Jerusalem, he married the missionary daughter Margarethe Zeller and got to know people from Switzerland and their networks, among other things. Basel, where he later stayed frequently, was a continental European hub of the Protestant International, also for the connection to Ottoman Palestine, and a hub of Christian and, from the end of the 19th century, also Jewish Zionists, where Theodor Herzl brought political Zionism to the public and to diplomacy at a first and at subsequent congresses. Margarete Zeller's grandfather was Samuel Gobat from the Bernese Jura, trained in Basel, who served as bishop of the strange Prussian-British diocese of Jerusalem for four decades. It became extinct shortly after Gobat's death, three years before Lepsius arrived.
The most experienced missionary actors in the late Ottoman world, particularly in Asia Minor, came from the USA. In the early 19th century, they were inspired by the idea of Restoration, worldwide evangelization and the construction of a global modern millennium with particular roots in the Bible lands. A comparatively liberal Ottoman reform period in the second third of the 19th century gave them plenty of room for pragmatic action, despite bold eschatology. This included many projects, in cities and in the countryside, in the areas of education, health, orphan, widow and disabled care, job creation, linguistics and journalism. The Ottoman Armenians became their main clientele.
Ten years after Lepsius's stay in Jerusalem, this ethnic group in Asia Minor became victims of major massacres. The anger, however, was also directed at the Americans themselves; they were a spearhead of subversive Western Protestantism and a thorn in the side of the actors of an Islamism founded by Sultan Abdulhamid at the time. For the same actors — there has only recently been university research on this — Armenians were regarded as beneficiaries of the Ottoman reforms and, since the Berlin Congress of 1878, as disloyal minions of European great power politics. As it were, the start of the general massacres was the Ottoman signature of a reform plan in accordance with Article 61 of the Berlin Treaty.
After returning from Jerusalem, Lepsius had found a parish in Friesdorf. The bang at the end of 1895, in the middle of the Belle Époque, coincided with his matured willingness to found his own Orient Mission. Situationally, it now began as an Armenian aid organization and became part of the German member of a transnational humanitarian movement for the victims of the massacres. American missionaries have also been leaders in this movement from the start. They also became mentors for the new German-language organizations in Asia Minor — according to Corinna Shattuck for Lepsius in Urfa, the future center of his Orient Mission. In addition to the will to provide emergency aid to the Armenians, both were united by an understanding of the Bible that took the concept and message of the Kingdom of God (on earth) seriously, during a “dualist-spiritist worldview of Orthodoxy and modern theology,” according to Lepsius, “the message of the Kingdom of God had to remain foolishness.”
As a makeshift, we can see Lepsius as a neo-pietist inspired by the Protestant International and its Middle East mission and label liberal Lutheran Christians. In network history, the modern missionary Protestant International was a development of the early modern Huguenot International; in utopia history, we could perhaps go so far as to describe it as the older brother of the continental European Socialist International, which translated a class struggle and secular movement leading to a proletarian world revolution and a classless society.
While socialism in the Empire of 1871 was in a more crippling than fertile tension with Church and Christianity, culturalist and racial competition began to overshadow transnational Protestantism since the late 19th century — both reasons for the fact that there was considerable solidarity in Germany after the massacres of 1895, but only late, and in contrast to Switzerland, not to a cross-party and religious movement Close ranks for victims. Many advocates of secular progress, left and right, argued in Germany anti-church, often subliminally anti-Christian, and also increasingly geostrategically, relying on German world power against Russia and Great Britain.
Germs of human solidarity with Armenian victims that were important for the development of human rights were stifled with geostrategic or geo-revolutionary arguments — something in the case of the right-wing journalist Hans Barth, the liberal pastor Friedrich Naumann or, a little later, the socialist Parvus-Helphand; but also in the church leaders themselves, which largely submitted themselves to an authoritarian logic of friendship with the sultan. In his extensive new book, Axel Meissner shows this very nicely with regard to Martin Rade's fight alongside Lepsius — a fight for solidarity with the victims and for open reporting.
In the hour of Armenian need, Lepsius hoped for the best from Germany in 1896; he called on “Christian Germany” to admit this in his locally researched indictment to the major powers. As a minority German member of a predominantly Calvinist and Anglo-American International, he hoped and insisted on the German contribution — and sometimes paid tribute to the spirit of the times. It was “the spirit of Luther and Calvin” that “let the Germanic peoples win over the Roman world” and, according to Lepsius in 1902, “caused the Protestant empires of Germany, England and America to dominate the world at present.” Such and similar hasty historical compressions longed for confirmation of German world recognition on equal footing with England and the USA. In this context, concepts such as world, culture, Christianity and Germanism — including in the following sentence from Lepsius's same speech from 1902: “If there is ever [...] a Christian world culture worth bearing the name of the Kingdom of God — which nation should first and foremost be the instrument of God for this? The philosopher of history Houston Steward Chamberlain gave the Germanic peoples this prediction that they were called to bring Christianity to rule in the world first — and there is a name that seems to vouch for the right of this prediction: Martin Luther. ”
Lepsius's reconnection to time-critical forces in and outside Germany brought him back to more fertile ground and to raisonnements beyond what was quoted, which can be attributed to National Protestantism anchored in the Second Empire and its wrong ways. In the case of Chamberlain, the Jewish-Christian friend from Basel Johannes Heman raised the news in Lepsius's theological journal The Kingdom of Christ resolute objection.
Conclusion of our first stage: Situational, networked speech and action for people in need, including thorough and accurate investigative journalism, was Lepsius's strength. It was here that his gifts, his dedication and the sources of his inspiration came into their own — and not in world-wide commentaries, forecasts and programs or in systematic theology.
2nd
The second stop of my presentation is a great moment in European diplomacy and the climax of the Belle Epoque:
The Armenian question, the crux of the Oriental question at the time, seemed close to a solid and pragmatic solution in 1913/14, together with the realisation of the decades-old, diverse dream of a new Orient co-designed by Germany. Apart from the affected Armenians, hardly anyone was more excited than the Orient Missionary Lepsius. Contrary to the logic of the prevailing alliances, Germany and Russia jointly committed themselves in 1913 to a reform plan that would fulfill the promise of the Berlin Congress and correct the European failure of 1895. “The Armenian question is decidedly at a crossroads today,” Ambassador Wangenheim wrote to Reich Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg on February 24, 1913, demanding a fundamental course correction. According to Wangenheim, the Armenians' legitimate concerns must be taken seriously; “the German press must give up its previous negative stance against everything Armenian.” “We in Germany” have “become accustomed to seeing in the periodically recurring Armenian massacres only a natural reaction to the aspiration system of Armenian businessmen” and called “the Armenians the Jews of the Orient.” In future, “Armenians must get to know the German authorities [primarily the consuls] as impartial but also really effective protectors in an emergency,” says Wangenheim. He also sent a historical analysis of the Armenian question to Berlin, which made the official statements of the past two decades a summary.
A remarkable self-criticism and a noble new task at a high political level broke ground — even if within the framework of a clear interest policy in combination with the Baghdad Railway. In contrast to the railway structures of the other powers limited to coastal areas, the Baghdad Railway in fact had sustainable economic development potential for the entire region. Following Germany's “Armenian turn” in Eastern politics, the comparatively well-trained, linguistically savvy Armenians would have assumed the role of privileged but not exclusive employees. “None of the Turkish article writers conceal themselves,” says Wangenheim in a discussion with negative Turkish press, “that if the Eastern Anatolian reform program is applied impartially and literally, the Ottoman fist must succumb to the Armenian head. ”
From 1913, Lepsius was a representative of a German-Armenian committee which, like the committees in other European countries, supported diplomatic efforts. Together with the representative of the British Committee, Garabed Thoumajan, he came to the Foreign Office for talks in January 1913 — a cooperation that was unthinkable just before and especially in the 1890s. It was crowned in the first half of 1914 with the Russian-Ottoman conclusion of the Reform Treaty and the founding of a German-Turkish and a German-Armenian Society. The latter presided over Lepsius. As late as July 1914, he stated with satisfaction that in Germany “the general judgment concerning the Armenian people had fundamentally [positively] changed.” A unique favor of the hour, a Kairos, it seemed: German Orient Mission and German Oriental Policy henceforth together and internationally well connected as a leading factor in the prosperous future of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia. And at the center of this vision on the ground: an Ottoman rule of law in Asia Minor, particularly in its eastern part. Since the middle of the 19th century, prominent Ottoman-Armenian reform forces worked towards this goal more actively than others, as there was no alternative for them.
Triggered by the assassination attempt in Sarajevo, the July crisis of 1914 combined the diplomatic risks and cracks of the Belle Époque in one fell swoop. And in the hour of crisis, it became apparent how unprincipled the new German Oriental policy was. At the end of July, Kaiser Wilhelm gave in hastily and contrary to the previous reluctance of German diplomacy to the Young Turk application for a German-Ottoman military alliance. The dictatorial one-party regime of the Young Turks was on shaky feet, even internationally, after it had expelled around 150,000 Christians from the Aegean coast to Greece in May-June and thus acted completely contrary to the perspective of the reform plan. But it had a comparatively easy game with German diplomacy; because, unlike Russian diplomacy, which also proposed it at the time, Germany did not insist on the reform plan. On the contrary, geo-strategically fixated on the war against Russia declared on August 1, the Young Turks allowed the Armenians to shift the northeast border to the Caucasian Muslims, which was dangerous for Armenians.
For the Austrian military attaché in the Ottoman capital, General Pomiankowski, decisive anti-Armenian dice were cast at the time. In contrast to individual American missionaries, Lepsius did not give out an early warning call — although Germany was about to lose its oriental political soul, which, in Lepsius's logic, had combined itself with the Armenian future. Like almost the entire German intelligentsia, he was dazzled in August by what Manfred Gailus called a national and in particular national Protestant pseudo-Pentecost experience. This made it clear how uncritically he had previously viewed imperialism, cultural pride and the social Darwinism of German elites. In August 1914, he equated the victory of German weapons with that of the Gospel and the breakthrough to world peace — an apocalypse that was irrevocably short.
All of this needs to be said and partly explored. However, Lepsius's reorientation soon after is particularly exciting and valuable for a search for clues to paths beyond the collective crash site.
3rd
And with that, a few words about Lepsius's life period from 1915.
Seen from an external perspective, it took a long time for him to notice the cancellation of his Orient vision in its most elementary form, the beginning physical destruction of the Armenians, who would have been important players in the vision. Just in time, in the first half of April 1915, a senior Ottoman official, Governor Jelal in Aleppo, had warned German diplomacy of the general Armenian hostility that was spreading among his Young Turkic party colleagues. The German diplomat did not act on this; on the contrary, she allowed herself to be exploited again at the end of May and approved so-called war-related resettlements. — These diplomatic files are documents of German weakness at the same time as misguided calculations of power, as Rade employee Ewald Stier, read from Meissner, has already discovered.
The previous year's own Oriental policy was definitely betrayed. But it was only six weeks later, at the beginning of July, that Wangenheim admitted to himself and the Reich Chancellor that the ally was doing nothing but the physical extermination of the Armenians. At that time, none of this got through to the German Armenian friends. And the reports in the Swiss press and the Entente's warning declaration as early as May seem to have passed Lepsius by without a trace. It was only when he was invited to the Federal Foreign Office at the beginning of June and presented with a telegram from Wangenheim, which spoke of the resettlement of Armenians, that alarm bells rang for him.
Now, as in the mid-1890s, he suddenly saw the fate of the Ottoman Armenians as an hour of truth in European diplomacy, Germany and Christian solidarity. Now, more than ever, he mobilized his own resources and those of his network, including American ones. In autumn 1915, under a different name, the humanitarian Near East Relief was founded by the Protestant International. Some employees from Lepsius's Orient Mission in and from Urfa worked for his Armenian and, temporarily, Kurdish aid.
His research trip to Istanbul in the summer of 1915 resulted in his “Report on the Situation of the Armenian People in Turkey,” which has remained a seminal document to this day. From the summer of 1915 onward, Lepsius stood up tirelessly and undaunted against those numerous voices in Germany from right and left who described the extermination of a people such as the Armenians, “particularly Entente-friendly,” as logical, even useful, and denounced a speech of humanity and Christian solidarity that called for material help as out of place in the World War, even harmful to their own war effort. In fighting on behalf of victims who were systematically deprived of their lives, their property and their ultimate symbolic dignity, Lepsius was able to do his best. It was journalistic work that shaped the last decade of his life. For him, the connection with the Armenians was a concrete lifeline, without which he would have become entangled much more into historical, political or theological abstractions.
His reasoning became difficult and ambivalent when abstract general terms caught up with him from the Wilhelmine Belle Epoque frustrated during the World War, e.g. word combinations beginning with “world-”. At this point, too, Lepsius can use research in an innovative, critical and educational way from a European-Turkish perspective. Nothing excited him as much as “the world lie about the moral indifference of German Christianity to the annihilation of the Armenian people and the complicity of the German Government in the deportations and massacres.” There was no doubt that there were propaganda distortions or overstatements. Lepsius, however, linked the question of guilt and responsibility for the genocide with the question of war guilt in an unnecessarily close way. Internally, Christian circles and Lepsius acknowledged German complicity in relation to the Armenians as well. However, they did not bring this to the outside world and onto a political surface. This forbade the myth of war innocence prevailing in the Weimar Republic.
In the “World Lie,” however, there was a spark of truth, which also shed light on the German question itself that Germany had hastily pushed aside its own principles in 1914 and suddenly lost a fine, decisive part of its soul in 1915 — which could be searched for and found again in much laborious, lengthy work.