ROBERT FISK’S WORLD: THE GERMAN LAWRENCE OF ARABIA HAD MUCH TO LIVE UP TO – AND FAILED
Independent
Saturday, 7 November 2009
UK
The victors write the history, so Frobenius’s adventures are today
virtually unknown
His name was Captain Leo Frobenius and he was the German Lawrence
of Arabia, tasked to start an Arab Muslim insurgency against British
rule in Sudan and Egypt. Colonel Lawrence’s mission, of course, was
to persuade the Arabs of the Gulf to rebel against the German-allied
Turkish army of the Ottoman empire. There were a few differences. A
colonel Lawrence may have been; a captain Frobenius was not. His
military rank was a fraud. And unlike Lawrence, the secret Frobenius
mission in 1915 was a hopeless failure.
So come with me this Saturday morning – with the help of a brilliant
Catalan scholar called Rocío Da Riva – with the German Lawrence,
an archaeologist (like Lawrence), cultural historian, traveller and
adventurer (again like Lawrence) regarded by some as a genius and a
leading expert on Africa, by others as a charlatan guilty of abject
behaviour (yet again, like Lawrence). But he ended up back in Germany,
denounced to Chancellor Bethman-Hollweg as a "tactless" political
agent and a liar, stirring up trouble among Germans, Arabs and Turks
in equal measure because he did "not understand the Oriental way of
thinking". Unlike Lawrence.
The victors write the history, of course, so Frobenius’s adventures
are today virtually unknown. Already an explorer in pre-1914 Congo,
Mali, Burkino Faso, Togo, Morocco, Algeria (twice), Tunis, northern
Cameroon and Sudan, Frobenius of Arabia’s mission in 1915 was to make
his way across Ottoman Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Arabia
via still neutral Italian Eritrea to Ethiopia where the marooned
German legation in Addis Ababa had no radio or even postal contact
with the Reich. Frobenius was to take "mail" (the official version)
to the legation while in fact encouraging the Ethiopians to invade
Sudan, organise uprisings by the Mahdiya partisans against Britain
and challenge the British position in Suez.
He and his expedition – Germans, Turks, an interpreter and eventually
11 Palestinian Arabs, most of whom would be mysteriously put on rations
as "gardeners" from Jaffa – travelled across Turkey on those bits of
the Berlin-Baghdad railway already completed, the rest of the way by
camel through the great passes of the Taurus and Cilician mountains,
the road then being "improved by thousands of Armenians, who had been
drafted into the Ottoman army for this purpose…".
These, of course, were the remnants of the Ottoman army’s Armenian
soldiers, already disarmed in preparation for their slaughter by
Turkish forces in the 1915 genocide. Through Aleppo, Hama and Homs,
our heroic spies chuffed through Lebanon’s Bekaa valley by narrow-gauge
railway.
>From Damascus, Frobenius adopted the name of Abdul Karim Pasha, now
dressed like the rest of his amateur agents in Arab costume. They
took the Hejaz railway – soon to be destroyed by Lawrence – to al-Ula
where they travelled by camel to al-Wajh on the Red Sea. Then came
the tricky bit: they had to cross the Red Sea for Massawa and dodge
the British and French naval patrols all the way.
Spies had already tipped off the Brits that the Germans were coming;
first to stop their boat was the English Empress of Russia, followed
by the French cruiser Desaix whose captain failed to spot Frobenius
and his men because the crew was selling them picture postcards.
According to a later despatch from the British ambassador to Rome,
Frobenius and company "concealed themselves in a corner of the hold,
used, apparently, for the same purpose as the ‘Sanitary Tank’ in a
more civilised vessel, having reached this unromantic hiding place
through a hole, the uses of which it is difficult to describe in
polite language…". Through a crack in their shithole, the Germans
even took a photo of the Desaix which remains to this day in the
archives of the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt.
It took Frobenius of Arabia 42 days to reach Eritrea, where the
Italians – alerted by the Brits – refused to let him move on to
Ethiopia. The Germans then ensconced themselves on the luxury German
liner Christian X, a new vessel whose silver cutlery and grand piano
must have pleased the pseudo-aristocratic Frobenius. But while he was
optimistically trying to arrange a radio cipher to take to the German
legation in Addis whence they could communicate with Berlin via the
captain of the Christian X, Sir Edward Grey – he of "lights going
out all over Europe" fame – was giving permission for the Italians
to take the Germans under safe conduct to Rome via Suez.
Frobenius ended up in the Holy City, claiming in the Italian press
that he was a plenipotentiary of the Ottoman emperor before admitting
he was a secret agent, hoping he would receive an Italian decoration
and then entraining for Germany one day before Italy declared war
on the side of the Allies. Later German spy missions proved equally
dismal. One left for Arabia dressed as an Arab dance troupe; another
was betrayed as a German dressed as an Arab; the lack of corns on
his feet proved to Eritrean policemen that he had been wearing shoes.
When Frobenius tried to return to Africa after the war, he was
stopped in Cairo where the British colonial office, regarding him as
a "thieving scoundrel", memorably noted that he was "one of those
scientific Germans to whom the word ‘Hun’ can be applied without
raising any controversy". He ended up president of the Institute of
Cultural Morphology in Frankfurt, reportedly selling artefacts from
his expeditions, his scientific reputation (according to the Foreign
Office) "as second rate as his reputation for decent behaviour".
Frobenius of Arabia outlived Lawrence of Arabia by three years. But
then again, Frobenius never rode a motorbike.