In partial acquiescence to his parents’ conventional aspirations, in 1901 the twenty-year-old Prüfer enrolled in the University of Berlin to study law. At the same time, he took seminars in Oriental languages and quickly developed a proficiency in Turkish and Arabic, two of the more difficult languages on earth. Two years later, he dispensed with his legal studies altogether and, under the pretext that a drier climate might improve his frail health, moved to southern Italy to study Italian.
But Italy was not the East, and in that same summer of 1903, Prüfer set sail for Cairo. It was to be the first of three extended trips he would make over the next three years, partially supporting himself by writing travel articles for German cultural magazines as he worked toward a doctorate in Oriental studies.
Perhaps spurred by his own commoner background, the area of study Prüfer chose was a very unusual one for a European scholar of the time: an indigenous theatrical art form known as shadow plays that catered exclusively to the Egyptian working class. In his dissertation, he described visiting one of the coffeehouses where these plays were performed in the Was’a slum of Cairo.
“The galleries and benches on the main floor of this establishment are packed with people, mostly from the lowest strata of society. Here, donkey drivers, porters and pushcart vendors sit in a dense throng, peacefully smoking their hashish pipes. Members of the upper classes do not dare to enter the Was’a milieu for fear of damaging their good reputations.”
The same held true for Cairo’s expatriate community, of course, affording the young German scholar a glimpse into everyday Egyptian life virtually unique among Europeans. The time he spent in places like Was’a also enabled Prüfer to thoroughly master colloquial Arabic, a very different language from that spoken by the genteel class, and a skill that would stand him in very good stead in the years ahead.
By the beginning of 1906, Prüfer stood at a kind of crossroads. With his doctorate from the University of Erlangen in hand, he might easily have landed a teaching position in Germany—and, in what would have been a nice little turn of revenge, at a far more prestigious level than his primary schoolteacher father had attained—but he was anxious to return to the East. In rather quick succession, two strokes of luck were to make that possible.
That winter, he met Frances Ethel Pinkham, an American woman studying music in Berlin. A graduate of Wellesley College from a wealthy family in Lynn, Massachusetts, the thirty-eight-year-old Pinkham was, by the standards of the day, already well into spinsterhood when she met the solicitous and charming Oriental scholar thirteen years her junior. Following a brief romance, and over the fierce objections of Pinkham’s parents, the couple married that April. Prüfer convinced his bride that they should move to Egypt so that he could further his studies and, hopefully, find suitable employment. While Pinkham’s parents back in Lynn were no doubt aghast at the idea, in Cairo an opportunity for adventure and advancement soon presented itself to their new son-in-law.
During his previous stays in Cairo, Prüfer had frequently socialized with personnel from the German embassy, and these diplomats had been very impressed by his command of both classic and colloquial Arabic. In early 1907, with the embassy’s current dragoman, or interpreter, slated for retirement, Prüfer was asked if he might be interested in the post. It’s hard to imagine he pondered the offer for more than an instant. That February, Prüfer became the newest staff member of the German diplomatic legation to Egypt.
But something else awaited the unprepossessing twenty-six-year-old at the German embassy: a mentor, one of the most colorful—and in the eyes of the British, one of the most dangerous—personalities ever to stalk the Middle East.
THE RUINS OF Carchemish are situated on a rocky bluff over a bend of the Euphrates River, flush on the border between modern-day Turkey and Syria. Around it are rolling plains gradually giving over to grassy foothills. Overlooking an important ford of the Euphrates, the bluff has been inhabited for at least five thousand years, but achieved its greatest prominence at about 1100 BC during the Late Bronze Age. At that time, Carchemish was a principal city of the Hittite civilization, centered in the Anatolia region just to the north, and was well known to both the Egyptian pharaohs and the authors of the Old Testament; the Bible contains several references to the city, including a battle waged there between the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar and Pharaoh Necho II in the sixth century BC. This small corner of the Ottoman Empire was the place where T. E. Lawrence came to feel a deeper sense of belonging than anywhere else during his lifetime.
Having wheedled his way onto David Hogarth’s archaeological expedition, Lawrence first reached Carchemish in February 1911. As the junior assistant on the excavation, his official duties were to photograph and sketch the dig as it progressed, as well as to keep a catalog of its various finds. His job quickly expanded far beyond this. As one of just two westerners permanently on-site to oversee a crew of some two hundred local workmen (Hogarth, although the overall administrator, would visit Carchemish only intermittently), Lawrence soon came to be something akin to a construction foreman. In this role he discovered, perhaps as much to his surprise as anyone else’s, that he was a natural leader of men.
To be sure, this was partly due to his status as a European. Under a system dating back to the 1500s known as the Capitulations, the European powers had steadily wrung a series of ever more humiliating concessions from the sultans in Constantinople under the pretext of protecting the Ottoman Empire’s Christian minorities. By the beginning of the twentieth century, European citizens were effectively exempt from Ottoman law. “Really, this country, for the foreigner, is too glorious for words,” Lawrence wrote to his family in the summer of 1912. “One is the baron of the feudal system.”
But it was not merely this that made Lawrence a leader. He seemed to possess an instant affinity for the East, and in that affinity an almost instinctive appreciation for how its culture worked. By now quite fluent in Arabic, in Carchemish he labored ceaselessly to deepen that knowledge. He did so by quizzing the men in his work crews, by visiting them in their homes, by taking painstaking notes on all he learned. From their folkloric tales, to their views on politics, to charting out the complicated clan structure that determined regional allegiances, Lawrence gradually came to know this small corner of northern Syria and its people better than probably any other European of the time.
Of course, there is nothing more endearing than attention. To the extent that the workmen at Carchemish, drawn from the nearby town of Jerablus, had ever had prior dealings with a westerner, it had undoubtedly been of the most cursory and servile kind. They’d surely never met one who bothered to learn the names of their children and relatives and ancestors, who gladly accepted invitations into their modest homes, who showed genuine respect for their rituals and customs.
There was another aspect to Lawrence that impressed the locals as well. He seemed to have none of the softness or frailty they associated with Europeans; rather, he could work in the blazing heat for hours without pause, could walk or ride for days without complaint, soldiered through bouts of dysentery and malaria with the composed resignation of a local. To the Arabs of Jerablus, most everything about Lawrence spoke of a toughness, a stamina and an austerity, that made him seem less like a European and more like themselves. In Arab tradition, they rewarded that sense of kinship with a fierce and abiding loyalty. This cut both ways, for the longer he stayed in Syria and the more he was accepted by the locals, the less Lawrence came to think and act like a Briton.
More profoundly, his time in Syria caused him to fundamentally rethink his views on the “civilizing influence” of the West. This change found personification in the close relationship he developed with a young man from Jerablus named Dahoum. Starting out as a mere thirteen-year- old donkey boy at the Carchemish excavation site, the bright and extraordinarily handsome Dahoum was soon elevated by Lawrence to be a kind of personal assistant, and the two became inseparable, leading to whispered rumors that they might be
lovers. Whatever the truth of those rumors, it was in the figure of Dahoum that Lawrence began to develop a new if rather romanticized notion of the essential nobility of the Arab race, admiring their asceticism as “the gospel of bareness,” free from the taint of Western indulgence.
Writing his parents in 1911 from Jerablus, in a letter where he first introduced Dahoum as “an interesting character” whom he wished to help, he evinced views quite at odds with a British colonial sensibility: “Fortunately there is no foreign influence as yet in the district. If only you had seen the ruination caused by the French influence, and to a lesser degree by the American, you would never wish it extended. The perfectly hopeless vulgarity of the half-Europeanized Arab is appalling. Better a thousand times the Arab untouched. The foreigners come out here always to teach, whereas they had much better learn.”
This wasn’t a preoccupation one normally associated with an archaeologist. Even David Hogarth, despite his great affection for his protégé, was never convinced that Lawrence truly had the heart or temperament of a scholar. He had little of the meticulous doggedness of a man like Leonard Woolley, who in 1912 became the lead scientist at Carchemish. Instead, Lawrence’s chief fascination seemed to be with the land and the people that surrounded him; it was there where his passion lay.
This passion also gave Lawrence a unique perspective on one of the more momentous developments of the early twentieth century: the protracted death throes of the Ottoman Empire. Most other Western eyewitnesses to that spectacle resided in the cities of the Middle East. Lawrence was one of the few who watched it play out in the countryside, where the great majority of Ottoman subjects still lived.
That death had been a very long time foretold. The Ottoman Empire had endured for nearly five centuries largely by allowing ethnic and religious minorities extraordinary freedom to govern themselves, so long as they paid their taxes and pledged ultimate allegiance to the sultans in Constantinople. This system had begun to crumble in the nineteenth century, buffeted by both the rise of nationalism and dramatic advances in communications and commerce. With astonishing speed, the world was becoming a smaller place, the industrializing nations of Europe were becoming exponentially more powerful, and an empire built on what essentially amounted to benign neglect of its component parts was an anachronism. By the 1850s, the Ottoman Empire was already “the sick man of Europe,” its final collapse eagerly anticipated by the ascendant Western powers.
Through nimble alliance-making, the Ottomans had consistently managed to dodge that demise, even as their Western competitors nibbled at the empire’s edges. In the 1870s, czarist Russia crushed an Ottoman army in the Balkans to win the independence of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro. In 1881, France grabbed Tunisia. The following year, Great Britain used the pretext of a nascent nationalist movement to snatch away Egypt.
Cruelly, the event that seemed to offer the Ottoman Empire its best hope for a renaissance merely accelerated the disintegration. In 1908, a reformist coup by a group of young military officers under the banner of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)—soon to become better known as the Young Turks—forced the despotic sultan to reinstate the parliamentary constitution he had abrogated thirty years earlier. Emboldened by their success, the Young Turks quickly launched a breathtakingly ambitious campaign designed to drag the empire into the twentieth century, including calls for the emancipation of women and the granting of full rights of citizenship to ethnic and religious minorities.
But if the CUP officers, most drawn from the European part of the empire and steeped in European liberalism, had expected the Western powers to embrace their cause, they were in for a rude surprise. Taking advantage of the political confusion in Constantinople, Austria-Hungary swiftly annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina. In other European capitals, including London, the Young Turks were regarded with the deepest suspicion, even derided as “crypto-Jews” bent on taking possession of the empire as part of some sinister plot by international Jewry. Within the Ottoman Empire, a virulent conservative backlash against the progressives quickly plunged the new parliamentary government into an era of political infighting and paralysis.
By 1911, the Young Turks had begun to solidify their hold on power, and had come up with three main rallying points in hopes of keeping their fractious empire together: modernization, the defense of Islam, and a call for a rejoining of the greater Turkic-speaking world, or Turanism. All of which sounded good, except that these three planks stood in direct opposition to one another.
The very progressivism of many of the Young Turks’ social decrees may have played well with secularists and the empire’s Jewish and Christian minorities, but they simultaneously enraged huge numbers of Muslim traditionalists. Similarly, while their increasingly jingoistic Turanist rhetoric surely excited the ethnic Turk populace, it just as surely alienated the non-Turkish populations—Arabs, Slavs, Armenians, Greeks—who now constituted a majority within the empire. As for wrapping themselves in the mantle of Islam’s defenders, that might conceivably win over Turkish, Kurdish, and Arab Muslims, but it didn’t do much for everyone else—including, for that matter, the sizable minority of Arabs who were Christians. In effect, by trying to find something to appeal to every segment of their polyglot society, the Young Turks were giving all of them something to hate and fear.
For Lawrence, a young man increasingly attuned to the political and social currents swirling around him, an inescapable conclusion began to form: little by little, the Ottoman Empire was coming apart at the seams. During his tenure at Jerablus, that process of disintegration accelerated, and what had been an intermittent nibbling at the Ottoman realm by the European powers was to become a feeding frenzy.
IN EARLY 1907, as Germany began to assert its assumed prerogatives as an imperial power, Curt Prüfer took up his post as embassy dragoman in Cairo.
On paper, the dragoman was merely the embassy interpreter, tasked to assist the ambassador at his diplomatic meetings, as well as to translate whatever documents the legation might address to the local government, or vice versa. In reality, an ambitious dragoman could become a virtual power unto himself. Then, as now, ambassadors were often a clueless and temporary bunch, products of a palace sinecure system and prone to be far more adept on the dance floor than at the negotiating table. Dragomen, on the other hand, represented continuity—many remained in their positions for decades—and through their translating work had intimate knowledge of most everything going on in every subsection of the embassy. Further, because they existed in a gray area between an embassy’s diplomatic and consular branches, they could quietly pursue questionable activities, such as meeting with a regime’s enemies, which might provoke an outcry if conducted by their superiors. This was crucial, for while nearly all the competing European imperial powers at the dawn of the twentieth century viewed their overseas legations as handy instruments for intelligence gathering, influence peddling, and general mischief making, the Germans were in a class by themselves. In keeping with Wilhelm II’s pugnacious approach to foreign policy, German legations were forever being caught out in some ungentlemanly transgression—stealing government and industrial secrets, operating spy rings—that left their purportedly more high-minded British and French counterparts spluttering with indignation. At the center of many of these various scandals were the embassy dragomen.
In Egypt Prüfer had landed in one of the most important playgrounds for this muscular German approach to diplomacy, a place where Berlin saw the opportunity to both curry favor with the Ottoman leadership in Constantinople and chip away at the hegemony of their British rivals. That’s because in 1882, under the pretext of defending the ruling clique from an independence-minded nationalist leader, Britain had invaded Egypt and effectively taken control of the country that had been under titular Ottoman rule for nearly four hundred years. The British hadn’t stopped there. In May 1906, just nine months before Prüfer’s arrival at the German embassy, they had exploited a minor diplomatic dispute in the Sinai, the
vast peninsula standing to the east of the Suez Canal, to wrest that from the Ottomans as well. That episode had further fueled Egyptian discontent with British rule—as well as Constantinople’s bitterness toward its former friend—and the Germans operating in Cairo saw nothing to lose and everything to gain by keeping that enmity at a low boil.
But perhaps the greatest asset Prüfer had to draw on in the Egyptian capital was his immediate supervisor at the embassy, a larger-than-life character named Count Max von Oppenheim.
Twenty-one years the dragoman’s senior, Oppenheim was a gregarious, snappily attired bon vivant with a handlebar mustache and a fondness for both the ladies and the racetrack, and a member in good standing at Berlin’s Union Club, the exclusive haunt of Germany’s political and economic elite. Oppenheim joined the German diplomatic service in 1883. In short order, he had decamped for Syria, beginning a love affair with the Near East that would last for the next sixty years. An amateur archaeologist and ethnologist, he conducted archaeological expeditions in the countryside, enterprises that he personally financed from his banking family’s fortune. In Oppenheim’s case, the hobby eventually paid off; in 1899, he discovered one of the most important lost settlements of the Neolithic period, Tell Halaf, in northern Syria. (It is presumably on the strength of that discovery that Oppenheim bears the odd distinction of having a Montblanc pen named after him, joining such luminaries as Charlemagne, Copernicus, and Alexander the Great in the company’s “patron of the arts” line.) The adventurer finally set up a semipermanent base of operations in Cairo in 1896, when he was given a vaguely defined attaché position in the consular section of the German embassy.
There were several controversial aspects to the count—no one was quite sure of the title’s pedigree beyond its appearance on Oppenheim’s business card—that set him apart from his diplomatic colleagues in the Egyptian capital. One was his propensity for “going native.” This was most evident in his habit of gadding about clad in Arab robes, as well as his choosing to live in a “native” quarter of the city, but it also extended to his amorous arrangements. According to Sean McMeekin in The Berlin-Baghdad Express, “Every autumn, after his return from Berlin, Oppenheim’s head servant Soliman would procure him a new slave girl (he called them his Zeitfrauen, or temporary concubines), who would become mistress of the harem until the following year, and who was herself served by two female attendants.”
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