Germany and the Middle East have experienced a number of significant physical and political transformations in history, and the terms Germany and Middle East harbor many meanings as a result. In 1830 Germany was a linguistic zone of Central Europe where people spoke primarily German, and it encompassed all of Prussia, Bavaria, Austria, Saxony, Hanover, Wurttemberg, and Baden, and part of Silesia, Bohemia, Denmark, and France. In 1871 Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) brought together dozens of German-speaking kingdoms, free cities, duchies, and principalities to form a new sovereign nation-state called Germany, which did not include the German-speaking parts of Austria or Czechoslovakia. The political borders of this Germany changed again after its defeat in World War I (1914-1918), during and after the Nazi Third Reich, and after the reunification of East and West Germany in 1989.
The meaning of the term Middle East has been even more fluid. Western European geographers and historians after the Renaissance divided the Orient (the land east of Western Europe) into three regions: Near East (the region nearest Europe and extending from the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf); Middle East (the region from the Persian Gulf to Southeast Asia); and Far East (the region bordering the Pacific Ocean).
In English the designation of Middle East changed during World War II (1939-1945) when the term identified the British military command in Egypt, which consisted of the states or territories of Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Palestine (now Israel), Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, and the Arabian Peninsula. This designation parallels current scholarly convention that identifies the Middle East as a region that includes Turkey in the northwest, Egypt in the southwest, the Arabian Peninsula in the southeast, and Persia (Iran) in the northeast. Greece is sometimes included in definitions of the Middle East because a problem for the European Great Powers called the Eastern question first arose when the Greeks fought for their independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1821. This Eastern question provides a natural focus for scholarly discussions of Germany and the Middle East, which concentrate on German relations with the Ottoman Empire in the period from 1880 to 1918 and particularly on German imperial ambitions in the Ottoman sphere of influence during that period—a sphere of influence that corresponds very closely to the current scholarly definition of the Middle East.
PRUSSIA/GERMANY AND THE EASTERN QUESTION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
In 1853 the Russian Tsar Nicholas I (1796-1855) described the Ottoman Empire as the ”sick man” of Europe, vocalizing the underlying assumption of the Eastern question that a once great and powerful empire was diseased and dying. Indeed, the Eastern question was one of the major geopolitical problems facing Great Britain, France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The slow disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean threatened to upset the equilibrium established at the Congress of Vienna between the European Great Powers after the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) in 1815. Most of the Great Powers in this self-styled Concert of Europe constantly probed Ottoman weakness to expand their imperial holdings in the Balkans and Middle East. Austria and Russia coveted Ottoman lands on their borders and the British in India desired control of neighboring Persia in the Ottoman sphere of influence.
The Eastern question attained volatile intensity during the Greek War of Independence (1821-1832), the Crimean War (1853-1856), the Balkan crisis between 1875 and 1878, the Bosnian crisis of 1908, the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, and World War I. France and Britain preemptively intervened on the side of the Greeks against the Turks in the 1820s to foil longstanding Russian designs on controlling the Bosphorus region leading from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, and they united again in the Crimean War against the Russians when Russia defeated the Ottoman navy and invaded a part of the Ottoman Empire (Moldavia and Wallachia) that is now Romania. In the peace treaty ending the war, all the Great Powers guaranteed the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, the Bosphorus remained closed to warships, and Moldavia and Wallachia remained under Turkish suzerainty. Austria mediated the conflict, whereas Prussia remained aloof.
Prussian aloofness to the Eastern question ended when Prussia fought and won wars against Austria in 1866 and France in 1870 and 1871 to unify Germany as a sovereign nation-state. As the leader of a new but satisfied Power, the Prussian/German Prime Minister Bismarck saw his task as maintaining peace among the Great Powers. Prussian victories had upset the old balance of power in the heart of Europe and had unsettled old alliances. Bismarck identified the Balkans—that hotbed of the Eastern question where the continued disintegration of the Ottoman Empire could easily lead to conflict between Austria and Russia—and France, which desired revenge for its defeat in 1871 and its loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany, as destabilizing forces. Ever wary of the violent potential present in the Eastern question and observing no German economic or political interest in the region per se, Bismarck quipped in 1876 that the solution to the Eastern question was not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier (i.e., German soldier). He crafted the Three Emperors’ League with Russia and Austria in 1873 to prevent their alliance with France, but it collapsed when rebellion broke out in the Ottomans’ Balkan provinces and Russia declared war on the Turks in 1877.
When Russia forced the Ottomans to cede extensive territory in the Treaty of San Stefano, Bismarck called for an international conference to reconsider the treaty. To maintain Great Power balance in regards to the Eastern question, Bismarck brokered a deal whereby the Russians accepted more modest territorial gains in the Balkans at the Congress of Berlin in 1878; Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania gained independence from the Ottomans, and Austria achieved temporary administrative rights to Bosnia-Herzegovina, which were still legally Ottoman territories. Bismarck next negotiated an alliance with Austria in 1879, which he repeatedly used to prevent Austria from going to war with Russia over Ottoman territories. He reluctantly extended Germany’s influence to the Middle East in 1882 when he agreed that the German Empire would replace France as the military adviser to the Ottoman army.
Germany’s military mission began a more active political and economic engagement with the Ottoman Empire and the Eastern question. Nicknamed Drang nach Osten (Drive to the East) and promoted by the German ambassador to the Ottomans in the early 1880s, the new policy advocated German cultural and economic penetration of the Ottoman realm to achieve imperial parity with France and Britain there. The Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II (1842-1918), who ruled from 1876 to 1909, turned to the Germans as a counterbalance to the British after the British occupied the Ottoman territories of Cyprus and Egypt and became involved in administering the Ottoman public debt.
After 1885 Germany’s military mission was responsible for instituting a network of military preparatory schools, reorganizing the Ottoman officer corps on the Prussian model, creating a market for arms shipments from Germany, and initiating concessions for construction of a railroad. Because the German Empire arrived late as a European overseas imperial power, especially in Africa and the Middle East, the Ottomans regarded the Germans as free from the taint of snatching land from Turkish rule. The same could not be said of the French (who seized Algeria in 1830 and Tunis in 1881) or the British (who occupied Cyprus in 1878 and Egypt in 1882). Also pleasing to the Turks was Bismarck’s stated policy of preserving what remained of the Ottoman Empire as a bulwark against Russian expansion into the Balkans and Middle East. Finally, the growing importance of the Middle East to Germany can also be seen in the founding of the Seminar for Oriental Languages in Berlin in 1887 to train Orientalist scholars.
German involvement with the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East quickened after Bismarck’s departure in 1890. Kaiser (emperor) Wilhelm II (1859-1941), who ruled from 1888 to 1918, proposed a new course, which he officially proclaimed in 1896 and 1897, that called for expanded German influence overseas. The resulting Weltpolitik, or drive for global power, produced the direct competition with the other Great Powers that Bismarck tried to avoid. The construction of a new German high seas battle fleet antagonized Britain, and both Britain and Russia felt threatened by the expanding German military and economic influence in the Ottoman Empire.
GERMANY AND THE MIDDLE EAST, 1896-1907
From 1880 to 1918 German Middle Eastern policy centered on the Ottoman Empire. As part of its new relationship with the Turkish state, Germany supported the Ottomans in the Turkish-Greek War over Crete in 1897, much to the irritation of the British. Especially disturbing to the British was Germany’s promotion of pan-Islamic politics. Pan-Islamism was an anti-European Ottoman doctrine that proclaimed that the sultan in his role as caliph (successor to Muhammad) was the spiritual leader of the world’s Muslims. The doctrine called on Muslims everywhere to defend the Ottoman Empire and caliphate against infidels (i.e., European imperialists). In a widely publicized speech during a state visit to the Ottoman Empire in late 1898, the kaiser proclaimed himself the protector of the world’s 300 million Muslims allying the German Empire with a Pan-Islamism that he believed would inspire revolts against Britain’s global empire by the 96 million Muslims living within it.
Sultan Abdulhamid II and the Turks appreciated Wilhelm’s words and in December 1899 awarded Deutsche Bank and German industrial firms the concession to build a railroad from Ankara to Baghdad. The deal was officially signed in 1903. The potential value of the railroad was obvious to the Germans and the British. When completed it would link Istanbul, the Ottoman capital, with Baghdad and the Persian Gulf, and the Germans planned to run the line all the way to Berlin. The intended Berlin-to-Baghdad railroad became a potent and much used symbol of German penetration of the Ottoman realm. The railway would allow Germany easy economic access to Mesopotamia, Persia, and the Gulf region (and British India) and the Germans were granted mineral (oil) rights along the route, a development that alarmed the British.
In 1903 the same German businesses received a concession to construct the Hijaz railway from Damascus to Mecca. German-Turkish financial ties were further strengthened with the founding of the German-Palestine Bank in 1903 in Jerusalem and the German Orient Bank in Cairo in 1906. In 1906 the Hamburg-Amerika line began competing with British ships for Persian Gulf traffic. Germany’s ambassadors to Turkey—Marschall von Bieberstein (1842-1912), who held office from 1897 until his death, and Hans von Wangenheim (1859-1915), who took over from 1912 to 1915—worked tirelessly to open markets for German products. By 1914 Germany’s share in the Ottoman public debt reached 22 percent (it had been 4.7 percent in 1888), Germans had a 67.5 percent share in Ottoman railway investment, and German banks played an important role in the Turkish economy.
In the two decades before World War I, Germany replaced France and Russia as Britain’s main rival in the Middle East, the territory occupied by the Ottoman Empire. Germany rebuffed British overtures for an alliance in 1899 and 1900 and instead engaged in a major naval arms race with Britain that encouraged Britain to settle its colonial differences with France and Russia in the Middle East and create Bismarck’s nightmare, a Germany encircled by a hostile Great Power alliance. The British agreement with France in 1904 was a severe blow to German diplomacy in the Middle East, which had exploited Anglo-French tensions over the British occupation of Egypt to wring colonial concessions from Britain. Britain and Russia solved issues on the eastern edge of the Ottoman Empire by reaching an understanding on Persia and Afghanistan in 1907.
GERMANY, THE EASTERN QUESTION, WORLD WAR I, AND AFTER
In July 1908 an army revolt placed nationalists called Young Turks in key positions of power in the Ottoman Empire. They intended to put an end to the Eastern question by making the Ottoman Empire a modern, parliamentary, centralized, industrial state along European lines. During the chaos caused by the army revolt, however, Austria annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina in October 1908 and Bulgaria declared its complete independence, further reducing Ottoman territories and resurrecting the Eastern question in its full force. Official Russian and Serbian reactions to Austria’s move were belligerent and the Bosnian crisis nearly led to a European-wide war. The Eastern question was still simmering and four years later the Turks suffered a crushing defeat in the first Balkan War (1912-1913) with Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria, which cost the Ottomans four-fifths of their European territories. A coup in January 1913 gave the pro-German faction of the Young Turks complete power and in November 1913 the Germans dispatched General Otto Liman von Sanders (1855-1929) to become inspector-general of the Turkish Army. His mission was to reorganize and modernize the Turkish army to block Russian designs on the Bosphorus and the Middle East. The glowing embers of the Eastern question sparked a renewed crisis in the Balkans in July 1914 involving Austria, Serbia, and Russia in the wake of the continued diminution of Ottoman power, and they soon ignited a world war.
Just as the Great Powers were declaring war on each other, the pro-German faction of the Turkish government signed a secret alliance with Germany on August 2, 1914, reflecting the strong German influence in the army faction headed by Enver Pasa (1881-1922), the minister of war, as well as centuries-long enmity with Russia. As part of the pact, the Germans promised to protect the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire while the war aims memorandum of German Prime Minister Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg (1856-1921), written in September 1914, called for the establishment of German economic domination of the Balkans and the Turkish Middle East after the war. The Ottomans remained officially neutral until November 1914 when early German victories against the French and the Russians, and a huge loan from Germany, led to an open alliance with the Germans.
The German Empire assisted the Ottomans militarily in World War I, especially in the defense of Gallipoli (1915-1916) against British and Australian forces, and hoped to incite rebellion among Britain’s Muslim subjects in Egypt and India and to inflame anti-British fervor in the Middle East as a whole, thereby weakening the British war effort in Europe. The Germans persuaded the new sultan-caliph Mehmed V (1844-1918) to declare a holy war (jihad) against Britain, France, and Russia in late 1914 as part of a military strategy to defeat the Allies, but the agitation among Arabs fell on deaf ears and the Germans were completely unprepared to organize indigenous revolts. In addition, the Young Turk rulers disliked German involvement in pan-Islamic and Ottoman affairs because it threatened Turkish sovereignty and foreign political interests and they were not interested in granting more political autonomy to the Arabs.
In the end, German leaders did not contest Turkish sensibilities regarding national minorities in the Ottoman Empire because the Germans intended to use the empire as a base for future economic and political expansion in the Middle East. Such a decision prevented any genuine German support of Arab nationalism. Ironically, harsh Ottoman treatment of Arabs and persecution of Arab nationalists led to a British-inspired revolt of the Arabs against Turkish rule in June 1916, which helped end Turkish rule in Arab lands by 1918. Also, German authorities rarely objected, and then only mildly, to the massacre of over a million Armenians beginning in April 1915 because the Germans wanted to maintain good relations with the Turks and accepted Turkish claims that the Armenians were traitors who were subverting Turkish military campaigns against the Russians.
The German-Turkish military alliance failed to prevail, however. Two major Turkish-German attacks on the Suez Canal, February 1915 and August 1916, were unsuccessful but they caused the British to keep large numbers of troops in Egypt. Advancing British and Arab forces from Egypt and Mesopotamia eventually won the desert campaigns against the Turks and Germans, whose problems included insufficient troops, weapons, and food, differences over military priorities, and the diversion of troops and supplies by the Turks to the Caucasus. The war ended in November 1918 and the last German forces left Turkey in January 1919. For the first time since 1835, when Prussia sent a small permanent military mission to Istanbul, there was no German military presence in Turkey. Germany’s once formidable position in the Ottoman Empire disappeared. The Treaty of Versailles (June 1919) made German losses permanent and official: Articles 147-155 and 434 liquidated its investments in the former Ottoman Empire and Egypt.
During the 1920s the Middle East was virtually absent in the foreign policy of the German Weimar Republic. With its investments and trade destroyed and no military presence to exert political influence, the area became peripheral to German national interests. Once again those interests focused on the European continent and particularly the revision of the war guilt and reparation clauses of the Versailles treaty. Serious German interest in the Middle East ended with the Wilhelmine Empire. It was not resurrected by the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), who ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945, which had no steady policy toward the Middle East.
Nazis gave early support to the Zionist movement as a way to rid Germany of Jews, but after 1937, when it was recognized that a Jewish sovereign state in the Middle East was possible and it might serve as a base of activity against the Nazi genocidal state, Hitler opposed Jewish emigration to Palestine. The German Afrikakorps under General Erwin Rommel (1891-1944) fought an unwanted war (1941-1943) in North Africa to keep the Germans’ Italian allies in Libya from being routed by the British and to forestall an Allied invasion of Italy. Germans were not attacking British Egypt in a repeat of the economic and political Drive to the East, which animated the kaiser’s imperialism. The focus of Nazi imperialism, expansionist lebensraum (living space), was Soviet Russia, not the Middle East, to which Hitler refused to give much thought until the mammoth and time-consuming undertaking of conquering and pacifying Soviet Russia was completed. Haphazard and belated arms shipments by the Nazis to anti-British governments in Iraq, Syria, and Iran in the early 1940s did not forestall British victories in those countries.
From the early 1880s until 1918, the Ottoman Empire was Germany’s bridge to the strategic and economic resources of the Middle East and the object of its political and economic expansion in the region. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Eastern question— as far as it concerned the question of which European Great Power or Powers would take the place of the Ottoman Empire and fill the vacuum created by its disappearance—ceased to exist. With it went German ambitions but, in a broader sense, as an international question that dealt with the conflicting interests and rivalries of the Great Powers in the political and economic fields in the Middle East, the Eastern question has by no means been settled. As the German experience in the Middle East revealed, it became a question with global implications.
