Category Archives: Germany

by | 7 December 2006 · 10:33 am

German Pogroms Before the Black Death, 1348-49

In German-speaking Europe, reaction to the Chillon transcripts [of “confessions” extracted by torture as the plague began to work its way north from the Mediterranean]—and other incriminating docurnents—was swift and furious. “Within the revolution of one year, that is from All Saints Day [November 1] 1348 until Michaelmas [September 29] 1349, all the Jews between Cologne and Austria were burnt and killed,” wrote Heinrich Truchess, Canon of Constance.

In November, barely a month after Balavigny, Belieta, her son Aquetus, and Agimetus were executed, the first pogroms broke out in Germany. The towns of Solden, Zofingen, and Stuttgart killed their Jews in November; and Reutlingen, Haigerloch, and Lindau killed theirs in December. As January 1349 dawned cold and bright along the Rhine, it was Speyer’s turn. The Jews who did not immolate themselves in their homes were hunted down in the winter streets and bludgeoned to death with pikes, axes, and scythes. This happened so frequently, unburied corpses became a public health problem. “The people of Speyer …,” wrote a chronicler, “fearing the air would be infected by the bodies in the streets … shut them into empty wine casks and launched them into the Rhine.” Farther down river in Basel, the city council made a halfhearted attempt to protect the local Jewish community, but when a mob protested the exile of several anti-Semitic nobles, the council lost its nerve. Basel spent the Christmas season of 1348 constructing a wooden death house on an island in the Rhine. On January 9, 1349, the local Jewish community was herded inside. Everyone was there, except the children who had accepted baptism and those in hiding. After the last victim had been shoved into the building and the door bolted, it was set afire. As flames leaped into the cobalt blue sky, the screams and prayers of the dying drifted across the river and into the gray streets of Basel.

In February, when the pogroms reached Strassburg, a bitter winter wind was blowing off the Rhine. The mayor, a tough patrician named Peter Swaber, was a man of conscience and resolve. If the Jews are poisoning wells, he told an angry crowd, bring me proof. The city council supported the mayor, and officials in Cologne sent a letter of encouragement, but in the end, all Swaber had to offer the people of Strassburg was the opportunity to act righteously, while his opponents could promise relief from Jewish debt and access to Jewish property. On February 9, a government more in tune with the popular will unseated Swaber and his supporters. Five days later, on February 14, under a dull winter sun, the Jews of Strassburg were “stripped almost naked by the crowd” as they were marched “to their own cemetery into a house prepared for burning.” At the cemetery gates, “the youth and beauty of several females excited some commiseration; and they were snatched from death against their will.” But the young and beautiful and the converts were the only Jews to see the sun set in Strassburg that Valentine’s Day. Marchers who tried to escape were chased down in the streets and murdered. By one estimate, half of Strassburg’s Jewish population—900 out of 1,884—were exterminated at the cemetery….

According to Canon Truchess, “once started, the burning of the Jews went on increasingly…. They were burnt on 21 January [1349] in Messkirch and Waldkirch … and on 30 January in Ulm, on 11 February in Uberlingen … in the town of Baden on 18 March, and on 30 May, in Radolfzell. In Mainz and Cologne, they were burnt on 23 August …

“And, thus, within one year,” wrote the Canon, “as I have said, all the Jews between Cologne and Austria were burnt. And in Austria they await the same fate for they are accursed of God …. I could believe that the end of the Hebrews had come if the time prophesied by Elias and Enoch were now complete, but since it is not complete, it is necessary that some be reserved.”

SOURCE: The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time, by John Kelly (Harper Perennial, 2006), pp. 255-257

Despite all these “preventive measures” in the German lands, the plague rolled on in anyway, hard on the heels of the mass executions.

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by | 21 August 2006 · 5:56 pm

Moeller, Spengler, and the Rising East

Moeller van den Bruck—a Prussian philosopher and translator of Dostoevsky who committed suicide in 1925—had been obsessed with the coming triumph of “the East,” from bolshevism to Islam over the bankrupt cultures of the West. In Germany the Occident is called Abendland, or “evening land” [just as Arabic al maghreb or Romanian apusul mean ‘the place of the setting sun’ and therefore ‘the west’, as opposed to the Levant ‘rising place, east’], and Moeller—like his friend Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of the West—thought that the sun was certainly setting on it. The rising sun was in the East, no matter how one defined it. Moeller thought that the right kind of collectivism, so manifestly “natural” among the Russians, offered an antidote to the anomie and selfishness of the Western societies.

Moellerians believed that the “German-Russian side of the world” was meant to do cosmic battle against the forces of Western bourgeois liberalism, with help from sundry other Eastern forces. They saw nations as either young or old. Germany was “young” because it was in an expansionary period, infused with a “leader-idea” (Führergedanke) and relying more on feelings than reason. Russia was in a similar phase, and the Bolshevik Revolution was a manifestation of it. Both Russia and Germany were searching, experimental nations, obsessed with their deep origins in barbarian I conflict; therefore, the Soviet Union was a false enemy. The real enemies lay in the West: they were the victors of Versailles. The United States, however, would be welcome in the coming “Eastern” alliance because it had a youthful spirit, a farm culture, and a lively “inner barbarian.” Moeller’s ideas, at times difficult and fruitlessly obscure, would more than likely have sunk into obscurity after his death, eclipsed by the work of his more media-savvy and self-promoting friend Oswald Spengler.*

([Footnote:] *In fact, Moeller had originally helped Spengler to feel better about the “decline of the West” back in 1919. Spengler had gone into a funk when his book’s publication had coincided with Germany’s defeat in the First World War; though one might think the philosopher of decline and despair would feel vindicated, the decline he had been thinking about was supposed to result from Germany’s victory—and the subsequent decline of its warrior fiber, as it grew fat and complacent—not from something as straightforward as an actual military defeat! Like most Germans, Spengler had not even considered that possibility. Moeller, apparently in a “high” period, convinced Spengler that by losing the war, Germany had won, because by facing the decline first, Germany could embrace its loss and form an “alternate West,” with the “young nations” of the East—in order to deliver a coup de grâce to the west West, so that the real revolution—not the “bourgeois Marxist Revolution”—could succeed at last…. Whatever one thinks of the logic, it apparently cheered Spengler up. The two became fast friends.)

But luckily for the Moellerians, their hero had written one final work before he killed himself and had given it, as an afterthought, a title that would resonate like no other. Moeller was going to call the little volume The Third Force, but at the last minute he changed his mind and called it The Third Reich.

SOURCE: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss (Random House, 2005), pp. 244-246

Does this shed a little more light on the pen name of the cold-blooded Asia Times columnist who calls himself Spengler? His latest column, entitled The peacekeepers of Penzance, begins in typical fashion.

Like W S Gilbert’s cowardly policemen in The Pirates of Penzance, Europe’s prospective peacekeepers have decided that “a policeman’s lot is not a happy one”. Europe’s serious exercise in peacekeeping led to the massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, when Dutch soldiers turned over Muslims in their charge to Serb death squads.

France offers no more than 200 engineers to join the peacekeeping force that the United Nations Security Council has mandated as a buffer on the Israeli-Lebanese border. The last time French peacekeepers ventured into Lebanon, a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed 58 paratroopers. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has appealed to Italy to lead the 15,000-strong UN force. The last time an Italian army confronted a well-armed and determined force in the region, at the Ethiopian battle of Adwa in 1896, the Italians suffered 70% casualties.

Otto von Bismarck pronounced the Balkans unworthy of the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier, and Europe’s governments seem unwilling to sacrifice a single soldier to maintain the peace in southern Lebanon. This raises the question: What is Europe’s interest in the Middle East? The answer appears to be: To disappear and be forgotten with the least possible fuss.

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by | 21 August 2006 · 5:17 pm

"Social Monarchism" in Weimar Germany

Lev [Nussimbaum aka Essad Bey] was not only [a would-be Burkean] conservative, he was a monarchist—as he announced in an article in Die Literarische Welt in 1931. “So why have I remained to this day a monarchist despite my having lived in a republic for years, and why am I becoming more monarchistic every day?” … His answer is simple and even rather sensible: “The world of today faces two great dangers: bolshevism and a nationalism that is overrunning everything. I know of only one means to stave off these two dangers: monarchy.” To which he adds, it must be “true monarchy and not its constitutional, nationally limited, Wilhelmine version.” …

Lev’s eclectic politics led him to ever weirder groups on the fringe of Weimar society. One such was the Soziale Konigspartei—the “Social Monarchist party”—which ran against the spirit of the times in various conflicting ways: it was philo-Semitic and called for a restoration of the kaiser but also wanted to form a kind of “workers’ state.” The idea was to get the kaiser to return with the backing of the proletariat, thus ending the farce of competing extremisms and finger-pointing that parliamentary democracy had brought to Germany. The Social Monarchists attacked everything the Nazis stood for, and didn’t find many allies anywhere else, so they were doomed from the start. It didn’t help that their leaders were an obscure mixture of liberal but penniless nobles and “creative proletarians.”

Lev’s dabbling in such groups evokes something of the disorientation of the time. Many people in the 1920s looked back on the monarchies and could not fathom that it was all over. This was not ancient history—this was life the way it had always been throughout history, back to Charlemagne, Saladin, or King David, and up until last year, or the year before that. This was the world that Lev had over his shoulder. And it had been replaced by—what? Fiends on all sides, bloodthirsty, completely unrestrained by their fathers’ and grandfathers’ traditions of politics, society, and decency. All the groups Lev tried joining in these years would have in common the idea that the only way to avoid bolshevism or fascism was a revival of monarchism with the support of the “people,” however defined. It was really a “happy valley” sort of politics that hoped to achieve something familiar from Robin Hood and King Arthur stories: the world righted by placing the “good” king back on the throne, his people content in their old time-tested traditions. But Lev’s state of mind had something in common, too, with modern libertarianism and its suspicion of central authority (and with a lot more justification). As he commented, “The less a government tried to make me happy, all the better I felt.”

SOURCE: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss (Random House, 2005), pp. 246-247

Genius or crackpot? Wingnut or moonbat? Lev or Essad? We excerpt, you decide.

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by | 16 August 2006 · 8:39 am

Education of Essad Bay Nousimbaoum, Orientalist

On October 17, 1922, Lev enrolled as a student in classes in Turkish and Arabic in the Seminar for Oriental Languages at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität. On his application, he wrote his name as “Essad Bey Nousimbaoum,” from Georgia. This was the first recorded official use of his new name—which was essentially “Mr. Leo Nussimbaum” transposed into Turkish. (However, the word “Bey” had connotations of Turkish nobility, and his new name helped build the impression that Lev was of princely origin.)

The inconvenient detail that Lev had not yet graduated from high school was not mentioned, and it became his great secret for the next year and a half. At first he was slightly disturbed by the university lectures, for he found that “the professors spoke about their subject matter as though they were speaking about completely ordinary things.” But gradually, he understood that the professors saw the Orient as a professional pursuit, while he was driven by “a mysterious compulsion.” Lev started to figure something out—a neat trick, in fact; a mental survival skill. He found that his love of ancient crumbling walls and winding souks was a guiding light he could shine on almost any landscape, no matter how bleak and intimidating it might seem. He would learn to carry a portable “Orient” inside him, one that he could unpack whenever he found a comfortable spot and the right audience.

He began to keep a crazy schedule. He was determined that no one in the Russian gymnasium find out that he was attending the university (under false pretenses), and at the same time no one at the university must realize that he was still in high school. At 6 a.m. each day, he set out from Charlottenburg and walked all the way to the other side of the city to the university. He would spend the morning in seminars while the gymnasium was still full of German girls. When the Russian school opened, at 3 p.m., he would be there just as if he had been loafing all day like his classmates. “While the teacher was explaining a geometric theorem, the Arabic grammar lay on my knees.”…

Lev’s capacity for hard work and mental focus was something that would drive the rest of his short life. The emigre writers were known for drinking and working like fiends, but Lev would soon astound even them. His clandestine academic activities made him feel at times like he was in an “exclusive club,” and at other times as though he lived in another world. He was glad to have a reason for being separate, however. Both the work and the schedule were a sort of emotional survival strategy. “Most likely I would have perished from this leap into poverty, if it had not been for the love of the ancient Orient that kept me going,” he recalled. Lev also found he enjoyed having a secret life. He was different, he knew, because of what he had done and what he was doing. He was now an Orientalist….

On the day of his final examination at the Russian gymnasium, Lev felt lost and hopeless. He had spent far too much time at night school, studying Arabic, Turkish dialects, and Uzbek geography. There was no hope he could pass in his basic subjects—especially Latin and mathematics. He felt a fool and imagined how his and his father’s prospects would become even worse when he flunked the exam. He would not be able to face the old man, who had experienced so much hardship. It would be more than he could bear.

The chairman of the examination committee, a wrinkled old Romanov prince with a monocle sunk impossibly deep into his face, seemed to take barely any notice of Lev during his exam. Then Lev saw he had written on his pad, “in his melancholy aristocratic handwriting” next to the name Nussimbaum, “a very poor candidate.” During the history examination, the old chairman practically seemed asleep as Lev was quizzed, sitting there indifferently and gazing off into the distance. Suddenly, he raised his head, fixed Lev through his monocle, and said: “Tell us something about the dominion of the Tartars and Mongols over Russia.”

The question would already have been the ultimate gift to Lev, even if he wasn’t in his third semester at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität.

“I saw before us the wide Mongolian steppes and the horsemen … and there was no stopping me,” Lev recalled. I think I even forgot that I was in the middle of the examination. I spoke and spoke, I quoted Arabic, Turkish, Persian authors in the original languages. Indeed, I even knew some Mongolian. The committee was dumbstruck—the prince dropped his monocle. Then suddenly he started posing questions, and lo and behold!—he posed questions in Persian, in Mongolian, he even quoted the classics of Oriental literature…. Only later did I find out that the prince was one of the most renowned Orientalists of Russia. The examination committee sweated; the whole thing went beyond their imagination. The teacher suddenly looked like a little schoolboy. What started out as an examination turned into a discussion in all different languages about all sorts of Oriental problems. I think it lasted two hours and it would have continued into the evening if the person sitting next to the prince, a former Russian privy councilor, hadn’t given him a nudge.

The discussion saved Lev. Whatever other mistakes he made on his examinations, the old prince saw his talent and would not let him fail. In place of “a very poor candidate,” the chairman made sure that all his examiners marked Lev as “average.” He could graduate.

SOURCE: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss (Random House, 2005), pp. 193-194, 198-199

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by | 15 August 2006 · 5:38 pm

Weimar–Soviet Alliance, 1920s

At the world economic conference in Italy, [German Foreign Minister Walther] Rathenau charmed and negotiated around the clock, trying everything to press the Allies for some concessions on reparations. He wanted Germany to deal with the West, but France was adamantly opposed—and Rathenau was not the sort of man to let the company collapse just because it was unsuccessful in one market. If the Western democracies would not help Germany, he was determined to “play the Russian card.” In a midnight phone call with the Russian delegation, Rathenau arranged a secret meeting in the nearby seaside town of Rapallo. There, he entered into negotiations with none other than Leonid Krasin, the elegant bomb-maker of Baku … Krasin’s terrorist days were over, and he was now helping bolshevism with his smooth negotiating skills and wide knowledge of the oil business. (In fact, his main brief was to sell Baku oil concessions to Western companies on behalf of the new Bolshevik regime …)

The new special relationship between Germany and Soviet Russia was based on their purely negative common affinity—a hatred for the West and the “victors of Versailles”—and would have terrible unforeseen consequences. Its secret codicils would allow the German Army to illegally rearm and train on Russian territory throughout the twenties and thirties. Tens of thousands of German “work commandos” would come to Russia in 1923 and begin experimenting in the new, still theoretical technique of the blitzkrieg, the idea that small, high-quality, mobile forces backed by airpower could overcome a country before it could react. Under the treaty, the Germans built aircraft outside Moscow and manufactured poison gas in a plant in the Russian provinces. Red and German armies trained their aviators and tank officers together at a series of new schools throughout the Soviet Union. Thus, the armies that would slaughter each other in the 1940s in the most massive mechanized battles in history trained together in the 1920s.

SOURCE: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss (Random House, 2005), p. 183

A great many alliances based on “purely negative common affinity” seem to have “terrible unforeseen consequences.”

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by | 8 June 2006 · 10:56 pm

Holocaust a Contingent Event?

Thus the Holocaust was a contingent event, one not predestined by the intensity of Nazi anti-Semitism, virulent as it was, but facilitated by the exigencies of a world war that threatened to destroy the Nazi state, with the Jews perceived by Hitler as leading a vanguard of that destruction. Each step in the decision-making process concerning the Jewish Question was dependent on critical war-related events. After the defeat of France in 1940, Madagascar, a French colony, was chosen as the future “homeland” of the Jews. When the undefeated British navy made such mass shipping impossible, an area at the fringe of the German empire near Lublin was chosen, to be later changed to an unnamed destination in the soon-to-be-conquered Soviet Union. This harsher decision was made in March 1941 at the same time as the Lend-Lease Agreement between the United States and Great Britain. Difficulties in the invasion of the USSR led to the killing of Jewish women and children after August 15. As these difficulties became increasingly apparent to the Germans, harsher measures including deportations of Jews from Western to Eastern Europe were carried out, to be followed by the ultimate decision to commit genocide after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the first Russian land victory defending Moscow….

The dynamic approach adopted here helps explain an apparent anomaly. While there is clear evidence of virulent German anti-Semitism during the war even among “ordinary” Germans who behaved abominably toward Jews in the death marches from the concentration camps into Germany proper in 1944–45, the evidence of earlier German anti-Semitism is variable. German anti-Semitic political parties had declined precipitously in their share of the Reichstag vote prior to World War I, achieving only 0.86 percent in 1912 compared with 3.70 percent in 1898. Even after World War I and the rapid rise of anti-Semitism, reasons for joining the Nazi Party given by early members generally did not include anti-Semitism among the primary factors. The economic boycott of Jewish businesses called by the Nazi leadership for April 1, 1933, shortly after its accession to power, was generally regarded as a public relations failure, even by the Nazis themselves. Only after the events of World War II and the growing threat to the Nazi – by now identified as German – state did the German population behave in a deeply anti-Semitic manner. Thus one resolution of the apparent inconsistencies between Goldhagen‘s account and the many critics of his emphasis on “eliminationist anti-Semitism” can be found in the dynamics of the confrontation between Nazi Germany and its systemic environment.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 151-153

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by | 17 April 2006 · 6:18 pm

Speaking German in Moscow, 1941

Vova must have been frightened, bearing a German name [Knipper] at this moment of pitiless struggle [as the Wehrmacht closed in on Moscow]. Daily bulletins from Informburo were attached to trees and walls. On one of them he was shaken to see an excerpt from a letter taken off the body of a German soldier called Hans Knipper. And a schoolfriend of his, a Volga German about to be transported to Siberia, came to see them in despair. Vova’s father, Vladimir, advised him to volunteer for the army to save himself from an exile of forced labour which would be as bad as the Gulag, but Vova’s friend replied that the description ‘German’ was stamped on his papers and they would not accept him in the army. Those of German origin were implicitly categorized as potential enemies of the state. The NKVD had not wasted time assembling records on every Soviet citizen of German descent, some 1.5 million people. Local NKVD departments ‘from Leningrad to the Far East’ began a programme of arrests immediately after the Wehrmacht invasion. Yet no member of the Knipper family was touched [presumably because Vova’s cousin Lev Knipper worked for the NKVD].

Other Germans in Moscow were also in a strange position, but for different reasons. In the same building as the Knippers lived the family of Friedrich Wolf, the famous German Communist playwright, who had left Germany soon after Hitler came to power in 1933. They were part of the so-called ‘Moscow emigration’ of foreign Communists seeking sanctuary and would have faced instant execution at Nazi hands if the city fell. Vova used to act a roof-top fire-watcher, ready to deal with incendiary bombs, along with Wolf’s two sons, Markus and Koni. Markus later became the chief of East German intelligence and the original of Karla in John Le Carré’s novels, and his younger brother, Koni, became a film-maker, writer and the president of East Germany’s academy of arts. During air raids, Vladimir Knipper and Friedrich Wolf sat in the cellar, chatting together in German. ‘People sitting around us,’ wrote Vova, ‘turned to look at the two of them with anger and fear. There they were in the centre of Moscow arguing about something in the enemy’s language.’

SOURCE: The Mystery of Olga Chekhova: The true story of a family torn apart by revolution and war, by Antony Beevor (Penguin, 2005), pp. 173-174

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by | 12 April 2006 · 9:04 pm

Targeting Russian Émigrés, 1920s

This period [the early 1920s] was one of intense secret operations abroad mounted by INO (Inostrannyi Otdel), the Foreign Intelligence Department of the OGPU. Even after the destruction of the White armies, Lenin was determined to pursue counter-revolution abroad. In December 1920, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, had begun to organize operations against émigré groups in France and Germany. Berlin alone contained 200,000 White Russian refugees.

Relatives of prominent émigrés were seized as hostages at home and agents were rapidly recruited for operations abroad to infiltrate émigré organizations and arrange the kidnapping of their leaders. A sophisticated development was to create fake White Guard organizations within Russia to trap the regime’s enemies. These activities were given the highest priority. For the first dozen years of its life, INO’s ‘main foreign target remained the White Guard movement’.

The White Guard movement was directed from Paris by the Russian combined Services Union (ROVS), led by General Kutepov, who was kidnapped in Paris by OGPU agents in January 1930. A successor, General Miller, was also kidnapped in December 1936. He was taken back to the Soviet Union drugged inside a trunk, interrogated, tortured and then shot. The émigré world of White Russians in the early 1920s was a political demi-monde of agents and double agents, mostly working for the OGPU. Homesick White Russians in Paris and Berlin, many of them well-born officers working at night as taxi drivers, were prepared to betray their closest friends for the chance of what they thought was a guarantee of safe conduct home….

The Russian émigré community in Berlin was more like a colony, largely because it was so concentrated on the western centre of the city. Berliners jokingly called the Kurfürstendamm the Nöpski Prospekt’, and Charlottenburg was known as ‘Charlottengrad’. Writers including Vladimir Nabokov, Ilya Ehrenburg and Boris Pasternak treated the cafés of the area, such as the Prager Diele, in the same way as French existentialists later used the cafés of Saint-Germain. There were around 200 Russian-language newspapers, magazines and journals in Berlin, a number of publishing houses and even a Russian high school. But this already precarious community was to be devastated and scattered within a decade by the economic crisis and unemployment triggered by the Wall Street Crash.

SOURCE: The Mystery of Olga Chekhova: The true story of a family torn apart by revolution and war, by Antony Beevor (Penguin, 2005), pp. 95-97

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by | 9 January 2006 · 5:56 pm

Indian Sati, German Totenfolge in Universal Context

The September 2004 issue of Journal of World History has a thought-provoking article on a much maligned, but not nearly rare enough phenomenon: the Indian custom of sati (= suttee). Author Jörg Fisch’s title is Dying for the Dead: Sati in Universal Context. Here’s the conclusion (courtesy of The History Cooperative).

Sati, the burning of widows in India, has probably been the best-known (and the most despised or lamented) Indian custom in Europe since the ancient Greeks. Comparisons with other customs usually have been made on the phenomenological level, especially with the burning of witches and heretics. Here it is suggested to introduce comparisons on the functional level. The main question is thus not what happens, but what the function and purpose of the act are. Seen in this perspective, the central aspect becomes the connection between this world and the other world, between the living and the dead. On the basis of a belief in a hereafter that is an immediate continuation of this life, both worlds are connected by an act in which a dead person is followed, voluntarily or by force, in a public ceremony, by one or several living persons, thus emphasizing the continuity between the two worlds. The particulars of the ritual, whether it is killing or self-killing, and the manner of killing are, from a functional point of view, unimportant. Usually, this manner corresponds to the manner of disposing of the dead. Thus, for example, in Indian castes that bury the dead, sati is usually performed by burying alive. In other contexts, the method of killing is to preserve the body of the followers as intact as possible, so as to enable them to do their duties in the hereafter, which often leads to strangling.

Following into death thus defined can be shown to have occurred, in the course of history, in most areas of the world for a longer or a shorter time, with the notable exception of Western Europe [Eva Braun?–J.], for which there is no satisfactory explanation so far, due to the lack of sources. Two further important questions cannot be answered either: we can only guess the context in which such customs had their origin, as we don’t know when they developed, and we do not know whether there was a kind of diffusion from one point of origin or whether the relevant customs developed independently from each other in different places. The only exceptions are Southeast Asia, where the occurrence of widow burning makes Indian influence very likely, and Japan, where there was probably Chinese influence.

Following into death is of special interest because it links two worlds and thus religious with sociopolitical aspects. It is a matter of life and death. As it is physically impossible to accompany every dead person, the question of who has the right to be followed and who has the duty to follow arises. Following into death thus not only becomes a mirror of social structure and political power; it also can influence them. There are two main functions in this framework. Especially in India, sati reflects, confirms, and strengthens the subordination of men to women [vice versa, surely–J.]. In many other places it has the same effect for the superiority of the ruling groups. The ceremony of killing the followers shows the long-term results of social and political power struggles.

Following into death presupposes certain religious beliefs (as a necessary, not a sufficient, condition). Wherever beliefs in a final judgment prevailed over beliefs in a transfer of this world into the other, following into death either vanished, if the beliefs of the people at large changed, or were suppressed, if foreign conquerors had sufficient strength to abolish them. This is what European colonialism did, mainly with humanitarian arguments, but basically because of its own religious background.

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by | 6 July 2005 · 8:29 am

Medieval German vs. Mongol Shock and Awe

Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who ranks as one of Germany’s greatest historical and cultural heroes, best exemplified the use of terror in the West. When he tried to conquer the Lombard city of Cremona in the north of modern Italy in 1160, he instituted an escalating series of violent acts of terror. His men beheaded their prisoners and played with the heads outside the city walls, kicking them like balls. The defenders of Cremona then brought out their German prisoners on the city walls and pulled their limbs off in front of their comrades. The Germans gathered more prisoners and executed them in a mass hanging. The city officials responded by hanging the remainder of their prisoners on top of the city walls. Instead of fighting each other directly, the two armies continued their escalation of terror. The Germans then gathered captive children and strapped them into their catapults, which were normally used to batter down walls and break through gates. With the power of these great siege machines, they hurled the living children at the city walls.

By comparison with the terrifying acts of civilized armies of the era, the Mongols did not inspire fear by the ferocity or cruelty of their acts so much as by the speed and efficiency with which they conquered and their seemingly total disdain for the lives of the rich and powerful. The Mongols unleashed terror as they rode east, but their campaign was more noteworthy for its unprecedented military success against powerful armies and seemingly impregnable cities than for its bloodlust or ostentatious use of public cruelty….

One of the worst slaughters was unleashed on the citizens of Omar Khayyám‘s home city of Nishapur. The residents revolted against the Mongols, and in the ensuing battle an arrow fired from walls of the city killed Genghis Khan’s son-in-law, Tokuchar. In revenge for the revolt and as a lesson to other cities, Genghis allowed his widowed daughter, who was pregnant at the time, to administer whatever revenge she wished upon the captured city. She reportedly decreed death for all, and in April 1221, the soldiers carried out her command. According to widely circulated but unverified stories, she ordered the soldiers to pile the heads of the dead citizens in three separate pyramids–one each for the men, the women, and the children. Then she supposedly ordered that the dogs, the cats, and all other living animals in the city be put to death so that no living creature would survive the murder of her husband….

While the destruction of many cities was complete, the numbers given by historians over the years were not merely exaggerated or fanciful–they were preposterous. The Persian chronicles reported that at the battle of Nishapur, the Mongols slaughtered the staggeringly precise number of 1,747,000. This surpassed the 1,600,000 listed as killed in the city of Herat. In more outrageous claims, Juzjani, a respectable but vehemently anti-Mongol historian, puts the total for Herat at 2,400,000. Later, more conservative scholars place the number of dead from Genghis Khan’s invasion of central Asia at 15 million within five years. Even this more modest total, however, would require that each Mongol kill more than a hundred people; the inflated tallies for other cities required a slaughter of 350 people by every Mongol soldier. Had so many people lived in the cities of central Asia at the time, they could have easily overwhelmed the invading Mongols.

SOURCE: Genghis Khan and the Remaking of the Modern World, by Jack Weatherford (Three Rivers Press, 2004), pp. 116-118

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