The Passion of Max von Oppenheim: Archaeology and Intrigue in the Middle East from Wilhelm II to Hitler

The Passion of Max von Oppenheim: Archaeology and Intrigue in the Middle East from Wilhelm II to Hitler Author: Lionel Gossman
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-909254-20-6 £15.95
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-909254-21-3 £29.95
PDF ISBN: 978-1-909254-22-0 £5.95

eBook Editions: (more info)


 
Click here to read this book online for free
One of the finest books on this period and topic. The research is thorough, the analysis careful and moderate, and the range of the book is broad. It will appeal to scholars in a variety of fields. The biographical sections on Oppenheim, a fascinating figure, are superb, and the many complexities of his life are contextualized beautifully as are those on Oppenheim's pamphlets during WWI concerning Jihad. A learned book of the highest caliber.
— Prof. Susannah Heschel

 
Born into a prominent German Jewish banking family, Baron Max von Oppenheim (1860-1946) was a keen amateur archaeologist and ethnologist. His discovery and excavation of Tell Halaf in Syria marked an important contribution to knowledge of the ancient Middle East, while his massive study of the Bedouins is still consulted by scholars today. He was also an ardent German patriot, eager to support his country's pursuit of its "place in the sun".

Excluded by his part-Jewish ancestry from the regular diplomatic service, Oppenheim earned a reputation as "the Kaiser's spy" because of his intriguing against the British in Cairo, as well as his plan, at the start of the First World War, to incite Muslims under British, French and Russian rule to a jihad against the colonial powers. After 1933, despite being half-Jewish according to the Nuremberg Laws, Oppenheim was not persecuted by the Nazis. In fact, he placed his knowledge of the Middle East and his connections with Muslim leaders at the service of the regime.

Ranging widely over many fields — from war studies to archaeology and banking history —The Passion of Max von Oppenheim tells the gripping and at times unsettling story of one part-Jewish man's passion for his country in the face of persistent and, in his later years, genocidal anti-Semitism.

Title: The Passion of Max von Oppenheim: Archaeology and Intrigue in the Middle East from Wilhelm II to Hitler
Author: Lionel Gossman
Publication Date: February 2013
Number of pages: 416
Dimensions: 6.14" x 9.21" | 234 x 156 mm
BIC subject codes: JFSR1 (Jewish studies), JPFQ (Fascism and Nazism), HBJF1 (Middle-Eastern history), HBJD (European history), HDDC (Middle and Near Eastern archaeology)
Illustrations: 20 black & white
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-909254-20-6


INTRODUCTION


 

PART I. FAMILY BACKGROUND, DIPLOMATIC CAREER, ROLE IN WORLD WAR I

1. The Oppenheims

2. The Charm of the Orient

3. Attaché in Cairo. "The Kaiser’s Spy"

4. The Spectre of Pan-Islamism and Jihad. The Background of Oppenheim’s 1914 Denkschrift betreffend die Revolutionierung der islamischen Gebiete Unserer Feinde

5. Oppenheim’s 1914 Denkschrift

6. Promoter of German Economic Expansion and the Berlin-Baghdad Railway


PART II. THE ARCHAEOLOGIST: TELL HALAF

7. Discovery and Excavation, Publications and Critical Reception

8. Financial Difficulties. The Fate of the Tell Halaf Finds


PART III."THE KAISER’S SPY" UNDER NATIONAL SOCIALISM. "LEBEN IM NS-STAAT"

9. Questions

10. The Oppenheims and their Bank under National Socialism



11. Waldemar and Friedrich Carl von Oppenheim, so-called "Quarter-Jews", during the National Socialist Regime: Work for the Abwehr (German Counter-Intelligence) and Association with the Conservative "Widerstand" (German Resistance)

12. Max von Oppenheim, "Half-Jew," during the National Socialist Regime

(i) Oppenheim and the Race Question 

(ii) Support of the Regime

13. Plotting for Nazi Germany. Oppenheim’s Role in the Middle East

Policy of the Third Reich

14. Max von Oppenheim’s Last Years


PART IV. MAX VON OPPENHEIM’S RELATION TO NATIONAL SOCIALISM IN CONTEXT. SOME RESPONSES OF "NON-ARYAN” GERMANS TO NATIONAL SOCIALISM

15. Two Jewish Organizations: the Verband nationaldeutscher Juden (Association of German National Jews) and the Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten (Jewish War Veterans Association)

16. Some Individuals: Schoeps, Pevsner, Kantorowicz, Landmann

17. By Way of Conclusion


APPENDIX of originals and translations of passages quoted          


INDEX OF NAMES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lionel Gossman is M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Romance Languages (Emeritus) at Princeton University. Most of his work has been on seventeenth and eighteenth-century French literature, nineteenth-century European cultural history, and the theory and practice of historiography. His publications include Men and Masks: A Study of Molière; Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment; French Society and Culture: Background for 18th Century Literature; The Empire Unpossess’d: An Essay on Gibbon’s "Decline and Fall;” Between History and Literature; Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas; The Making of a Romantic Icon: The Religious Context of Friedrich Overbeck’s "Italia und Germania;” and several edited volumes: The Charles Sanders Peirce Symposium on Semiotics and the Arts; Building a Profession: Autobiographical Perspectives on the Beginnings of Comparative Literature in the United States (with Mihai Spariosu); Geneva-Zurich-Basel: History, Culture, and National Identity, and Begegnungen mit Jacob Burckhardt (with Andreas Cesana). He is also author of Brownshirt Princess: A Study of the 'Nazi Conscience', and the editor and translator of The End and the Beginning: The Book of My Life by Hermynia Zur Mühlen, both published by OBP.