Alma’s Abdülhamid

The Shadow of God, King of Kings, arbiter of earth’s destiny, master of two continents and two seas, saw and heard more than all other men or less than all other men, according to his will.’ (269)

This quote demonstrates how decisive control of information can be for an autocrat in a period of transition, intent on impeding shared communication channels and democratic development. It is taken from a biography of Abdülhamid II by a Viennese-trained scholar and museologist, Alma Wittlin (1899-1991), published in English translation in 1940. Originally written in German, subtitled The Downfall of the Orient, the work would be translated into Arabic and Portuguese. Advertisements for the English-language edition claimed that Wittlin’s book wove together ‘fifty years of European politics and 500 years of oriental history’.  

Alongside earlier literature on the sultan, Wittlin drew on archival materials and oral history: unofficial diplomatic reports, public record offices in Vienna and London, interviews in Istanbul and Ankara with former members of the court, among them two women of the harem and a court physician who doubled as financial counsellor. This first-hand information furnished an interesting background to the Turkey of 1940. Throughout Abdul Hamid Wittlin intertwined detailed description and panorama, providing facts, psychology, atmosphere and local colour. Twelve chapters spanned her subject’s birth and childhood, rise to power, Panislamism, and the Young Turks. ‘The ruler of Turkey had been endowed by tradition with a double face,’ Wittlin wrote, ‘the face of divinity and of an earthly warrior.’ (210) His ‘Panislamist call…had been to Shiites and Sunnites, to all Moslems, in Russia and Northern Africa, in India, in China’ —an attempt to counter a ‘European attempt to dominate the world.’ (231-2).

On August 31, 1900, Abdul Hamid celebrated his Silver Jubilee. Twenty-five years had passed since the day when, un-awaited and undesired, he had first ridden as a ruler through the unfriendly streets of Constantinople. [He] promised to lead the Moslems towards a better future, and he was the first, after two hundred years of retreat, to dare to defy the Western world…After the Armenian massacres, four years earlier, leading figures in Britain and France had revealed him as murderer but the representatives of foreign Powers had only flatteries upon their lips. The most important guest [was] the Shah of Persia [ending] the schism which had for so long weakened the Moslem world. Through all the suffering and misfortune which had befallen Turkey in the past two centuries it had continued to be powerful. (234, 238)

An exile in England since 1937, Alma Wittlin belonged to a generation of Austrian intellectuals who had experienced the Great War, the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, the 1929 crash and Great Depression. Vienna, the oversized capital of a fledgling Republic, was beset with great economic and social problems, as well as a forcing house for the arts, politics, philosophy, pedagogy  –  all seen as heralds of democratic development. Wittlin’s Abdul Hamid echoed this trans- and interdisciplinary thinking. For Wittlin pre-WWI developments in the Near East were ‘not only illustrating the past, but also the contemporary and the future.’(175)

A keen traveller, Wittlin probably visited Turkey in the early 1930s, and published reviews of new governmental buildings in Ankara (including Çankaya Mansion and the Parliament) designed by fellow Austrian Clemens Holzmeister. Travel as well interviews with those close to the sultan enabled Wittlin to deliver a book for the ‘expert historian and for the general reader alike’. Having been married to a writer of historical biographies, Paul M. Frischauer (the couple divorced in 1932) Wittlin was aware that this genre was en vogue. Her interest may also have been triggered by an article by a PEN colleague, historian George P. Gooch, that appeared in the Contemporary Review in 1934. This had compared events in Hitler’s Germany with crimes committed in Turkey under the despotic sultan. Wittlin’s activity as art historian/archaeologist at the Imperial Collection in Vienna and Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin brought her into contact with treasures of Byzantine and oriental art from the sultan’s collection.

Reviewers hailed Abdul Hamid as ‘a standard history of Turkey in the modern world’, as well as a ‘living, breathing likeness of Turkey in its Sick man stage’. Others remarked on the analogy to Hitler, observing that this ‘enthralling study of the rise, decline and fall of a tyrant…aids in understanding the despot who today is the chief curse of the world’. The exceptional illustrations, affording glimpses of an unfamiliar Orient drew little comment.

The Young Turk program embodied the principle that all the inhabitants of Turkey should enjoy racial and religious equality, thus reconciling Nationalism with Liberalism. [They] were careful to explain that they desired to ‘conserve’ as well as to reform. Such was their theory: it remained to be seen how it would work out in practice, in a land where past and future stood opposed with no bridge between them. (254)

Wittlin’s Abdülhamid is one with an unshaken ‘belief in the paramount importance for Turkey of her ancient spiritual values’. Acceptance of the changes wrought by the Young Turks and WWI was not an option for one with ‘his far-reaching views. The worth of which time has still to decide.’ (288).

This post draws on a chapter from the author’s recent book Museum. Learning. Democracy. The Work and Life of Alma S. Wittlin (1899-1991), Vienna/Münster: LIT Verlag, 2025. Page numbers in brackets are citations from Alma Wittlin, Abdul Hamid. The Shadow of God, London: The Bodley Head, 1940.

FEATURE IMAGE: W. DUKE, SONS & CO. TRADE CARD, FROM THE SERIES RULERS, FLAGS AND COATS OF ARMS (1888). METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, 63.350.206.126.48.