On the corner of Berliner Straße in the southwestern Berlin municipal district of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf stands an ornate if humbly sized Mughal-style mosque. Planned by Indian missionaries beginning in 1922, the building was constructed between 1924 and 1928 on a plot of land just inside the city's Ringbahn. The simply named Berlin Mosque (Berliner Moschee) was the first permanent place of Muslim worship in all of Germany and by the late 1920s became a pillar for a vibrant Muslim community that peaked around 3,000 strong. While the community of Muslims in Weimar Berlin has received growing scholarly attention, the mosque project itself has received very little.Footnote 1 This article situates the construction of the Berlin Mosque in the legacies of German empire and the radical transformation of Muslim societies around the world. The construction of Muslim space in interwar Berlin depended not only on Indian missionaries but also on German and non-German diplomats and activists. Throughout the interwar period they drew on imperial ideologies and projected global ambitions onto the local Muslim community and the Berlin Mosque project. The building itself thus offers an anchor for a broader history of imperial aftermaths and geopolitical change. In the 1920s many German and non-German diplomats and activists understood the mosque project as a potential political bridge between the imperial politics of Islam and the fragmenting diplomatic realities of the Middle East, North Africa and India.
Locating the construction of the Berlin Mosque at the intersection of international ambitions and Berlin's growing Muslim community expands the historiography of imperial legacies in the Weimar Republic and provides an important link in an emerging history of German global aspirations. In the last two decades, and particularly in the last few years, a growing body of scholarship has located the echoes of German overseas empire in the Weimar Republic and beyond.Footnote 2 German historians have of course stressed continuities since the Sonderweg debates, but scholars specifically interested in overseas empire broadened the focus beyond authoritarianism and the limits of liberalisation by foregrounding the trajectories of imperial violence.Footnote 3 Much of the subsequent scholarship similarly focused on continuities of the German colonial project; that is, on territorial ambitions, racism and violence.Footnote 4 As recent work has demonstrated, racism and cultural chauvinism continued to inform German efforts at colonial revanchism and restoration in the decades after 1918.Footnote 5 Pointing to different continuities, others have emphasised how the post-imperial condition opened space in Germany for a budding politics and culture of anti-imperialism.Footnote 6 But because Germany had no empire in the 1920s, it often appears only as a backdrop for this history. To pull the threads together it must be underlined that the German empire was never solely about violent and racist territorial expansions. Wilhelmine Weltpolitik was also centrally focused on undermining British, French and Russian hegemony from Iran and India to North Africa and the Baltic states. Such hopes most famously came to a head in the First World War, where revolutionising the global order was a goal and not just a means of waging war.Footnote 7 The continuities of this particular aspect of German empire have only recently begun to be investigated. We know, for example, that the global ambitions seen in Imperial Germany were echoed decades later by the Nazi regime, which sought to mobilise, ally with and even follow anti-imperial authoritarian movements around the world.Footnote 8 The Berlin Mosque helps to anchor the continuities of such global aims in the Weimar Republic. Some continuities are direct, as in the case of key German and non-German personnel in 1920s Berlin who were continuously active in imperial policy from the 1890s to the 1940s. As we shall see, however, the more conceptual continuity – of seeking global partners against imperial rivals – shifted in important ways in the interwar moment as ideological fancy met diplomatic reality.
In the course of the 1920s German and non-German diplomats and political leaders projected a much larger desire to ally with the Muslim world onto the Berlin Mosque. Forged in Wilhelmine and Ottoman efforts to undermine other European empires, particularly the British, this ambition most famously took the form of a declaration of jihad in the First World War. The effort, however, was much larger than that declaration and in the 1920s it was refracted through the post-imperial moment. Changes in the European imperial balance of power and in the political realities of the post-Ottoman world played out in the streets of Berlin, informing the agendas of both Germans and non-Germans. To tell this story, the first section of this article surveys visions and aspirations of an alliance between Germany and the Muslim World from the late Kaiserreich to the early Weimar Republic. Having sketched out the ideological contours and the political trajectories of individuals who carried them from the imperial to post-imperial context, the second section focuses on the construction and uses of the Berlin Mosque itself. From conception to completion, the process of building the Berlin Mosque depended on the legacies of empire, the fragmentation of the Wilhelmine referent and the global entanglements of Weimar Berlin. The Berlin Mosque captures one of the ways that Wilhelmine geopolitical objectives were carried into the 1920s and came to inform the discourses, politics, culture and the concrete spaces of the Weimar Republic.
The ‘Muslim World’, Islam and Germany from Wilhelm to Weimar
The political aspirations that both Germans and non-Germans projected onto the Berlin Mosque project had their roots in two entangled developments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first of these was the emergence of ‘the idea of the Muslim World’, an imagined civilisational entity uniting diverse Muslims around the globe through the political institution of the caliphate.Footnote 9 The second key development was the emergence of a German–Ottoman alliance, one part of which was an overlapping, if conceptually divergent spiritual and political emphasis on Islam. The jihad of November 1914 marked the conspicuous entanglement of the relatively new idea that Muslims around the world would operate as a single unit and the imperial goals of Germany and the Ottoman Empire. The end and immediate aftermath of the Great War proved pivotal for both of these developments. Most obviously, the German and Ottoman Empires ceased to exist. But the same fate also awaited the institution of the Ottoman caliphate, the knot that tied the two threads together in 1914. At the same time, the political realities of majority Muslim societies around the globe changed significantly, from the expansion of French and British imperial hegemony to the emergence of new Islamic states and nationalist reform movements. While these developments complicated the realities of the post-Ottoman and post-Wilhelmine world, the idea that Islam could be allied with and mobilised in the service of geopolitics nonetheless continued to resonate with a number of former imperial diplomats and clandestine service members who shaped the construction of the Berlin Mosque.
Islam was increasingly politicised in the course of the nineteenth century in response to new articulations of imperial racism and the emergence of particularist nationalisms in the Ottoman periphery. Throughout Africa and Asia, the Dutch, French, Russian and British Empires increasingly made full equality all but impossible through codified racial hierarchies and sweeping legal distinctions. In response, pan-Islamic intellectuals advanced the idea of the Muslim world to combat notions of fundamental inequality. As Cemil Aydin has shown, such intellectuals emphasised a rational and scientific past, fused together disparate Muslim experiences and positioned the institution of the Ottoman caliphate as a representative political entity.Footnote 10 Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II (1842–1918) at first shied from pan-Islamism on the international stage for fear of disrupting his relations with the British, but he gradually learned that by encouraging non-Ottoman Muslims to split their political and spiritual loyalties he could in fact gain the favour of other dynastic empires.Footnote 11 Domestically, too, Abdülhamid had his own reasons for embracing and politicising Islam beginning in the 1870s. Abandoning his former secular Ottomanism, the sultan politicised Islam in an effort to take the wind from the sails of Arab and other political factions that challenged his authority in the imperial periphery.Footnote 12 Thus while pan-Islamism emerged from critiques of European racism in non-Ottoman Muslim societies, it increasingly entered Ottoman policy and discourse thanks to international and domestic efforts to ensure dynastic stability. As an unintended consequence, this development fed many European fears of ‘a Muslim peril . . . attributed to the caliphate’.Footnote 13 While this was true of established European empires that ruled over large Muslim populations, it was less true of fledgling German adventures in overseas empire.
Under Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941), Imperial Germany broadened its diplomatic aims, away from the continental Realpolitik of Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) and towards a more ambitious Weltpolitik. One of the central pillars of Wilhelmine diplomacy was an ever-closer relationship with the Ottoman Empire. The influx of German capital and political interest was almost immediate: public and private loans as well as monetary and diplomatic investments in rail lines and other logistics intensified in the 1890s and 1900s.Footnote 14 This continued even after the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, when the Committee of Union and Progress likewise found the Germans an attractive alternative to the British, French and Russian empires. But beyond the economic and diplomatic stakes of the German–Ottoman relationship, Islam also played an increasingly important role. We have already seen how pan-Islamism entered Ottoman policy and discourse. And Wilhelm II, like other European leaders, gradually came to believe in the homogeneity of ‘the Muslim world’. Unlike most other European leaders, however, he followed the assessments of German diplomats and Orientalist scholars who argued that the religion itself was a potential ally against his imperial rivals.Footnote 15 Foremost among these was Baron Max von Oppenheim (1860–1946), who spent three decades in the Middle East and was a close associate of several of the pan-Islamic intellectuals who developed the ‘idea of the Muslim world’, including the Egyptian Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905). Combining rumour with fear and confusion with fancy, von Oppenheim increasingly advocated – eventually to the Kaiser – that Islam, and particularly the idea of jihad, held the power to mobilise colonised Muslims against their imperial overlords.Footnote 16
While much ink has been spilt on the origins and causes of the German request and the Ottoman declaration of jihad in the autumn of 1914, much remains to be said about its purpose, especially for the Germans.Footnote 17 For Wilhelm II and a sizeable group of diplomats and Orientalists including von Oppenheim and Carl Heinrich Becker (1876–1933), jihad was understood as the lever that would move Muslims around the world in the service of German Weltpolitik. To be sure, what the historian Mustafa Aksakal called ‘the magic wand of the German emperor's imagination’, was meant to weaponise not just Ottoman Muslims but the Muslim populations of the Russian, British and French Empires.Footnote 18 Well beyond the German–Ottoman alliance, the effort to instrumentalise Islam through jihad reflected a broader German push for global revolution. In non-Ottoman Muslim societies, for example, German diplomats and orientalists led groups of Muslim POWs and Ottoman soldiers into North Africa, Afghanistan and Iran to rally local Muslims. But going a step further, the idea of mobilising ‘the Muslim world’ was also but one part of Wilhelm II's ambitious global revolutionary program, which sought to harness colonial insurrection to geopolitical revolution far beyond Muslim societies alone.Footnote 19 Indeed, none less than Max von Oppenheim also worked to recruit Indian Hindu revolutionaries from Paris, London and San Francisco to join the German war effort by undermining the British Raj.Footnote 20 Thus while the German diplomat Friedrich Rosen (1856–1935) was correct in his assessment that the ‘whole oriental policy was executed by fantasy prone opportunists’, they were responding to definitive elements in the intellectual and political currents of the Islamic, Ottoman and colonial worlds while also acting within a broader policy of Wilhelmine Weltpolitik.Footnote 21
While the Imperial German ambition of global revolution came to an official end during the war, it had a number of post-war afterlives. Most importantly, German and Ottoman imperial personnel and anti-colonial activists sustained the hope of instrumentalising Islam, projecting geopolitical aspirations onto the lives and built environment of Berlin's Muslim community in the 1920s. These international entanglements informed and shaped the construction of the Berlin Mosque but were dependent on the radical transformation of the post-Wilhelmine and post-Ottoman world. To be sure, the global order was revolutionised by the war, but not as German or Ottoman leadership would have hoped. While it remained an attractive idea, the Muslim world began to crumble, thanks in part to imperial expansions, the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of new Muslim leaders. The dramatic international transitions of the 1920s informed precisely how and why the legacies of Wilhelmine dreams of a German–Muslim alliance played out in the streets of Weimar Berlin.
First and foremost, the Ottoman Empire disintegrated under the weight of internal reform and external dismemberment. From 1918 to 1922 international diplomats, imperialists and wars of conquest carved up the Ottoman periphery. Armenia, for example, became independent in 1918, only to be incorporated into the Soviet Union four years later. To the south, and under the auspices of the League of Nations mandate system, the Treaty of San Remo granted the British and French empires control of Iraq, Transjordan, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. The next month, in Anatolia, the Grand National Assembly elected the national reformer Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938). And, finally, in October of 1923 the Assembly proclaimed Turkey an independent republic thereby dissolving the Ottoman Empire from within. By that point at the latest, the political geography of Germany's erstwhile ally had been fundamentally transformed.
Beyond the Ottoman Empire, the Wilhelmine hope for global insurrection had also depended on the political idea of ‘the Muslim world’. Here, too, seismic shifts in the 1920s cracked the foundations, though perhaps not the fantasy, of an imagined Muslim solidarity. The Ottoman caliphate had been at the heart of the idea of the Muslim world since the 1880s, but its actual power had been in question since at least the ineffectual call to jihad in 1914. While Atatürk promoted secularism in Anatolia, elsewhere, such as in the British Raj, the Khilafat Movement of pan-Islamic activists advocated for the restoration of the Ottoman caliph. A year after the declaration of the Turkish Republic, however, Atatürk abolished the institution of the Ottoman caliphate, sparking conversation and debate amongst many Muslim organisations, sects, activist groups and leaders around the world.Footnote 22 Many interested parties, such as the Khilafat Movement, ultimately decided that the caliphate should be an Arab institution tied to the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina.Footnote 23 In that, one successor seemed an obvious choice. Just as Atatürk was abolishing the caliphate, King Abdulaziz II, or Ibn Saud, consolidated control of the Arabian Peninsula, including Mecca and Medina. The European imperial powers feared the potential power Saud wielded as a Muslim leader. The British, for example, underwrote his conquest of Arabia through sworn non-interference in the fate of Islamic holy places out of fear of raising the ‘ire of Muslims in the British Empire’, especially in India.Footnote 24 The British similarly encouraged Ibn Saud to reject the title of caliph after consolidating power in the Arabian Peninsula.Footnote 25 This pressure, combined with Saudi-Wahhabi hostility to the Ottoman model of a caliphate in effect eliminated the institution for the foreseeable future. The end of the Ottoman Empire and the institution of the caliphate dealt a heavy blow to the hopes of Muslim reformers around the world who had seen in both the mouthpiece of opposition to European imperialism and racism.Footnote 26
The 1920s thus witnessed a dramatic religious and political restructuring of the Middle East and the post-Ottoman Muslim world: the emergence of a secular Turkish Republic, the abolition of the caliphate, the rise of Ibn Saud, and the establishment of British and French Mandate States in Iraq and the Levant. Locating Germany within these political changes is not always easy. Formally, the country had lost its empire and been branded ‘unfit’ for colonial activity by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Nonetheless, throughout the 1920s Germany worked towards establishing diplomatic relations in the new political order of the Middle East and in some cases even tried to join it. In 1924, for example, Germany reopened its Consulate General in Jerusalem to normalise relations with British Mandatory government in Palestine. Two years later the Weimar Republic was admitted to the League of Nations and, under the urging of German imperialists, became a member of its Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC). As Sean Wempe has recently shown, restorationist hopes for German colonial control of a League Mandate were never fulfilled, but the entry of German delegates into the PMC nonetheless provided an institutional framework for colonial lobbyists and revanchists to advocate for German global interests in a colonial purview.Footnote 27 For many in the Foreign Service the Wilhelmine aspiration of allying with the opponents of British and French imperialism remained firmly in their minds. Indeed, as late as 1930 German diplomats stationed in the Palestinian Mandate rejected the thorny proposition of mediating between Zionists and what they saw as the ‘legitimate demands’ of the Arab and Muslim majority, all in the name of preserving ‘German prestige in Palestine’.Footnote 28
Throughout the 1920s foreign service workers and intellectuals active before and during the First World War sustained and revised imperial dreams of allying with and mobilising the Muslim world in the service of geopolitics.Footnote 29 On the diplomatic front, for example, the single most important German bureaucrat involved in the construction of the Berlin Mosque was Dr Fritz Grobba. Before the war Grobba had been a lawyer and scholar of Oriental languages stationed in the German Consulate in Jerusalem. After 1914 he fought in the Ottoman Empire and in 1922 was appointed to the Middle Eastern department in the Weimar Foreign Office in Berlin. He is perhaps most famous for advocating German–Arab solidarity as Ambassador to Iraq (1932–1938) and Saudi Arabia (1938–1939), as well as for his covert role in orchestrating, organising and supporting the Iraqi coup against Britain in 1941.Footnote 30 In 1920s Berlin, however, he was the main intermediary between the German state and the local Muslim community in the city. But Grobba was far from alone in carrying imperial experience into the Berlin Foreign Office. Gerhard von Mutius (1872–1934) and Herbert von Richthofen (1879–1952) served in Istanbul and Cairo, respectively, before and during the First World War and were subsequently appointed to the Middle Eastern department office in Berlin. Richthofen in particular was an associate of Max von Oppenheim and solicited his advice on a number of occasions. Joining these diplomats were scholars like Dr Georg Kampffmeyer, a professor of Arabic and Moroccan Studies at the School of Oriental Languages in Berlin. During the war he served as a liaison officer between the Foreign Office and two POW camps for Muslims from the imperial territories of the Entente Powers built just southwest of Berlin. After the war he remained committed to networking between the local Muslim community in Berlin and the Foreign Office. Over the course of the 1920s he became one of the strongest advocates for anti-imperialism, national self-determination in the Arab world and the continued application of academic knowledge of Islam to foreign policy.Footnote 31
That former colonial agents living and working in Berlin in the 1920s were able to pull imperial fantasies across 1918 depended on the rapidly growing presence of Muslims in the German capital. While they developed their own increasingly bourgeois culture in Berlin, many Muslims living in the city also played into German fantasies of allying with Islam.Footnote 32 As will be shown, this may have been accidental in some cases, such as with the Ahmadi missionary Sadr-ud-Din, who first went about building a mosque in the city. Before supporting the mosque project, Foreign Office personnel questioned the British loyalties of the missionary sect and the extent to which they aligned with German aims. In other cases Berlin residents like the ex-Ottoman intelligence operators Ahmed Shukri and Alimjan Idris actively sustained, developed and manipulated German objectives. Idris in particular liaised between the German Foreign Office and emerging majority Muslim states seeking a European ally that stood in opposition to British and French imperial hegemony. In subsequent years Idris would go on to work more directly with the Foreign Office in the Third Reich, eventually recruiting and training Muslim volunteers and imams for the Wehrmacht.Footnote 33 Like Grobba, Idris provides an important personality for locating the Weimar Republic in a longer history of Weltpolitik stretching from the Second to the Third Reich. More specifically, the examples of Sadr-ud-Din, Shukri and Idris, discussed more below, capture the extent to which both Germans and non-Germans were willing to, and did, understand the local in an international register. While operating on the same logic as larger Weimar era Kulturpropaganda campaigns, these informal networks symbolised not a break with Wilhelmine ambition but rather their recasting in the interwar context.Footnote 34 Throughout the 1920s former Wilhelmine foreign service workers, joined by former Ottoman intelligence officers, projected imperial ideals and fantasies onto the local community of Muslims in Berlin. Far from static, exchanges between Germans and non-Germans around the Berlin Mosque changed over time, directly reflecting the international politics of Muslim societies around the world.
Building the Berlin Mosque
The story of the Berlin Mosque begins with the Ahmadi missionaries who imagined and initiated its construction. These missionaries hailed from two branches of the Ahmadiyya Anjuman Ishaat-i-Islam (or Ahmadiyya), located in Lahore and Qadian in present day Pakistan and India, respectively.Footnote 35 Maulana Sadr-ud-Din, from the Lahore branch, arrived in Berlin in late 1922 and was the first to contact the German state. As soon as he arrived, he wrote to the Foreign Office asking for their support in his missionary work, promising that the mosque project was in the interest of both the Indians and the Germans. Gerhard von Mutius, former German counsellor in Ottoman Istanbul, forwarded the request to Fritz Grobba, formerly of the German consulate in Ottoman Jerusalem. Both men had lived and worked within the Orientalist and insurrectionary fantasies of Wilhelmine Weltpolitik and quickly expressed the ‘greatest interest’ in the Ahmadiyya's ‘lofty plans to build a mosque . . . and [their] intentions to benefit the Germans’.Footnote 36 Knowingly or not, Sadr-ud-Din pulled German imperial ambitions of allying itself with Islam from the familiar realm of external foreign politics to the internal spaces of Berlin. This remained a dominant interpretive lens for understanding the mosque project for at least the next decade, but its particular shade would transition with the shifting politics of Muslim societies around the world.
Within the Foreign Office the Ahmadiyya presence sparked conversation about the extent to which Germany could continue a fruitful relationship with the Muslim world and if the Indian sect was the appropriate medium. From the beginning, the Foreign Office worked diligently to determine the relationship between the Ahmadiyya and the British Empire, often with little concrete success. By the third week of communications with Sadr-ud-Din, von Mutius, Grobba and others debated the extent to which the Ahmadiyya could be trusted as allies in the post-war context. Behind closed doors they questioned whether the sect was loyal to the British, as it had been prior to the First World War, and whether members of its ranks had fought under the British flag against Germany and the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 37 At their most extreme, such concerns suggested that the sect was even invented by, and in the employ of, the British government. One rumour even claimed that the leader of the Ahmadiyya mission in London had convinced the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali, to revolt against the Ottoman Empire in 1916.Footnote 38 During these deliberations Grobba bided his time, opting to not explicitly endorse the construction of a mosque. The stakes were apparently too high, and the Foreign Office would not commit local support without clarity on the diplomatic risks.
The construction of the Berlin Mosque was nonetheless set to proceed for August 1923. The Ahmadiyya wielded private capital and a track record of successful missionary experience with their London Woking Mosque. The Berlin Mosque was designed by local architect K.A. Herrmann and was set to be built on land purchased near the Kaiserdamm underground station. The missionaries invited representatives of the Foreign Office to the ceremony in spite of having heard little from them in recent weeks. Two days before the ceremony representatives in the Foreign Office decided not to attend. Their rationale depended on internal suspicions that the appointed imam of the mosque, Mubarak Ali of the Qadian branch of the Ahmadiyya, was loyal to the British. This conviction was widespread in Berlin's diverse Muslim community. Rumours circulated that other segments of the city's Muslim population planned to protest the ceremony and the alleged British sympathies of the Ahmadi.Footnote 39 Grobba, von Mutius and others in the Foreign Office did not want to be seen opposing the convictions of Berlin's other Muslim residents and remained concerned about local rumours of pro-British sympathies among the Ahmadiyya. As it happened, construction on the mosque near Kaiserdamm quickly stalled, in large part because the height of hyperinflation exhausted the means of construction.Footnote 40 Reconsidering the scale and the location of the project, the Ahmadis decided to build a more modest mosque a few kilometres south.
The groundbreaking ceremony on the mosque in Wilmersdorf in 1924 featured the same geopolitical concerns of the previous year but introduced new actors and new political commitments. On 9 October the Ahmadis broke ground on a new, smaller mosque on Fehlbelliner Platz, designed by the same German architect. More than 100 local Muslims attended the ceremony in support, but perhaps more came to protest it. Chief among the protesters was Dr Mansur Rifat Bey (1883–1926), the head of the Egyptian National Radical Group in Berlin. He and at least two other Egyptian nationals were arrested during the ceremony for protesting the Ahmadiyya presence, causing general unrest and distributing leaflets slandering the sect as pro-British.Footnote 41 Rifat Bey was undoubtedly an advocate for German–Muslim fraternity, as well as for the mosque itself, which he later appraised as, ‘a vital sign of the friendship that has come into existence between the German people in their darkest moment and the Orient’.Footnote 42 Nevertheless, Rifat Bey had been an open and vehement opponent of the Ahmadiyya since their arrival in the German capital. Indeed, even after his arrest, and amidst a storm of subpoenas and legal pressures, he and members of the Egyptian National Radical Group continued publishing staunch critiques of the Ahmadiyya, continually branding them a trojan horse of British imperial interests.Footnote 43
The arrest and fate of Mansur Rifat Bey merit further investigation. From the perspective of the Foreign Office, the Ahmadiyya was the topic of the day and Rifat remained a critic. This is only part of the story, however. Rifat also embodied some of the complexities of the Muslim and Arab world of the 1920s – complexities that exposed the institutional limits of the Foreign Office. On the one hand he was a radical Egyptian nationalist, tremendously critical of continued British influence in Egypt since its formal independence in 1922. Moreover, he was committed to pan-Islamic internationalism at precisely the same time that German diplomats struggled to make sense of the political fragmentation of the Muslim world, seen most acutely in the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate only months before the groundbreaking ceremony. Taken together, this would seem to make Rifat an ideal ally in German geopolitical interests. On the other hand, however, his radical anti-imperialism was deeply idealistic. Already in 1924 he had excoriated nationalist leaders ranging from Egypt's Saad Zaghloul to India's Mahatma Gandhi as veritable puppets of imperial interest: ‘obedient machines in the hands of the British colonisation’.Footnote 44 While he was a nationalist, he was also Marxist-Leninist in his critique of imperialism and the League of Nations Mandate projects. So strong were his convictions that at one point he was even rumoured to be an agent of Moscow.Footnote 45 The pluralistic and multifaceted components of Rifat Bey's political identity and his staunch, compromise averse radicalism clashed with the simplistic lens of the German Foreign Office in the early 1920s. An intensely conservative institution, the Foreign Office had a hard time balancing its hostility towards the British Empire with its rigid anti-Bolshevism.Footnote 46
The ultimate fate of Rifat Bey demonstrates how, and with what limitations, officials in the Foreign Office projected their global aspirations onto the streets of Berlin. While they had stayed away from the first mosque groundbreaking, the second time around they believed they had reason to act. The Ottoman caliphate was gone and vague conceptions of ‘the Muslim world’ now had to take international diplomacy more seriously. Shortly after the arrest of Rifat Bey, Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) and President Friedrich Ebert (1871–1925) received letters that detailed the credibility of the Ahmadiyya movement and made promises of their anti-British sentiments.Footnote 47 One such letter came from Heinrich Baron Rüdt von Collenberg-Bödigheim (1875–1954), the German consul in Calcutta, who had been working to streamline Indian hostility towards the British. He claimed that the Iranian minister was now secretly supporting the Ahmadiyya in India for the sake of his own efforts to undermine British imperial interests.Footnote 48 Germany had been working to re-establish relations with Iran for several years, and this stream of encouragement from there and elsewhere convinced the Foreign Office to act decisively in defence of the Ahmadis in Berlin. An inter-ministerial exchange between the Foreign Office and the Ministry of the Interior dated two days after the report of Iranian support shows that the charges against Rifat Bey were intensified to criminal political activity. As a result, Mansur Rifat Bey was exiled to Vienna where he continued writing in German, circulating materials in Berlin, and advocating for his return to the city.Footnote 49
If the 1924 groundbreaking and the exile of Rifat Bey hinged on assessments of the Ahmadiyya, then the completion of the Berlin Mosque in early 1928 demonstrates just how much the politics of Islam had changed in the intervening years. As mentioned previously, in 1924 and 1925, respectively, Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk abolished the caliphate and Ibn Saud consolidated control of the Arabian Peninsula. Both of these had direct influence on the construction of the Berlin Mosque. In the former case, the abolition of the caliphate led to an organisational split in the Muslim community. Since 1922 the first and by far the largest organisation of Muslims in Berlin was the pan-Islamic Islamische Gemeinde zu Berlin e.V. (IGB). It had been founded by Abdul Jabbar Kheiri and Abdus Sattar Kheiri, who had served in the wartime Foreign Office reconnaissance and propaganda bureau in Istanbul. Boasting members from forty-two different countries and territories, the IGB ultimately fragmented with the abolition of the caliphate. In 1924 the Kheiris, the IGB and a number of other Muslim organisations including Rifat Bey's National Radical Egyptians published a manifesto declaring that Atatürk and the Turkish nation did not have the authority to abolish a global institution.Footnote 50 In response, the ambassadors of Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Egypt founded the Gesellschaft für Islamische Gottesverehrung e.V. (GIG) under the leadership of former Ottoman intelligence operator Alimjan Idris.Footnote 51 This registered association became the local mouthpiece for politically independent majority Muslim countries while also embodying continuities of Wilhelmine-Ottoman Weltpolitik.
The political attractiveness of the GIG in matters of the Berlin Mosque was given a boost by the emergence of other strong reform and independence-minded Muslim leaders and movements. For instance, shortly after consolidating power in the Holy Cities in 1925, Ibn Saud denounced the Ahmadiyya as heretical for the sect's belief in the prophethood of its founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad.Footnote 52 Within the Foreign Office, this denunciation from Saud, now one of the most powerful Arab and Muslim leaders in the world and ruler of the Holy Cities, triggered concerns that they had backed the wrong horse in the Ahmadiyya. Such concerns spanned beyond Saud and Atatürk, however, as German diplomats came to understand the increasing impossibility of a unified post-Ottoman, post-caliphate political ally in Islam. By the spring of 1926 international journalists and German diplomats alike had begun taking seriously that nationalist or at least more localised political movements like those of Atatürk, Saud, Reza Shah (Iran), Abd el-Krim (Rif/Morocco) and Saad Zaghloul (Egypt) precluded pan-Islamic politics.Footnote 53 Put differently, the oversimplifications that long plagued German diplomatic conceptions of Islam and informed their initial support for the Ahmadiyya began to give way to an awareness of the fragmented political realities of the post-Ottoman Muslim world.
As the political cache of the Ahmadiyya waned in the late 1920s, the GIG became increasingly active in the construction of the Berlin Mosque and the continued discourse of, and hopes for, a German–Muslim alliance. By 1927 the Ahmadis had run out of money and the Berlin Mosque remained incomplete, lacking a surrounding fence, garden, walkway, interior paint and even one of the two minarets. Later that year municipal building authorities noted that the incomplete structure could be legally slated for demolition, prompting the Ahmadis and other Muslim leaders in Berlin to raise funds to finish the construction quickly.Footnote 54 Initial fundraising included selling assets and running donation campaigns in local publications like the trilingual, reformist El-Islah. Such efforts raised over 4,000RM, with sizeable donations coming from the Iranian and Afghan ministers, and the Turkish ambassador and his wife, each representing the founding members of the GIG. Under their suggestion, Alimjan Idris and his associate Mirza Hasan, likewise of the Ottoman clandestine service, appealed to the Foreign Office to make the final funding push by leveraging the rhetorical power of a Muslim alliance. In addition to encouraging Fritz Grobba, the two former intelligence operators also wrote to Herbert von Richthofen, who had served in Cairo and was an associate of Max von Oppenheim. Hoping to secure Foreign Office funding to cover the remaining construction costs, Idris and Hasan wrote that the ‘generosity’ of the Foreign Office ‘will be known throughout all Muslim lands and will be great publicity (Propaganda) for Germany’. Even more explicitly, they pointed to the upcoming visit by the king of Afghanistan, Amanullah Khan, on whom the German state might like to make an impression.Footnote 55 In the subsequent days and weeks Idris and Hasan's suggestion was bolstered by the Turkish ambassador and the Egyptian, Iranian and Afghan ministers, all of whom weighed in advocating for the anti-British modernist reformer Amanullah Khan. They vouched for Idris, Hasan and the GIG, and encouraged the Foreign Office to support the completion of the mosque before Khan arrived. As Ministry Director Schneider put it to Grobba, Foreign Office subsidies would ‘certainly make an advantageous impact on Muslims around the world and procure the German government new sympathies throughout the Muslim world’.Footnote 56 Less than two weeks after their initial request, Grobba notified Idris and the GIG that the Foreign Office would pay the remaining 6,000RM needed for construction.Footnote 57 The Berlin Mosque was completed soon afterward in early 1928.
The visit of Amanullah Khan in late February was full of pageantry and pomp that testified to the importance German diplomats and even the German public saw in relations with Afghanistan. Khan had arrived on the global stage as vanquisher of the world's most dominant empire, the leader of one of the only free and sovereign Islamic states in the world and a ‘triumphant warrior king’ in the eyes of Muslims from India to Anatolia.Footnote 58 For the Germans, Khan likewise represented a potential successor for their geopolitical aspirations. In ‘the theatre of Weltpolitik’, one newspaper pointed out, Germans could be proud that Khan chose to spend more time in Berlin than in Paris or London.Footnote 59 He was picked up in Basel and taken by private train over Frankfurt to Berlin's main train station, which was closed to the public and meticulously staged for media coverage. Upon arrival he and President Paul von Hindenburg were taken by honour guard past the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate, through the Platz der Republik, around the Victory Column and back through Sieges Allee, Pariser Platz and down Wilhelmstrasse to the Prinz Albrecht Palace. Along the way the route was cordoned off to keep spectators out of the streets. The streets themselves were decorated with flowers and German and Afghan flags. Throughout his visit, spectators and participants were held to a formal dress code (Kleiderordnung) with provisions for civil and military participants as well as for women, who were required to wear hats at all times. Just before his arrival at the Prinz Albrecht Palace, Khan and his convoy, including Paul von Hindenburg, were greeted on Wilhelmplatz by 1,000 Muslim residents of Berlin. This final spectacle had been choreographed to demonstrate to Khan that Islam provided a cultural bridge between Germany and Afghanistan, and Islamic societies more broadly.Footnote 60 Khan himself seems to have been equally interested in fostering such relations. He stayed for a week and a half, touring the city with Hindenburg and Chancellor Wilhelm Marx and even hosting a party for close to 300 guests to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Afghan independence from Britain – a year and a half early. At the end of his time in Berlin Khan visited the newly completed Berlin Mosque in Wilmersdorf. The building itself offered the final setting for a performance of transnational Muslim solidarity as Khan addressed a multinational crowd more than 1,000 strong and prayed alongside them before leaving Germany.Footnote 61
The Foreign Office funded the completion of the Berlin Mosque in the hopes of making a good impression on Khan and strengthening the relationship between Germany and Muslims around the world. Former imperial agents, both Wilhelmine and Ottoman, projected international ambitions onto the Berlin Mosque. The post-Ottoman, post-Wilhelmine context of the 1920s, however, was markedly different than that of decades past. The British and French empires emerged from the Great War stronger and larger thanks to the League of Nations mandate system. At the same time, any Wilhelmine fantasies of global revolution, particularly those tied to a Muslim alliance, ran headlong into the shifting landscape of Middle Eastern politics, from Turkish secularisation to the consolidation of Saudi power. In spite of all of that, however, the hope did not shatter. Instead, the aftermath of this global aspiration permeated both local state dealings with Berlin's Muslim community and larger diplomatic interests in newly independent majority Muslim countries. The story of the Berlin Mosque thus captures some of the ways that the fantasies of Weltpolitik shaped a Germany that remained intensely global in the turbulent interwar years.
Conclusion
In late 1927, when the GIG was looking for ways to fund the completion of the Wilmersdorf mosque, Idris and Hasan had at first hoped to reap proceeds from selling assets. In particular, they wanted to sell the Wünsdorf Halbmondlager, a POW camp built in 1914 to house Muslim POWs from the Entente empires. The camp had been condemned in 1924 but remained a site of prayer (illegally) until 1930. Many in the GIG, including Idris and Hasan, maintained that materials from the Halbmondlager could be monetised and made a low-ball offer on the site. They asked that Grobba assist and promised, once again, the goodwill of global Muslims. With Grobba's support, the Brandenburg Finance Ministry accepted the offer and the GIG assumed ownership of the Wünsdorf camp.Footnote 62 But before disassembling, salvaging and repurposing the building materials, the Foreign Office asked that the GIG wait until they made sure that the Turkish Republic had no objections. The camp, after all, had been built as part of the 1914 jihad and the Foreign Office did not want to risk upsetting Turkey.Footnote 63 A representative of the Turkish Republic took almost two years to respond and in the meantime the GIG secured funding for the mosque completion from the Foreign Office. When a Turkish representative finally did respond, it was short and sweet and to the point. The Turkish Republic was ‘completely disinterested in the issue of the mosque in Wünsdorf’.Footnote 64
The supreme indifference of the Turkish Republic to this marker of the German–Ottoman alliance is but one example of how dramatically geopolitics had changed from 1914 to 1930. The Ottoman Empire and the caliphate were gone. Ottoman successor states ranged from the ostensibly secular Turkish Republic, the nominally sovereign Egypt and the British and French League of Nations Mandate states in Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon and Syria. Indian pan-Islamists had risen and fallen. Ibn Saud had become one of the most powerful Muslim leaders in the world but had rejected the institutional authority of the caliphate. In the midst of all this, the Foreign Office of the Weimar Republic worked to ensure that they kept alive what alliances they could, so much so that they sought Turkish support before a locally registered organisation could demolish a condemned building on their own property. Again and again in cases of local politics the Foreign Office sought advice from the other side of the world, from foreign dignitaries and German diplomats on the ground. Just as importantly for the streets of Berlin, Wilhelmine ambitions reverberated through the Weimar Republic. Former operatives of the German and Ottoman alliance remained convinced that a German–Muslim union could undermine British and French imperial hegemony. Germans and non-Germans alike restructured their notions of what this alliance might be as the geopolitical terrain shifted underfoot: from the international loyalties of the Ahmadiyya to Turkish indifference and the hopes for Khan's state visit.
The Wilhelmine aspiration to undermine imperial rivals – in particular by seeking an ally in Islam – transitioned over the course of the 1920s in direct response to political changes in majority Muslim societies around the world. Throughout, German and non-German diplomats were joined by former Ottoman operatives to sustain and foster this hope. As we have seen, the ultimate completion of the Berlin Mosque was funded by the German state on the request of ex-Ottoman agents and backed by diplomats from sovereign Muslim countries, all of whom touted the geopolitical utility of finishing construction. The repeated promises and aspirations of Muslim loyalty, rooted in fantasies of undermining (particularly British) imperial hegemony, drew on the hopes of the Wilhelmine–Ottoman alliance but reflected the new political realities of the post-Wilhelmine and post-Ottoman order. And while the hopes of allying with Islam remained potent, the idea of a singular ‘Muslim world’ had undoubtedly begun to fragment. The caliphate gone, German and non-German diplomats increasingly tied their political aspirations of instrumentalising Islam to specific states. We have seen this in the case of Khan but also with the increasing relevance of the GIG as the representative of reform and independence minded majority Muslim states. As the specific Wilhelmine referent dissolved, the aspiration of revolutionising the global order remained. Continuities in personnel, most notably Grobba and Idris, stretch directly from the 1910s to the 1940s. The former would go on to help organise the Iraqi coup against Britain in 1941, while the latter recruited and trained volunteers and imams for the Muslim divisions of the Wehrmacht.Footnote 65 The dramatic geopolitical and diplomatic upheavals of the 1920s undermined simplistic insurrectionary fantasies of cultural homogeneity, encouraging a more pragmatic hope for favourable state alliances. This change in form but not in aim reflects the transformative pressures of the 1920s in a history of Weltpolitik that stretches at least from the 1890s to the 1940s.
Acknowledgments
This article has benefitted from generous feedback in a number of different settings but I would like to explicitly acknowledge the critiques, encouragements and suggestions of Patrick Adamiak, Mikkel Dack, Rebekka Habermas, Timur Hammond, Jay Lockenour Larissa Schmid and the three anonymous reviewers of Contemporary European History.
