.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
BRILL is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Die Welt des Islams.
http://www.jstor.org
COLIN HEYWOOD
London
A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY
387
long and distinguished career at the University of Chicago and, latterly, at the University of California, Los Angeles until his death in
1972.4 Equally overlooked has been the noted Sinologist Wolfram
Eberhard (1909-1989), who has some claim at least to be recognised as a historian as much as a social anthropologist. Eberhard,
like many Austrian and German refugees from Nazism, first found
refuge in Turkey, teaching at the University of Ankara before migrating to the United States in the postwar years.5 A number of his
most important publications on the history of early medieval China
were thus written in Turkish, which has perhaps contributed to the
undeserved oblivion to which his work has been largely but not entirely consigned.
Eberhard apart, the Turkish connection in German-speaking
refugee historical scholarship has been little explored outside of
the specialist literature. The present paper represents an attempt
to open up for discussion by an audience wider than that of professional Ottoman historians the career and writings of Paul Wittek,
one of the most significant but overlooked Austrian historians of
the Diaspora, who ended his professional career, from 1949 to his
retirement in 1961, as the first holder of the Chair of Turkish in
the University of London. Wittek was born in the outer Viennese
suburb of Baden bei Wien in 1894; he died in the outer London
suburb of Eastcote in 1978. His life spanned and in its external
course was moulded by the tragedies of his time, for he belonged
to that lost Austrian generation concerning which his friend the
writer Herbert Cysarz remarked that "it was not [political] systems,
states and armies that lost wars, but particularly age-groups, those
of the 1890s who went straight from the school bench or the university to the battlefield and who, if they returned, were anaesthe-
4 On G.E. von Grunebaum see, in particular, notices by A. Abel (Correspondence d'Orient: Etudes xvii-xviii (1970 [sic]), 3-5; C. Cahen (JESHO xv (1972), 1-2;
F. Gabrieli (J. Oriental Inst. Baroda xxi (1972), 87-88; F. Rosenthal, IJMES iv
(1973), 355-8, together with longer studies by G.C. Anawati, "Dialogue with
Gustave E. von Grunebaum", IJMES vii (1976), 123-8; Amin Banani, ,G.E. von
Grunebaum: towards relating Islamic studies to universal history", IJMES vi
(1975), 140-7), and Abdallah Laroui, 'For a methodology of Islamic studies. Islam as seen by G.E. von Grunebaum', Diogenes lxxxiii (1973), 12-39.
5 H. Widmann, Exil und
Bildungshilfe. Die deutschsprachigeakademischeEmigration in die Turkei nach 1933, (Bern 1973), 259-260.
388
COLIN HEYWOOD
A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY
389
a leading figure in the newly-founded academic discipline of Ottoman historical studies both as joint editor (with his teacher Friedrich von Kraelitz-Greifenhorst) and as a leading contributor to the
first scholarly journal of Ottoman history published outside of
Turkey, the Vienna-based Mitteilungen zur osmanischen Geschichte
(1921-26). Financially, he supported himself by journalism, most
of which was published in the conservative, Grossdeutsch-leaning
OsterreichischeRundschau, which he edited from 1922 until it
ceased publication in 1924. Thereafter followed some years of
uncertainty, until (in 1929) Wittek took up a post at the German
Archaeological Institute in Istanbul. On the Nazi seizure of power
in 1933 he quickly renounced a position which rendered him a
civil servant in the employ of the German state, and found refuge
(1934) in Belgium. He settled in Brussels, establishing a connection with the Universit6 Libre at Brussels and with its eminent
Byzantinist, Henri Gregoire. In 1940, with Belgium invaded, Wittek
escaped via Dunkirk to Britain, where he was to spend most of the
remainder of his life. In 1948 he was appointed to the newlycreated Chair of Turkish in the University of London, a post which
he held until his retirement, at the age of 67, in 1961.9
Wittek's scholarly output was small, but in terms of the field,
highly significant. A single monograph and a short series of lectures, products both of the 1930s, were the only works to appear
between their own covers in his lifetime. He also wrote few reviews;
the greatest part of his oeuvre, written in German, French or English according to its period, appeared for the main part in scholarly
journals devoted to oriental, Middle Eastern or Islamic studies. His
work is best remembered for two rather disparate qualities, which
were displayed (often to their mutual exclusion) in his various academic publications. On the one side stands a compact oeuvre of
closely argued and strictly text-based studies in the field of early Ottoman history. In this work Wittek displayed both an astonishing
precocity and a remarkable sense of continuity. Both his earliest
9 On Wittek's pre-war career in Turkey Belgium and his post-war activities in
London see Heywood, "Wittek and the Austrian tradition", 8-11, together with
the notices by Klaus Kreiser (in Istanbuler Mitteilungen xxix (1979), 5-6); [V.L.
Menage] (in The Times [London], 16 June 1978), and CJ.F. Dowsett (ibid., 24
June 1978). Cf. also K. Bittel, F.W. Deichmann, W. Grfinhagen et al., Beitrige zur
Geschichtedes Deutschen ArchaologischenInstituts 1929 bis 1979, i (Mainz, 1979), 65,
ff.
390
COLIN HEYWOOD
A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY
391
not surprising
his return to Istanbul in 1924, Wittek's historical formulations concerning the genesis and nature of the early Ottoman state were already fully developed.
I have already analysed in detail the intellectual origins of these
formulations, and their projection on to the earliest period of Ot12 Cf. n.
1, supra.
13
392
COLIN HEYWOOD
A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY
393
394
COLIN HEYWOOD
20 p.
Wittek, "Die Glaubenskampfer im Osmanenstaat", Oostersch Genootschap in Nederland, Verslag van het achtste Congres (Leiden, 1936), 2-7; ,Les
Ghazis dans l'histoire ottomane", "Deux chapitres", 302-19.
21 P.
Wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1938, 14-15.
22 P.
Wittek, ,Die Tfirkei nach dem Weltkrieg", Ost. Rund. XVII, Jg. (1921),
599-603, at p. 603.
A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY
395
396
COLIN HEYWOOD
paper, which even more than his London lectures of the previous
year on "the Rise of the Ottoman Empire", provides a revealing
synthesis of all Wittek's ideesfixes, Wittek attempted to account for
the establishment of a futuwwa organisation by the thirteenthcentury 'Abbasid caliph Al-Nasir. Principally, Wittek felt, al-Nasir
appeared to have had the ghazi movement in mind:
Denn es kam ihm ja darauf an, fur seine Politik, die auf Erneuerung der
Kalifenmachtzielte, ergebene Krieger zu finden. Dazu bot die Futuwamit
ihremTreueverhiiltnis
zwischenMeisterundjftngerein vorzfigliches Mittel.25
Here, in the stress (justified or not) placed by Wittek on the element of a "relationship of loyalty" (Treueverhaltnis) between a Master and his young male followers, is clear evidence of a transfer
into Ottoman history of Stefan George's own view of his ideal relationship as Meisterwith his disciples, which was a leading (if not the
fundamental) tenet of the George-Kreis. The Anatolian ghazis, indeed, in Wittek's elevated view, had become by this time, no longer
mere adventurers, but the title of ghazi was now recognised
throughout the Islamic world as signifying no less than Rittertum
und Adel-"Chivalry and Nobility".
An epitome and summation of Wittek's intellectual legacy is to
be found in his 1937 London lectures, already mentioned above.
These lectures, in their published form, have already been discussed elsewhere;26 here it is merely necessary to remember that
they contain in compressed form all of Wittek's historical formulations concerning the origins, character and destiny of the Ottoman
state. One such sweeping historical generalisation, which appears
to have gained wide acceptance, and which ties up the whole of Ottoman history in a couple of sentences, bears requoting. It was not
"naive curiosity", Wittek wrote, that impelled him to undertake his
study, "but rather the conviction that the history of the Ottoman
state ... becomes comprehensible only after one has accounted for
its origin. The well-known sentence, that every state owes its existence to the same causes that created it, holds good to the full extent for the Ottoman state ...".
"Today", he continued and assured his audience, "by having
gained a clearer comprehension of its origins, we are able to un25 Italics added.
26 See n. 8.
A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY
397
derstand better the latter and even the most recent periods of Ottoman history".
But what was the source of Wittek's "well-known sentence", for
which he fails to provide a reference? To the Anglo-Saxon mind
the idea is at best a paradox, at worst a substitute for serious
thought on the processes of cause and effect. What, on further investigation, proves to be surprising is that Wittek's formulation, in
the context of English writing on Ottoman history, was by no
means a new one in 1937. Sixty years earlier, at the height of the
Eastern Crisis of 1875-8, Cardinal Newman, in the course of a long
essay on "The Turks in their relation to Europe",27 observed that
"the catastrophe of a state is according to its antecedents, and its
destiny according to its nature; and therefore ... we cannot venture
on any anticipation of the instruments or condition of its death,
until we know something about the principle and the character of
its life".28 The Wittekian parallelisms in this passage are remarkable: yet clearly it is unlikely (if not impossible) that Wittek had
read and was regesting Newman.29 It is worth recalling, therefore,
that the intellectual roots of enlightened English Roman Catholic
thought in the mid-nineteenth century-Newman's roots as much
as those of a more mainstream and significant historian like Lord
Acton-lay deep within the traditions of German historicism and
romantic medievalism. Acton's own intellectual debt to his mentor
Ignaz von D6llinger (1799-1890), theologian of Munich and president of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, is well documented;30
27 John
Henry Newman, Historical Sketches,i (London, 1876), 1-238.
28
Newman, Historical Sketches,i, 161.
29
is the correlation between Newman's historicist
Equally noteworthy
prefiguring of the conditions for the disappearance of the Ottoman empire"indestructable ... in the simplicity of its national [sic] existence ... while it remains faithful to its religion and its imperial line. Should its fidelity to either fail,
it would not merely degenerate or decay; it would simply cease to be" (Historical
Sketches,i, 220)-with Wittek's post-imperial rationalisation of the reasons for its
final disappearance (Rise of the Ottoman Empire).
30 Cf. David Mathew, Acton: the formative years (London, 1946), 67, ff.; idem,
Lord Acton and his times (London, 1968), 38, ff. Acton had a long, intellectually
unsatisfactory relationship with Newman; and in 1858 was instrumental in bringing Newman and Dollinger together-in
Birmingham (Mathew, Acton and his
times, 60). D6llinger's work as a historian was known in late-Victorian England.
His Studies in European History, "translated at the request of the author", were
published posthumously by John Murray in 1890: cf. his essay on "The significance of dynasties in the history of the world", originally delivered to the Royal
398
COLIN HEYWOOD
A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY
399
have set in train the academic processes which would bring Wittek
a distinguished visiting scholar in 1937; as an ento London-as
emy alien and refugee in 1940; as Professor of Turkish in the University of London in 1948. For already in 1935 the intellectual
shortcomings of the neoromantic school of history, together with
the baleful influence of Stefan George on a generation of impressionable younger historians, had been attacked in a seminal paper,
presented to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in that year, by the
German medievalist Walther Goetz, a paper which presumably had
gone unread in Anglo-Saxon orientalist circles of the time.33 It is
possible only to speculate as to the extent to which, in 1935, Denison Ross and Gibb were aware of Wittek's ideological makeup,
and in particular of his devotion to the ideals of the George-Kreis
and to history as a genre of literature based on intuition and "Wesensschau". Possibly, to both English scholars, such ideas were congenial. Both Denison Ross and Gibb were romantics, and more orientalists than historians. It comes as no surprise to discover from
the late Elie Kedourie's revelations that Gibb, at least, appears to
have regarded academic history in much the same light as did the
German neoromatics of the period, "als bloBe Materialsammlung
und Beschreibung".34
V.
Sitzungsberichte
der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische
Abteilung,Jg. 1935, Hft. 5 (Minchen, 1935).
34 Goetz, 'Intuition in der Geschichtswissenschaft', 5.
400
COLIN HEYWOOD
A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY
401
402
COLIN HEYWOOD
37J.H. Plumb, "The atomic historian" [on Sir Lewis Namier], The New Statesman (London), 1 August 1969, pp. 141-3. Cf. also John Brooke, "Namier and
Namierism", in George II. Nadel (ed.), Studies in the philosophy of history (New
York, 1975), 97-113 (originally published in History and Theory,iii/3 (1964), 33147).
38 FrederickII: A mediaval emperor, London 2 ed. 1988. D. Abulafia, "Kantorowicz and Frederick II", History, lxii (1977), 193-210, at p. 197. The article is reprinted in D. Abulafia, Italy, Sicily and the Mediterranean, 1050-1400 (London,
1987).
39 P. Wittek, "Fath mubin-'An
eloquent victory"', in: Steven Runciman, B.
Lewis, R.R. Betts, N. Rubinstein and P. Wittek, The Fall of Constantinople (London:
SOAS, 1955), 33-44, at p. 35.
40 Wittek, "Fath mubin", 42.
A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY
403
404
COLIN HEYWOOD
phy and collection of the letters ofJacob Burckhardt? That this paper has not gone so far in its discussion of Wittek as have, for example, recent studies on his contemporary fellow-historian and member of the George-Kreis, Ernst Kantorowicz, is only in part the result of our possessing at present a relatively smaller mass of documentation on which to draw.
And indeed, there are so many questions relating to our understanding of Wittek as a historian which remain perforce unanswered. What were the causes of his youthful obsession with and
lifelong devotion to the poetry and ethos of Stefan George. What
do we know of those early years about which Wittek apparently
spoke with affection late in life? Why the obsession with George,
and the apparently desperate need for an authority-figure in a
time of crisis? It may be worth recalling to mind a parallel instance
from the life of a greater mind than Wittek: Max Weber's interest
in the George-Kreis came much later in his life, following on a partial recovery from a paralysingly severe breakdown of several years'
duration.44 At that time this most rational of minds exhibited a
flight from the rational as evidenced by his increased interest in,
firstly, Marx's explanation of the nature and origin of capitalism;
secondly, in a surge of interest in Russian culture, as particularly
represented by the mystical and irrational side of Tolstoy's work;
and thirdly in the George-Kreis, and in what one perceptive observer (Y. Malkiel) has defined as "its glorification of instinct and
impulse".45
There is a need to know more. In a savage but perceptive review
of Wittek's sole monograph, Das Firstentum Mentesche (1932),
his former collaborator and contributor to the Mitteilungen zur
osmanischen Geschichte, Fr. Giese, spoke of Wittek having produced a bogus historical totality out of a series of "individual phenomena" (Einzelerkenntnisse)concerning the emirate of Menteshe
44 On the intellectual and personal background to Max Weber's relationship
with the George-Kreis see Arthur Mitzmann, The Iron Cage: an Historical Interpretation of Max Weber(New York, 1970), 261-71 and passim: further: cf. G. Roth, "Political Critiques of Max Weber: Some Implications for Political Sociology", in:
Reinhard Bendix and Guenther Roth (ed.), Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on
Max Weber(Berkeley-Los Angeles-London, 1971), 55-71.
45 Yakov Malkiel, "Ernst H. Kantorowicz", in R.A. Evans,
jr. (ed.), On Four
Modern Humanists, Hoffmansthal Gundolf, Curtius, Kantorowicz (Princeton, 1970),
146-219, at pp. 171-2, 173.
A SUBTERRANEAN HISTORY
405
46 Fr.
Giese, [review of P. Wittek, Das Firstentum Mentesche (Istanbul,
1935)], Historische Zeitschrift, cliii (1935-6), 370-1.
47 It is now more than ten
years since my two earlier articles on Wittek appeared. Apart from some ill-tempered but non specific public criticism from certain quarters concerning the iniquities of 'younger' [sic] revisionist historians
(amongst whom I presume I have the honour to be included), the most recent
work on the emergence of the Ottoman state has still failed to take up the challenge of exploring further the subject's intellectual foundations.