GREENMANTLE'S REVENGE
Middle Eastern connections before the Berlin bombing
Berlin THE Hauptstrasse in West Berlin on the morning of 5 April did not look like the starting place of an international crisis any more than Sarajevo on 28 June, 1914. Several hours after the bomb at the La Belle discotheque, only a handful of the curious still stood in the rain in this quiet bourgeois street of a suburb comparable to Finchley. The house had been covered in scaffolding, so one could see little inside. Only one West Berlin policeman was there to keep off intruders. The wholesale wall- paper shop did business next door. The bomb had taken the city by surprise. That morning's tabloid BZ carried a front page `Warning to all Berliners', but on turning the fold I discovered that this referred to the peril of drinking adulterated Italian wine. Yet ten days later, President Reagan justified his bombing attacks on Libya with `irrefutable evidence' that Colonel Gaddafi held responsibility for the La Belle out- rage, which killed an American soldier and a Turkish girl. A German newspaper has claimed that one of the eight Libyan `diplomats' in East Berlin had crossed to the West a few days before the atrocity, and afterwards, so the reports claim, Col- onel Gaddafi congratulated his East Berlin office by telephone.
The former capital of the German Reich is paying the price of an old obsession with Middle Eastern affairs, in 'which first the Kaiser and then Hitler attempted to use and inflame Muslim fanatics. It started with scholars and archaeologists in the 19th century. At the Pergamon Museum in the Soviet Zone of Berlin, one sees an enor- mous map of Vorderasien in Altertum, the ancient Near East, including the modern states of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and part of Iran. It was a German adventurer, Schliemann, who excavated or plundered the ruins of Troy. Most of his treasures are now dispersed, some say to the Soviet Union. In the Pergamon one can see the Processional Way of Babylon, constructed in 585 Eic• by Nebuchadnezzar II, and other such artefacts that escaped the bombing and shelling of 1945 AD. Whereas the British were paramount in Greek and Egyptian research, the Germans led in the excavation and study of sites on the Asian mainland. Although most of these men and women were genuine scholars, the German spy pretending to be an archaeologist is a cliché figure of Hollywood and pulp fic- tion.
Towards the end of the 19th century, the Germans adopted an active political role in the Middle East. Although their immedi- ate route to the south-east was blocked by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ger- mans looked beyond to the independent Balkan states such as Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria and Greece, and then further, to Constantinople, Anatolian Turkey, Syria, Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Persia (Iran). German officers trained the armies of some of these countries. German prince- lings became Balkan kings. German en- gineers constructed railways through Tur- key and Syria to Baghdad and beyond. The British First Lord of the Admiralty, Win- ston Churchill saw and forestalled the menace of Germany getting control of the Gulf's petroleum.
Kaiser Wilhelm II cultivated Islamic nationalism to woo the Turks to his side, and inflame Muslim sentiment against Bri- tain. As a result, Turkey came into the first world war on the German side, and a Jihad threatened the Muslim part of the British 'Our place, five o'clock, for drinks.' Empire, inlcuding Egypt, the Suez Canal and India. This is the theme of John Buchan's stirring and prophetic thriller Greenmantle, published in 1916, yet strangely topical today if one substitutes Soviet Union for Germany. The hero Richard Hannay is told by Sir Walter Bullivant of the Secret Service: 'The Syrian army is as fanatical as the hordes of the Mandi. The Senussi have taken a hand in the game. The Persian Moslems are threat- ening trouble. There is a dry wind blowing through the East and the parched grasses wait the spark . . . . There is a Jehad preparing . . . Islam is a fighting creed,' and the mullah still stands in the pull/4 with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other.' The Rhodesian, Hannay, and his South African friend, Peter Pienaar, go first to Germany, which is planning to use the Jihad to win control of the East. Although `the Kaiser proclaims a Holy War and calls himself Hadji Mohammed Guillamo, and says that the Hohenzollerns are descended from the Prophet, that seems to have fallen pretty flat'. But in Constantinople, the beautiful Hilda von Einem has chosen an Islamic leader, `Greenmantle', to drive the British from Persia and Mesopotamia' Another of Hannay's colleagues, the dyspeptic American Walter S. Bullivant, avers: 'I've found out one thing, and that is, that the last dream Germany will Part with is the control of the Near East. • • She'll give up Belgium and Alsace' Lorraine and Poland, but by God, shell never give tip the road to Mesopotamia' . . . Germany's like a scorpion: her stings in her tail, and that tail stretches away down into Asia.' This thriller, written and published actually during the war, contained much political wisdom. In 1918, Germany Ws', Alsace-Lorraine and Poland, as well as her African Empire, but during the 1920s she started her push to the south-east, the Drang nach Osten under another name; The German economy gained control o' the Balkans, Turkey and much of the Middle East, supplying capital and factory goods in return for cheap labour and rag' materials. In the second world war, Hitlar soon won control of the Balkans; Turkey was neutral; Iran, Iraq and some of the southern Arabs were friendly to Hider s policy on the Jews. If Rommel's armies had got to Cairo, they would have found a friendly Egyptian populace. Since the second world war, the recent imperial powers such as Britain and Franca have accepted millions of immigrants fro their former colonies, like Pakistan an Algeria. The Germans, with no EmPire since 1918, have not had to play host to Tanganykans, or New Guinea islanders' Instead there has been an influx to Ger- many of those people who used to be Par; of the pre-war economic empire. lviii.01/4 of Yugoslays have come to work in vv' German, bringing with them the factional, quarrels of Serb versus Croat. Most of the Yugoslays go home but the Turkish immig- rants have tended to settle and raise their families in West Germany. In West Berlin the Turks number half of the quarter million gastarbeiter, of whom many, such as the girl killed in La Belle nightclub, are first-generation residents. Turkish gas- tarbeiter are blamed for much of the drug traffic by car and lorry, which may be condoned by the East German customs men as a way of further corrupting the Western part of the city. As John Buchan observed 70 years ago, the Turks them- selves are not attracted by militant Islamic sects and have not so far lent support to an Arab or Persian Jihad. The only extremists in West Berlin's Turkish community seem to belong to the far political Right such as the Grey Wolves, who plotted to kill the Pope, and the 'Skinheads', a bullyboy street gang. However the Libyans have connections with some of the West Ger- man terrorists.
The Drang nach Osten was often identi- fied with the need for lebensraum, or living space, in the days when Germany had a growing and young population. Now the ethnic West Germans reproduce them- selves at a rate of less than two children per family, must to the dismay of conservative politicians such as Herbert Geissler, the General Secretary of the CDU, who says, 'When nobody more has children, our country has no more future,' or Ignaz Kiechle, the Agricultural Minister, who suggested: 'Our young couple should be reminded that even the most expensive Mercedes never says "Daddy" or "Mum- my".' Statistics on newly nationalised Ger- mans show a huge preponderance from the east: Poles, Yugoslays, Bulgarians and above all Turks. Perhaps it is Greenman- tle's revenge on Hilda von Einem.
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