BOOKS

There was a crooked man

John Grigg

THE SECRET LIVES OF TREBITSCH LINCOLN by Bernard Wasserstein

Yale, £16.95, pp. 384

Trebitsch Lincoln in 1901 During the five-day 'Kapp putsch' against the Weimar Republic in March 1920, Adolf Hitler flew from Munich to Berlin (incidentally, his first flight) to be at the scene of action. He was accompanied by the poet and journalist Dietrich Eckart. In the lobby of the Adlon hotel they saw a leading member of the conspiracy, who was acting as the Kapp regime's press chief. Eckhart, recognising the man as of Jewish origin, gripped Hitler's arm and said 'Come on Adolf, we have no further business here'; and the two then left Berlin. Soon afterwards the putsch col lapsed.

The man they had seen was Ignacz Trebitsch Lincoln, one of history's truly inspired adventurers, whose astonishingly varied — but invariably astonishing — life has now been recorded in greater detail and with fuller access to sources than ever before by Bernard Wasserstein, head of the history department at Brandeis. Since a pioneering study' of Trebitsch appeared in 1961, the British government's extensive dossier on him at the PRO has been opened under the 30-year rule, and Profes- sor Wasserstein has made good use of it. In addition, he has traced a number of Tre- bitsch's close relations, who have given valuable information. The result is a mar- vellous read, deliberately in the tradition of Symons's Quest for Corvo and Trevor- Roper's Hermit of Peking. The author is so much in awe of his subject's prowess as a con-man that he warns us of the 'faint possibility' that Trebitsch might 'rise from the grave, in the form of a posthumous cache of documents' that would contradict the whole argument of the book. But the possibility seems faint Indeed.

Trebitsch was born in 1879, the son of a prosperous Jewish merchant in Hungary. As a boy he failed as a student of drama, though his histrionic talents were certainly not atrophied. Soon afterwards he was in trouble with the police: a condition which was to become habitual with him, on a cosmic scale.

Fleeing from the law in Hungary, he embarked on a lifetime of travels. In England he was converted from Judaism to Christianity, the man responsible (whose wife's watch and chain he stole) later saying of him that he was 'thoroughly bad, a genius, and very attractive, but taking the crooked way always for choice'. In fact there was a genuine streak of mysticism in him, though fatally alloyed with baser motives. His extraordinary gift of the gab led him into missionary activity, seeking to convert his former co-religionists. He was ordained an Anglican deacon in Canada, and after a brief, discreditable career there was appointed to a curacy in Kent. But he failed his examination for the full priest- hood, Archbishop Randall Davidson sage- ly noting against his name 'I don't think he is a gt loss'.

Others were less percipient. Through applying for a job as a Temperance prop- agandist, he was taken on as a researcher by Seebohm Rowntree, the well-known cocoa manufacturer, philanthropist and pioneer sociologist, who worked closely with Lloyd George on his Land Campaign. Rowntree, for a time deeply impressed by him, made him an unsecured loan of £10,000 (worth about £350,000 in today's money), and helped indirectly to bring about his nomination as Liberal candidate for Darlington, where he was elected, against the national trend, in January 1910. He took an English name (the first of many aliases) and sat in the House of Commons for a few months as Trebitsch Lincoln MP. But he did not stand again at the end of 1910, probably because his past was catch- ing up on him and he was about to be declared bankrupt.

Characteristically bouncing back, he en- gaged in fraudulent speculations in Eastern European oil, which cost other people a lot of money, until the outbreak of war in 1914. Then, after trying in vain to sell his services as a spy to both the British and the Germans, he went to America and pub- lished sensational articles claiming to have spied on behalf of Germany as an act of revenge against Britain. The British au- thorities, whose attitude towards him now and for the rest of his life verged on the paranoid, had to wait a long time before obtaining his extradition. But in 1916 he was deported to Britain, charged with forgery (the most easily provable offence), convicted, and sentenced to three years' penal servitude.

Through this and all the other bewilder- ing vicissitudes of his life he was loyally supported by his German wife Margarethe, whom he met in Hamburg and married in 1901. It was her sad destiny to follow him to one distant land after another, only to be repeatedly abandoned. Their children were major victims too, and one of them came to a particularly sticky end.

After his release from prison he wrote anti-British articles in the Deutsche Zeitung, which made him welcome in right-wing circles in postwar Germany. Hence his involvement in the Kapp putsch, and his subsequent role in the so-called `white international', which plotted the overthrow of democratic governments in Austria and elsewhere. Since most of his associates were rabid anti-Semites, his presence among them was from the first anomalous. Before long he was selling their secrets to the Czech government, and in 1922, when things became too hot for him in Europe — not least because those whom he had betrayed were known killers — he escaped to China, by way of the United States. True to form, while crossing the Atlantic he talked a rich fellow- passenger into advancing him £15,000; and he managed to get into America without a visa.

The rest of his life was spent mainly in China, though with quite frequent returns to America and Europe. After (to him) advantageous dealings with various war- lords, he turned again to religion: first to Theosophy, and then to Buddhism. In 1931 he was ordained a Buddhist monk at a monastery near Nanking, and thereafter went under the name of Chao Kung, to which he prefixed the title 'venerable'. Later he gave himself the further title 'abbot'. He undertook a proselytising mis- sion abroad, returning with 13 acolytes, including six from Nice and three from Berlin.

In 1934, after crossing Canada with his retinue, and being received by the Canad- ian prime minister, he visited Britain for the first time since 1919. It was also the last time, and the visit was short. On landing at Liverpool he was conducted straight to Walton gaol, where he spent a few days before being put on the next ship back to Canada. Established at last in Shanghai, he suffered no molestation from the Japanese, the virtues of whose rule he extolled; and he had contacts with German agents during the second world war. He died in 1943.

No summary could do anything like justice to such a career, or to such a personality. There is no substitute for reading Professor Wasserstein's book. Tre- bitsch's brief encounter with Hitler in 1920 has a special piquancy, because there are many similarities between the two men. Both had mesmeric powers of persuasion, allied to a desire for self-expression totally unrestrained by moral sense. Both were perverted artists, and both combined breath-taking boldness with low cunning. It is appropriate that 'Chao Kung's' League of Truth should have had as its symbol a mirror-image swastika superim- posed on two hemispheres.

Yet there was a saving difference. Tre- bitsch fortunately lacked Hitler's dreadful fixity of purpose. As a result, though he was a menace to his family, creditors, colleagues and patrons, he was never a menace to the whole human race. His life, in retrospect, is the stuff not of tragedy, but rather of picaresque comedy, and we who are at a safe distance can read about it with amusement.