Coordinator:     Dr. Oliver Stein 

Duration:         2013 - 2016 

Funding:          HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area)

Sub-project of “Making War, Mapping Europe: Militarized Cultural Encounters, 1792-1920“ (MWME)  

Website:  http://www.mwme.eu/research/german-soldiers-and-the-ottoman-empire_-1835-1918/index.html

 
German Soldiers and the Ottoman Empire, 1835 - 1918

In 1835 the Prussian captain Helmuth von Moltke travelled to Turkey to become military instructor of the Ottoman army. Over the next decades other officers followed. During the First World War, the German Asienkorps with nearly 18,000 soldiers was sent to support their Turkish allies in the Middle East.

The focus of the post-doctoral project will be German soldiers’ experiences of the Ottoman Empire. While the political and military history of German military missions and expeditions to Turkey have been relatively well studied, its cultural impact has been largely neglected. The project will investigate how the soldier’s image of the Middle East was influenced by oriental discourses, how it developed during the period of direct encounter and afterwards and how it influenced the image of the ‚Orient‘ that was transferred to Germany.

One particular point of enquiry involves the self-image of German soldiers. The project will explore the evidence of different potential identities (e.g. German, European, soldier, instructor, traveller) through the intercultural contacts, and their influence on perception and action. The German soldiers who took part in the military mission became members of the Turkish army and they were consequently faced with a new set of loyalties and new schemas of friend and foe. The boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’ would be similarly blurred and complicated during World War I, when the Germans found themselves involved in a Holy Islamic War fighting side by side with Turks and Arabs against Europeans.

In most of the cross-cultural contact situations the objective was to establish an effective collaboration with the Turkish partners. In practice, those situations gave rise to particular challenges, which arose due to differences in language and culture as well as in models of perception, communication and action. This research will analyse the soldiers’ cross-cultural competences and examples of acculturation to Turkish norms and customs.