Trades of The Arabian Nights

He dined with U.S. millionaires, parties celebrating the Arabian Nights and worked for Kaiser Wilhelm II and Hermann Goering in the Orient: an exhibition in Berlin shows for the first time – believed destroyed forever – Discoveries of the excavator and banker’s son, Max von Oppenheim.

Samuel Beckett and the Iraqi King Faisal I traveled on to admire the new sensation on the Spree. In July 1930, the diplomat, secret agent and Oriental traveler Max von Oppenheim in Charlottenburg had founded a private museum.

Weighing several tons to see there were griffins, sphinxes of basalt and strange “bird scorpion men”. The nearly 3,000 year old mythical creatures came from a buried fortress on the outskirts of the Syrian desert. The Bible is the mysterious place, “Gozan.

In 13 rail cars of the discoverers of the giant stone figures had brought to Aleppo and from there taken by trucks and ships to Germany – a cultural coup in a class of goods. The most striking piece Fund, a female grave figure with pigtails and a pointed nose, called Oppenheim in the presence of crime writer Agatha Christie, “my Venus.”

But then World War II broke out. 1943 Allied phosphorus bombs crashed on the statues from the Orient and kindling 900 degree hot coals. Deleting the fire shattered the image works. This left 27 000 basalt boulders, some only thumb-sized, pitched in the GDR in a cellar.

The fragments were considered unrestaurierbar.

Now, however, the monuments are resurrected. The Berlin Pergamon Museum opens this Friday at an exhibition (”The rescued gods”), which his own sentiment for on an “unprecedented restoration project is based.

Restoration on the edge of a nervous breakdown

In October 2001 a four-man sort team began to assemble the puzzle. At first it spread from the rubble in two rooms of 600 square meters. For nine years, was then searched for matching hanky and ornaments – Restoration on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

Some 30 sculptures are now back in shape. Cracks and joints due to pull it, there are some of the idols out of a thousand or more fragments. Gaps were filled with plaster. Finally lupfte a crane up the chunky monuments: dangling on chains, they floated from the outside through the upper windows of the building Pergamon. The total weight of the jewelry is estimated at 30 tons.

Even the Louvre and the British Museum have expressed interest. His colleagues, however, there would have to check first, whether their floors to withstand such heavy objects, “as the curator Lutz Martin explained.

No question: Berlin stands before weighty. For rush but should also ensure the discoverer of the figures. Max von Oppenheim (1860 to 1946) was – like Heinrich Schliemann – a career changer in archeology. As a scion of the Jewish banking firm Salomon Oppenheim dynasty (his mother was a daughter of patrician Cologne) grew the boy into the sumptuous life of the Belle Epoque. The residence of the parents near Bonn, was like a magic castle. The hearing, ordered father jurisprudence Max found little favor. It drew him into the Orient.

Cured heads of tribal enemies

In 1886 he traveled to the then almost medieval Morocco. Disguised he came – despite the threat of capital punishment – a mosque in Fez. He later auctioned at a slave market, a Berber girl and was cured in a remote village heads served up by tribal enemies.

This was followed by trips to Iraq. 1896 Dandy moved to Cairo, where he lived with the gardener Soliman, six servants and a French chef in a house with palm trees.

Long Oppenheim spoke fluent Arabic, he camped with sheikhs and chatted in costume turban with Druze prince. Such people need the colonial-minded emperor. So he hired Oppenheim for the German Consulate General in Egypt.

Besides collecting the flamboyant son of a banker 42 000 books and studied the customs of the Orient. His pioneering work on the history of the Bedouins in Saudi Arabia is just rediscovered.
Equipped with papas lush pocket money held, the scholar in Cairo also “dances” of the Arabian Nights. On couches, he received British Ambassador, Polish princesses or U.S. Hotel King John Jacob Astor (who later drowned in the sinking of the Titanic). As Agatha Christie traveled to the Orient smoldering, there are still legends of fabulous wealth, “El Baron”.

Oppenheim had a glamorous, not least because of his many love affairs. Instead of getting married, he used the Islamic custom of “taking women on time.” There were also brief flirtations and adventures.

1908 in the bazaar of Cairo, he ventured into a married, very pretty, very young “Arab woman with” elastic rocking course “approach, the step-hidden behind a curtain and guarded by a muscular eunuchs steam bath. It says so in his memoirs. The affair ended in disaster. The husband learned of the infidelity of his wife and murdered her.

2. Part: “selfish Schnatterer”

No wonder that Oppenheim not only had friends. A British diplomat called him a “selfish Schnatterer.

The business, which he carried on the way, failed. His coffee plantation in Tanzania would be almost gone bankrupt. Plans for industrial development within the context of the proposed Baghdad railway named a director of Deutsche Bank “drivel”.

Even in the First World War made the German not a happy character. While in Britain he is regarded today as a “master spy” because he founded in 1914, the magazine “El Jihad, with which he tried to incite the Arabs for a holy war against the British and French occupiers in the East.

But his counterpart Lawrence of Arabia (whom he knew personally) was the stirring up of overturning far more successful.

In terms of archeology, the baron, however behaved impeccably. He hired the best architects, he finds documentation was groundbreaking. He also spared no means the exposure of the mound “Tell Halaf.

1000 camels, 21 tons of expedition equipment and 800-meter rail tracks

With 1000 camels who dragged 21 tons of expedition equipment, including Loren and 800 meters tracks, Oppenheim moved in 1911 in front of the desert. Because of an unusually severe winter in northern Mesopotamia around stinking animal carcasses lay in the sand. Up to 500 Bedouin were part of the blade command. Oppenheim had a doctor here, cooks, a photographer and several excellent excavation experts.

Even just below the surface of the excavators came upon stone sphinxes, lions and dark basalt slabs, which were displayed on ships, camels, and club-wielding dignitaries. It was trappings of the West Palace “, which had once built a mysterious king Kapara.

The organizer of the whole, meanwhile, sat in his expedition-equipped with the finest carpets house (”my desert castle”) diligently working on a large desk. Besides, he considered predatory residents in good spirits and enjoyed the evening the charm of a 15-year-old Bedouin girl.

With all the distractions he underwent also carvers. Time, he invented the – misleading – term “palace temple”. Then again, he said Guzana to a “culture in ancient Mesopotamia, 5000 years old.

Half of it would have done.

But that was forgiven. The modern research – since 2006 German archaeologists are back on the ground – has problems to place the site in time. For there is hardly any written findings.

It is clear now that the people there – like Jesus – Aramaic languages ​​and lived about 1000 BC, a period of prosperity. Of all weakened in the “Dark Ages”, as Assyrians, Greeks and Egyptians and the Hittites went down completely, began Guzanas star to shine. A mighty fortress was built at that time, to a palace with ten meter high walls. At the foot of the settlement splashed a tributary of the Euphrates, which brought the ships into the Indian Ocean. Reich was the place probably through the refining of elephant tusks Mesopotamian.

resurgence was only when the Assyrians and the little neighbor squeezes Tribute, it was over with the good life. When an uprising of Christ 808 West Palace was burned down. All this did not Oppenheim, as he exposed the facade of this huge building. Soon he found victims troughs and gold jewelry.

During the inflation his assets melted away

Then came the First World War. The excavator fled back to his luxury apartment on the Kurfürstendamm. During the inflation his assets melted away. The relatives from Cologne had the “Uncle the Wonderland” help.

However, managed the “destitute” (self-report) soon again an amazing deal. In 1927 he returned to his “dream land” back and cajoled the French mandate government to give him the finds from Tell Halaf.

This is what happened. Only the gold jewelry came to Istanbul.

Just where is he now? When the Berlin asked for their issue by loans from Turkey were only excuses. Perhaps the glittering rings and brooches were messy or stolen. The curator Martin is silent on the matter. Instead, the show reported in a four-pound backing prolix about the struggles of the sculpture Puzzelei. Retrieved from “numbered adhesive dots” and “small-scale fragmentation is the speech that were the basis verbastelt” petrographic characteristics.

Yawn! Remains little room to appreciate the enigmatic explorer, whose life under the Nazis expire no less adventurous than before.

On 30 January 1933, when Adolf Hitler became chancellor and his supporters walked in the torchlight parade through the Brandenburg Gate, Oppenheim was sitting with the New York press-tsar Cornelius Vanderbilt in a nearby dance hall. Suddenly, half-drunken men rushed into the restaurant and shouted: “Jews out!”

A sudden signal Oppenheim also covered. The Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, it degraded to the “first-degree hybrid. This group was hovering in a gray area between toleration and persecution.

Max von Oppenheim got to feel the brutal shift quickly. Berlin’s top leader scoffed Museum, Oppenheim’s family had “contaminated Jewish” aristocracy of Europe. In truth, the man wanted to reap the treasures from Tell Halaf.

But the oppressed still had good connections. Friends in the Foreign Office and in the financial world held her hand protectively over him. As the owner of the private bank of the Heydt Kersten him anti-Semitic pushed, the Oriental man even called for the opponent to duel with pistols and began shooting with exercises at the Wannsee. Finally, the case went before a Berlin court of honor. The banker had to apologize.

Support of the Hitler government

With claws and teeth of the Arabist defended his legacy. In a speech to Nazi leaders, he slammed his smooth statues of the “Aryan” culture. He even received support from the Hitler government.

What has been wheeling and dealing going there?

His last trip to the Orient is in the dark. In March 1939, the 78-year-old broke again to Syria. It is said that he wanted to resume the excavation, because otherwise the license would have expired. Or was there more to it? Financed the trip of a special pot of Hermann Goering, the paintings and antiques from half of Europe was zusammenklaute.

During the war, bombed out, with a few treasures luggage, the old man saw the demise of the Third Reich finally in Bavaria, where his life went plump to an unspectacular end.

Max von Oppenheim died in 1946 of old age.