Rudolf Slatin

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Rudolf Slatin (1910)
Rudolf Slatin
Slatin Pascha and his horse “Plum Pudding” in Wadi Halfa, watercolor by Friedrich Perlberg
Rudolf Slatin and daughter Anne Marie (1927)
Slatin Pasha's grave in the Ober Sankt Veiter cemetery

Rudolf Carl Freiherr von Slatin GCVO KCMG CB , known as Slatin Pascha (born June 7, 1857 in Ober St. Veit near Vienna , † October 4, 1932 in Vienna) was an Austrian , Egyptian and British officer, explorer, Egyptian governor of the Greater Province Darfur in the Turkish-Egyptian Sudan and General Inspector in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan .

Life

Rudolf Anton Carl Slatin was born as the fourth child of Michael Slatin, a businessman who converted from Judaism to Catholicism, and his second wife Maria Anna Feuerstein in Ober Sankt Veit near Vienna. His siblings were the twins Maria and Anna (born 1852), Heinrich (1855), Adolf (1861) and Leopoldine (1864). The father died on March 13, 1873 while Rudolf was attending the Vienna Commercial Academy. During this time he heard that a German bookseller was looking for an assistant in Cairo. Slatin then broke off his training at the commercial academy at the age of 17 and went to Cairo via Trieste and Alexandria as a bookseller's assistant . Later he went to Khartoum with the German businessman and consul Rosset , after which he traveled to Sudan from 1874 to 1876 , where he met Eduard Schnitzer , who later became Emin Pascha.

In 1877 he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army ; there he served as a lieutenant in the 19th infantry regiment. On Schnitzer's recommendation, Slatin was summoned to Sudan by Gordon Pascha in 1879 as an Egyptian officer . Sudan had been conquered from Egypt by the Ottoman viceroys from 1821 . In the 1870s several Europeans were deployed in Sudan to organize the administration in the occupied territories and to put an end to the slave trade . Slatin became a finance inspector and rose to governor ( mudir ) of Dara Province in Darfur in 1879 . There he put down the rebellion of Harun, the son of the Fur Sultan , near the Marra Mountains. In April 1881 Slatin was appointed governor ( mudir umum ) of the entire Greater Province of Darfur by the Khedive Tawfiq and received the title of Bey .

In 1881 the Mahdi uprising broke out in Sudan and the Mahdists began to conquer the country. On December 23, 1883, Slatin was also captured by the Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad . Slatin was able to convince the Mahdi that he had converted from Christianity to Islam and was therefore not murdered. For the next twelve years he lived as a slave to Caliph Abdallahi ibn Muhammad , the successor of the Mahdi, and gradually gained the trust of the Mahdists. In 1895 Slatin managed to escape under adventurous circumstances; he made his way to Anglo-Egyptian troops. This escape was supported by the head of the Egyptian intelligence service Francis Reginald Wingate . Slatin's 1896 work on life at the court of the caliph and his flight, Fire and Sword in the Sudan , played a key role in the British government's decision to free Sudan from the Mahdists. Through this report and the work of the missionary Josef Ohrwalder Ten Years Prisoner of the Mahdi against the reign of terror of the Islamic fanatics of Omdurman, public opinion among the British population was set.

On March 21, 1895, Slatin was elevated to Pasha in Cairo by the Khedives of Egypt . According to the wishes of the Khedive, he should be appointed major general at the same time . Due to British resistance, he was only promoted to colonel in the Egyptian army , otherwise he would have had the same rank as the British Sirdar (Commander in Chief) Horatio Herbert Kitchener . Slatin thus held the highest rank of non-British in the Anglo-Egyptian army. On March 22, 1896, Kitchener, Wingate and Slatin traveled to the front in Wadi Halfa . Slatin participated as a colonel in Wingate's intelligence service in 1896 in Kitchener's Dongola campaign against the Mahdists. For his achievements in the campaign he was named Companion of the Order of the Bath .

From 1897 to 1898 he took part in the Nile campaign to recapture Khartoum . After the Battle of Omdurman , he led a command to pursue the caliph. After the reconquest of Sudan, Slatin was appointed Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George by Queen Victoria ; at the same time he was promoted to British Colonel . The following year, Slatin tried his hand as a treasure hunter in Sudan. After his friend Wingate became Governor General of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and Sirdar , he appointed Slatin on September 25, 1900 as British Inspector General in Sudan. He stayed that way until 1914.

Villa Mathilde in Obermais (residence 1923–1932)

In 1899 Slatin was raised to the Austrian knighthood by Emperor Franz Joseph I and in 1906 to the Austrian baron. During the First World War , as an Austrian lieutenant, he was head of the prisoner- of- war aid of the Austrian Red Cross . On June 21, 1914, Slatin married Baroness Alice von Ramberg, 16 years his junior in Vienna's Votive Church , who died of cancer in June 1921 and left him alone with their daughter Anne Marie, who was born in 1916. With a pension from the Egyptian government, the royalties from his memoirs and a sizeable US inheritance, he moved into his retirement home in 1923, the Villa Mathilde in the Obermais district of Merano . A cancer operation in the Cottage sanatorium for nervous and metabolic disorders ended with Slatin's death. Slatin was buried on October 6, 1932 in the Ober Sankt Veiter cemetery . The funeral was like a state funeral.

In 1951 the Slatingasse in Vienna- Hietzing was named after him.

Pointed villa in Upper Austria

Pointed villa near Traunkirchen

The Spitzvilla near Traunkirchen is a special memorial for Slatin Pascha . Slatin acquired this house in 1897 and welcomed important personalities of his era there. The Spitzvilla has been owned by the Province of Upper Austria since 1976 and is a public leisure facility with a park and a café-restaurant in the villa itself. The Spitzvilla is also used as an exhibition and event center, especially in summer.

Awards (selection)

coat of arms

Slatin coat of arms (stylized) on the Spitzvilla

The baronial coat of arms awarded to Slatin in 1906 was: Split; on the right a golden palm tree in black on a golden ground; on the left divided by a red thread of gold and silver, above a black bowl scale, below on a green floor a red lion, in the right a bare scimitar with a golden handle, in the left an iron chain with a broken handcuff (= reference to imprisonment at court of the Mahdi) holding. Two helmets: I a growing black horse; II the red lion growing with the saber. Helmet covers: black and gold, red and silver. Motto: Festina lente .

Works

He wrote down his adventurous life in the autobiography Fire and Sword in Sudan , which became a bestseller at Brockhaus Verlag in Leipzig:

  • with Francis Reginald Wingate: Fire and Sword in the Sudan. A Personal narrative of Fighting and Serving the Dervishes. London 1896 ( archive.org , 17th edition 1914).
  • Fire and sword in Sudan. My fights with the dervishes, my imprisonment and flight. 1879-1895. Verlag FA Brockhaus, Leipzig 1896 ( archive.org ). 13th edition in two volumes 1921; abridged edition, edited by Heinrich Pleticha : Erdmann, Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-522-60920-4 ; expanded and commented edition: Verlag der Pioniere, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-941924-05-5 .
  • On the run. Reichswehr, Vienna 1895, is the first edition, Fire and Sword has been "shortened" for the public.

literature

Rudolf Slatin. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 12, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 2001–2005,ISBN 3-7001-3580-7, p. 350.

Movies

  • Thomas Macho : Slatin Pascha - On Her Majesty's behalf . Austria 2012. (Documentation)
  • Wolfgang Schleif : Slatin Pascha . Germany 1967. (Two-part feature film series)
  • Riot in the desert - The rule of the Mahdi . Docu-drama , Germany 2017, 53 min., Director: Robert Schotter .

Web links

Wikisource: Rudolf Slatin  - Sources and full texts
Commons : Rudolf Slatin  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ^ HA Vogelsberger: Slatin Pascha. P. 156.
  2. ^ HA Vogelsberger: Slatin Pascha. P. 205ff.
  3. ^ Baroness Anne Marie von Slatin, * November 12, 1916, † November 27, 2007, married Galitzine and Ponsonby , http://www.thepeerage.com/p6322.htm#i63217
  4. ^ Franz Gall : Austrian heraldry. Handbook of coat of arms science. 2nd Edition. Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 1992, ISBN 3-205-05352-4 , p. 393.
  5. ^ FAZ: Review
personal data
SURNAME Slatin, Rudolf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Slatin Pasha
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian adventurer, British general
DATE OF BIRTH June 7, 1857
PLACE OF BIRTH Ober St. Veit near Vienna
DATE OF DEATH October 4, 1932
Place of death Vienna