Emily Ruete

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Emily Ruete, Princess Salme

Emily Ruete (born August 30, 1844 in Beit il Mtoni near Zanzibar City as Salama bint Said , also called Sayyid a Salme, Princess of Oman and Zanzibar; †  February 29, 1924 in Jena ) was an Omani-Zanzibarian princess who, after the marriage with the German businessman Rudolph Heinrich Ruete lived as a writer and teacher in Germany. Her book Memoirs of an Arab Princess , published in 1886, is the first autobiography of an Arab woman in literary history.

Life in Zanzibar

Princess Salme was born as the daughter of Sayyid Said , the ruling Sultan of Oman and Zanzibar , and a Circassian concubine who was abducted as a slave . She grew up in the palace Beit il Mtoni near Zanzibar City . She had a carefree childhood in luxurious surroundings and taught herself to read and write. She had a special relationship of trust with her half-brother Majid ; he taught her to ride and shoot. From 1851 she lived in his house.

After his father's death, Majid became sultan of Zanzibar in 1856. Salme was declared of legal age and received her paternal inheritance, a plantation with a house and 5,429 pounds. Her mother died in 1859 in a cholera epidemic , from whose inheritance Salme received three plantations and several houses. Thereafter, Salme was increasingly drawn into intrigues at the Sultan's court. Her half-sister Khwala and her half-brother Bargasch persuaded her to take part in the attempt to overthrow Majid. Since she could read and write best, she took on the role of secretary for Bargash at the age of fifteen. The coup attempt failed; she was placed under house arrest for a few months. Then she reconciled with Majid. Bargasch, who was expelled from the country for two years, regarded this as treason and refused any further contact with her throughout his life.

In 1866, Princess Salme met the merchant Heinrich Ruete from Hamburg , who lived in a building next to the Sultan's palace. The family was aware of her relationship with Ruete, but marriage to a Christian was unthinkable. On August 24, 1866, four months pregnant, she fled Zanzibar with the help of the British Vice Consul on board the warship Highflier in order to avoid the impending stoning there. Majid sent a formal letter of protest to the British consul; however, her brothers were satisfied with the solution found. Salme traveled to Aden , where on December 7, 1866 her son Heinrich jr. was born. On April 1, 1867, she was baptized and took the name Emily. Their first son died before his father even arrived in Aden.

live in Germany

The Ruete family in Hamburg
Memorial stone, Ohlsdorf cemetery

Emily and Rudolph Heinrich married in Aden on May 30, 1867 and then went to Hamburg. Their daughter Antonie Thawka Ruete was born on March 24, 1868 (later wife of the colonial official Eugen Brandeis ), their son Rudolph Said-Ruete on April 13, 1869 and their daughter Rosalie Guza Ruete on April 16, 1870. Her husband died on August 6, 1870 when he was run over while jumping from a horse-drawn tram on the Uhlenhorst .

Cushion stone Emily Ruete , family grave Ohlsdorf

As a result, the authorities denied Emily Ruete her husband's inheritance; she lived briefly in Dresden , Berlin , Rudolstadt and Cologne . In 1875 she tried unsuccessfully in London to come into contact with her brother Bargash, who became sultan in 1870 and was in England on a state visit. She publicly made claims on her possessions in Zanzibar, which were expropriated after fleeing, which Bargash rejected. In the course of the escalation of the German-British territorial disputes in East Africa , Bismarck tried to use them for his colonial interests by allowing them to travel to Zanzibar twice, in 1885 and 1888, accompanied by German officials. Again, however, all claims were denied by Bargash, and he again refused to see his sister at all. After the German-British disputes had been resolved in the context of the Congo Conference and then in the Heligoland-Sansibar Treaty , the German authorities were no longer interested in them.

Emily Ruete published her autobiography in 1886. In addition to the income from this, she earned her living as a teacher of Arabic . In 1898 she traveled to Beirut , where her son Rudolph worked as an official at the German consulate. Until 1914 she made longer trips to the Middle East. In 1922, after the death of all of her half-siblings, her nephew Sultan Khalifa bin Bargash offered her a small pension. From 1920 on she lived in Jena with the in-laws of one of her two daughters.

Emily Ruete died in Jena in 1924 and was buried in Hamburg's Ohlsdorf cemetery in the area of ​​the Ruete family burial site , grid square U 27 ( Kapellenstrasse east of Lippertplatz ); the grave site is preserved as a celebrity grave.

On the occasion of the year of equal opportunities for all across Europe , a memorial stone was set up in the women's garden at the Ohlsdorf cemetery in Hamburg for the princess of Oman and Zanzibar. The fate of Emily Ruete aims to draw attention to the fact that immigrants should not be discriminated against.

Writing activity

Emily Ruete published two books, Memoirs of an Arab Princess and, later, Letters to the Homeland , the first of which was a notable popular success. Extensive reports on them were printed in several contemporary magazines. Her first book was the first autobiography of an Arab woman in literary history.

Museum in Zanzibar City

In the Palace Museum in Zanzibar City, a room is dedicated to her memory and furnished with contemporary furniture from the 1860s. The escape from the Sultan's Palace is particularly emphasized and didactically integrated into the concept of a critical appreciation of the pre-revolutionary conditions in Zanzibar.

literature

  • Emily Ruete: Memoirs of an Arab Princess . 2 volumes. 4th Edition, by Frederick Luckhardt, Berlin 1886 ( digital copies of the Berlin State Library : Overview ; first band , second band )
  • Emily Ruete: Letters to Home: Her Life in Germany from 1867 to ~ 1885. Philo Verlagsgesellschaft, 1999, ISBN 3-8257-0114-X
  • Emily Ruete: Life in the Sultan's Palace: Memoirs from the 19th Century . European Publishing House 2006, ISBN 978-3-931705-34-3
  • Julius Waldschmidt: Emperor, Chancellor and Princess. A woman's fate between Orient and Occident . trafo verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-89626-131-2
  • Jessica Rauch: Hybrid Identities. The iconography of the "Arab princess" and "Hamburg merchant" Emily Ruete from 1868-1916. Master thesis, Univ. Heidelberg 2015.
  • Rudolph Said-Ruete: An auto-biographical partial sketch . The Al-bu-Said dynasty in Arabia and East Africa. Lucerne, 1932.

Dubbing

  • Georgia Charlotte Hoppe: salme projection - a musical-poetic kaleidoscope. Reading concert for a speaker and four improvising musicians. Concept: Georgia Ch. Hoppe. Content: Crucial situations in the life of Emily Ruete are intertwined with oriental and modern European poetry as well as contemporary witness texts: potential emotional tracks are projected and musical improvisations enable a deeper dimension of compassion to be experienced from today's perspective. World premiere: December 8, 2009 in Hamburg. Source: www.purplepool.de/projekte (accessed June 14, 2020)
  • Friedemann Holst-Solbach: Salme - Princess of Zanzibar and Oman - No fairy tale from 1001 nights . A Singspiel in 7 pictures, a prologue and an epilogue. Libretto: Regina Solbach. Content: Socio-cultural aspects in the life of a migrant in the 19th century in Germany. The character melodies are based on North and East African folk music. The piano reduction has 108 pages including an eight-page libretto with suggestions for direction. Verlag Edition Meisel & Co (2017), ISBN 979-0-50072-614-2 .

documentary

  • " The Princess of Zanzibar " (Germany 2007) by Tink Diaz

As a character in a novel

In the 1963 novel Trade Winds (German translation under the title: Insel im Sturm ) by Mary M. Kaye the attempted revolution in Zanzibar is described. Emily Ruete plays a supporting role in it.

The 2010 novel Stars about Zanzibar by Nicole C. Vosseler tells the life story of Emily Ruete.

In 2013, the Swiss writer Lukas Hartmann published the novel Farewell to Sansibar about the eventful life of Emily Ruete and the no less touching fate of her children, who lived up to the 1940s.

Web links

Wikisource: Emily Ruete  - Sources and full texts
Commons : Emily Ruete (Sayyida Salme)  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Memoirs of an Arabian Princess: An Autobiography . 1888. Retrieved September 19, 2013.
  2. ↑ Where Hamburg's big names rest. In: friedhof-hamburg.de. Retrieved August 30, 2019 .
  3. ^ Nicole C. Vosseler: Stars over Zanzibar. Bastei Lübbe, archived from the original on September 17, 2014 ; Retrieved on August 30, 2019 (Book Description).
  4. ^ Farewell to Zanzibar. Diogenes-Verlag, accessed on September 24, 2013 (table of contents).
personal data
SURNAME Ruete, Emily
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Salme Princess of Oman and Zanzibar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Omani-Zanzibari princess, writer and teacher
DATE OF BIRTH August 30, 1844
PLACE OF BIRTH Beit il Mtoni near Zanzibar City
DATE OF DEATH February 29, 1924
Place of death Jena