Johannes Lepsius

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Johannes Lepsius

Johannes Lepsius (born December 15, 1858 in Berlin , † February 3, 1926 in Meran ) was a German Protestant theologian and orientalist who mainly dealt with the history of the Armenian people .

family

Johannes Lepsius
Johannes Lepsius and Johannes Awetaranian

Johannes Lepsius was the youngest son of the founder of Egyptology in Germany, the Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius , and his wife Elisabeth, geb. Klein (1828–1899), a great-granddaughter of the Berlin enlightener Friedrich Nicolai . Johannes Lepsius grew up in a family with a broad intellectual horizon. Many important personalities of the empire from politics, culture and church met in the house of Lepsius.

He had five siblings, including the geologist and rector of the Technical University of Darmstadt Karl Georg Richard Lepsius (1851-1915), the chemist and director of the Griesheim Chemical Factory Bernhard Lepsius (1854-1934) and the portrait painter and member of the Academy of Sciences Reinhold Lepsius (1857-1922).

His grandfather was the Naumburg District Administrator Carl Peter Lepsius (1775-1853), his great-grandfather Johann August Lepsius (1745-1801) was Lord Mayor of Naumburg (Saale) . His first wife was Margarethe (Maggie) Zeller. She came from the internationally known Württemberg missionary family Zeller, her father was Reverend Johannes Zeller (1830-1902), director of the Bishop Gobat School (Gobat School of the CMS ) in Jerusalem. Lepsius and his wife met in Ottoman Jerusalem. Maggie Lepsius was a granddaughter of Jerusalem Bishop Samuel Gobat and a niece of Dora Rappard . She died on October 17, 1898, leaving six children behind.

Life

Lepsius initially studied mathematics and philosophy in Munich and received his doctorate in 1880 with an award-winning doctor of philosophy. He later studied theology . In Jerusalem Lepsius got to know many local problems from 1884 to 1886 when he was assistant preacher of the Evangelical Congregation in Jerusalem and worked on the board of the Syrian orphanage , which was founded in 1860 as a result of massacres of the Christian population. He was also the co-founder of the German Orient Mission and worked with Johannes Avetaranian , a Mollah who had converted to Christianity . The aim was “missionary work among Muslims, less through preaching than through active charity”.

Lepsius and the massacre of the Armenians

His main work is the Armenian Aid Organization he set up . As a reaction to the Armenian massacres of Abdülhamid II from 1894 to 1896, which were already genocidal in nature, he founded his aid organization in 1896/1897 with a large advertising campaign that took him across Germany. Disguised as a carpet manufacturer, he had visited the regions where the massacres had taken place. Aid stations were set up in Turkey as well as in Persia and Bulgaria , because the Christians, threatened with murder and manslaughter, fled from the Ottoman Empire to those countries. Later, after the genocide of the Armenians , which the Turks committed in the shadow of the First World War (from 1915), refugee homes and orphanages as well as Armenian resettlement in Syria and Lebanon were added. In 1914 he was a co-founder of the German-Armenian Society founded in Berlin .

Johannes Lepsius has been committed to the Armenians since he was able to make contact with Armenians as a very young man in Egypt accompanied by his parents. During a trip to Turkey he witnessed the pogroms against the Armenians in Eastern Anatolia . He denounced these crimes in the German media and at lectures. In Urfa , among other places , he founded several charitable institutions for Armenians, which were run by his Danish colleague Karen Jeppe until 1917 , who like Lepsius saved the lives of numerous Armenians during the First World War.

Lepsius also worked in Urfa with the American Corinna Shattuck (1848–1910). She witnessed the Hamid massacre in the city of Urfa and the burning of thousands of Armenians alive in the cathedral there at the end of 1895. Corinna Shattuck described this cremation as the “ Holocaust ” of the Urfa Armenians.

On his return from the trip, Lepsius published a factual report in Germany, which was continued almost daily in August and September 1896 in the much-read Berlin Reichsbote . These articles were summarized as a book and formed the first significant documentation on Armenia by Johannes Lepsius. Its title was: Armenia and Europe. An indictment against the major Christian powers and an appeal to Christian Germany . The first edition could be found in Berlin bookshops in 1896. Almost simultaneously the French translation was published in Lausanne, and in 1897 the English edition appeared in London. In 1898 parts were even translated into Russian and published in Moscow. Even this first documentation helped the Protestant theologian and director of the Armenian Aid Organization to gain a reputation throughout Europe.

Genocide 1915–1917

Report on the situation of the Armenian people in Turkey.pdf

Lepsius is also known for his documentation of the Armenian genocide in 1915/1916. It is entitled Report on the Situation of the Armenian People in Turkey and was banned by German censors on August 7, 1916 . 20,000 copies had already been sent to addressees across Germany before the censors took it. The text contains eyewitness accounts who describe how Armenians were deliberately murdered, stabbed, shot or drowned in the Euphrates with their hands tied. Lepsius describes how the Armenians were driven from everywhere into the deserts of Mesopotamia, where they perished from hunger, thirst and exhaustion. There is another edition of the documentation, which has been expanded to include a conversation with Enver Pascha in 1915. It is entitled The Passage of Death of the Armenian People .

In 1908 the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire had high hopes for the Young Turk Revolution , which put an end to the hated regime of Abdul Hamid (1876–1909). During the First World War, however, especially during the critical weeks in April 1915, when an Allied invasion of Constantinople was imminent ( Battle of Gallipoli ), attacks on the Armenian population first took place in the capital, in the form of mass arrests and deportations, and later then in the areas of eastern Anatolia populated by Armenians. During this time Lepsius continued the humanitarian activities with the aid organization he founded and tried to exert political influence, especially in Germany, which at that time was the most important military ally of the Ottoman Empire and had thousands of soldiers and officers stationed in Turkey, but even in direct discussions with officials in Turkey, such as the Commander-in-Chief Enver Pascha.

The political parties in Germany largely ignored Lepsius' warnings. Liberal politicians like Ernst Jäckh and Friedrich Naumann loudly supported the German-Turkish brotherhood in arms, the SPD , which did not want to endanger the civil peace policy , remained silent. Only the Catholic Center Member Matthias Erzberger supported Lepsius and traveled to Turkey on his own to negotiate with the Young Turkish rulers. Lepsius finally had to continue his activities in neighboring countries because of the threat of criminal prosecution in connection with the German military censorship.

One of the most important works by Lepsius is his publication Germany and Armenia 1914–1918 , published in 1919 : Collection of diplomatic files , also known as Lepsius documents , which later became the most important document on the genocide of the Armenians. In 1918 the Foreign Office gave Lepsius the task of publishing the files on the German government's position on the Armenian question. Lepsius himself was not only concerned with covering up the German traces, but also with “placing the factuality of the Armenian genocide in the foreground”. Lepsius describes the difficult task in creating this work with the words that it was “an art between the four fronts of relieving Germany, burdening Turkey, needing reserve positions and gaining the trust of the Armenians”.

His commitment was recognized, among other things, in Franz Werfel's novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh , in which Werfel used two chapters to describe Lepsius' commitment. In particular, his negotiations with Enver in 1915, already mentioned, are described in a dramatic form. In the work, Lepsius, as a representative of the principle of good, encounters the Enver Pascha, the principle of total amorality beyond any sense of guilt.

Commemoration

The Lepsiushaus in Grosse Weinmeisterstrasse, Potsdam.
A postage stamp was issued in Armenia in 2013 in memory of Johannes Lepsius.

In the Lepsiushaus in Potsdam , located below the Pfingstberg , where Johannes Lepsius lived and worked from 1908 to 1925, the Lepsius Archive, which until then was located at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg , has been in operation since May 2, 2011 . as well as a research and meeting place. The theologian Hermann Goltz was the founder of the Lepsius Archive . In addition, a library, a research and meeting place for international scientific and ecumenical cooperation and the revitalization of the German-Armenian Academy, which Lepsius had built up since 1923, are planned. The Lepsiushaus was opened on May 2nd, 2011 by Minister of State for Culture Bernd Neumann . In 2001/2002 there was therefore a political conflict with the Turkish embassy, ​​which tries to prevent any memory of Johannes Lepsius. Officials in Turkey deny the Armenian genocide.

Already earlier, in 2009, Kenan Kolat , the federal chairman of the Turkish Community in Germany (TGD) , criticized the inclusion of the topics genocide of the Armenians and denial of the genocide of the Armenians in the curricula and schoolbooks in the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet of the state of Brandenburg as well as the planned monument for Johannes Lepsius and announced a corresponding letter to the Chancellor Merkel . These “historical events” have been “treated inadequately and one-sidedly”, the topic “endangers the inner peace” of Turkish students and could put them under “psychological pressure”.

In Friesdorf bei Mansfeld , where Lepsius was pastor from 1887 to 1896, a memorial stone has been commemorating the work of the couple since 2008. One street in Potsdam and the 88th elementary school in Yerevan in Karachanjan Street was named after Johannes Lepsius.

Fonts

  • Drama and stage. Contributions to the knowledge of dramatic art . Munich 1880; jointly ed. with Ludwig Traube.
  • Armenia and Europe. An indictment against the major Christian powers and an appeal to Christian Germany . Berlin-Westend 1896, 2nd edition, read online at archive.org .
  • Report on the situation of the Armenian people in Turkey in 1916. New edition 2011, Gerhard Hess Verlag, ISBN 978-3-87336-368-7 .
  • Germany and Armenia 1914–1918: Collection of diplomatic files . Read Potsdam 1919 online at archive.org .
  • The Passage of the Armenian People: Report on the Fate of the Armenian People in Turkey during the World War . Potsdam 1919; read google books online (with us proxy!).
  • The great politics of the European cabinets 1871–1914 . Berlin 1924 several volumes, read online at archive.org .
  • Johannes Lepsius: The Path of Horror , Armenian Aid Organization Dr. Lepsius, Potsdam 1916, DNB 361509731 ; 2nd edition, Bureau des Armenian Aid Organization, Potsdam, Roonstrasse 13 1920, DNB 580552608 (= leaflet No. 7 World War II collection ).

literature

  • Andreas Baumann: The Orient for Christ: Johannes Lepsius - Biography and Missiology . Brunnen, Giessen 2007; also university dissertation South Africa 2005.
Digitized dissertation under the title Johannes Lepsius' Missiologie
  • Johannes Lepsius: The rebirth of the orient: texts for mission , ed. by Andreas Baumann; VTR, Nuremberg 2008; Reading sample 44 pp. Pdf .
  • Brigitte Troeger : Burning eyes: Johannes Lepsius - His life for the Armenians. His fight against genocide . Biographical story. Brunnen, Giessen 2008, ISBN 978-3-7655-1904-8 .
  • German Gender Book ; Article Lepsius in volumes 4 (1896), 5 (1897) and 10 (1903).
  • Bernhard Lepsius: The Lepsius House . Berlin 1933.
  • Cem Özgönül : The myth of a genocide: a critical examination of the Lepsius documents and the German role in the past and present of the "Armenian question" ; Önel-Verlag, Cologne 2006, ISBN 3-933348-93-5 .
  • Rolf Hosfeld (Ed.): Johannes Lepsius - A German exception. The genocide of the Armenians, humanitarianism and human rights , Wallstein, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8353-1292-0 .
  • Rolf Hosfeld: Death in the desert: the genocide of the Armenians . Beck, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-406-67451-8 .
  • Catalog, microfiche edition and thematic lexicon of Dr. Johannes Lepsius Archives :
  • Hermann Goltz (Ed.): Germany, Armenia and Turkey 1895–1925, documents and journals from the Dr. Johannes Lepsius Archive. Three parts; Saur, Munich, 1998-2004.
    • Part 1: Catalog. Documents and journals from the Dr. Johannes Lepsius Archive ; compiled and edited by Hermann Goltz and Axel Meissner; Saur, Munich; ISBN 3-598-34407-4 .
    • Part 2: Microfiche edition of the documents and journals from the Dr. Johannes Lepsius Archive ; edited by Hermann Goltz and Axel Meissner with the assistance of Ute Blaar and others; Microfiche edition; Saur, Munich; ISBN 3-598-34408-2 .
    • Part 3: Thematic lexicon on people, institutions, places, events ; compiled and written by Hermann Goltz and Axel Meissner; Saur, Munich; ISBN 3-598-34409-0 .

Web links

Commons : Johannes Lepsius  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Johannes Lepsius  - sources and full texts
Wikisource: The Great Politics of the European Cabinets 1871–1914  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Liesel Reichle-Zeller: Johannes Zeller 1830–1902. Missionary in Palestine ; Stuttgart: 1987 (= special publication by the Martinzeller Verband; issue 7).
  2. ↑ Martha Anna Friedemann: In Persia - As a teacher and orphan mother. Berlin 2017, p. 6.
  3. ↑ Interview by Doris Schäfer-Noske with Hans-Ulrich Schulz. Deutschlandradio on May 2, 2011 at 5:35 p.m.
  4. ↑ Genocide in the curriculum. The poor students. FAZ, August 7, 2009
  5. ↑ Langlüttich, Helga, Lepsius-Stein inaugurated , in: Mitteldeutsche Zeitung of July 20, 2008, accessed on May 14, 2015. - Currently as a pastor in Friesdorf cf. Baumann, Andreas, The German Orient Mission. A missiological thinking mark, in: Evangelical Missiology 18 (2002) 4, pp. 122-133.
  6. ↑ See the Google aerial photo at Panoramio ( memento of the original from January 19, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.panoramio.com
personal data
SURNAME Lepsius, Johannes
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Protestant theologian, orientalist and humanist
DATE OF BIRTH December 15, 1858
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH February 3, 1926
Place of death Meran