Karl Neufeld

Karl Neufeld (1899)

Karl Otto Neufeld , anglicised : Charles Neufeld , convert Name: Abd Allah Nawfal al-Almani , (* 4. August 1856 in Damerau , West Prussia ; † 2. July 1918 in Beelitz ) was a German merchant and during the First World War, political agent in the Middle East . He gained fame through the publication of his memoirs about his 12 years imprisonment with the Mahdists .

Life

Karl Neufeld shortly after his release from captivity

Neufeld was born the son of a landowner and doctor. He studied medicine at the University of Leipzig , but finished this course without a degree. From around 1880 he worked in Cairo first as a pharmacist and later as a merchant. There he married a British nurse named Emma Netherton, with whom he had a daughter. Because of his knowledge of English and Arabic, he took part in the Gordon Relief Expedition as a translator and then continued his business in Aswan . In 1887 he was captured by Mahdists on a trade caravan to Kordofan . He spent the next 12 years, mostly in chains, in captivity in Omdurman , where he met Rudolf Slatin and Josef Ohrwalder, who were also arrested. He converted to Islam while in captivity and married an Abyssinian named Umm Shul, with whom he had two children. Neufeld was liberated by Anglo-Egyptian troops in 1898 in the aftermath of the Battle of Omdurman and returned to Germany. He gave lectures about his imprisonment and published his experiences in book form in 1899 under the title In Chains of the Caliph. Twelve years imprisonment in Omdurman . He later ran a sanatorium in Aswan , but was expelled from Egypt by the British administration after the outbreak of World War I. In the first half of the First World War he worked for the Foreign Office as a translator and political agent in the Middle East . After the failure of the Stotzingen mission , Neufeld worked for the resignation commission of the Reichsentschädigungsamt in Brussels before he fell seriously ill in 1918 and was taken to the sanatorium in Beelitz , where he died of pneumonia on July 2, 1918 . He was buried anonymously in a Protestant cemetery in Beelitz .

Works

• In the chains of the caliph. Twelve years imprisonment in Omdurman . First edition: Berlin: Verlag W. Spemann, 1899. English first edition published as Charles Neufeld : A prisoner of the khaleefa. Twelve years captivity at Omdurman , London: Chapman & Hall, Ld., 1899, digitized from Internet Archive : [1] .
• Under the rebel's reign. A story of Egyptian revolt . London: Wells Gardner, Darton & Co, 1900. Digitized at Internet Archive: [2] .

literature

• Jürgen W. Schmidt: German-British cooperation against Islamic fundamentalism: The liberation of Carl Neufeld in Sudan , in: Jürgen W. Schmidt (ed.): Spione, Doppelagenten und Islamistische Threathung, Ludwigsfelde 2017 (history of secret service vol. 5), p 55-99, ISBN 978-3-933022-93-6 .
• Martin Strohmeier: The “very real bogey”. The Stotzingen-Neufeld Mission to the Hijāz (1916) . In: Arabian Humanities, Revue internationale d'archéologie et de sciences sociales sur la péninsule Arabique 6 (2016), pp. 1–18, doi : 10.4000 / cy.3098 .
• Byron Farwell: Prisoners of the Mahdi . New York: Harper & Row, 1967. Reprint: New York and London: WW Norton & Company, 1989, ISBN 0-393-30579-1 .
• Der Neue Orient III / 8 (July 30, 1918), pp. 391–392.

Web links

Commons : Karl Neufeld  - Collection of images, videos and audio files