Friedrich Schrader

Friedrich Schrader (19 November 1865 – 28 August 1922) was a German philologist of oriental languages, orientalist, art historian, writer, social democrat, translator and journalist.

Starting from the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, Schrader began to translate contemporary Turkish literature and to write articles about it in German journals and newspapers such as Das Literarische Echo and Frankfurter Zeitung.

Starting from 1908, Schrader lived with his second wife, who had Bulgarian Sephardic background and was raised in the Anglican Orphanage for Jewish girls in Istanbul-Ortakoy (operated by the London Jew's Society), and his three sons in an apartment in the Dogan Apartmani in Beyoğlu.

In a letter to the headquarters of the World Zionist Organization in Berlin, Richard Lichtheim,[2] the WZO representative in Constantinople in 1913-17 wrote in November 1913: "Dr Schrader is a remarkable "Mensch", who might be useful for us.

[...] Dr Schrader expressed himself with great sharpness, and even if he is exaggerating because of some personal causes ( he is very democratic and pro-Jewish, his wife is Spaniolic and baptized as a small child ) his opinion is quite remarkable, since he should especially know this question well regarding his position and his experience.

Schrader was a fierce critic of the destruction of the multi-cultural Ottoman society and culture by competing ethnic nationalist ideologies, largely promoted by European intellectuals.

In parallel, he became a member of the Constantinople Municipal Commission for the Registration and Listing of Islamic and Byzantine monuments (which included the well-known Armenian photographer Hagop Iskender, at that time owner of the photography company Sabah and Joaillier.

In his diary, published in Germany in 1919, he described several dangerous situations in connection with the various civil war factions, but also the very warm reception and strong support the refugees receive by the local Jewish population.

In several articles Schrader voiced his criticism of the failed German Middle East policies before and during the First World War, especially in relation with the support for the Young Turkish regime and its attitude towards non-Muslim minorities.

In an article published in 1920, Die Ägyptische Frage ("The Egyptian Question"), Schrader warned about possibly fateful and negative results of the Anglo-French colonial politics in the former Ottoman provinces Egypt, Palestine and Syria after World War I. Schrader spent the last two years of his life in Berlin as freelance journalist, mainly writing for Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (DAZ), which was in the early years of the Weimar Republic still a centre-right publication supporting the consolidation of Germany in the Weimar Republic (the foreign policy editor and later editor in chief at that time was Paul Lensch, a former SPD politician and associate of Parvus and Rosa Luxemburg).