Practicing for independence. The Indian News and Information Bureau in Berlin-Halensee

At the end of Kurfürstendamm, where the S-Bahn tracks cut through Halensee and the grey box of the Bauhaus rises, the Indian News and Information Bureau had its headquarters almost 100 years ago. From 1924 to 1931, it was consolidated at Georg-Wilhelmstraße 9. It was founded in 1921 with the aim of bringing about Indian independence. The Indian office worked on the creation of a secular nation state. To this end, it strove for solidarity between Hindus and Muslims and tried to find allies in Berlin. Undermining the British colonial administration was another goal. The newspaper The Indian Independence, published in Berlin and distributed in large circulation in Calcutta and London, stated that the Berlini (as the Indians in Berlin called themselves) were striving for "the comprehensive and complete independence of India by all necessary means". ^[1]

To speak of independence in India at that time was a dangerous undertaking. The situation was different in Berlin, the political centre of Great Britain's biggest rival in terms of power politics. According to the motto "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", anti-colonial efforts were able to unfold here – for example in the form of the Indian News and Information Bureau (hereinafter referred to as the Bureau). The article takes a closer look at the importance of the office as part of the anti-colonial efforts.

Hub of the anti-colonial movement

In the course of its existence, the office was visited by hundreds of people, including Muslims and Hindus, Indians, Germans and Russians, Christians and Jews. It functioned as the first point of contact for Indian students in Berlin (Indian female students were rather rare), but also as a hub in the extensive network of the Communist International (Comintern). It served as an address for Indian exile organizations such as the Association of Indians in Europe, the Indian Independence Party, the Hindustan Organization and the Communist-influenced League against Imperialism. It was also a place where the future, secular coexistence in independent India was practiced and probably for this reason also the driving force behind the Hindustan House, the student residence on Uhlandstraße, where Hindus and Muslims lived together under one roof. In the office, actors with different political goals and interests met: ideologically, it was fed by the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, at the same time it was supported by the Foreign Office and received financial contributions from Moscow.

For interested Berliners, the office acted as a point of contact for the liberation of (colonially) oppressed peoples. It offered young German Jews, whose families had a long history of discrimination, an opportunity to contribute their experiences and mediate between Indians and the German public. ^[2] This extremely dynamic and imaginative exchange did not come to an end until National Socialism: the work of the office was discontinued, the employees chased away or imprisoned, and the archive thrown out of the window. However, this no longer happened in Halensee, but in Mauerstraße in Berlin-Mitte, where the office had moved in 1931.

A wide variety of actors have shaped the history of the office and left their mark on historical memory. Much has already been written about the director of the office, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, known as Chatto, his brother-in-law and close colleague Narayan Nambiar, and his Berlin companions from the communist movement, Karl Radek and Willi Münzenberg. ^[3] Lesser-known communists such as the American journalist and author Agnes Smedley – Chatto's partner – and Louis Gibarti – activist and supporter of Münzenberg – also used the office as a starting point for their anti-colonial commitment. ^[4] Prominent Indians visited the office and had themselves photographed in group photos. These included the Nobel Prize winner for literature Rabindranath Tagore, the poet and activist Saroyini Naidu and the leading politician of the Indian National Congress, Jawaharlal Nehru.

The sources available to us are extremely diverse. British and German diplomats and intelligence agents created files, and Indians who studied in Berlin in the interwar period wrote memoirs in which the office in Halensee occupied a central place. ^[5] The letters of Lucie Hecht, the Jewish activist who worked as an interpreter and translator in the office from 1923 to 1931, provide us with rare insights into the everyday life of the office. ^[6] Finally, a dense network of relationships spanned between the mosque in Berlin-Wilmersdorf and the office, captured in photos of joint iftar meals and intercultural marriages in the mosque. ^[7] In the following, they will help to outline the activities of the office.

Halensee

The house at Georg-Wilhelmstraße 9, in which the office was housed, no longer stands today. Lucie Hecht described it as "a quiet, secluded house in Halensee, framed by columns, under a vaulted roof, with high colorful windows through which daylight refracted, looking like a chapel." ^[8] Photos suggest a deep garden and several outbuildings.

A short walk through today's street shows how much the place has changed since then. At number 9, where the office was located, there is now a residential complex that occupies the right side of the street. Branching off from Kurfürstendamm in a northerly direction, the street is mainly characterized by new buildings. At the intersection with Kurfürstendamm, the writing of a Turkish sewing room is emblazoned. Further ahead at the S-Bahn bridge, the "oriental snack bar" reminds us that Kurfürstendamm was once shaped by "Orientals". In the 1920s, the famous Oriental Club was located directly on Lake Halen, where Muslim diplomats and aristocrats, Ottoman court ladies and writers socialized. The Egyptian vaudeville artist and circus director Mohamed Soliman ran an "oriental department" in the nearby Lunapark, with cafés, restaurants and ethnographic shows. At Kurfürstendamm 169, his brother Abdul Asis maintained an artist training course and a "Lilliput Show". Towards Adenauerplatz were hotels with names such as Tempo and Kosmopolitan, where Muslims preferred to stay. At the corner of Uhlandstraße, Azerbaijani restaurants, Persian carpet shops, Egyptian recording studios and jazz clubs followed in close succession. ^[9]

The 500,000 Russian refugees who had also looked for a place between Wittenbergplatz and Halensee were merely extras in this setting. Between 1920 and 1927, the former Russian bourgeoisie populated the streets and cafés. But it was not they who set the tone in Muslim Berlin, but the Muslim Tatars and Uzbeks in search of independence and their own nation-state. In the mosque behind Fehrbelliner Platz and the Islamic Institute at Fasanenstraße 23, the "Russians" were heavily involved. Tatars, Persians, Egyptians and Azerbaijanis had in common that they stood up for national independence. This created revolutionary milieus in Charlottenburg and Wilmersdorf, into which the Indians fitted seamlessly with their anti-colonial efforts. The time was short – no more than an episode between two murderous wars. But it was enough to lay a very special building block for Indian independence.

The office in Georg-Wilhelmstraße was not only frequented by Muslims. Its founders were mainly Hindus. Chatto and his siblings, the poets Suhalini and Shuhasini as well as the musician Harendranath and his brother-in-law Nambiar, together formed the heart. The Chattos pursued the idea of a secular state in which Hindus, Muslims and other religious groups in India would live together on an equal footing. Although they belonged to the Hindu elite, they did not strive for an exclusively Hindu identity. Their ideas attracted the attention of Muslim Indians in Berlin, who in turn were descendants of the Mughal elites in Lahore and Delhi. Under British colonial rule, which had set itself the goal of playing the two groups off against each other, fierce religious conflicts were now part of everyday life in India. The Indian Berlini, on the other hand, tried to find each other. Rather, they were concerned with the question of how the coexistence of Hindus and Muslims should be shaped in the future.

Practicing for independence

At the center of the office was Chatto, the "boss". He had already been hired by the German War Ministry in 1915 to carry out incitement behind the front. ^[10] After the German defeat in the First World War, he remained in Berlin and turned his gaze to the Comintern in the direction of Moscow in search of strategic allies. The latter strove for the overthrow of the global capitalist order, which also included an end to colonial rule. The Comintern decided to appoint Chatto as a liaison to the Indians in Berlin and provided him with finances. He thus became a liaison between the Berlini, the worldwide network of the Comintern and the Indian National Congress in Delhi.

Chatto maintained relations with Moscow, but most of the students who visited his office did not know about it. Zakir Hussain, Muhamed Mujeeb, Abid Hussain, Khwaja Abdul Hamied, Salim Ali, Mehdi Hasan, Nizam Shahidi, Rauf Malik and hundreds of other Indian young men wrote their doctoral thesis in Berlin with the firm intention of gathering building blocks for a secular nation-state with a socialist character. After Indian independence in 1947, they became president, university rector, professor, parliamentarian, leading official, founder of chemical plants, multimillionaire. As Berlini, their most important occupation was to practice living together across religious boundaries.

Central to this were events organized by the office. The common meal was practiced because Hindus of the Brahma caste were ritually forbidden to eat with non-Hindus and it was difficult for them to do just that. Joint discussions helped to dissolve the caricatures of the 'other' with which Hindus and Muslims had grown up. The joint festivities included iftar meals in the mosque. The Muslim Zakir Hussain practiced on the spinning wheel, the symbol of Hindu identity, in the garden of the house at Georg-Wilhelmstraße 9. Lucie Hecht describes his intensive efforts for Chatto's friendship in the exalted style of the 1920s: "When Chatto, the belligerent Hindu, and Zakir Hussain, the 'non-violent' Mohammedan, were engrossed in conversation and stood on the platform, then the agreement between Hindus and Mohammedans at the highest level was complete." ^[11] (Fig. 1)

India and Pakistan, the two nation states that emerged from British colonial rule in 1947, were indeed secular and socialist, and the students of that time, who had sought a new, common identity as Berlini, distinguished themselves as founders and organizers in both. But Hindus and Muslims no longer found each other inside. In Berlin in the 1920s, however, no one suspected this.

The Congress Against Colonial Oppression

Lucie Hecht and Louis Gibarti, probably the firm's largest undertaking, the organization of the first anti-colonial congress in 1927, took center stage. In doing so, the office placed itself in a continuum of anti-colonial efforts, which were first globally networked in Istanbul around 1900, were appropriated by the Germans during the First World War and settled in Berlin after the war. ^[12]

The Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism held from 10 to 15 February 1927 at the Palais Egmont in Brussels was part of a growing series of international congresses organised by "representatives of oppressed peoples" (such as Istanbul in 1907, Jerusalem in 1925) and aimed at a broad coalition. Essentially, it was the work of the publisher, KPD member and Comintern commissioner Willy Münzenberg. ^[13] In 1925, preparations began in Berlin, with one working group being housed in the office in Halensee and a second in the office of the Anti-Imperialist League in Hedemannstraße. ^[14] Josef Langyel, Louis Gibarti, Agnes Smedley, Narayan Nambiar and Lucie Hecht belonged to the inner organizational circle along with Chatto. Their work was to contact anti-colonial activists in China, Japan, India, South America and Africa and to persuade them to participate. The list of participants eventually included 174 delegates from 31 countries, colonies or regions and was twelve pages long. ^[15] The Berlin preparation team smuggled communists from China and Japan, leading personalities from India and Indochina, Indonesia, Persia and the Middle East, labor leaders from the French colonies in Africa, Cuba, Mexico and Colombia from their countries in the greatest secrecy, provided them with visas, ship passages and a speech (Fig. 2).

Münzenberg, for his part, ensured that the event was reported on by the public. For example, the high-circulation Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (A-I-Z) reported extensively with world maps, photos from the colonial world and portraits of the congress participants (Fig. 3). ^[16] In the same year, Gibarti published the official protocol The Flame Sign of the Palais Egmont, in which all speeches and names of the participating organizations and individuals were listed. ^[17] The Brussels Congress was probably the largest resistant enterprise in which the office was involved. The Bolsheviks financed it, but were not represented in Brussels. For them, the congress was part of the Comintern's efforts to pave the way for the worldwide revolution by means of alliances with socialists and anti-colonial nationalists.

But despite the enormous investment of manpower and energy, despite the worldwide networks that could be mobilized, despite the creative élan, the undertaking came to nothing after a short time. Two months after the Brussels Congress, the bloody suppression of the Communist Party by the nationalist Kuomintang began in China. As a result, the Comintern leadership refused to approve any alliance policy. For example, the Indian National Congress was excluded from the League as a bourgeois party. This was a fatal change of strategy, as a result of which the League against Imperialism, which had presented itself on the international stage with a bang in 1927, increasingly sank into insignificance. ^[18]

The following years also brought extensive changes in Berlin. Chatto increasingly withdrew from active business and went to Moscow in 1931, where he was murdered in 1938 as part of the Stalinist purges. Münzenberg came into conflict with Moscow over his independence and died in 1940 while fleeing in France. Nambiar witnessed how the SA devastated the office and fled to Prague. Lucie Hecht went underground, worked for a while for the Fédération Balkanique, a French-speaking communist resistance group in Berlin, and finally emigrated to London, where she joined the Women's International Zionist Union.

End of history? Not at all. What these Berlini have left us is a trace in the collective memory of the city, which is able to shed light on the transnational beginnings of the founding of nation states in India and the Muslim world. If you take a closer look, an exciting chapter of Berlin's city history opens up, which is able to shake up some certainties.