The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln

"The reason I love this book is because it’s the sort of the story that, as a historian, you dream of stumbling over. Bernard Wasserstein, who wrote it, is a bona fide professor of history and he has this preface at the beginning of the book where he sets out in rather fascinating detail how he came across this story. He was in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University one day, it was pouring and he had half an hour to spare before the library shut and he didn’t want to go out in the rain. So he just started leafing through the catalogue, and he came across this name, a guy called Trebitsch Lincoln. He was a Hungarian Jew who fled to Britain, where, for want of any other way of making a living, he became a missionary trying to convert Jews to Christianity, which is a really difficult job. I’m not sure he actually had any successes in the two or three years he was trying to do this. From there he got to know the Rowntree family, who are well-known in England for making confectionery. They were one of the main employers in York, where they had a huge sweet factory. They were tremendously interested in social justice and sponsored these amazing surveys of poverty and tried to work out why people were poor. And they discovered that they weren’t poor because they were alcoholic losers, which is the way British society treated them at that time, and that they were genuinely deserving of help. Lincoln got to know the family and through them he managed to get himself elected as the Liberal member of parliament for Darlington, which is a medium-sized northern town. He served for a year or so in 1910, and when he lost his seat, he decided to turn all this society backing that he had to his own personal profit. He started offering to spy for various enemies of Britain – the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. They didn’t know quite what to do with him because he was such a weird character and they didn’t entirely believe he was genuine or knew what to do, but he started dabbling in espionage. When war broke out, he went and lived in Germany for the duration of the war, and afterward he fell in with the far-right-wing plotters who took over Berlin for a short period in the aftermath of World War I – the Kapp Putsch. He became a minister in the Kapp government for about a week before it fell, after which he started living this amazingly peripatetic life, and he ended up, in the 1940s, living in Shanghai as a Buddhist abbot and collaborating with the Japanese, and planning to go and live out the last of his days in Tibet. Wasserstein just does an astonishingly good job of tracking the story, finding obscure missionary archives from Canada – which turned out to have reams of correspondence from Trebitsch Lincoln – and the records of the Special Branch of the Shanghai police, which had more material about him, and eventually, by some amazing coincidence, he meets the great-niece of Trebitsch Lincoln in Jerusalem and he has the final piece of the jigsaw. So the book as a whole holds together unbelievably well for somebody who travelled so much and led this underworld life. Wasserstein manages to put it all together as a story. I’m just tremendously envious of this achievement. I also like the fact that this professor of history has done exactly what I would have done, which is to allow himself to become completely seduced by a weird sidetrack in history and follow it wherever it leads. That’s what I like doing, but he just does it as well as anybody possibly could. I used to run Viz , which is quite a famous British comic. It had an Australian edition. I got married and the guy who ran the company said, “Why don’t you go and have a honeymoon in Australia? I’ll pay for the flights, and you can go and spend the week in Sydney afterwards and look at the Australian edition for me.” So I took him up on this very kind offer, and we ended up in Sydney. My wife fell ill in this hotel, and said, “Please can you go and get me some medicine?” On the way from the hotel to the chemist’s I passed a second-hand bookshop, which was fatal. I always go into those things, and my poor wife was left groaning on the bed, while I leafed through these books on the naval history shelf. I stumbled across the story of the Batavia there. It was relatively well-known in Western Australia, but nobody else outside the Netherlands had ever heard of it. It was just three or so pages in this book I picked up, and I just thought, this is the most amazing story I have ever read, and I can’t believe it’s true. I started gradually picking up more bits of information, and as I did, I realised it is, quite possibly, the greatest story ever told. Publishers always want books that have novelistic qualities and heroes and villains and beginnings, middles and ends. As a historian you’re always telling them, “This isn’t the way history works, it’s more lumpy than that.” But the Batavia story isn’t. The Batavia story really is a rip-roaring tale that does have heroes and villains and a beginning, middle and an incredibly violent end. Yes, if this shipwreck had happened in America, it would have been filmed five times by now. But because it happened in the 1620s to these Dutch people whose names no one can pronounce, somehow no one has quite cottoned on to what a great story is. If you change the names to American names, it would have been a huge bestseller. As it happens, the only place I’m really well known is the Netherlands. Most of the stories I’ve done I’ve considered to be fascinating, but they’re just too marginal for me to be a gigantically successful author, sadly. You’ll see from my Smithsonian blog that my interests are ludicrously eclectic by anyone else’s standards. I should probably go off and write about Hitler and Napoleon, but I just can’t bring myself to do it."