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An Olympian Scoundrel

It’s a funny thing, humour. What makes you laugh out loud may leave me with a face like an Easter Island statue. In my own experi­ence the funniest books are non-fiction, and most of these are biographies. There really is nothing so strange or funny as real peo­ple. If I had to present my case, then Exhibit A would surely be Bernard Wasserstein’s The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (1988), the extraordinary, meticulous, marvellously funny biography of a man who was – well, what exactly?

In his foreword Wasserstein seeks to explain how a serious aca­demic historian became obsessed by a character he describes as ‘part-parasite, part-irritant, part-entertainer’. It all began one after­noon in the mid-1980s, when a summer downpour left Wasserstein stranded in the Bodleian Library. Idly, he started to browse the Index to the General Correspondence of the Foreign Office and looked up a half-remembered name: Ignatius Trebitsch Lincoln. Like a spell, the words opened a portal to another world, with minute after memo after telegram logging the diverse, baffling and always preposterous activities of Trebitsch in locations ranging from Budapest to Shanghai. ‘I started to read while waiting for the storm to pass,’ writes Wasserstein, ‘. . . and the tempest has not yet abated.’ For several years, he would pursue his anti-hero through archives held in multiple countries which recorded an equally dizzying multiplicity of aliases, frauds, conspiracies and scams. More remarkably still, he would shape this material into a lucid, disturbing and very funny narrative.

Even in its bare bones, the story unearthed by Wasserstein is mind- boggling. Ignácz or Ignatius Trebitsch was born into a Hungarian Jewish family in 1879, and as a young man drifted into a life of petty crime. Having converted to Christianity, he fetched up in Canada, where he became the star preacher of the Montreal Mission to the Jews. As would invariably occur, Trebitsch d

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It’s a funny thing, humour. What makes you laugh out loud may leave me with a face like an Easter Island statue. In my own experi­ence the funniest books are non-fiction, and most of these are biographies. There really is nothing so strange or funny as real peo­ple. If I had to present my case, then Exhibit A would surely be Bernard Wasserstein’s The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (1988), the extraordinary, meticulous, marvellously funny biography of a man who was – well, what exactly?

In his foreword Wasserstein seeks to explain how a serious aca­demic historian became obsessed by a character he describes as ‘part-parasite, part-irritant, part-entertainer’. It all began one after­noon in the mid-1980s, when a summer downpour left Wasserstein stranded in the Bodleian Library. Idly, he started to browse the Index to the General Correspondence of the Foreign Office and looked up a half-remembered name: Ignatius Trebitsch Lincoln. Like a spell, the words opened a portal to another world, with minute after memo after telegram logging the diverse, baffling and always preposterous activities of Trebitsch in locations ranging from Budapest to Shanghai. ‘I started to read while waiting for the storm to pass,’ writes Wasserstein, ‘. . . and the tempest has not yet abated.’ For several years, he would pursue his anti-hero through archives held in multiple countries which recorded an equally dizzying multiplicity of aliases, frauds, conspiracies and scams. More remarkably still, he would shape this material into a lucid, disturbing and very funny narrative. Even in its bare bones, the story unearthed by Wasserstein is mind- boggling. Ignácz or Ignatius Trebitsch was born into a Hungarian Jewish family in 1879, and as a young man drifted into a life of petty crime. Having converted to Christianity, he fetched up in Canada, where he became the star preacher of the Montreal Mission to the Jews. As would invariably occur, Trebitsch dazzled with his charm and energy before infuriating everyone with his absurd egotism. By 1903 he was in England, where he added ‘Lincoln’ to his name as a token of his new passion: politics. An entrée to this wider world was provided by B. S. Rowntree, the Quaker cocoa magnate, who persuaded him to stand as a Liberal in the General Election of 1910. Sensing his disadvantage as a foreigner, Trebitsch turned his eloquence on the filthy German custom of eat­ing dogs and gained a famous victory. However, he soon stood down to focus on business, having set up a number of dubious companies to exploit the oil boom in central Europe. When the oil ran out, Trebitsch faced ruin and took the fatal step of forging a crucial document. Exposure could only be a matter of time. Wasserstein pinpoints the next phase as crucial to the birth of Trebitsch Lincoln, International Man of Mystery. With the advent of war, Trebitsch saw a way out of his predicament. Boldly, he called at the War Office and offered to infiltrate German Intelligence as a double agent. He then met German officials and suggested the con­verse. Before much could come of all this, exposure over the forgery loomed and in 1915 he hightailed it across the Atlantic. Probably no one but Trebitsch would have thought to deflect a charge of fraud by accusing himself of high treason. In a series of pieces for the US press he built up his inconsequential dealings with the spy agencies into a tale worthy of John Buchan; he had been a foreign agent for years, he now insisted, acting always from a principled hatred of England. The superspy was duly collared but managed to escape through a lavatory window. Typically, rather than lying low he went to the papers and gave a bombastic press conference. When he was recap­tured, his pockets full of press clippings about himself, he congratulated the police on catching ‘the cleverest man in America’. Returned to England, Trebitsch served three years in Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight and on his release in 1919 was deported. He went straight to Berlin and there plunged into the atmosphere of febrile conspiracy brewing in right-wing circles. With a grisly crew of confederates, he helped to foment the Kapp Putsch of March 1920 – a bungled coup in which militarists briefly seized control of the state. ‘We shall come again,’ Trebitsch prophesied, as it all collapsed around him. In the last hours of the putsch he had met a new recruit, a cer­tain ex-corporal who would be rather more than a footnote to history. In Wasserstein’s words, the putsch ‘began as comic opera and ended as melodrama, but . . . may also be seen as a dress rehearsal for tragedy’. As for Trebitsch himself, the Daily Telegraph had few doubts that he would be back: There is something almost Olympian about this man’s scoun­drelism . . . I have heard it variously suggested that he was in the movement as a Bolshevik, as a British, and as a French spy. Poss-ibly he was all these . . . The world will watch with interest to see at what point this really remarkable rogue will crop up next. Within weeks Trebitsch was in Hungary, at the centre of a still more dangerous plot: the creation of a ‘White International’ to stir up counter-revolutionary action throughout Europe. Its leaders included White Russian generals and fanatical right-wingers from half a dozen states. Where Trebitsch’s earlier associates-cum-dupes had been a mostly herbivorous lot – Quakers, missionaries, Liberals – he was now consorting with terrorists, thugs and murderous anti-Semites. As a Jew himself, however, Trebitsch began to feel distinctly unsafe and fled to Vienna with a suitcase full of stolen plans. These he attempted to hawk to British and French diplomats, only to be dis­missed as a liar and fantasist. He was even arrested by the Austrians for attempted fraud. Meanwhile, he was stalked through the streets of Vienna by White agents seeking his death. Wisely, Trebitsch decided that it was time for another disappear­ing act. ‘My destination is a profound secret,’ he announced, ‘I shall disappear as if the earth had swallowed me and shall reappear in an unexpected quarter . . .’ That quarter turned out to be Sichuan province in China, where he surfaced some time in 1922. Not even Wasserstein was able to dig up much about his doings there, but it seems that he served several rival warlords as an arms dealer, loan-broker and all-purpose con­sigliere. China also provided the scene for the last and most astounding phase of Trebitsch’s career. By late 1925 he had come to believe that his life had been futile, and so by definition was any kind of worldly activity. ‘I made the great renunciation,’ he would write, ‘I forced the doors of the lunatic asylum open and – walked out.’ For five years Trebitsch immersed himself in the study of Chinese Buddhism, and in 1931 he became a monk, adopting the name Chao Kung. The initiation involved an agonizing ritual in which his shaved head was branded with religious symbols and from this time he dressed in a skull cap and flowing robes. In 1932 he set up his own monastery in Shanghai with thirteen European converts. ‘My work is to help suffering humanity,’ he proclaimed, ‘You are all doomed by your wickedness and folly!’ Not for the first time, we are left wondering what on earth to think. Wasserstein’s view is that Trebitsch was quite genuine in his newfound religious convictions, however dodgy his conduct (there would be allegations concerning the younger nuns). Judgement is made more difficult by the way Trebitsch’s always fervent self-belief had curdled into something bordering on the psychotic. Not only had he taken to lecturing world leaders on their duties, in the most peremptory terms, but he believed he had a telepathic link to certain ‘Supreme Masters’ of Tibet, whose spiritual powers made them all but omnipotent. So, for example, at Christmas 1939 he wrote to demand the resignation of every government fighting the war (except the Japanese), as otherwise the Masters would ‘unchain forces and powers whose very existence are unknown to you’. Despite claiming to have abjured poli­tics, Trebitsch spent the war years in tortuous, mostly pro-Axis, intrigues and made enemies who could hardly have been more lethal. When the end came, in 1943, it would be in a baffling manner wholly appropriate to the life he had lived. Officially he died from an intestinal com­plaint, but there were rumours of poison. The story of Trebitsch Lincoln is by any standards a strange one, but what makes it so very funny? Cheats and scammers are always potentially funny so long as we are not their victims. And then there is Trebitsch’s extraordinary personality. He had the folie de grandeur of the classic sitcom character – a Tony Hancock or Captain Mainwaring – but on an almost apocalyptic scale. This is the man who admonished King George V that ‘millions of Buddhists . . . throughout Asia are solidly behind me’ when he had a handful of adherents; the would-be Dr Evil who warned diplomats to heed his words ‘before I press the button and inaugurate . . . a new period of bloodshed’. Wasserstein quotes Trebitsch at length and it is this voice – absurd, bombastic, petty and querulous – that echoes in the mind long after the book is closed. There is also a cruel comedy in the shape of Trebitsch’s career. Each minor deception leads him into deeper and more dangerous waters. With its ever-escalating jeopardy his story has the relentless mechanics of farce (which, of course, are also those of tragedy). There is comedy too in the way Wasserstein tells his story, with an eye for the ludicrous detail. Perhaps the most cherishable revelation is that Trebitsch owned an expensive set of bed linen, monogrammed with his initials, and allowed this to dictate his numerous pseudonyms. We can only imagine the groans from the Foreign Office as reports came in (yet again) that a Tibor Lehotzky, Theodor Lakatos, Thomas Lorincz or Leo Tandler was up to something murky in Central Europe . . . Wasserstein’s canniest move, however, is to play straight man to his own protagonist. No matter how bonkers it gets, Trebitsch’s story is told as if it were a perfectly serious and quite conventional piece of history, underpinned at each point by scholarly citation. Only occa­sionally does the biographer forego his neutral tone and allow himself an exasperated aside – ‘What, it may be asked, was the point of this nonsensical contretemps?’ As a historian, Wasserstein felt obliged to draw some sort of wider significance from his subject, and he did so by placing him in his times – an era of world crisis and collapsing empires that saw the rise of Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler. In this context, Trebitsch can be seen less as a one-off joke and more as a ‘microcosm of global lunacy’. Anyone reading his story today will be uncomfortably struck by con­temporary parallels. Had he been alive now, he would certainly have wreaked entertaining havoc in our ‘post-truth’ society of fake news and ‘alternative facts’. We can all think of modern leaders who remind us of Trebitsch Lincoln. We may or may not find this funny.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 76 © Jonathan Law 2022


About the contributor

Jonathan Law is a writer and editor living in Buckinghamshire. His latest book, The Whartons of Winchendon, tells the true story of one of the strangest families in English history, featuring incest, treason, fairies and the self-proclaimed Solar King of the World. People have found it quite funny.

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