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MADRAS MISCELLANY

The German connection

Dr. Joadhim Bautze’s talks (Miscellany, August 20th) at the Max Mueller Bhavan during Madras Week provided several surprises to those familiar with the Emden and Wiele & Klein.

The feats of the pocket cruiser Emden were so highly rated in Germany during the Great War that the Kaiser decreed that all its crew and their descendants could thenceforth ‘double-barrel’ their surnames by suffixing the Emden to it. Thus, its skipper, Captain Helmut von Muller became Muller-Emden. All these Emdens apparently still get together every year to toast the ship that contributed to their names.

Also little-known in Madras has been the fact that an even more legendary journey was one that Unter-Kapitan Mucke, the Emden’s second in command, undertook. Shortly before being cornered by the Australian cruiser Sydney off the Cocos Islands, Muller had disembarked Mucke and 49 sailors to put the Cocos Islands’ cable and wireless station out of action. When the Emden was sunk, the Sydney took aboard the German cr ew and headed for Colombo, leaving Mucke’s team high and dry ashore — where they found a long disused schooner beached on the island and got it afloat. Then, despite none of them knowing how to handle a sailing vessel, they managed to reach Penang and thereafter sailed across the Indian Ocean to what was German East Africa. From there, they trekked northwards across Africa to get to the Mediterranean and made their way home to be greeted as heroes. It was a memorable journey full of adventure but fraught with danger every mile, Bautze hinted – but having whetted his audience’s appetite, that was not the story he narrated that evening.

The biggest surprise of all, however, was that he could find no record of any Indian having been aboard the Emden. It has long been believed in Madras that D. Champakararaman Pillai from Travancore-Cochin, who had studied in Madras, had gone on to study medicine in Germany and later served as the Emden’s medical officer. Members of his family have for some years now held, on September 22nd, annual memorial meetings in front of the Emden p laque let into the High Court’s sea-facing wall commemorating his contribution to the Emden’s exploits. Narration of all this did not convince Bautze; the most he was prepared to concede was that Dr. Pillai might have saile d with the newly constructed Emden from Germany to Tsingtao, Germany’s China station, and that he and some of the crew might have been furloughed ashore and replacements taken aboard, or that he had served on the second Emden, sunk at Scapa Flow.

As for the Wiele & Klein talk, Bautze felt Wiele was a German and not an Englishman as many in Madras have long thought; that the Madras Almanacs sometimes described the firm as an Anglo-German one and that there is no information about Wiele, who had later set up shop on his own in Bangalore, being interned during the Great War, did not make Bautze change his mind. The next surprise was that Bautze was certain that Erwin Drinneberg, Klein’s brother-in-law, had not taken any of the Wiele, Klein and Peyerl pictures found in Madras and Heidelberg, thus contradicting local belief.

And then came another Mucke-like googly to bowl over his audience. Showing a couple of photographs of an elderly Klein sitting a bit apart from a younger Valeska Klein and a still younger Michael Peyerl leaning towards each other, Bautze offered a bit of a verbal nudge and a wink and then said his lips were sealed.

Maybe if Bautze visits Madras next year for Madras Week, we will hear more about Mucke’s Munchausenesque adventures and the love life of the Kleins.

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