Talk:Baron Umar Rolf von Ehrenfels

Untitled
Well, let's make it short: HORRIBLE article. 92.193.38.75 (talk) 19:14, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

Very bad article
This article is written by somebody who appears to be working for the government of Azerbaijan, who really does not want to accept that Ali and Nino was written by Essad Bey. For those not familiar with debate, Ali and Nino, which is the best loved novel of Azerbaijan, was written by a Jew who converted to Islam named Essad Bey, who was born Lev Nussbaum. Much of what article says here is asinine. For example, the article says that Tom Reiss is an idiot because there was no need to "Aryanize" the authorship of Ali and Nino in 1937 and the Anschluss didn't happen until 1938. Germany had 68 million people while Austria had 8 million people. Even if you add in the 3 million German-speakers in Switzerland and the 2 million German-speakers in the Sudetenland, Germany was by far the largest market for German language books in the 1930s, as it still is today. It was very common for Austrian publishers to "Aryanize" books by the Jewish authors long before the Anschluss in order to enter the German market, something that the author of this article is apparently unaware of.

It was one thing to have a best-selling novel in Austria, and quite another to have a best-selling novel in the far larger market of Germany. Some of the statements here about Reiss are acts of character assassination. The article's whole case that Ehrenfels was "Kurban Said" seems to rest on the fact that Ehrenfels's wife,  Elfriede, had the book copyrighted in her name in 1937, which all that proves is that she copyrighted the book. After it was discovered in 1935 that Essad Bey was not a Shia Muslim Azerbaijani prince as he claimed to be, and was really just the Russian Jew Nussbaum who had converted to Islam and reinvented himself as Essad Bey, he was expelled from the German Writers Union and his books were banned in Germany. Significantly, it is after 1935 that books by "Kurban Said" start appearing in Austria. To get around the ban on Jewish authors, Austrian publishers used pseudonyms, but the German state quickly got wise to this stratagem, and started checking who registered the copyright to a book, to see if the author was Jewish or not. Elfriede von Ehrenfels registered the copyright to Ali and Nino because the Austrian publisher of Tal Verlag knew that German authorities would check that one before allowing Ali and Nino into the German book market. And she was perfect as a cover. Elfriede von Ehrenfels was an author, but not a very well known one, and since she was married a to Muslim, it would make sense she produce an Oriental novel like Ali and Nino. Note; at the time, the term the Orient referred to the Middle East, not East Asia.

Without claiming to be a savant on this subject, my understanding is that the consensus is that Nussbaum/Essad is the author of Ali and Nino. A real Muslim, or somebody married to a Muslim, would not produced a book so full of Orientalism as Ali and Nino is. One of the major themes of Ali and Nino is how strange, exotic and romantic the peoples of the Caucasus, especially the Muslim peoples, are. Only somebody from the West would produce a picture. A Muslim from the Caucasus would regard the West as strange, not him/herself. The Orientalist picture of the Caucasus is meant to appeal to Western preconceptions of the region. And it seems unlikely that a woman would produce such a macho hero as Ali; despite the title of Ali and Nino, the book is very much Ali's story as he pursues his one true love, the Christian princess Nino, who appears mainly as the object of his desire. Would a woman really write such an andro-centric novel as Ali and Nino? The way the female characters are portrayed in Ali and Nino strongly suggests that the book was written by a man. Nussbaum, the nerdy Jewish nebbish decided to reinvent himself as Essad Bey, macho Azerbaijani prince. Part of the reason for this was to deny being a Jew, and partly the reason was to go from being a nobody to being a somebody. As Essad Bey, Nussbaum catered to and validated Western preconceptions and prejudices about the Orient, and his work was all the more popular as being apparently written by an Oriental. A recurring theme of his Essad Bey persona was that the Orient was a strange and mysterious region, full of secrets that only he could unlock, which thereby gave him a sort of power. And finally the Essad Bey persona allowed Nussbaum to engage in what was even by the standards of the time, rather outrageous sexism and machismo. As Essad Bey, Nussbaum boasted that he was a Muslim who would have four wives and an unlimited number of concubines, which was proof of his masculinity; just to be rub in the point, he liked to point to his groin while saying all this, with the implication he had a very big penis. What is striking is just how closely the character of Ali resembles the character of Essad Bey that Nussbaum had developed for himself. It really seems doubtful that a woman would create such a protagonist like Ali for her novel. And finally, there are enough stylistic similarities between Ali and Nino and other books written by Nussbaum to suggest that he was the author. This article needs to be rewritten from the top to bottom.--A.S. Brown (talk) 00:49, 6 December 2017 (UTC)