Scholars in the service of war: The censorship of letters by Tatar prisoners of war in Germany during World War I

Abstract

The article examines one of the interesting and little-known episodes from the history of World War I, telling about orientalist scholars involved in censoring letters from prisoners of war in German camps. This large-scale involvement of scholars in the censorship of letters from prisoners of war was a forced measure, since the military censors did not speak oriental languages. Among such letters, there were many written in the Tatar language, which was not taught at German universities before World War I. It can be assumed that it was the censorship of letters from prisoners of war in the Tatar language that to a certain extent influenced the emergence of a noticeable interest in the Tatar lan- guage in German Turkology. This is evidenced by the research work of the famous Turkologist Gotthold Weil who was responsible for the censorship of Tatar letters during the war and taught the Tatar language at the University of Berlin from 1918.