A Closed Kingdom Observed: The Yemen Travel Accounts of Hermann von Wissmann and Carl Rathjens, 1927–1938

This volume presents critical, annotated editions of three unpublished German travel accounts of Yemen under Imām Yaḥyā Ḥamīd al-Dīn (r. 1904–1948). The first is Hermann von Wissmann's account of the expedition he undertook in the winter of 1927/28 with the geographer Carl A. Rathjens and the teacher Frieda ("Friedel") Apitz—the journey, improvised after Saudi authorities refused the party access to the interior of the Ḥiǧāz, that opened the largely closed kingdom to German scholarship and occasioned, at the Imām's own initiative, the first archaeological excavation on Yemeni soil, at al-Ḥuqqa. The second and third are Rathjens's diaries of his return journeys of 1931 and of 1937, the latter made through Palestine and Egypt in the company of the Imām's Jewish commercial agent, Israel Isḥāq Ṣubayrī. Written for private recipients and never intended for publication, the accounts offer an unusually candid, day-by-day record of Ṣanʿāʾ and the Yemeni highlands between the wars: the court of Imām Yaḥyā and his sons, the rivalries of Italian, British, Soviet, and German interests, the Jewish community of Ṣanʿāʾ, the beginnings of archaeology, meteorology, and modern cartography in the country, and—through Apitz, who traveled disguised as a man yet enjoyed unique access to the world of Yemeni women—rooms no male traveler could enter. Since the archives of the Yemeni government for those years are mostly lost, these testimonies, edited here from the typescripts in the Carl Rathjens Nachlass at the SUB Hamburg and collated against von Wissmann's original letters in Tübingen, and accompanied by von Wissmann's sketches and hand-drawn map, constitute a primary source of the first order for the history of Yemen in the first half of the twentieth century. An introduction situates the three travelers and their sharply contrasting ways of seeing within the broader history of European travel to Yemen.